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Is 40 hours a week too much?

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Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#141

Post by feoren »

yboris wrote: post #35

4DWW - Four Day Work Week is the future. So many benefits for workers and the company! It's a win-win for many types of companies. Even if it's not a win for all companies, society would benefit greatly by mandating 4 days of 8 hours with no loss of pay as the standard. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/11/15/1136039542/the...

I wish I lived in the world where "obviously beneficial to everyone" implied "it will be the future!" Plenty of things just get worse, just because. People are fucking awful. I look forward to the day when AGI takes over the world.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#143

Post by hax0ron3 »

>In the 1800s, it was common for people in manufacturing to work nearly 100 hours per week: between 10- and 16-hour shifts over six-day workweeks. >By the early 1900s, many industries had adopted the eight-hour workday, but most people were still working six days a week.

If these figures are true, it helps me to understand why so many people in the 19th and early 20th century were huge advocates of socialism and communism. Even though, having read about the history of the last 100 or so years, I think that communism is a relatively inefficient and often brutally murderous form of government, even I feel that it might be better to launch a revolution to overthrow the rich and take their stuff than to put up with working so much that there is essentially no time in one's life to do anything other than work, all just to be able to live in some cramped apartment in a dirty industrial city.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#144

Post by georgeplusplus »

Here's what I believe : the fraternizing and huddling around the break room during coffee breaks and distracting leisurely talks with coworkers at their desk, which all contribute to wasted time at the office would still happen in a 30 hour work week.

Except, Workers would be demanding overtime pay to finish the work they have normally been doing in a 40 hour work week and employers would have to pay premium compensation for the same level of work they used to be getting at 40 hours a week.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#145

Post by CallMeJim »

manmal wrote: post #90
CallMeJim wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side; no one is productive 100% of the time. If people worked 20 hours per week, the actual productive time would likely be between 5 and 10 hours per week.

No, people would cut the unnecessary BS in order to get things done. Most people can’t concentrate 40h/week, so the BS serves to fill up the remaining time.

Do you think people would be able to maintain 100% productivity when working 20 hours/week?

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#146

Post by Euphorbium »

Usually when there is a question in the title, the answer is no. Not this time. But 35h is also ridiculously too much. It needs to be 20h max, just because households are dual income, and personal work needed to be done did not disappear.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#147

Post by jeroenhd »

dzikimarian wrote: post #96

Interesting to see such articles, when I heard from some people on HN that it's ok and healthy to have two contracts at the same time. Which one is it then?

Some people have the energy to do two jobs at once even if they don't strictly need the money to survive (like many minimum wage workers do); if they can keep themselves in check, that's a great way to make more money and build up a comfortable life or prepare for an early retirement.

It's not for everyone and it's certainly not the standard. There are also people who work themselves to death and pretend to be fine. I'm sure it _can_ be healthy and fine if that is what you want; it just shouldn't be expected of people.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#148

Post by snu »

sbf501 wrote: post #65

8-to-5 is 45 hours a week. I'm still in the office, even for lunch. Considering travel, it bumps up to 50 hrs/week. I hate how this 10-hour "work tax" is always dismissed as part of 40 hour work week.

This is a great point that too few people think about. I like to take travel time and mandatory lunch breaks into account when I'm figuring out my 'adjusted' wage, and I use that number when thinking about getting a different job or taking time off. Your time isn't ACTUALLY worth $20/hr (or whatever), its more like 16, or less if you factor in taxes.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#149

Post by version_five »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #116
shagie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the "I'm sitting down and writing things that are going to be productive" is likely in the 10-20h/week range, there is still a lot of * Meetings * Mentoring * Answering random questions * Continuing education (Hey, Spring 6.0 was just released, what's in that?) * Support (and being available for support) Those can easily fill in a lot of the 'void'. I can point to 5h/week that are standing 'meetings' where it i…

Most of these conversations seem to come down to weird definitions of "productive time". Most of us managers would consider meetings, mentoring, work-related Slack conversations to be productive time. Yet I read a lot of the comments here where people don't consider anything to be productive time unless they're actively writing code, which ignores the realities of working in a team environment. A better metric might…

There is a framework that we used to use for tim classification in manufacturing that was based around adding value to the product - in software that would be coding, testing, etc. Then there is necessary non-value add, like meetings and slack, that are needed (so are work as you say) but don't in themselves make the product directly, so you want to minimize time spent on them while still accomplishing whatever is needed (obviously easier said then done). Same goes for admin stuff. And then there is non-value add, like HN or whatever.

Personally, I think the non-value add category doesn't translate from a factory to coding. If your job is putting boxes on a pallet, when you're browsing HN instead you probably don't do it faster later. When coding, at least for me, I take breaks to think or clear my mind, and I'm not swapping productive coding for online time wasting, browsing HN (or taking a walk or coffee) is a necessary part of the work that improves productivity.

All that to say, meetings and other management stuff can and should be streamlined as much as possible, small breaks, not necessarily. If someone is actually typing code (or an equivalent activity) 25% of their time sitting at the computer, I'd consider that e extremely productive.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#150

Post by wenbin »

Future of knowledge work [0]:

1. 5-hour work day, not pretending busy work for 8 or even 12 full hours (eg, 996 in China tech corps)

Knowledge work, especially creative work, is just different from hard manual labor. More work hours won’t necessarily produce more value

For some people / jobs, maybe 2-hour work day is enough.

@tobi says it well [1]: "For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company."

2. One or multiple part-time jobs

For some part-time jobs, you work for money; for others, you work for fun/impact.

See how @gumroad works [2]: No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees

3. Streaming income in real time, rather than bulk income once or twice per month

You have a stream of small incomes 24/7. Some are passive incomes, while others are active incomes. You get paid directly from customers you serve, not from a proxy (eg HR in big corp). Anytime during the day, you know how much you’ve made so far

---

[0] https://twitter.com/wenbinf/status/1472356359953809409

[1] https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433

[2] https://sahillavingia.com/work

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