We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor • Hacker News Board

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#181

Post by vidarh » Mon, Feb 04, 2013, 9:27 AM UTC

shin_lao wrote: post #171

mark_l_watson wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I must disagree. Two people working 20 hours a week are refreshed, not burned out, have time for educationally side projects, etc. I am in my early 60s and for my whole life I limited my work hours to 32 hours per week, even working for large companies. I had lots of time for educational side projects, exercise, extra time with family and friends, and mediation. My only regret was not perhaps cutting this to l…

Err... 20 hours is really not a lot of work. Some problems, to be solved, require intense work. At 40 hours a week you will hardly feel "burned out".

It's meaningless to count hours for development work without also talking about how much of that time is spent doing actual work, and their velocity.

Someone who works 40 hours, takes regular breaks and keeps a moderate pace, sure. 40 hours of high pace concentrated development work? In the last 17 years of managing development teams, I've had maybe 1-2 people who could sustain that for more than a week or two at the time.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#182

Post by rmc » Mon, Feb 04, 2013, 9:28 AM UTC

zurn wrote: post #134

jdietrich wrote: post #92

In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption. The cost of living hasn't meaningfully increased, we've just continually redefined luxuries as necessities. My grandparents are perfectly typical working-class people. They gre…

> We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power. Not so: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=AVE_HRS (the statistic above excludes vacatyion and national holidays, sick leave, paid maternity/paternity leave etc, which are also much more generous these days) Note how the wel…

Another data point : the European countries with the longest holidays (France & Germany) are bailing out countries with the shortest holidays ( Greece Ireland Portugal)

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#183

Post by simonh » Mon, Feb 04, 2013, 9:30 AM UTC

One problem I've come to appreciate in Britain is that we are all in direct competition with each other for access to good housing. As disposable incomes go up, property prices rocket as the middle class use their new wealth to bid up the price of houses in an attempt to trade that wealth for a nicer place to live. I'm keenly aware of this because that's exactly what my wife and I have been doing. A big chunk of our income goes into our mortgage.

The dynamic my well be very different in other countries. In the USA for example there's much more scope for increasing the supply of housing, something that's harder to do in a more densely populated country like the UK. I think this is why the US had a property crash while we didn't - the housing market here is a lot less elastic.

Still, my point is that if incomes generally go up, a proportion of that will be expended in price wars over scarce local resources, property being the most obvious example.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#184

Post by vidarh » Mon, Feb 04, 2013, 9:35 AM UTC

sebcat wrote: post #164

learc83 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Two programmers working 20 hours a week, for example, are way less productive than one programmer working 40 hours a week. That makes assumptions efficiency as it relates to number of hours worked that I'm not sure you can make. How many of those 40 hours are really spent working? 40 hour work weeks are the result of labor regulations, and the binding of health insurance to full-time employment, not a free market eq…

Didn't people work longer back when there were no labor laws?

Yes. It took decades of hard fights, including many that ended up in violent confrontations, to get the working day down from 12+ hours to about 8.

May 1 as an international day of labour demonstration was partly inspired by the immense effort of the US unions at fighting for the 8 hour day, and partly as a commemoration of the Haymarket massacre in Chicago that were part of that struggle:

http://www.illinoislaborhistory.org/haymarket/the-story-of-t...

Even today, there's plenty of people who want to reverse those gains. E.g. in the UK, our sitting PM is trying hard to get additional exemptions for the UK from the EU Working Time Directive because it limits how much extra time employers can demand and/or ask for.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#185

Post by judgardner » Mon, Feb 04, 2013, 9:36 AM UTC

svachalek wrote: post #151

judgardner wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up. Can you support this? Millions of people all over the world are being lifted out of poverty. Here is a chart of per capita GNI for the past 20 years http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#... edi: linked wrong chart

GNI is just a grand total divided by population; people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S.

> GNI is just a grand total divided by population;

Right, per capita, as I stated, but really just GNI is fine too.

> people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S

Unfortunately the google public data didn't have enough US data but take a look at these two charts for India.

First is just India's per capita GNI the second is India's income distribution over the same time frame. Notice how the income distribution is relatively flat and how the GNI is growing.

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#186

Post by yardie » Mon, Feb 04, 2013, 9:37 AM UTC

wildgift wrote: post #176

electromagnetic wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, 40 hours less my hour lunch a day ends up at 35 hours, which over 7 days is only 5 hours. To me personally I would prefer to work 5 hours a day every day than be getting up at 6am to get home for 6pm, and forget it if I want to do groceries on a night, I'll be getting home in time to have a shower, read a chapter of a book and fall asleep. My weekend work usually averages around 4-5 hours a day, I get t…

FYI, the standard US lunch is 30 minutes and doesn't count toward the 40 hours. It's been this way for a long time.

That is if you are waged. If salaried your lunch break is supposed to be built into your renumeration. But I know plenty of people taking 15-30 minute unpaid lunches verses an hour unpaid lunches just so they can leave the office in a reasonable amount of time.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#187

Post by lifeisstillgood » Mon, Feb 04, 2013, 9:54 AM UTC

jseliger wrote: post #107

jdietrich wrote: post #92

In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption. The cost of living hasn't meaningfully increased, we've just continually redefined luxuries as necessities. My grandparents are perfectly typical working-class people. They gre…

>In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption. I'm not convinced this is true: there are also intense coordination costs and learning costs. Two programmers working 20 hours a week, for example, are way less productive tha…

This is best seen through the lens and A type work and B type work. A work is what you get paid for - the delivering value to clients, committing code work. B work is education, design, clearing the desk, sharpening the saw.

40-60 hours a week of A work - or just tryi g to do A work leaves us without B work - soon this piles up into lack of education, lack of preparation.

I would be far better off and more productive if I limited myself to just 5 hours client work a day (or more likely 10 then 0) than the current mad rush.

We need to balance A work, B work and probably A leisure (time with kids) and B leisure ( housework, tv)

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#188

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Feb 04, 2013, 9:56 AM UTC

nagrom wrote: post #179

serge2k wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for you, my rent is more than that and I don't live in an expensive place.

Sure you do! So do I! You and I probably live in the most expensive 1% of places on the planet. We live incredible lives - our existences are better on average than anything any king had 150 years ago. We have whatever food we want at whatever time in the year we want it. We have phenomenal connectivity and mobility and, if we need to be on the other side of the planet in 48 hours time, that's doable. Of course, I wa…

The gargantuan difference between kings of old and us today, the critical difference that these comparisons always miss, is that whatever lifestyle you choose, you have to work roughly the same number of hours to maintain it.

If you are a programmer, you can't just decide to work 10 hours a week for $25k and live a $25k lifestyle. If you want to earn $25k, you'll probably still have to work full time to do it. Regardless of the comforts we enjoy, we are still slaves to the workweek (there's not enough contract work for every programmer or designer to go freelance), and that is why it's right to complain.

We may have more "things" per person than Arthur himself, yet we lack the freedom and status of being royalty.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#189

Post by pkorzeniewski » Mon, Feb 04, 2013, 9:59 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #180

Well, 25 hours a week is for how long your average worker is productive throughout the typical work-week anyway. The rest is spent dicking around on the Internet and socializing with coworkers. I feel like if we cut down the "official" work to 25 hours, people would suddenly realize that they need to be a lot more productive to get the same amount of work done. No more pointless interruptions. No more bullshit meetin…

Being on site is just as important as being productive. Employers buy your time and in these 8 hours a day, whenever something pops up and has to be done quickly, you have to be ready to take on it.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#190

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Feb 04, 2013, 10:03 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #110

burntsushi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week) Bad assumption. > If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive work time (40 hours/week) then how are you not a slave to that subsistence lifestyle? What is "subsistence" about it? I understand subsistence living to mean "having just enough to survive."

Jesus, you and ctdonath sound like 20-something morons. Get a fucking life with several mortgages and children. Or, better yet - go live the idolized life of the genius software development hermit you both appear to think yourself to be. What a wonderful life that will be. I am so sick of these douchebag HNers that all think of themselves to be the next rails revolution and have no fucking clue as to what it actually…

If something else about life is bothering you, it's probably best not to take it out on us naive 20-somethings. Either way it's clear something about this thread has deeply upset you (happens to all of us), so if it's something deeper going on I wish you luck sorting it out. If not, at the least, I too wish it was possible to live on $10/day and still have some semblance of a family and social life.