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Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

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Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#201

Post by alexpetralia »

crdrost wrote: post #129
muzani wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, honestly, I think soccer/basketball are better analogies. The team remains in formation. Doing too much is far worse than doing too little, because it pushes everything else out of sync. A big part of the work is sometimes just fixing/improving workflow. There are tests to write, documentation, refactoring, warnings to look at, plugins to update, that wonky button padding to fix, all these little things that ar…

There is a much bigger point here, though, about idle time. Idle time is not just about healing the psyche. It also does that. But you run into problems from not having idle time much sooner than burnout, typically. What is at stake is that the greedy algorithm for optimization does NOT work for complex systems. “I will make every individual person efficient, everyone is always working on something, look how good of…

This is great. Thanks

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#202

Post by Bootwizard »

dcolkitt wrote: post #189
scottlocklin wrote: post #112

Let's reduce economics to its barest rudiments: I'm pretty sure a worker could buy a house and support a family in 1950 on a single, average 40 hour a week salary; this was probably also true even as late as 1970. How many workers in the modern economy can buy a house and support a family on 1/4 of a 40 hour a week salary? Those "productivity" numbers are obviously cooking the books bullshit. Either that or they're n…

In 1950 the average new home was 983 square feet and the average household 3.8 people. Today it's 2500 square feet and 2.6 people. That's a 270% increase in home space per person. And that doesn't even get into all the other ways that modern housing is fancier. Central A/C, attached garages, swimming pools, high ceilings, granite countertops, finished basements, more bathrooms, massively decreased fire risk, higher c…

That salary price is nowhere near the minimum wage in the US. $45,000 is around $21.63/hr. Although most places pay more than minimum wage, the current federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr.

Also, you'll be hard pressed to find a livable house for that cheap. The average price of a home in the US in 2019 is $226,800 [2].

The numbers just don't work. Most people can't afford a house right now.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_S... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/cost-to-buy-a-house-in-every...

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#203

Post by cle »

Qwertystop wrote: post #138
scottlocklin wrote: post #112

Let's reduce economics to its barest rudiments: I'm pretty sure a worker could buy a house and support a family in 1950 on a single, average 40 hour a week salary; this was probably also true even as late as 1970. How many workers in the modern economy can buy a house and support a family on 1/4 of a 40 hour a week salary? Those "productivity" numbers are obviously cooking the books bullshit. Either that or they're n…

If productivity goes up but wages are flat, the productivity doesn't help the person who's being more productive.

It might if they also get compensation other than wages.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#204

Post by musicale »

UglyToad wrote: post #21

I'd be interested to know if other software developers feel their current working hours are good/positive? From feedback I've had I'm generally regarded as pretty good at my job and highly productive but my current working hours leave me completely drained, to the point I go home and collapse on the sofa, make dinner and go to bed. And that's off an 8.5 hour day. It's at the point now where it's extremely likely I'll…

> It's my experience that at most 2-3 hours is productively spent, the rest is wasted.

That sounds about right for most workplaces I've been in, and it's probably a fairly sustainable pace for work that requires careful thought and concentration.

I remember reading about a consultant who advised struggling graduate students to spend no more than 18 hours a week working on their dissertations; on this schedule most of them finished in 6 months or less.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#205

Post by yabadabadoes »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #197
yabadabadoes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US system's structure penalizes companies for hiring workers between 20-40 hours. Any company that doesn't rely on flexible edit oops- <20..

Can you elaborate on why? Is this a tax related thing? Or benefits related?

Tax code relating to benefits and labor laws (which kind of assume the environment encouraged by the tax code.)

As an example, benefits have fairness tests between highest and lowest paid employees. Fail those tests and the benefits are taxed, possibly as normal income. Companies find tricks to get people out of the group of normal employees under the IRS rules to beat these tests.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#206

Post by lbj »

Interestingly we did a survey such as this on our massive danish government and it turns out that since the 1950s there has been a 0% productivity increase, the wages have however followed increases in the private sector.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#207

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

We should be having official 4 hour workdays. State mandated.

We can only do about four hours of solid work. There’s really no tricks to productivity. Just trying to mask fatigue, I suppose.

But me? I don’t do any real work until after lunch. Maybe a meeting, to manage my managers, of course.

I learned this just in recent years tho. Before that, I was as neurotic as anyone.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#208

Post by Consultant32452 »

anonymousJim12 wrote: post #82
Consultant32452 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a global economy now. Like a billion people have been raised out of abject poverty. It's an absolute falsehood that only the top earners have prospered. The middle class is shrinking in the US, because they're moving up. We brought in millions and millions of foreign workers from impoverished countries, did their wages remain stagnant?

Executives live in a global economy. The rest of us might "operate" in one but we don't get to take advantage of that privilege the way the wealthy do. You are right, world wide poverty is on the decline. But given the choice between: - better for 1 billion people - worse for 2 billion people - really outstandingly fantastic for 200 people and - really good for 5 billion people - worse for 200 people I know which way…

It's slightly worse for white men in the West who had a historically unique period of prosperity immediately following WWII. It's still nominally better for them, it's just not relatively better compared to everyone else. It's better for women, it's better for minorities, it's better for immigrants, it's better for the billion people who escaped poverty since just 1990. What are the big complaints compared to 50 years ago? If you happen to live in some of the best places to live in all of human history it's harder to buy a house?

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#209

Post by Consultant32452 »

knightofmars wrote: post #73
Consultant32452 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a global economy now. Like a billion people have been raised out of abject poverty. It's an absolute falsehood that only the top earners have prospered. The middle class is shrinking in the US, because they're moving up. We brought in millions and millions of foreign workers from impoverished countries, did their wages remain stagnant?

> The middle class is shrinking in the US, because they're moving up. This is only half the picture. The middle class is shrinking in the US, because some are moving up and some are moving down.

According to the US Census data, the percentage of households that are low income is smaller than ever.

https://fee.org/articles/why-our-shrinking-middle-class-is-a...

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#210

Post by dcolkitt »

Bootwizard wrote: post #202
dcolkitt wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1950 the average new home was 983 square feet and the average household 3.8 people. Today it's 2500 square feet and 2.6 people. That's a 270% increase in home space per person. And that doesn't even get into all the other ways that modern housing is fancier. Central A/C, attached garages, swimming pools, high ceilings, granite countertops, finished basements, more bathrooms, massively decreased fire risk, higher c…

That salary price is nowhere near the minimum wage in the US. $45,000 is around $21.63/hr. Although most places pay more than minimum wage, the current federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr. Also, you'll be hard pressed to find a livable house for that cheap. The average price of a home in the US in 2019 is $226,800 [2]. The numbers just don't work. Most people can't afford a house right now. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.or…

> The average price of a home in the US in 2019 is $226,800

Yes, because the average home in America is 2000+ square feet. The OP explicitly made the comparison to 1950. And in 1950 the average home was 980 square feet. It'd be like me complaining that cars have become unaffordable because I decided to double the number of cars that my household owns.

You can easily find a 1950s size home for less than $125,000 almost anywhere in America. For example check out the Zillow listings for Omaha, Nebraska. There's a plethora of 2 bedroom/1 bathroom homes (typical 1950 sized house) priced around $100,000. (Many actually built in the 1950s.)

Omaha has the third lowest unemployment rate in the country, and Nebraska's educational system is ranked above average. If your benchmark is 1950, which entails a four-person family, a 1000 square foot house, a job, and decent schools, that's easily achievable today, unless you insist on living in a high cost metro like New York, San Francisco or Miami.

> Although most places pay more than minimum wage, the current federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr.

Only 2% of full-time workers make less than minimum wage. And of those ones that do the vast majority are under-25. Not exactly the typical 1950 head-of-household. You're trying to compare the poorest segment today to the upper-middle of 1950. You can't compare advertising executives from Mad Men to modern-day dishwashers, then declare that things have gone backwards.

If you do want to look at the poorest Americans, instead of the middle-class, then 1950 looks even more bleak. 25% of homes didn't have full plumbing. 15% didn't have a toilet. 20% didn't have electricity. A third of were heated with coal (which is filthy, unreliable and terrible for the respiratory system).

Without a doubt the bottom quartile of Americans had much much worse housing conditions in 1950 than today.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2016/home.htm [2] https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS04_Pa...

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