311–320 of 351 posts
If you were explaining the world to an alien, it would be hard to justify the lack of diversity in working arrangements. I applaud any such non standard option in the labor market - may your office be full of good fits!
I don't know. The aliens could be some type of insect with entire classes of workers that can never stop working. Maybe they think about how to justify their working arrangements to us humans.
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To clarify to a since flagged (by someone else) comment: When i say "I'm at least 90% as productive" -- I mean I am more productive per hour worked. Not that I end up working 90% hours but only getting paid for 80%. I really do work 80% hours, only four days a week, Monday to Thursday. I am not expected to and don't work on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays. I just get done I think 90% or more of what I would get done i…
Personally I don’t find an ethics violation. If you’re meeting your output expectations who cares how many hours you work. I certainly don’t as a manager at a large public company. I fully expect most ppl are getting some amount of personal stuff done during the day, or power napping between meetings. Just don’t be a dick and make the rest of the team pick up your slack.
If it got to the point where I felt like I had to hide the amount of time I was spending "working"/"not working" from my boss, then even if it were ethical (I still think it depends on the situation), I would just find it too stressful and unpleasant an experience, to be routinely hiding or lying about what I did with my day.
To me, doing 'some amount' of personal stuff during the day (which should be acceptable at any job), is still an entirely different thing than "I don't work Fridays, don't expect to see me online". Qualitatively, not just quantitatively.
"meeting output expectations" is tricky, I think, because what is the amount of "output" expected from "a person week"? It obviously varies for different people, at different times in their career, different skills, and just from week to week different things going on their lives/stress level. Knowing that I am not "cheating" my week is part of what makes me feel justified and honest in pushing back if a workplace does try to assign more work than is possible. Barring emergencies (and "your failure to plan is not my emergency") -- we should not be expected to work extra hours to get more work done. We get done in a week what we get done in a week, and then we come back the next week and do more -- to some extent, as engineers, the amount we can get done in a week is simply defined by what we do get done in a week.
But still, my real point is that even using this humane "you get done what you get done" approach, in our line of work, most organizations would find, I predict, that people working only 4 days a week (80% time), get done 90% or more of what people working five days a week do.
I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself. As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the…
The upside/downside to this is that you can't filibuster on something that matters to you but nobody else cares about, because they already left the room before you started. But of course neither can any of the other people who think their hill is as valuable as yours.
I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself. As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the…
> As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. I worked as a contractor for a while with a 32 hour/week schedule. I was essentially just as productive as I was full time. Reality is for most creative jobs, there's a fraction o…
Like, if a marathon only takes 6 hours then why can't you do a second one on Sunday? And if I harass you enough can you do another one on Saturday afternoon as well?
I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself. As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the…
> Let's say you do need to attend a meeting. It's a 1 hour meeting. You're needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins. Every time I've tried this or seen it tried the meeting gets rescheduled and everyone's time is wasted. I wish it worked this way.
And the older I get, the more I realize that thinking that such a thing exists is its own kind of immaturity.
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Yesterday I had a 1 hour meeting where 3 of the 7 participants needed to attend another meeting after 30 minutes. We reorganized the agenda to hit the issues that they were especially concerned about while they were available, and then did the other things in the next 20 minutes, finishing a little early. It's not impossible, it just requires a culture of consideration, communication, and prioritization.
I wonder if that's the key -- maybe it's acceptable to shorten one meeting on your behalf (or at least your participation in that meeting) if the reason you'll miss this meeting is that you'll be in a different meeting. As long as you're in some time-wasting activity, they're satisfied. I say mostly tongue in cheek...
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> Let's say you do need to attend a meeting. It's a 1 hour meeting. You're needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins. Every time I've tried this or seen it tried the meeting gets rescheduled and everyone's time is wasted. I wish it worked this way.
It also heavily favors the loud and self important who will force their way to the front and dominate the conversation. In an hour long meeting there is much more opportunity to give everyone several minutes to speak and have group discussion and deliberation. Now if your meeting can actually get done in 20 minutes, it probably should have been a phone call.
Advocating for working 32 hours a week as if 40 is hard? I don't really get that at all. I know lots of people in other areas who easily work 60+ hours a week for years on end.
I suppose if all you want to do is coast along at a company that will likely get wiped out by the competition when TSHTF, it would be nice to work 32 hours, but if you want to get ahead, don't set your sights so low.
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When I was working before my retirement I routinely had to work 60 hr weeks since I was lead (went to every meeting) and wrote code full time along with my team. Most of our projects started with a hard deadline (estimates were only used for budgeting, the time was predetermined) and constant change was endemic during every project. No way this would fit in 32 hr weeks. Yet we still had sprints (which assumed 40 hrs…
Absolutely. Almost every org treats engineers as an expendable resource. They do this because they fear the alternative, which requires treating people with respect, because those people are valuable to your organization.
One of my goals in life is to get better at identifying (read, admitting/accepting) when the team has defectors and finding someplace else to apply my skills. But the few times it has actually worked are a mighty incentive to try again, even when I should know better.
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I can only agree, depending on what you include in "productivity". I'd say it's incredibly common for a modern office worker to be engaged in email, meetings and chat for some 4-6 hours per day. Not only does this leave little time to do actual tasks, that little time is also highly fragmented across the day. It's a point I've made repeatedly on similar threads: the problem with modern office work is too much collabo…
> Pretty much we spent the vast majority of the day figuring out what to do when, instead of actually doing it. One could argue that we virtually never do actual work. Machines or remote workers do. All we are doing is defining, communicating and controlling others' work.