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Can we have the day off?

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Re: Can we have the day off?

#381

Post by ixtli »

lazide wrote: post #256
theptip wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off. As experienced by companies, the market is more competitive than ever. Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch. It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma. The only way to get this outcome is to coordinate at a level higher than individual market participants. In other words, get your government to i…

lol, this government is going to just throw anyone trying into the meat grinder. The only way to do this is to bypass the authorities.

Few willing to discuss this!

Re: Can we have the day off?

#382

Post by madrox »

culi wrote: post #275
madrox wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusingly, there is literally not even a 7 day work week ban for companies in the US. You can require employees work every day. Employers are just required to pay employees overtime under various conditions beyond 40 hours / five days a week, which is why you don't see it. And what's more, software engineers are exempt from these rules because of their pay grades. If you're a SWE making a salary the odds are your emp…

it's not powered by norms. In the US, if you want to employ someone more than 40 hours you have to give them extra overtime pay. It's called the Fair Labor Standards Act and it was passed in 1938

Unless you are exempt. Guess what profession tends to be considered exempt?

If you are a SWE, you don't get paid overtime for working that incident on the weekend or going over 40 hours in a week. The only reason you work five days a week is tradition.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#383

Post by ChrisArchitect »

Meanwhile, a trend in the last year:

AI Startup Founders Tout a Winning Formula–No Booze, No Sleep, No Fun

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45221423

996

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149049

New trend: extreme hours at AI startups

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45156674

SV AI Startups Are Embracing China's Controversial '996' Work Schedule

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44657480

Re: Can we have the day off?

#384

Post by polisaez »

xiaoyu2006 wrote: post #167
alexpotato wrote: post #43

My dad was a stock broker in the late 1970s and remembers when most of trading was 100% manual and firms actually had "runners" who would take stock certificates back and forth between trading firms. He has this great quote about when computers came out: "We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the sam…

Human had all the industrialization and stuff, yet we work 5 days / week now.

I was looking for facts to disprove your point, but it seems we actually work more than our ancestors.

Medieval folks and hunter-gatherers had plenty of time off. It wasn't until the industrial revolution that we started extending our workweek.

Here's a nice summary of how the workweek looked like, from the AskHistorians subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rf0lb/comme...

Re: Can we have the day off?

#385

Post by rickydroll »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #316
Avicebron wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't understand why people make these hyperbolic jokes about guillotines. Violence is counterproductive; and not practical anyway. Joking about it just makes you feel great without actually doing anything. There is a simple alternative. Vote; and educate your family and friends. If you don't know what is on the ballot in the midterms, you are part of the problem. If you aren't starting a family conversation about…

So you are saying that I shouldn't start my artisanal guillotine business?

Believe me, I know what's on the ballot for the midterm in the state but it's not going to stop me from making dark snarky jokes.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#386

Post by bwhiting2356 »

komali2 wrote: post #361
bwhiting2356 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the musician's union for 12 years before I got into tech. There were some silly rules, like someone couldn't be both a musician and and orchestrator on the same show, because it's "doing 2 jobs". It's like saying you can't be full stack. You couldn't fire people who were bad at their jobs and stopped putting in any effort. There was a profit sharing agreement that the union rejected, because it would come at…

> If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works I run a co-op, and the most surprising thing I've learned is that it seems the only reason other people don't set up their businesses as co-ops is, frankly, greed. In this startup ecosystem, why would you do a co-op when you could instead chase that multi million dollar exit that…

Maybe i’m a cynical capitalist, but I expect everyone to be operating in their own self interest. There are few true saints. Startups are high risk high reward. 9/10 fail. If a VC gets less upside when it works, the successes wouldn’t pay for the failures.

Co-op for consulting actually seems like it could work.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#387

Post by warkdarrior »

__loam wrote: post #305
Aurornis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity. I’m seeing this talking point circulated a lot recently but it’s not really the whole story. Luddites weren’t on a selfless crusade to steal from the rich and give to the poor. They wanted…

[flagged]

I don't know, since I cannot afford the boot. Apparently it was priced way out of my range because the boot was unloaded of a ship by an expensive human dock worker.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#388

Post by noduerme »

So I freelance and I still write all the code by hand. I'm not sure how to honestly inject LLM code and bill for it. It would also probably cause me a lot of downstream problems if I did. But I asked my largest client if they were willing to begin donating $20k a year to my retirement fund if I'm going to be helping them to phase me out over some number of years. They did agree to that.

The reality is that if you were already a 10x coder, you can't be 10x more productive even if the LLMs made you so, because there's only so much work.

And even just using LLMs in my private projects, I feel my daily coding skills slipping. I want to ask Claude to do some dumb API integration instead of doing it myself. But I know if I don't do it myself, I'll be lost at sea and never able to debug it without more Claude.

This is a drunk state of mind post, feel free to ignore it.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#389

Post by dolebirchwood »

cattown wrote: post #33

This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should…

> 10x’ing our productivity

Normalizing this "10x" language (well before AI) is a factor in this problem.

It's been so loosely and casually thrown about in this industry. 10x engineer... 10x mindset... 10x growth... 10x this... 10x that...

All paraded around by people who fancied themselves to be their own version of 10x whatever.

Well, keep parroting this long enough, and it's just a matter of time before people not only believe it to be commonplace, but they start to expect and demand it.

So now we have AI as the next thing foisted upon us to force everyone to be 10x or die trying.

Should've just settled for being 3.14x engineers like reasonable people.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#390

Post by Helloworldboy »

__loam wrote: post #305
Aurornis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity. I’m seeing this talking point circulated a lot recently but it’s not really the whole story. Luddites weren’t on a selfless crusade to steal from the rich and give to the poor. They wanted…

[flagged]

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