Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric • Hacker News Board

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#51

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 3:36 PM UTC

Look, we all know there are much harder jobs than a 9-5 office job. However, I think an interesting question is:

How necessary is the job? How much does the job satisfy human needs, or contribute to human well-being? If it simply doesn't, if its only function is institutional, why should we consider it anything less than barbaric, or even perverse? Institutions such as businesses exist to serve people, after all, and doing things the other way around has been at the heart of some of the 20th century's major atrocities.

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

>Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#52

Post by mantas » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 3:36 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #36

mantas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for 3rd world country. Quite a few people (mostly older, but not only) in my whereabouts see stable 9-5 job as freedom and strive for it.

And yet, there could be more. So many 9-5 jobs have little or no meaning, yet we insist they are filled to provide people with "purpose" or to justify their continued existence. Looking into the future and seeing 9-5 as "a step in the right direction, but far from the last step" is not inconceivable. We look upon slave and child labor as barbaric, whereas not even 200 years ago it was the accepted norm. What prevents…

Job meaningfulness is not related wether it's 9-5 or not. And some jobs, wether we like it or not, have to be done at specific predefined time. There're no jobs that have to be done by slaves or children though.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#53

Post by Bartweiss » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 3:39 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #47

Avshalom wrote: post #32

Of course it's actually 7-6 with the commute and lunch

My lunch is included in my day but I know that's an extremely rare situation. The 4-mile, 10-minute drive is pretty nice too. But serious question: do you think your employer should pay you to commute?

> But serious question: do you think your employer should pay you to commute?

In a practical sense, most employers should or do. Not for your personal choice of commute, that's on you, but an employer in downtown LA or rural Nebraska does end up having to compensate people for living somewhere so hard to get to.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#54

Post by jhoechtl » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 3:44 PM UTC

test1235 wrote: post #39

filereaper wrote: post #17

Rather than going down the barbaric tone. When it comes to 9-5 jobs, I keep going back to city infrastructures. Where I live in Toronto, all the highways and subways get clogged as everyone needs to make it to the office for 9-5. Everyone then complains about poor infrastructure, but then all cities keep building for a short burst peak traffic. Infrastructure is overbuilt for other times. I can understand a lot of it…

Another complaint I have about 9-5 is I can't find time to do certain things because everyone all works the same hours. Certain services such as doctors appointments are only available while I'm working, or if I need contractor services at home, again, only available while I'm working. Luckily I work in a city centre so I can do some things in my lunch hour, but if you happened to work out of town (e.g. business park…

In former times it was perceived to be ok to see your doctor during the 'regular' office hours. Go figure

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#55

Post by jhoechtl » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 3:46 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #40

_m8fo wrote: post #33

I personally disagree with premise (though a few points I must agree with), I think the real problem is the lack of satisfaction in general. Because some capitalistic societies are obessed with growth, we've created problems for ourselves that are not only pointless, but exist in part, to employ drones of people, who due to their own life circumstances, cannot say "no." Once all jobs serve a visible, real purpose and…

In my area McDonald's is a pretty large employer of physically disabled people. Not a single one of them has the dexterity or strength to load a plane. Coincidentally I know some people who work at my local airport and they don't have any idea what they're loading or unloading or where it's going to unless they happen to speak to the pilot. Employment does not exist to fulfill your personal sense of self worth. You'r…

Get money out of the equation and everything changes dramatically!

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#56

Post by RUG3Y » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 3:46 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #51

Look, we all know there are much harder jobs than a 9-5 office job. However, I think an interesting question is: How necessary is the job? How much does the job satisfy human needs, or contribute to human well-being? If it simply doesn't, if its only function is institutional, why should we consider it anything less than barbaric, or even perverse? Institutions such as businesses exist to serve people, after all, and…

If my job, and even the entire company I work at, disappeared today, not a single soul would notice. Or they might casually notice, but their life would not be affected in any meaningful way.

The work is soul destroying, I'd love to be doing something better.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#57

Post by Bartweiss » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 3:47 PM UTC

> Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing. They just want to hit their milestones and that’s it.

That's a hell of a strange line.

As far as I can see, people in tech spend way more time looking at the implications of tech work than anyone else does. (Except, perhaps, people like Coupland who are make their money from doing so.) Tech workers are responsible for much of the endless conversation on web privacy and AI risk and automation and gamification and all the rest. Which is how it should be, presumably - I assume architects spend more time looking at the implications of building design than the rest of us.

The best justification I can see is that he's just restricting a general, Stugeon's Law observation (90% of everyone don't look at implications) to one specific field.

There ought to be a name for making a true observation, but singling out one instance of it for no particular reason. It happens damned often.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#58

Post by innocentoldguy » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 3:50 PM UTC

Perhaps the word "barbaric" is a bit much, but there is certainly an element of truth to what he's saying about the office being obsolete; at least in some professions.

For example, I am a software engineer, and there is literally no reason whatsoever for me to go into an office everyday. None. I am more productive when I'm remote, and working where, how, and when works best for me. I also have no emotional need for social camaraderie in the workplace, which some people do. My family meets my emotional needs, so I don't need social constructs foisted upon me by my employer. Being social for the sake of being social drains the life out of me and makes me less productive. I've worked in offices and I've worked remotely for almost 30 years, and remote work, at least for me, has proven time and again to work best.

While "barbaric" may be a hyperbolic choice of words, when describing the 9-to-5 grind, I do have to say that the reasons typically given for forcing engineers to work in a modern, open-office environments (e.g. "We need to collaborate") are shallow at best. These environments have been proven to cause more problems than they solve, so in this case, I'll have to side with Coupland, in spite of his embellishments. The collaboration excuse is especially annoying when we still use Slack to communicate, even when we are sitting two feet from each other.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#59

Post by krapp » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 4:04 PM UTC

fsloth wrote: post #49

krapp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employment doesn't exist to improve your quality of life, or even provide you with a living wage. Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company, in exchange for whatever compensation the market deems fair, and under terms that benefit the company's bottom line. To expect most, or even many, jobs to be motivating or inspiring or even enjoyable is unrealistic. And to be fair, many people would love it if…

"Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company..." I would claim employment is an economic pattern our civilization uses to process the resources of our planet. Money is just a signaling and resource allocation tool in this endeavour. Companies are a self organization pattern formed from legal constraints and economies of scale. There is no intrinsic necessity to organize work into 9 to 5 desk jobs. Lo…

>Sure, I don't know a better way to organize all of it but that does not mean that there is no need to, or that we can't or won't.

Who are "we", though?

Employers aren't likely to change their job requirements unless profits increase from doing so, or unless a government or union forces them to. A desire to improve the human condition alone probably isn't sufficient to convince businesses to change their status quo. The people capable of making such decisions already enjoy a very high quality of life.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#60

Post by Bartweiss » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #22

jgrahamc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation? I don't think it's hard to see that as barbaric. Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods".

"Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods"." As opposed to what, though? Hunter-gatherers may or may not have had a lot more leisure time, depending on who you ask, but they didn't hunt and gather together in family groups all the time, and while many people use their words to sing the praises of this…

> ...while many people use their words to sing the praises of [hunting-gathering] their actions suggest they don't really want that, since they could still have it if they wanted it enough.

I think you're overestimating how much you can have that if you wanted it. I realize many people would reject that life (or at a minimum want modern medicine alongside it), but basically no one actually has the choice.

Hunting-gathering became steadily less 'appealing' as it became impossible to do effectively. In America, start from the near-extinction of bison. Add the privatization of most land, mass agriculture destroying the great plains habitat completely, fenced cattle farming destroying western spaces. (That also destroyed the semi-hunter-gatherer vaquero lifestyle, which people were mourning mere decades ago.)

You can do this anywhere - urbanization of the American East, desertification of the Southwest, the list goes on. And if you want a less-nomadic version, since the open spaces for nomadism are gone, you run into more modern laws actively preventing it. I know people who grew up (not at all as hunter-gatherers) in houses out in the woods that are now completely illegal because electricity and running water have been mandated.

I'm on a soapbox here, yeah. But I know people who do want this lifestyle, people who've tried for this lifestyle, and the simple answer is that it's not actually available. For most people, that choice is gone. It can't coexist with modern civilization, and that might be a price worth paying but we ought to admit we paid it.