When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier? • Hacker News Board

Re: When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

#51

Post by tankerdude » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 6:47 PM UTC

seanstickle wrote: post #44

grecy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you personally, but to play the devil's advocate a little: > If it takes me 10 hours or 40 hours to deliver those results, that's up to me, as long as the deadlines are hit and the deliverables are high-quality. If you are able to consistently deliver the required results in only 10 hours of "work", it's clear that any organization will slowly ramp up the required results more and more until you are work…

This is a cultural change that the company has to go through. They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours. Thinking that they'll "ramp up the required results more and more until you are working 40 hours a week" means that you're still thinking that you're paying for hours. Still, it's the responsibility of all employees to improve the process that they work in, just as part of the company's continuous impro…

The queues of things to do is always extremely long.

There are 1000 tickets in your JIRA queue. They then ask you, what can you do in the 2 week (or 1 week) sprint?

What do you say? Is it the 10 hour or 40 hour timeframe? That happens all the time in development, and people do a few things. They underestimate a lot or they write code that is 90%, where when bad things happen, it's ugly to clean up.

So the results are what you say you can do in your week of work. And of course, they will put the pressure of "but that's easy." Yada yada.

As a results oriented place, some companies pack in what you think is 80 in your 40 hour work week (a lot of companies will try to do this). So what happens then? You switch jobs?

As for improving the process, most engineers don't know exactly how. They speculate and guess, hoping to hit it right. It's really up to the people driving it to affect the company culture. Doing it as an individual within an organization is quite difficult.

That's what I've experienced at certain companies anyways, generally with management with less experience, tbh.

Re: When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

#52

Post by qwerta » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 6:49 PM UTC

muyuu wrote: post #21

qwerta wrote: post #4

I can speek for Greece, where is ban on sunday work. For workers it just means they have to work unpaid (and undeclared) overtimes. If you wont to make people happy, just introduce double pay for overtimes and really enforce it!

If you cannot "really enforce" one policy why do you think you will be able to "really enforce" the other? When enforcement doesn't work rules are guidelines.

Some rules "enforce themselfs". Unpaid overtime brings positive motivation for emplyers to broken. Paid overtime is negative motivations, and people are more likely to report it and sue due to lost money.

Re: When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

#53

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 6:51 PM UTC

seanstickle wrote: post #44

grecy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you personally, but to play the devil's advocate a little: > If it takes me 10 hours or 40 hours to deliver those results, that's up to me, as long as the deadlines are hit and the deliverables are high-quality. If you are able to consistently deliver the required results in only 10 hours of "work", it's clear that any organization will slowly ramp up the required results more and more until you are work…

This is a cultural change that the company has to go through. They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours. Thinking that they'll "ramp up the required results more and more until you are working 40 hours a week" means that you're still thinking that you're paying for hours. Still, it's the responsibility of all employees to improve the process that they work in, just as part of the company's continuous impro…

[deleted]

Re: When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

#54

Post by seanstickle » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 6:52 PM UTC

tankerdude wrote: post #51

seanstickle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cultural change that the company has to go through. They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours. Thinking that they'll "ramp up the required results more and more until you are working 40 hours a week" means that you're still thinking that you're paying for hours. Still, it's the responsibility of all employees to improve the process that they work in, just as part of the company's continuous impro…

The queues of things to do is always extremely long. There are 1000 tickets in your JIRA queue. They then ask you, what can you do in the 2 week (or 1 week) sprint? What do you say? Is it the 10 hour or 40 hour timeframe? That happens all the time in development, and people do a few things. They underestimate a lot or they write code that is 90%, where when bad things happen, it's ugly to clean up. So the results are…

Let's be honest. Both a Results-Only Work Environment or a "9-5 in the office" environment try to pack as much into an employee's schedule as possible. That's not unique to ROWE.

Some of the answers to your questions are: well, what do you do now, and how can that be made better? ROWE isn't magic. It's just a recognition that pretending that you're paying for hours spent in an office is nonsense, and that we should talk about the work itself rather than the things that don't have to do with the work.

The old equation (fetishistically held to, even in the face of its absurdity) of TIME + PRESENCE = RESULTS typically takes the focus of the conversation, and we end up in conversations about who can work remotely, and how many hours people should put in, etc. Instead of talking about the stuff we're actually paid to deliver.

As for not knowing how to improve processes, I don't mean that we should just say to them "hey, go improve things." It's a crucial management responsibility to make sure that people know how to do this sort of thing, to teach them how, and to provide ongoing coaching in doing it.

Re: When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

#55

Post by evincarofautumn » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 6:53 PM UTC

seanstickle wrote: post #38

I favor something more like a Results-Only Work Environment ( http://gorowe.com/pages/rowe-standards ), where the focus is on the results and not on how many hours are worked. Too many companies (even startups) are conservatives and traditionalists in the sense of thinking that work needs to be done within certain hours and at a certain place, even when those are not drivers of the results. I'm hired to deliver certa…

Forcing someone to punch a clock is definitely misguided. But work hours are a useful proxy for effort spent, provided you have good estimation of your pace. And being in the office not only puts you in a “work” frame of mind, but also promotes serendipitous sharing with your coworkers—swapping productivity tips, planning features, explaining systems.

So even in a quite results-oriented workplace, with almost total freedom over my hours, I still often choose to go into the office for about six hours a day.

Re: When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

#56

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 6:55 PM UTC

seanstickle wrote: post #44

grecy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you personally, but to play the devil's advocate a little: > If it takes me 10 hours or 40 hours to deliver those results, that's up to me, as long as the deadlines are hit and the deliverables are high-quality. If you are able to consistently deliver the required results in only 10 hours of "work", it's clear that any organization will slowly ramp up the required results more and more until you are work…

This is a cultural change that the company has to go through. They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours. Thinking that they'll "ramp up the required results more and more until you are working 40 hours a week" means that you're still thinking that you're paying for hours. Still, it's the responsibility of all employees to improve the process that they work in, just as part of the company's continuous impro…

> They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours.

True. But since "results" aren't exactly quantifiable, how can they get steady value for their money?

Is result A equal to result B or result Q? If results M, N, and O are all equal, how many M/N/O results does it take to earn one week's worth of paycheck?

What if they decide that they're paying too much for M/N/O results, and want at least 11 of those per week instead of the current 4?

What if you wait an entire week for the dumb assholes in the other department to deliver the specifications? Do you not get paid that week?

You're paid by the hour not because hours are the best way to measure accomplishments, but because it's easy to measure hours and difficult to measure anything else.

Re: When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

#57

Post by jerf » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 7:00 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #18

jerf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The article author suggests that the Korean laws may not have gone far enough." That's a really scary line of logic though. "We did a thing, and there was no effect. We propose that to obtain the desired effect we should do even more of the thing that had no effect." That's undisprovable. It's possible that doing the thing that produced no results even harder could have some positive effect, but the world is probabl…

> It's possible that doing the thing that produced no results even harder could have some positive effect, but the world is probably even more full of things that produced no results but if pushed harder will have negative effects. Part of being a real scientist is acknowledging that this can only be interpreted as evidence against the idea that forcing shorter work hours will make people happier, no matter how cogni…

"A mild change in X did nothing, so you should assume a major change in X will do nothing?"

Wrong direction. We are not entitled to take a result that a minor change had no effect on the target variable and treat that as evidence that a major change must do the thing we expect it to do. We must accept this as evidence that in fact the major version of our change will, at the very least, do something other than what we expected; our theory made predictions and our theory predicted wrong. This is not a thing to be glossed over lightly! Forcing further reductions in hours may very well have some other net-negative benefit, for instance.

You are all, frankly, making exactly the mistake I'm talking about, and doubling down on it.

Re: When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

#58

Post by seanstickle » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 7:00 PM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #56

seanstickle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cultural change that the company has to go through. They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours. Thinking that they'll "ramp up the required results more and more until you are working 40 hours a week" means that you're still thinking that you're paying for hours. Still, it's the responsibility of all employees to improve the process that they work in, just as part of the company's continuous impro…

> They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours. True. But since "results" aren't exactly quantifiable, how can they get steady value for their money? Is result A equal to result B or result Q? If results M, N, and O are all equal, how many M/N/O results does it take to earn one week's worth of paycheck? What if they decide that they're paying too much for M/N/O results, and want at least 11 of those per week…

I feel for you. Apparently you don't have a boss who can define what they want from you. This is not uncommon, and we're struggling with that ourselves. We've all spent so many years with the belief that putting in hours is the work, that we don't really know what we've hired people to actually do.

All your questions are the same questions you have in an TIME + PRESENCE = RESULTS job. What if they decide they want 11 instead of the current 4. What if you wait an entire week for the other department? These are all still problems. Are you excusing yourself from dealing with them because you say "hey, 40 hours in and I'm done, bye!"?

It's not difficult to measure results of work that you hire people to do. It's hard to decide to start doing that though.

Re: When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

#59

Post by akirarei » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 7:00 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #16

ekidd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like it might relate to the "hedonic treadmill": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman were among the first to investigate the hedonic treadmill in their 1978 study, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?”. Lottery winners and paraplegics were compared to a control group and as predicted, comparison (with past experiences and current comm…

Wow, I wonder what effect this has on politics? It was noted that the Arab Spring was largely not the result of political discontent but the fact food prices were becoming very high [0]. It might be the case that unless the basic livelihood of people is consistently threatened - such as not being able to eat - that they will always put up with the political status quo. As we're seeing now with the non-existent politi…

For a revolution you need a revolutionary situation in a society, Lenin described two conditions "The bottoms don't want and the tops cannot live in the old way".

It is often connected to food or another word necessity's. That was the case during the "arab spring" and was also the case in 1917 Russia, the main slogan for the Russian revolution being "bread and peace". The Russian people had nothing left to lose and the ruling class had nothing left to give(to sustain their power) thus fulfilling the two conditions.

All you need then is a catalyst. Which in the case of the "arab spring" was when Mohamed Bouazizi set him self on fire.

When it concerns America and mass-surveillance I would see that as a possible catalyst that lacked a revolutionary situation.

Re: When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

#60

Post by jerf » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 7:02 PM UTC

Bahamut wrote: post #14

jerf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The article author suggests that the Korean laws may not have gone far enough." That's a really scary line of logic though. "We did a thing, and there was no effect. We propose that to obtain the desired effect we should do even more of the thing that had no effect." That's undisprovable. It's possible that doing the thing that produced no results even harder could have some positive effect, but the world is probabl…

That is not how a true scientist thinks. Effects are not necessarily linear. For example, in order to see some effects in quantum mechanics, a threshold must be passed. Or in physics, a certain amount of force to overcome the minimum threshold as a result of friction. Problem solving isn't such a simple operation. One must be careful with logic.

See my other post. You are not entitled to simply leap to the conclusion that because we did not see a predicted effect, that we must have simply not reached the threshold. There is still the distinct possibility that we're entirely wrong about what will happen if we increase the input.

Basically, everybody here is not thinking with their science hats. They are thinking with their social engineering/political hats, where a government action to forcibly reduce working hours simply must have positive benefits, essentially axiomatically, and if we're not seeing them yet we must simply not be trying hard enough yet, a classic social engineering mindset. But that's not a scientific mindset. There's no guarantee this intervention must have positive results. There's no guarantee the axiom is actually true.