What a strange article, his first issue:
"I am happy to be contradicted with data, but too often I see this issue being discussed with links to web articles citing other web articles, finally citing studies which suffer from the issues listed below.
Maximum output at work is traded off" while he him self does not cite a single scientific article
Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
71–80 of 198 posts
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#72I wonder how they got this curve. A lot of things can be sustained for 1 week cannot be sustained in the long term. I'd say in the long term: * 140-168 hours/week --> almost certain death. * 100-140 hours/week --> at risk of cardiovascular disease and many other serious medical conditions. Possible early death. * 80-100 hours/week --> still super-bad for your body. Forget raising children, dating, getting married, or…
I'm curious what you consider "work" when thinking about these numbers. Do you also consider chores, exercise, side projects/hobbies, etc to be work, or are you strictly referring to work for an employer? Do your numbers only apply to situations where people don't enjoy their jobs? If it's the weekend and I want to explore a cool work-related idea I had, does that count as work according to your numbers?
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#73We need to delineate manual, low-effort work from mental exercise. I can perform manual work virtually unendingly, but have a very finite ability to do mental exercises before mental exhaustion or simple boredom/distraction undermines the work. Individuals will differ, but data for manual work has no application to research, software development, etc. Having said that, there is shockingly little research or proof for…
Yes, I've thought the same thing. Wasn't 40 hours mainly about factories and coal mines --- though 40 hours in a mine would also be exhausting. But I think you meant something like a barista.
To my bosses and other non-programmers, I try to describe programming as doing math problems all day. I wonder what the history of hours is for clerks, architects, and other jobs more like ours.
I feel like I would be less tired if I just worked trouble tickets all day. Actually, writing a program too would be easier if that's all I did. Instead, I switch among writing a few different programs, working tickets, and the normal bureaucracy of emails, meetings, required training, etc.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#74Article is focused on the academic world so doesn't talk about interruptions, meetings, and quiet time. If you work in an open-plan office the 10 hours you do at night, at home, and on the wkend can be the most productive. I've had months where I put out more real fires on a kayak, on vacation, than at my desk; people bother you when you're at a desk but they can't get to you on the water.
Academia isn't exempt from those things. A professor (PI) is as much a manager as anything.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
i've never thought about how these two things relate to each other: asymptotic productivity of work, and winner take almost all nature of capitalism. seems like a very succinct way of explaining why people work so damned much. i'm actually kind of embarrassed i've never connected the two. it seems to make the argument against it more clear too- if marginal hours worked grow less productive, and marginal improvement t…
Great insight! You can see this not only at the macro level (Google winning all of search by being marginally better than competitors), but at the micro level (top employee out of a team of 10 gets the bonus/promotion while everyone else gets nothing), and probably everywhere in between. What I wonder is: Is this really an intrinsic quality of capitalism? What causes this "winner take most" reward system emerging in…
I suspect that in industries with strong network effects, the winner-takes-most system is most prevalent, as say, one additional unit could mean stealing three units away from competitors in the long-term.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt that the bugs provoked by tiredness have an aggregate of negative productivity. And even if so, it can be mitigated. As a webdeveloper, when Im tired i do the most menial tasks which means that bugs introduced there are rare and not important.
What is a menial task in software development? I mean, our entire field exist for pushing menial tasks into computers. If you have as many of them to fill 50% of your work load, there's probably something wrong. Besides, are you sure bugs in menial tasks are not important? When did you judge those tasks to decide this?
So many: fleshing out test suites, setting up that build server, automating your documentation generation process, making that internal tool a bit more generic to be useful, fixing those warnings from that analysis tool, checking for performance regressions against the data from when you last did it 3 months ago, refactoring some of that code from 3 years ago for which there is now a more idiomatic way of doing it, issue tracker triaging, ... There is so much in software development that is menial yet isn't worth or can't be automated.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
i've never thought about how these two things relate to each other: asymptotic productivity of work, and winner take almost all nature of capitalism. seems like a very succinct way of explaining why people work so damned much. i'm actually kind of embarrassed i've never connected the two. it seems to make the argument against it more clear too- if marginal hours worked grow less productive, and marginal improvement t…
asymptotic productivity of work, and winner take almost all nature of capitalism. seems like a very succinct way of explaining why people work so damned much A myth of capitalism is that the donkey can reach the carrot hanging from the stick if they work harder, that "almost all" can be won by those who are being driven to work more hours. However, this doesn't take into account that there are at least as many carrot…
Well personally I've come from a family where hardly anyone make a productive decisions, where nobody had a college degree, and a tiny portion are even middle class. And now I'm 22, self-taught, and make $70k a year in the Midwest. And I did get there by working endless hours and catching the carrot, repeatedly. I think the truth of how these things go is probably somewhere between where your typical anti capitalist and your typical social Darwinist would expect it to be.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#78TL;DR: you can get more done if you work 60 hours instead of 40 hours in a week, but the work done in that extra 20 hours might be a small fraction of what gets done in 20 hours during a 40 hour week. This is self-evidently true for many jobs. E.g., if you pick apples for 40 hours, then even if you only pick one apple per hour after that, you will still pick more apples working 50 hours than 40. We software developer…
There's a ton of conflation going on in the article. Most importantly, what defines "productive work" versus just "output" is not defined. He seems to focus on "academic" work but doesn't define terms well.
I've written about this here before, in summary:
1) Work has a cost to the endeavor too. Even with salaried workers.
2) If what you're doing can be boiled down to time-and-motion studies, you can always make cases where longer hours yield more "output". BUT pushing even these types of work beyond marginally has been found to incur large ongoing cost the mission. This is backed by research that has been done many times since WWII with thousands of subjects.
3) Then, what software developers do is NOT amenable to time-and-motion studies. So even the marginal increases in time working has an even greater case of dubious value.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you might be missing the author's last point which is that in a competitive field, even a small increase in output can lead to a large increase in payoff. In his example of getting research funding, it's a step function: either you get funded (y=1) or you don't (y=0), and because you're competing with others, even a small output increase can take you from the 0 side to the 1 side.
i've never thought about how these two things relate to each other: asymptotic productivity of work, and winner take almost all nature of capitalism. seems like a very succinct way of explaining why people work so damned much. i'm actually kind of embarrassed i've never connected the two. it seems to make the argument against it more clear too- if marginal hours worked grow less productive, and marginal improvement t…
How much of winner-take-all is due to other factors like timing, luck and self-selection-bias?
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#80I wonder how they got this curve. A lot of things can be sustained for 1 week cannot be sustained in the long term. I'd say in the long term: * 140-168 hours/week --> almost certain death. * 100-140 hours/week --> at risk of cardiovascular disease and many other serious medical conditions. Possible early death. * 80-100 hours/week --> still super-bad for your body. Forget raising children, dating, getting married, or…
What about these? * 30-40 hours * 20-30 hours
We only question hours/week > 40. It's edgy and cool. Past that, you are looked upon as a sluggard or kook.