Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

groups.csail.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 233 posts

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#71

Post by mlevental »

amiga_500 wrote: post #61

People aren’t motivated because work is an endless treadmill. Financial independence a roll of the loaded startup dice. The British model of a financialised economy doesn’t work for the many. Just the rich, like YC VCs. All the questioning “how do you stay motivated “. By retaining your surplus value.

you're going to get downvoted the all the protestant work ethic people that think labor is virtuous per se - "an honest day's work is reward in and of itself" type thing (forgetting or conveniently omitting that these values/virtues were defined by capital not labor). I agree with you and many more would too if they didn't see themselves as "temporarily aggrieved millionaires".

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#72

Post by kittko »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #4
astonex wrote: post #2

Something like 30 hours a week, 4 days a week cant come soon enough. Right now I work 40-45, 5 days a week and it feels like all I do is work and chores.

Two questions Are many companies offering 4 day weeks? I’d guess yes. Can people afford to live off a 4 day week salary? I’d guess no in general.

Personal anecdota: it definitely seems like a huge part of the people in my city (Zurich) are working 80% (4-day week for 80% pay).

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#73

Post by knightofmars »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #44
firepoet wrote: post #15

The interesting thing is that wages have remained stagnant as productivity has increased dramatically. Which means that our labor has been valued less over time. What needs to happen is that the work week shortens while the minimum wage increases in kind. Top execs need to be comfortable making less, as they are the only ones profiting off these productivity increases.

We live in a global economy now. Like a billion people have been raised out of abject poverty. It's an absolute falsehood that only the top earners have prospered. The middle class is shrinking in the US, because they're moving up. We brought in millions and millions of foreign workers from impoverished countries, did their wages remain stagnant?

> The middle class is shrinking in the US, because they're moving up.

This is only half the picture. The middle class is shrinking in the US, because some are moving up and some are moving down.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#74

Post by ThalesX »

brixon wrote: post #68
ckosidows wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the exact same way. I come home and exercise and make food and I feel just beat. All I want to do is sleep by 9pm. I wish I had a few extra hours a day to study or spend time on leisure activities. As it is I study or read until it's time to sleep and if I want to spend time with friends something has to fall off my schedule even though I sit at work and try to look busy most days. Once my work in a sprint is…

As a Scrum Master the final comment bugs me. The Sprint is a team effort, you might have been assigned user stories, but if your velocity is higher than others then you need to improve your estimations and you need to help others finish their user stories. Your scrum team does not sound like a team, but a collection of individuals.

So... what does the scrum master do then? If the developer needs to figure out how to work things out so he aligns with the rest of the team?

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#75

Post by cableshaft »

UglyToad wrote: post #32
random_kris wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that either. I can be REALLY productive for 2-3 hours a day but rest is socializing with other devs, answering emails etc... I try to structure my day so that I learn some stuff in those 8 hours, do some personal stuff (pay bills, call doctor, arrange stuff after work). I am regarded as quite productive but sometimes I feel really bad for not putting 100% in all those 8 hours but I find it impossible. I…

I think it's maybe partly that the jobs I've tended to work have no real socializing/email answering/meetings aspect. I've tried to get more onto that side just to preserve my sanity but it's been very much "go through tickets for 7-8 hours a day". I can't remember the last time I needed to respond to an email. And they've all been very different jobs/industries - consultancy, startup and large company. Maybe part of…

Grass is greener...

I miss the days when I could just sit down in front of a program, and just program for 6+ hours out of the day. I did that when I worked for a small startup. I talked to a boss for 30 minutes to an hour sometimes, but otherwise I was left to myself to build software.

Right now I work as an Architect/Support/Developer combo, and it feels like I get nothing real done most days. I'll have meetings at random times throughout the day, half of them status meetings, I'll get pinged at random times in the day by the business side asking to look into various things (I maintain the phone systems for three call centers, and various things don't happen the way they expect and they need us to look into it...we used to have a dedicated support guy for this, but he quit and they won't replaced him, it's been six months now). And then I need to look into our codebase for any of seven different internal phone applications I'm responsible for, figure out how to add the new enhancement requested by the business, and then write precise instructions for our offshore dev team of else it won't be done correctly (might as well have done it myself, half the time).

There are some days in which outside of the meetings, I'll fix a couple of tickets requested by the business side, and then feel like I have no mental energy for anything else.

Every once in awhile I get a taste of what it used to be like when I was productive when I work on projects at home, but even that has lots of distractions between my spouse and attention seeking dogs. I don't mind those distractions quite as much though. Usually. :)

I probably should find a small developer to work for again, where I can just be expected to code, but at my age I'm almost afraid to do that, since I know ageism is going to start limiting the dev jobs I can get before too much longer, and I could make a lot more money just embracing the management roles....but my brain wants to build cool things, not people.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#76

Post by rajacombinator »

UglyToad wrote: post #21

I'd be interested to know if other software developers feel their current working hours are good/positive? From feedback I've had I'm generally regarded as pretty good at my job and highly productive but my current working hours leave me completely drained, to the point I go home and collapse on the sofa, make dinner and go to bed. And that's off an 8.5 hour day. It's at the point now where it's extremely likely I'll…

If you’re interested in the work it’s definitely possible to work more hours productively. But it’s not optimal. Maybe if employers escaped the gulag mentality and paid wages more proportional to value created it would make sense. But as is, any intelligent dev will find ways to minimize their output.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#77

Post by UglyToad »

magnamerca wrote: post #31
UglyToad wrote: post #21

I'd be interested to know if other software developers feel their current working hours are good/positive? From feedback I've had I'm generally regarded as pretty good at my job and highly productive but my current working hours leave me completely drained, to the point I go home and collapse on the sofa, make dinner and go to bed. And that's off an 8.5 hour day. It's at the point now where it's extremely likely I'll…

I'm not a software developer, but basically a structural engineer / project engineer. I just wanted to say that my job is exactly like yours in some ways. Most of my quality work gets done in less than 2-3 hours; the rest of the time I'm either doing menial/repetitve tasks or talking to people / in meetings. I guess I'm just trying to point out that I think this isn;t exclusive to software jobs, but it's the same tre…

It's interesting to hear that this is not just peculiar to software. I have no real understanding of what other jobs involve but I can well believe there's a similar experience in other mentally (and physically!) demanding jobs.

Flow is one of those things that I think is related to interest in the task at hand but is also, as you point out, difficult to recover once disturbed. It's also highly unpredictable. The 2-3 hours I spend productively might not be in a continuous block but also the time spent giving the appearance of productivity makes it harder to (re)enter flow. If work was structured such that you could work when productive and take care of life admin when not, rather than a discrete chunk of time every day, I feel like it would significantly improve mentally demanding labour.

Ultimately I'd like to see everyone work less [0] for which I think the driving force has to be regulation (companies demanding these hours are just more-or-less rational actors in the system), the productivity gains are there but we seem to be busier than ever - we've thereby created new fields of work (TaskRabbit, Deliveroo, etc) for people to work in, but at little benefit to people or society.

[0]: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#78

Post by TheCoelacanth »

brixon wrote: post #68
ckosidows wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the exact same way. I come home and exercise and make food and I feel just beat. All I want to do is sleep by 9pm. I wish I had a few extra hours a day to study or spend time on leisure activities. As it is I study or read until it's time to sleep and if I want to spend time with friends something has to fall off my schedule even though I sit at work and try to look busy most days. Once my work in a sprint is…

As a Scrum Master the final comment bugs me. The Sprint is a team effort, you might have been assigned user stories, but if your velocity is higher than others then you need to improve your estimations and you need to help others finish their user stories. Your scrum team does not sound like a team, but a collection of individuals.

This is exactly the attitude that causes anxiety. You are done with the thing you were working on, now go "help" one of your teammates somehow regardless of whether that will actually increase the amount of value the team is delivering.

Baseball is a team sport, but that doesn't mean you have two people swinging one bat.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#79

Post by cableshaft »

r34 wrote: post #43
UglyToad wrote: post #21

I'd be interested to know if other software developers feel their current working hours are good/positive? From feedback I've had I'm generally regarded as pretty good at my job and highly productive but my current working hours leave me completely drained, to the point I go home and collapse on the sofa, make dinner and go to bed. And that's off an 8.5 hour day. It's at the point now where it's extremely likely I'll…

Another phenomenon that makes most programmers unable to achieve flow state is technology diversity - brain can get into flow state only when one is using familiar tools - and than happens rarely, at least for me (I work on a project for 6-12 months and ten move to other and tools and main technologies aren't chosen by me usually).

Work on one project for 6-12 months? Sounds wonderful. Try context switching between 7 different application's codebases with different technology stacks / system architecture in a single iteration (well, sometimes just 3 or 4). Our department was eviscerated and software that had dedicated people on them all got put in my lap to maintain and support. I have to reboot in my head how each application works a couple times a week at least.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#80

Post by mikelyons »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #44
firepoet wrote: post #15

The interesting thing is that wages have remained stagnant as productivity has increased dramatically. Which means that our labor has been valued less over time. What needs to happen is that the work week shortens while the minimum wage increases in kind. Top execs need to be comfortable making less, as they are the only ones profiting off these productivity increases.

We live in a global economy now. Like a billion people have been raised out of abject poverty. It's an absolute falsehood that only the top earners have prospered. The middle class is shrinking in the US, because they're moving up. We brought in millions and millions of foreign workers from impoverished countries, did their wages remain stagnant?

> Only the top earners have prospered

This is actually a relative truth, absolute falsehood cannot exist. It's not absolute truth though.

Post reply on HN