I stayed in a small town outside Chablis, France, many years ago. I rented a room above the only restaurant in town. There were a few businesses, mostly food-related and clothing repair. Everything just seemed slowed down. I watched a man in waders unload a dead boar he had just shot to the butcher at 9am. I watched two other men repairing brickwork on a foundation. I watched another woman tending a large garden, then go to work at a bar/restaurant. The stores were open for just a few hours. The shelves were free of random plastic trinkets and gadgets.
It just seemed like it was 1/10th the normal speed, somewhat Luddite... and every task seemed oddly fundamental.
I've also encountered towns like this in Spain, Greece, Austria, Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Uruguay, Thailand and Cambodia.
After reading these comments, I would never have believed that so many small towns exist that seem untouched by 24-hour stores and everything cheap and on-demand. It sounds inevitable that everyone is eventually pushed into hyperinflationary always-working mode. But yet, these places persist. I might even chalk it up to depressed economies and "third-world" nature, but my samples include all sorts of economies.
I think we choose what kind of lifestyle we want, but it needs to be done at the community level. Without going all "we should all be farmers hippie dippy portland nature fetishist", it does seem like decisions have consequences and it is possible to steer away from hyperactivity.
I think part of it is the weird dynamics of cost of living increasing. Rent and housing prices in a lot of places are at a record high. A lot of this hustle culture - or overwork, or the having to work 2-3 jobs and still be poor - is all down to the cost of living vs income.
Raise wages, lower cost of living. This will benefit everyone.
@employers of HN: Compare your wages with the cost of living in the location you expect your employers to be. Ensure that their rent plus fixed expenses is at most a third of their wage, and ensure that they need to work at most 40 hours a week to earn that. If you do not meet that standard, you are underpaying your employees. If you make them work more than 40 hours a week - either directly or indirectly via e.g. slack channels - pay them gratuitous overtime on the one hand, and see to reducing the need for it on the other.
even as a person who wants their team to be as tight-knit as possible, it seems paternalistic for me to decide what level of housing is acceptable for my employees. Where's the line?
I don't understand comments like this. Employers are trying to pay as little as possible, with some exceptions, ie. in some cases are willing to pay for "talent" and in demand skills. Even with some lower level jobs, some employers are waking up to the idea that paying the bare minimum has drawbacks, and they get some value by paying essential workers.
So they're not generally in the business of carefully ensuring they don't make the "mistake" of underpaying their employees. If they're underpaying that's a good thing, with some exceptions.
And just how are we supposed vet and/or collect data on employee housing? I don't want that. I want us to work on fixing the housing market, and employers to offer remote work options. I want more flexible hours and vacation time. We need cultural standards and legislation to protect against these things.
Generally bosses have more control over their workers wages then the housing market. It is unrealistic to expect your bosses to provide cheaper housing. It is much easier to expect your bosses to pay you a living wage.
> And just how are we supposed vet and/or collect data on employee housing?
First step is to ask them. Second step is to go to your local government agency that collects data on housing prices and rent values. And third step is to check the prices your self by inspecting rent ads that disclose the price.
> I don't understand comments like this [...] If they're underpaying that's a good thing.
Only from the perspective of the boss. Put your self in the shoe of a worker and then perhaps you can begin to understand what the parent means. Workers also have bargaining power through collective bargaining. The longer bosses pay us lower then what we deserve, the more we will collectivize. A workers union will eventually form and you have to pay us a living wage anyway. In the meantime you must deal with us quitting, calling in sick, striking, advising your potential workers against working for you, etc.
> It is unrealistic to expect your bosses to provide cheaper housing. It is much easier to expect your bosses to pay you a living wage.
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
An example:
The company I work for pay my broadband bill as does most IT companies.
Now my broadband provider is also my TV provider. They have of course noted this so guess what: they kept sliding the split between broadband and TV cost until it was ridiculous[1].
Guess what I think will happen if it becomes well known that employers pay for hosting?
Prices will go through the roof.
[1]: That was last year. Last I checked I now pay $0.6 for the broadband and $90 for TV. I haven't figured out why this is but I guess financial incentives at some level.
Chicken, meet egg. Why do you think corporations are terrified of unions? Especially trillion-dollar corporations? Because people have excepted this mythical work ethic. It is a time of self-policing, which is what your comment amounts to.
UNIONS
The nefarious angle of the work culture myth is that it perpetuates by our own hands, or rather, it is supposed to. Anyone who speaks out against it is a "unionist commie" or "lazy". It is self-reenforcing, where one group of workers is scared of losing their jobs so they attack the ones who want to unionize for better conditions.
FEMINISM
There's a similar analogy in feminism, where women who have internalized misogyny actively work to make sure other women don't try to upset the status quo in the name of liberation. It is why you sometimes read about women tearing each other apart because one might chose to not shave her legs or armpits, or wear makeup or heels to work: why should THEY be free of oppression when I'M NOT. Self-policing is very effective for the upper classes to retain control.
RACISM
It goes even further. Read "The Invention of the White Race". The idea of pitting poor white people against poor black people wasn't intentional: the hierarchy was constructed because wealthy land owners needed help policing their slaves, so they created the notion of white / black superiority which led to former white slaves earning their freedom becoming slave masters. (I'm simplifying, but that's the gist.)
Self-policing is highly effective way for those in power to leverage fear and keep the oppressed classes at war with each other and not the people exploiting them. Your comment is spreading that fear.
I find the notion that somebody "Invented" the white race ridiculous at it's face. Nobody invented the white race, there is no conspiracy from the rich. It's a silly, stupid idea I don't know why people entertain it.
It's not about that. It's about whether it's a 'stable' solution or not.
It's the same reason why most of the chocolate sold isn't fair trade and there's often modern slavery produced beans in mainstream products.
Calls for voluntary improvement are great, and may be heeded sometimes, but aren't uniformly reliable when there is no effective legal requirement and financial incentives point the other way.
Businesses are designed to make money. That includes controlling costs. I'm not saying it a good thing, but you don't have to be some cartoon villain to think this way. It's par for the course in capitalism.
If this isn't a defense then what is the point of adding this?
We are aware it's par for the course. But "controlling costs" doesn't necessarily mean "paying the absolute minimum of what the market will bear." That thinking may as well belong to a cartoon negligent fool, one who ignores the impacts of their actions simply because those impacts are not immediately obvious to them.
Hey, I don't expect this to get read, but I wanted to respond. It's important to understand what we're working with here.
The reality is that businesses don't just pay people because they need the money to support themselves. They don't see underpaying employees as a "problem", not necessarily at least.
So they're not carefully accounting for their employees personal needs so they can provide sufficient pay. That's probably not going to change, at least not much. There's other things that can change.
OP:
> @employers of HN: Compare your wages with the cost of living in the location you expect your employers to be. Ensure that their rent plus fixed expenses is at most a third of their wage, and ensure that they need to work at most 40 hours a week to earn that. If you do not meet that standard, you are underpaying your employees
> That sounds all nice but why would they do that when they can find people who accept to work longer for less?
> Because not everyone thinks like Gordon Gecko.
Simply reducing the players to cartoon characters that think greed is good doesn't help the problem. I'm not defending our current system, I think that we need to change policies, tax incentives, minimum wage, and real estate policy. I'm also wary of wealth disparity among management and executives, but am even more pessimistic there.
I don't think expecting corporations to be altruistic or else calling them villains, fools ect. is the answer. At the end of the day they're concerned that they will get out competed, or about their responsibility to shareholders, and that's how budgets get set. Saying "come on, have a heart" doesn't help.
This only is possible with people owning their homes and the land they're built on. With asset prices outgrowing wages and thereby pricing out generations out of the same arrangement for most of their working life and also beyond for lifetime renters, this will be possible for fewer and fewer families.
Bingo! The slow life in small European towns, like grandfather described, works because almost everyone there is a part of the boomer generation so they are financially secure by now, with their homes or small businesses inherited across family generations or fully paid off, have no loans or debt, so then they can afford to do only the work that they enjoy and fulfills them.
Younger generations that have no family business or real estate to inherit, have no option of such a cushy lifestyle so their option is moving to big cities/wealthier countries and grind on the hamster-wheel or risk being left out of the game due to ever increasing real-estate costs and stagnating wages.
Near the Austrian alps, a region of mostly farmers in the 1950's, most of the land there could be bough and houses build for pennies, with very little regulations. A father could get a factory job with no advanced formal education, receive training from the company and make enough money to support a family, take them on vacation and even buy a second home.
Fast forward to today, real estate prices have exploded there while wages have stagnated and competition fiercely increased along with the requirements for education. Homes in that region that were just poor farmers about 7 decades ago, are now worth millions and the small family business there are making bank thanks to the tourism boom, but a factory worker today can't even dream of building a house there anymore, hell, even a SW dev can't afford to do that due to the scarcity of land and increase in regulations plus wage stagnation.
Totally. It is why this exponential housing boom scares the bejeebers outta me. And I'm in my 50's on my 4th house. I've benefited from it, but I know it isn't going to end well.
It is funny that you mention Portland there. In my experience Portland is precisely this fast moving town, everything 24/7, with stressed out workers where everything has to be done fast and for profits. Don’t get me wrong, Portland is a nice town and worth the visit. To an extent it is more chill then say Seattle or San Fransisco.
If you want a chill town in the West I think Boise, Idaho or Santa Fe, New Mexico, are a better fit. Although I do admit that people don’t generally think of the hippie dippy type when they think of Boise.
Yeah, there is a vibrant tech scene in portland that fits what you say. I like it more than San Fran because I feel like I can fit the whole town in my head, whereas San Fran is a bit overwhelming (too many meetups up there in San Fran!!) But PDX really does have a bubble-headed progressive wing. They voted NOT to put fluoride in the water!
Boise is simply too far right. I don't want to live in a light purple zone surrounded by bright-red crazies. I'll prefer the type of crazy that protests for social justice over protesting to keep facism and white supremacy. Yet Portland has great examples of progressives who have their heart in the right place but forget to think critically.
New Mexico is collapsing. Outside of ABQ and Santa Fe, it is full of ghost towns. Quite literally boarded up towns between Las Cruces and Roswell. It's a state in decline.
"The roots of this phenomenon can be traced back to the 'Protestant work ethic' in the 16th Century - a worldview held by white Protestants in Europe that made hard work and the quest for profit seem virtuous. Sally Maitlis, professor of organisational behaviour and leadership at the University of Oxford, says that "later, the drive for efficiency that arose out of the Industrial Revolution", as well as the way we prize productivity, have "further embedded the value of consistent hard work, often at the cost of personal wellbeing".
The roots of the valorization of work may well have been religious, and maybe Christian (though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin), but it's definitely spread throughout much of the world, even among the non-religious and even atheist population.
I can't count the number of times I've heard people praise others as "hard working"... in all sorts of contexts, in many different parts of the world, native or immigrant, hard work is praised to the heavens and one of the best things you can say about a person is that they're hard working.
I almost never hear the value of working hard being questioned, except when the subject turns to burnout. Then everybody nods sagely and agrees that overwork is bad.. the next day they go back to praising hard workers.
The problem is not about being hard working or not hard working. It is about the constraints around that hard work; or lack thereof. In late modern labor society the normativity is to achieve in itself, without any philosophical or ethical constraints that grounds achievement in real meaning. It is a pick-and-choose buffet of values and priorities, that is individually curated - rather than also being synchronized with others, the past and the future - and there is only one rule, that you have to achieve.
The grammar of achievement is performance and excess. Everything is possible, and you must exploit yourself while trying to exhaust the possibilities. Except you can't and therefore it is a slow burn spiritual suicide, until you burnout, get into depression, have autoimmune problems etc and hopefully get a wakeup call. Except your therapist is not going to tell you to take it easy either, because they can't come up with any answer to lack of meaning other than work (and maybe to get a family) either.
Not that there is any evil conspiring forces that have set this up, but it also happens having people exploit themselves in the name of achievement yields more than being exploited by someone else directly; to be told what and what not to do all the time is unnecessary when people are equally capable of auto-exploitation. Everyone carries little walking labor camps in themselves.
> and there is only one rule, that you have to achieve.... achievement is performance and excess.
and yet, this is what led to most, if not all human achievements and progress. The modern quality of life that most people have come to enjoy is off the backs of people who _are_ doing their utmost to achieve performance and excess (aka, earn more than their spending).
If everyone lived an idyllic, and idle life, we'd have much less modern life amenities and conveniences; stuff would be more expensive, and less wealth all round.
That's a very narrow view of "human achievements and progress". Did Mozart achieve because he was forced by peer-pressure to work around the clock? Picasso? Miles Davis?
It's pretty sad if we consider Facebook, Google or Apple as the pinnacles of human achievement. Sure it's useful to have a phone in my pocket that can tell me at any time of the day what's the weather in Hong Kong or how to cook Pork Hock. Sure it's nice that I can connect to relatives in Spain or Brazil through Facebook or search for the number of current Covid cases in South Africa. But I could live with those "achievements" having come later if that had not meant a work culture that forces me into burnout.
Same for space rockets bringing robots to Mars, electric cars for the upper class and drilling tunnels under some Bay Area city.
And for those claiming the climate catastrophe is here and we need to act now .. yeah, let's think for a moment how we got here and whether overachieving and overworking have something to do with it.
If Mozart had to spend more, or most, of his time gathering food and tending to his basic needs would he have had time to make music? What about the musicians who played it?
Wealth is the ability to do more with less effort. Some of that free labor goes to arts, science, or philosophy and advances humanity. Maybe too much goes toward building even more wealth or a fancier house/things but you would not have the former without the ability to get later.
I'm not saying we should all be artists and drop any work on improving science or technology. To the contrary, some people really thrive doing that, and who am I to outlaw it.
But this is about working 80+ hours a week to achieve that. Changing the world is possible in 40 hours a week. Or 30, or 20. It may happen more slowly, but it won't leave so many train wrecks of burnout in its path.
(Apart from overall total productivity not necessarily being lower with a 30 hour week than a 50 hour week as the increased energy and motivation can often times easily offset the fewer hours.)
I am reminded of a commend I read on HN a few years ago.
"Here lies marvin, who valiantly sacrificed his life in the name of progress.
Thanks to his heroic efforts, the trees in GTA 7 look very good."
I'd love to read a proper study on how people experience different types of hard work. I've worked overtime myself, and it's been a memorable experience when it's been for just a few weeks or months, and in pursuit of something that meaningfully advances the world.
But it would not be fun if it was only a peripheral advance, or it happened regularly. For me, it only works if it's something exceptional, to be done a few times.
Interesting that you mention autoimmune problems alongside burnout and depression, I hadn’t heard of that possible link before. Do you have any anecdotes on this that you would share?
> The problem is not about being hard working or not hard working. It is about the constraints around that hard work; or lack thereof. In late modern labor society the normativity is to achieve in itself, without any philosophical or ethical constraints that grounds achievement in real meaning. It is a pick-and-choose buffet of values and priorities, that is individually curated - rather than also being synchronized with others, the past and the future - and there is only one rule, that you have to achieve.
That is of course not true. Individually curated means synchronized with others as no individual exists in a vacuum; it feeds on others, on the environment, on history, and others feed on the individual, and the environment is modified by the individual, and history written by it. That it is free to evaluate its own future path is not the same as not being also part of something else, much less not take into account the something else.
Achievement in itself is, unparadoxically, and achievement. That you don't agree with it says more about your synchronicity with the rest of society than the opposite.
> That is of course not true. Individually curated means synchronized with others as no individual exists in a vacuum ... That it is free to evaluate its own future path
You misunderstand. The question is whether individual value structures converge/approximate to a superstructure outside every individual, not whether individuals can use environment, history, each other etc as an inspiration for their custom tailored lives. The sense of the former was destroyed with the end of modernism. Everything dissolved in an acid vat of infinite relativism. Every normativity other than growth in the market got destroyed/crumbled. And individual achievement is merely the projection of that at the atomized level.
> Achievement in itself is, unparadoxically, and achievement. That you don't agree with it says more about your synchronicity with the rest of society than the opposite.
I take that as a compliment because one of the things I aspire to is to not get dissolved in the blind allegiance to achievement and excess positivity. It usually gets unnoticed but when people excessively project themselves to achievements and future growth; they turn into massive narcissists. And I am not using that in the pejorative sense; they lose a grounded sense of themselves. The freedom from "improving", being able to have leisurely, contemplative time, enjoying "returnless" social encounters for their own sake, having a sense of limits etc counter that. I wish they were valued more.
> You misunderstand. The question is whether individual value structures converge/approximate to a superstructure outside every individual, not whether individuals can use environment, history, each other etc as an inspiration for their custom tailored lives.
You misunderstand. They of course converge, there is no other alternative but for society to be a reflection of their individuals. You don't like the answer so you pretend what they converge into is not worthy somehow because it doesn't adhere to some high societal morality standard which by the way just so happen to be the morality you ascribe to, which is of course nonsense.
> I take that as a compliment because one of the things I aspire to is to not get dissolved in the blind allegiance to achievement and excess positivity.
> It usually gets unnoticed but when people excessively project themselves to achievements and future growth; they turn into massive narcissists. And I am not using that in the pejorative sense; they lose a grounded sense of themselves.
If you don't have a counter-argument that is not an ad-hominem attack, strawmanning someone's position or shallow namecalling, you don't have to participate. This is not the forum for that.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Incidentally, this is a good example to the value superstructure I was talking about. It is not a passive culmination of individual preferences, it is an aspirational guidepost sitting outside of us as a reference point. It allows selecting what behavior belongs to what extent and what doesn't. It tells us we can do better and what that better looks like.
Again, that you don’t consider what I wrote a counter argument and are trying to dismiss it as ad-hominem to not have to actually generate a rebuttal or accept it says more about you than the opposite.
Society decides its morals, not I, certainly not you.
I think the real point of the protestant work ethic is that when you have a post-Christian society that replaces church with work, you end up with people effectively going to work-monasteries.
But if you look at the Middle Ages, you'll find something like 100 days off a year, tons of feast days and days off, limited working hours in the remaining days, and not at all a culture that valorized work even thought it was much more deeply Christian than modern Europe. It's all about what you worship.
The vast majority people in the Middle Ages lived off subsistence farming, which doesn't really have "days off". Yes, farming has busier and quieter periods, but many types of work like spinning and weaving were essentially continuous (the amount of work required to clothe a family was ridiculous), and even the quietest "off day" still included things like feeding and milking the animals. Feast days were often also designed around communal events like harvesting or barn-raising, when the entire community got together and basically took turns working at tasks that needed more labor than a single household can provide.
My grand-parents were Eastern-European peasants and they certainly had "days off", you were not allowed to go to the field during a religious holiday (and one was not allowed to do it on Sundays, either).
25 years since I last helped my paternal grand-parents to collect hay I can still remember those religious holidays when we'd just sit around the house, not going to the field: July 20th (Saint Elijah), August 15th (Assumption of Mary), August 6th (Transfiguration) and I think also June 29th (Saint Peter and Paul).
> The vast majority people in the Middle Ages lived off subsistence farming, which doesn't really have "days off".
I think you have an incorrect view of subsistence farming. It does not require constant work, and you do not see constant work in traditional societies. You do see many days off. Now during harvest time there is lots of work, but that is a small period of the year, say 7 weeks out of the year. Other times the farmer has the option of when to plant and how much, when to weed and how much, when to work on processing food and how much. And these fall into familiar patterns from which things like feast days emerge as the interstitial times when the above does not need to happen. The idea of constant backbreaking labor all year long may be appropriate for something like a large Jamaican plantation, but not a small farm in Europe. Of course if it was an American farmer, they would enlarge their farm, bring in more livestock or auxiliary sources of income to fill up whatever daylight was available, and keep adding work until they and all their hired hands were busy all the time. Then they would take the earnings and use it to buy more land and hire more people and expand the work even further. But traditional societies did not organize themselves this way, nor is this something required of farmers.
"The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks' worth of ales -- to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.[5]
The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year."
That article equates "work" with farming alone, which is a common but fallacious trope. A subsistence farming household has to manufacture virtually everything they need, and in your "small farm in Europe" setting, spinning and weaving alone consume essentially all the working hours of one person in a family:
Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person).
The main difference between the subsistence farmer and the wage worker -- and ACOUP goes into this in detail -- is that the subsistence farmer has to optimize for security over productivity, meaning that the marginal returns for working harder/longer hours are much less. Working twice as hard to till twice the fields won't help when a summer frost nukes the whole crop.
I'm not sure why exactly subsistence farming households would have to manufacture everything -- farmer can sell produce on the market and buy stuff.
You quote quite a long article - yet you do not give the full data. 7.35 labor hours per day whole year is to produce 21 sq meters of cloth, using estimates about ancient world, not pre-modern Europe.
20 sq meters of cloth using a bit more modern (Middle ages) estimate would give you 3 hours per day whole year by one person. Also keep in mind that those farmer households would not change their clothes every year (and that's an understatement)
> I'm not sure why exactly subsistence farming households would have to manufacture everything -- farmer can sell produce on the market and buy stuff
That doesn't lower the total amount of labor required. Someone still has to make the garments. Garments were also very expensive, and most farmers wouldn't have had enough surplus crops to purchase them.
> more modern (Middle ages) estimate would give you 3 hours per day whole year by one person
That's after the invention of the spinning wheel, which didn't exist for ~90% of the Middle Ages. The second estimate from just before the invention of the spinning wheel (1300s) is close to the ancient estimate.
> Also keep in mind that those farmer households would not change their clothes every year (and that's an understatement)
One garment per year. That doesn't mean they throw away the old garment. They might keep it as a spare or repurpose it for other uses. He also justifies this estimate based on historical data for people who were issued garments by their employers (slaves and soldiers). Cato the Elder recommended issuing slaves one garment every two years, and was infamous for being cruel and parsimonious towards his slaves, so that is probably about the bare minimum for subsistence. Soldiers in the Roman Republic were issued two garments per year.
Assuming that subsistence farmers aimed for a standard of living above that of the most poorly treated slaves seems like a reasonable assumption.
> farmer can sell produce on the market and buy stuff
They used to produce most of stuff by themselves, because functional market requires good roads and a lot of people. And if course, if you are buing it, you need to produce a lot more food, so that you can sell it or exchange it.
>> They used to produce most of stuff by themselves, because functional market requires good roads and a lot of people
Do you have any data that supports it?
I think it is fair to say that at least in Europe both Western and Eastern from onset of Middle Ages people living in villages were actually able to travel to the adjacent towns and to yearly market fairs. That wasn't a daily trip of course but I do not see an issue of farmer exchanging some bags of flour for some clothes once in two years.
>> And if course, if you are buing it, you need to produce a lot more food, so that you can sell it or exchange it.
Well, yeah, that's generally an intention when you are a farmer :) Also farmers were serfs often and had to give up some part of what they gathered.
The article equates the holiday with "doing nothing". Just on top of head, animals still needed daily care. They needed food, milking, being taken outside, made mess that that day as much as normally. You would still have to take eggs away of chickens. And that is just stuff I vaguely remember my grandma talking about. The holiday, including Christmas, was not "do nothing whole day" affair.
People still needed food during holidays, which means food preparation that day also more work before holidays. Holidays themselves had to be prepared. The special holiday cloth had to be decorated and sewn. All that is work. Work/leisure trade off for organizing "bride ales" and such is an additional work. Just like the Christmas today are basically a lot of work, cleaning, cooking, gifts shopping and stress before celebration in exchange of two days of rest.
It is also odd to equate The ancien règime in France with like a lot of leisure, since it led to quite a lot of social issues - poverty, famine and such.
Hired-hands? Sorry but in America we had a majority of the population in the south as chattel slaves. I assumed at first you were talking about recent memory but then you went back to Medieval times, so I should clarify.
Work is not replacing church. In the Middle Ages, there was farm work performed by peasants. As far as 100 days off, if we take 52 weekends a year, we're a little over that same amount for those who don't work weekends (which is the majority of single job holders). Broadcast media replaced the church as a moral arbiter and now we are sort of in a phase where some are attempting to rebuild that church of television with the internet.
>I can't count the number of times I've heard people praise others as "hard working"... in all sorts of contexts, in many different parts of the world, native or immigrant, hard work is praised to the heavens and one of the best things you can say about a person is that they're hard working.
this reminds me of how, in the US at least, society has settled into the pattern of saying "thank you" to the "heroes" who fight our wars, protect us from fire and keep our for-profit prisons full. it's because the rest of us have no interest in doing any of those things, so we blow smoke up their proverbial *. fuck the protestant work ethic, and fuck being guilted into wage slavery, for at least, you know, the period of your life that lasts from the time your young and healthy until you die.
The Japanese working culture might be the only one worse than the American one.
In Japan you need to be at the office before your boss and can't leave before they do. And this goes all the way up, meaning that the lowest employees practically live at the office.
Combine this with a culture that doesn't really allow questioning your superiors makes for a really stressful work life.
One anecdote I heard was that a company had a one hour meeting with the Big Boss, who told what he wanted people to do. After that they had a two-hour meeting where they figured out what the boss meant. It was not proper to ask questions directly from the big boss.
Americans on the other hand glorify working two or three jobs, suffering 80-100 hour work weeks is a badge of honour. And they still just barely manage to get a living wage.
> One anecdote I heard was that a company had a one hour meeting with the Big Boss, who told what he wanted people to do. After that they had a two-hour meeting where they figured out what the boss meant. It was not proper to ask questions directly from the big boss.
Totally believe that. I worked at a Japanese company for 27 years, and attended a lot of meetings. Japanese managers pretty much spend their entire career in conference rooms.
The Chinese, however, have the concept of "996," which means "9AM to 9PM, six days a week." The Japanese also do that, but it's not quite as explicit.
The opposite of "hard working" is not "good work-life balance", but "slacking off".
And that's one of the roots of this cult. You don't want to be perceived as slacking off, so you sacrifice work-life balance and work overtime. That's such an enormous misconception. You can be very focused 9-to-5, and then you go home and don't look back until next morning at 9 am when you again are as hard-working as the day before. Somebody who is 12 hours a day at the office but spends half the time chit-chatting at the water cooler and browsing facebook is not "hard working".
Hard-working and work-life balance are not opposites. That's something people really need to understand.
I’ll add that working hard doesn’t mean being effective or productive. I can go dig holes in my backyard 24x7 which is very hard work but does nothing. Some people can be very effective 9 to 5 and push progress much further than many others working 14 hr days doing the digital equivalent of digging holes.
> even among the non-religious and even atheist population
Just because one proclaims to not believe in God doesn't free them from the values that were drilled in their head during childhood. So many people proclaim to be "atheists" but otherwise strongly believe in and defend Christian values (Bill Gates is a prominent example).
It's not just childhood, it's social pressure. It's extremely hard to publicly hold values that go contrary to the group, even more so when those contrarian values don't bring success and therefore don't have much to show for themselves.
Hard workers should be praised. It is hard and it works. It is the only lever we actually have some control over to move forward in life.
On the other hand there is nothing admirable about taking it easy. Anyone can do it and it does not lead to any achievement.
Of course some people care about achievement and some do not, that is fine, but lets not pretend hard work is not necessary for it.
The Protestant/Calvinist work-ethic is definitely a factor especially, IMHO, in technology work. It stretches over to Asian non-Christian cultures too, but I suspect that's because it's an export which they've accepted as their own because it happens to jive with the strict authoritarian hierarchies which are common in Asian countries.
You can see it in Stackoverflow as well. The gamification encourages people to prove they are "worthy" of even deigning to ask a question by showing they've done "the work". Those who haven't are subject to humiliation and dismissal, regardless of need or authenticity.
You can see the ultimate expression of Calvinism/Protestantism in Bitcoin too, where authority over what counts as money is granted to machines that can prove that they have done ‘work’. This proof is not judged by a human, but rather by the laws of mathematics and physics - I.e. the creations of God, thus Bitcoin is a money whose purity is sanctified by an offering of work done for its own sake.
That view implies and required the acceptance of a God, though - it's like saying that gravity itself is the ultimate expression of protestantism (not sure if your post is supposed to be a /s).
No, not necessarily. You can be psychologically influenced by a society imbued with religious moral undertones to the point where you unwittingly want to "prove yourself" to "some omnipotent other." I think it's fairly common, actually.
It is self-evident that BTC was invented specifically in rejection of and in opposition to being judged by humans. One could easily compare this to the importance of purity in religious contexts but it would be foolish to assume there is any connection.
> You can see it in Stackoverflow as well. The gamification encourages people to prove they are "worthy" of even deigning to ask a question by showing they've done "the work". Those who haven't are subject to humiliation and dismissal, regardless of need or authenticity.
I don't see how stackexchange's policy is related to the article, or "Protestant/Calvinist work-ethic".
They are banning low-effort questions (e.g "File couldn't be opened" when the person just has a typo in a file path) because they devalue the platform, waste time that could have instead been spent on useful questions.
> I suspect that's because it's an export which they've accepted as their own because it happens to jive with the strict authoritarian hierarchies which are common in Asian countries.
Or they independently developed a glorification of hard-work from other sources. It's nothing new. All the Abrahamic religions do, and the same is true for secular ideologies such as communism.
I've always viewed the Calvinism theory as a kind of anti-American theory that violates Ockham's razor. The desire to prove one's self by overworking strikes me as an innate adolescent approach to competition. Whether it's to impress your peers at a casual sport or at your job. If some cultures achieve progress in a more healthy way, then that's the interesting and unnatural situation which needs investigating.
I bet they're not making their own thread, cloth, clothes, and a lot of the other things provided by an industrialized world. Doing those things the old way is very, very labor intensive.
Yes, that's a major point in Weber's original formulation of the Protestant work ethic—the secularization of those values and practices. In other words, the puritans wanted to live this way; we have to.
If the phenomenon seems like it's global now—even appearing in parts of the world that Protestantism never touched—then that's because, well, capitalism is global.
Confucianism has a work ethic that while not exactly the same as the Western/Christian one, has a lot of similarities. Although Confucius was Chinese, these ideas spread into other East Asian countries that were under historical Chinese influence like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam
> The roots of the valorization of work may well have been religious, and maybe Christian (though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin), but it's definitely spread throughout much of the world, even among the non-religious and even atheist population.
The article is referencing "The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", which is a seminal work on the history and structure of labour. It does not, in any way, imply that this is a religious phenomenon any more than capitalism itself.
Most values that exist in religious doctrine and culture end up spreading to secular culture.
Issues like sexual shame, circumcision, censored language, etc. are all commonplace in America because they are actively promoted by religious conservatives and (for the most part) passively ignored by critics.
It's difficult to be critical of values that religious institutions have without being generally dismissed as overly antagonistic.
Six-day work week was standard like, what, 100 years ago? Now it just seems savage. And so will the five-day work week.
I had the luck of getting a four month severance when a company closed, full salary, full benefits. I lined up a new job and just said I will start later.
Let me tell you, going back into a tech job, 10 to 6-ish PM every day was no joke, after three months of not giving a fuck. It was torture. I could not understand how I did it until then. And there was that painful realization of "what am I doing here for eight hours a day? I am clearly not using all of it. Give me four hours and I will do the same amount of work and go live my life".
And that's when I knew that I am not going to be the guy on his deathbed, realizing that he worked too hard and didn't live, after winning the cosmic lottery of being born on such a rare place as planet Earth.
> Let me tell you, going back into a tech job, 10 to 6-ish PM every day was no joke, after three months of not giving a fuck. It was torture.
As a consultant, after a _very_ quiet year due to covid (I had travel and entertainment clients - yay me), I am finding the same. I have zero drive to go out and win business.
I don't want to spend days building software to enrich the bosses and "streamline operations" so they don't have to re-hire the staff they laid off. Or work long days. Or have to kiss ass.
It can't last because the money won't, but a break from work has challenged me.
I think there are two issues here. One is - turning your brain back on after over a year of low-grade depression, as it was for me with COVID.
But, I am talking specifically more about most of us going back to the office for 50-hour weeks. People have NO idea how jarring the experience will be. It will break you, it will ruin office work for you forever. And you know what? Perhaps that's not the way to live then.
Perhaps you could make a course adjustment, to work in an industry where you'd do work you see as more important?
I decided years ago that I didn't want to work on adtech or fintech, and while it's meant passing over some opportunities, it hasn't limited my career much.
It is interesting that Keynes predicted a 15 hour work week in the 1930s. There are many reasons why this didn't come to pass but part of it is our desire for a higher standard of living. The majority of people in the 1930s didn't have 4,000 sq foot houses. A lot of houses were multi-generational. But we wanted new cars and bigger houses and bigger vacations because we "deserve" it. This is fine but these things we deserve cost money and require even more work. I think our own selves would be incredulous if someone suggested in 2000 that we would be buying $50K "normal" cars and $1K phones every couple of years. This is the flip-side of next day shipping e-commerce, urgent cares on every corner, everything packaged for single use convenience, etc. Even something as silly as lunch, how many people pack versus go out in your workplace? We are part of the problem and we need to acknowledge our greed and its control of our choices.
In many cases, we're not being given the choice. Nobody builds 1,000sqft houses. When they build 1,000sqft apartments, the rent is mortgage-level. When they build 500sqft apartments, the rent is, at best, a couple hundred dollars cheaper. Few cheaper options exist, aside from co-living with other people/couples/families.
I'm reminded of Innuendo Studios' statement about porn: what becomes standard is not often what the majority wants, but what a minority wants and the majority will tolerate.
Developers optimize for developer profits. They know a bigger house will sell for more than a smaller one, so nobody builds smaller ones. And since "no housing" isn't an option, people will begrudgingly accept housing that is bigger and more expensive than they want, if it's the only realistic option.
My choices aren't constrained by my own greed; they're constrained by that of people with far more capital than me.
> * The majority of people in the 1930s didn't have 4,000 sq foot houses.*
The majority of people today don't have 4,000 sq. ft houses, don't buy new cars excessively, or take big vacations. You're describing how a small segment of the upper middle class lives.
I wanted to take a month off work between jobs last time, but the new employer was desperate for someone to pick up some maintenance work so it ended up being a 1 day/week thing. Not quite the same. Plus it was December and I have a family now so traveling or doing something silly wasn't an option unfortunately. Did finish a big lego piece though.
Six-day week was a standard for the majority of firms and government offices in India till 2-3 years ago. It is still prevalent in some workplaces today.
And in a capitalist 3rd world society, they're still happening now. A lot of people I see here in brazil are at their doors selling stuff on their feet and doing whatever needs doing 6 days a week.
The saving grace is that there are more holidays here than in most of the first world.
Inflation basically. In the 1950s you could afford a nice middle class lifestyle, own a home, raise multiple children, all on a single income and no college education. When women entered the workforce en masse, everything seemingly doubled in price. Both spouses working to maintain the same lifestyle. When everyone got college degrees, they became required even for jobs like bartending. When everyone got mobile phones and high speed internet, suddenly you're expected to work around the clock and on weekends. All to maintain more or less the same lifestyle, albeit more technologically advanced.
As a arm-chair historian, I feel there has always been an ebb and flow of balanced-working versus over-working. For example, reading stories of Carnegie's steel plants with 12-hours work days, 7 days a week in 1894:
>> The demanding conditions sapped the life from workers. "You don't notice any old men here," said a Homestead laborer in 1894. "The long hours, the strain, and the sudden changes of temperature use a man up." Sociologist John A. Fitch called it "old age at forty."
My greatest fear is that there will not be enough jobs for everyone, and Andrew Yang's proposal for UBI will become even more important, but the 'cult of over-working' will keep it from ever being implemented:
That wasn't true everywhere though, in the USA in the 1950's it might have been true but in the rest of the world?
Whenever I try to think about these large scale systems I end up realizing how difficult it is to predict the outcome. Everything people are buying has to be produced. Everything produced needs people (or automation) producing it. Somewhere there is an equilibrium.
What's happening globally has an impact (e.g. we possibly had a better standard of living by taking advantage of places that had a lower standard of living). Competition (and inequality) has an impact because not getting ahead of the game can put you in the bottom rungs where you're really doing badly. In a game where only the top 20% are doing well there is fierce never ending competition to be in that 20%. In a game where everyone has some guaranteed basic standard of living you would expect the competition to be less fierce.
Another note is that people used to work crazy hours during the industrial revolution. Similar story there, you had to get some work if you didn't want to be poor, and it was easy for employers to take advantage of employees.
The 1950s were a unique time in the American economy. The rest of the developed world had just come out of WW2 with large portions of its cities, industrial production, and overall economies severely disrupted or outright destroyed. Meanwhile, the US was unscathed and had spent the war further building up its industrial capacity.
It was never sustainable, only something possible for a point in time.
US economy was almost a full autarchy in the 50s and 60s - imports and exports as percentage of GDP were at all time low - at about 3-4%. Meaning 96-97% of the economy was done by Americans for Americans - it was a closed system.
The stagnation in standards of living since the 80s is fully engineered - it's a choice. Tax cuts, regulatory changes, disarming the antitrust, union busting, deregulation of finance and similar changes redistributed $47 trillion to the top 10% from 1975 through 2018 (1), enough to give every worker in the bottom 90% a raise of $1140 per month.
> In a game where everyone has some guaranteed basic standard of living you would expect the competition to be less fierce.
And how can you, or anyone, guarantee something like that? The standard of living we have, however imbalanced it might be, is a byproduct of fierce competition.
To guarantee any kind of basic standard of living, specially one without even more fierce competition, the only alternatives are: a much much lower standard of living, much lower, or, a much much intense exploitation of natural resources. Pick your poison, as they are both catastrophic, and there is no third option.
I guess the question is what is the cost of a "basic" standard of living. e.g. a shelter, not starving, healthcare, education. As long as that cost is low enough then it doesn't take much to guarantee it. You can certainly see some countries (e.g. Scandinavia, or Australia, or even Canada) finding a different balance point than other countries (e.g. the US). In other words, governments, regulations, unions, can (and do) influence that curve and bring it to a different (better?) place.
Competition does play some role in incentivizing people but I don't think it's the entire story when it comes to progress/improved standard of living. When 8 hour work days were introduced was there some sort of sharp drop in productivity or innovation or standard of living? Or when the work week was shortened to 5 days from 6 days? I don't think so.
> You can certainly see some countries (e.g. Scandinavia, or Australia, or even Canada) finding a different balance point than other countries (e.g. the US).
Three very resources rich regions. They are exploiting their natural resources to compensate for their (relative) low productivity.
> When 8 hour work days were introduced was there some sort of sharp drop in productivity or innovation or standard of living? Or when the work week was shortened to 5 days from 6 days? I don't think so.
Yes there was a drop, if you consider everything relevant. When the 8 hour work day was introduced new workers were still being added to the workforce. Almost half the population in productive age joined the work force in the later part of the 20th century alone and women were for the most part not working when the 5 day work week became a thing for example. Individually the work hours came down, but as a whole we work much much more today.
But we don't have that luxury now, we don't have an untapped work force to lean against. And of course, the elephant in the room: our declining and aging population. Fewer and fewer working adults will have to provide for an increasingly large number of retirees.
The situation particularly in the west is dire. Pension funds are at very high risk of collapsing almost everywhere and the solution will not be to work less. Maybe, because politicians are politicians, the 4 day work week will be a thing, but retirement will creep into the 70s, it's already being proposed in some countries.
Increases in leisure time will be only on paper, done only in exchange for votes.
> Three very resources rich regions. They are exploiting their natural resources to compensate for their (relative) low productivity.
This can't be the reason, simply because the relative share of GDP is so small. For Denmark, Sweden and Finland natural resources amount to less than 0.5% of GDP. For Norway it's 7%.
For Australia it's 5.4%, and for Canada 1.9%.
For comparison: In Congo, Lybia and Kuweit natural resources explain nearly 50% of GDP.
The pension crisis is because people aren't having enough children, because they're working too much. Working less is a solution to that, strangely enough.
It's not that simple. Young people aren't meeting each other as much anymore, and overwork is just a symptom of that I feel (people with families don't tend to put them second unless the money is needed). We need some kind of cultural shift to fix things.
The lifestyle that the typical American lives 30 year old lives today is well in excess of the one lived by today's 90 year olds when they were 30. We're not trying to "keep up" with the 1950s in any sense.
And also, any inflation graph I look at shows no "doubling in price" at any point. Or anything that looks loosely like it.
I disagree. Maybe my grandparents weren't traveling to Croatia for Yacht Week but they traveled and lived all over the US, joined social clubs, my grandfather hunted and competed in sports, played piano. They weren't living under thatched roofs with scurvy or anything. And you can google any inflation calculator you want, $1000 in 1950 would be about $10k now, so I'd say it's doubled a few times.
He is saying it doubled after women joined the workforce. Not that it has doubled over the past half century.
And your father was well off compared to what is described in the Parent's comment. Some good evidence of my point is that the average house in 1950 was about 1000 sq ft and had one bathroom.
Today, the average American home is about 2800 sq ft with multiple full bathrooms.
Another example is that in 1950, very few American families owned more than one automotible. Today it is normal to own 2, 3, or 4.
Food is much cheaper as a percentage of income, travel has gotten dramatically cheaper, and of course cheap technology and entertainment is coming out of our ears.
Not to mention modern medicine and creature comforts such as year round air conditioning in the home and auto.
People who think there has been a decline in the average Americans living standard since 1950 are either misinformed or trying to push a sketchy political agenda.
> He is saying it doubled after women joined the workforce. Not that it has doubled over the past half century.
But it did not doubled, because such proposition assumes zero female labor participation in 1950 and that was not actually the case.
Also, the healthcare costs and education costs went up significantly. Yes, there is more space, because space is cheap in suburbs. In a lot of ways, the gains are something I would happily gladly trade for cheap healthcare or college.
Plus again, if you live in suburbs which were build and poplar only after 1950, the two cars are necessity. Because otherwise one partner is stuck at home without even being able to go shopping or take kids to school. In places with good public transport, the second or even first car is luxury. In suburb, you are way more pressured to have it.
Women joining the (paid) workforce happened smoothly over a few decades.
And I believe the relevant economic effect was not so much an increase in the price of consumer goods but a suppression of wages, which otherwise might have been expected to grow at a rate closer to that of the GDP.
There is still something to be said of the cost of basics has increased by an order of magnitude. I would argue that today's 30 year olds certainly have access to more options that simply didn't exist in the 50s or at least weren't commonplace, hence more things to spend one's pay on, but it would be near impossible to raise a family of four modestly on a middle class wage in most American cities/suburbs.
Impossible is a term that is probably much stronger than you meant to use. I grew up in a family of 8 (many adopted children) in American surburbia, on one income, and we never wanted for much. The breadwinner never even breached a six figure income.
And this was not long ago. I have likely been around the sun fewer times than you have.
> The breadwinner never even breached a six figure income
Raising 6-7 kids on less than 100k sounds tough, although I'd guess you're getting towards the upper end of middle class by that point. The median household income in NYC is around $64k according to USCB, which leaves around $52k after taxes and social security. The rent on a three-bed in Brooklyn doesn't seem to go much below $2k per month, which leaves $2.3k per month for bills, groceries etc... .
I can't agree when the idea of owning a home near where they work is a pipedream for many.
People will say that you can move out of the cities in the same breath as telling you to get an education in order to get a higher paying white collar job at a big company, so which is it?
It seems no matter the configuration of life the numbers end up weighted in favour of rent-seeking capitalism and even the salaryman following all the society best practices is pinching pennies just to enjoy a coffee.
Even when I earned triple figures I couldn't afford to live in the suburbs. So why play the game at all if the grand prize is just scraping by?
You can still do this. You might not have people in your social circle and family who meet these criteria, but it's happening all around you. Just anecdotally in my own family, I've got 20something nieces and nephews who own homes and are raising multiple children on single salaries with a stay-at-home parent, two cars, and a comfortable life. Sure, it's not easy, but it's not that unusual. They're happy, comfortable, and self-sufficient.
Some in NJ, some in the San Diego area. If you're outside the ultra-urban expensive bubbles like SF and NYC, it's not hard to survive on the salary of a full-time skilled tradesman. People have a habit of increasing their spending to rise with their salary and then thinking it's not possible to live on less salary. In the suburbs and in smaller cities, mid/upper five figures with medical benefits is enough to buy a home and raise a family. The median US salary for full-time salaried workers is about $50k.
The difference in working hours is not as big as you make it seem.
In the 1950s it was normal to work on Saturdays. Nowadays, it Europe at least, the 40 hour working week is standard.
Also most women used to work until they had kids, and some returned back to work when the kids had grown up.
And then there's the difference of lifestyle:
In the 1950s most people did not own a car or a television. A family home would many times be smaller than a present one, even though families had more kids.
And finally nowadays it's pretty normal to go on holiday abroad twice a year. In the 1950's this was unheard of.
> When women entered the workforce en masse, everything seemingly doubled in price. Both spouses working to maintain the same lifestyle.
Gentle reminder that female employment was not 0. Depending on age, it was in between 35% and 39%. While it is significantly lower then male employment, the idea that no woman worked outside of house is a fantasy. They did earned less money then men and faced discrimination. But their salaries were important either to feed themselves, kids or generally add to family income.
Notably, Rosa Parks was employed and her unemployability after bus sit in was a big issue for her.
Yes for the most part, plenty of women always had jobs. The feminist movement was about women who wanted careers, which is why so much of its appeal was amongst the middle to upper-middle class who were unfairly being kept out of prestigious professional roles.
I wonder why this was downvoted rather then argued against if someone happens to disagree. The characterization of the feminism movement of that time as being predominantly middle class white women movement is valid. Imo, that is why it ended up being successful. Some people think that career or prestigious professional roles is frivolous demand, but I personally strongly disagree. Just like it is legitimate for men to want them, it is equally legitimate for women to seek good jobs with good pay, good conditions and respect.
Just like middle and upper class guys on HN seek jobs that they like and that challenge them, women wanting these is equally valid.
Yet moreover, issues like domestic violence were really acute for many middle class women too, having good job makes escape so much more easier. Career is not just frivolous thing, it is safety. Yet moreover, middle class men get sick, injured die and career makes you safer.
And second, discrimination on the jobs was as acute. Those women (and their families) needed work, full stop. Them being paid less or having bad working conditions was something that impacted them a lot. It was not just pocket money where the difference does not matter.
While there's definitely been a drop in the purchasing power of lower and middle classes (though [1]), monetary inflation alone does not seem to explain this trend in a satisfactory manner.
In all honesty, most software developers I know could probably sustain a really decent living working 50% of the time they are doing now, if they really wanted to. But for whatever reason, we _don't_ want to. It's almost like our expectations are what have inflated.
[1] Some things have gotten ridiculously expensive, like housing. However, other things have not, we're just buying much, much more of them. It's hard not to draw comparisons between our own children's environment and our own upbringing, as cliche as that might be, but they have a lot more "stuff" than we did, be it phones, tablets, sports classes and coaches, you name it.
> In the 1950s you could afford a nice middle class lifestyle, own a home, raise multiple children, all on a single income and no college education.
This was a unique situation, only in the US, which was a small fraction of the world population. The majority of the world was in poverty. The average human lifestyle has seen drastic improvements since then. This comment seems to suggest that things have been getting worse, but it's the exact opposite at the global level. Things have never been better.
But your data doesn't account whether women wanted this arrangement or not, the way things are now clearly demonstrates women wanted greater freedom even if they've to leave their home and kids, so this what it is happening.
Eh, want is a subtle thing. There's a lot of research around women's declining happiness since the 1970s[1], which implies this change is not an unalloyed good. I blame marketing. A lot of marketing tells women what to want, and marketers certainly have zero incentive to steer women away from consumerism, a career to finance that consumer lifestyle, or the idea that such a lifestyle is "freedom".
The article paints a picture of this as a universal but it's not really true I think. From my experience, in the German Mittelstand, overwork is not seen as a positive. There are a lot of very productive firms, and there's a huge focus on working 9-5, doing your work well, not being distracted, and then going home and having a life. Staying at work till midnight would be seen as not managing time correctly, neglecting family, being overworked, not in good shape, making mistakes and so on.
I don't even think it's necessarily that popular in American culture any more after the sort of financial excesses of the late aughts. The stereotypical banker who is coked up and accidentally destroys the economy isn't really as cool anymore as he was in the 80s
Indeed. As a European, my time in academia very well illustrated this cultural divide. The first conference I ever went to as a completely fresh PhD student was in the US. The conference was naturally dominated by American PhD students. They were very nice and all, but the amount of effort they spent just to out-do each other in stories of amount of time worked was shocking to me. Of course, academic research is hard, and sometimes requires putting in late evenings, especially close to deadlines. But these young students were falling over themselves out-doing each other with tales of their regular graveyard sessions and soul-crushing lives.
I felt dismayed and sad. Was this life in academia? Luckily, only a short while later I went to another conference, this one dominated by European PhD students. More chill discussions over a beer at five o'clock, more talk about people's hobbies and free time. Still, hard work, but also life. I was relieved.
I have not been exposed to the work life of "ordinary" Americans, but all the stories seem to indicate that this attitude is pervasive. It's sad, I think. And certainly unhealthy. And it must also make work culture unbearable for Americans that do value a healthier work-life balance.
"The stereotypical banker who is coked up and accidentally destroys the economy isn't really as cool anymore as he was in the 80s"
Even in finance, the phenomenon of working crazy hours didn't end with the 80s. I'd be shocked if it wasn't still the norm there.
In the medical field, it's quite typical for doctors and nurses to work insanely long shifts and get by on very little sleep... this was the case even before the pandemic hit, but as everyone knows it's gotten even worse since as doctors and nurses started getting sick, dying, and quitting, leaving more work for the rest.
It's long been common in the tech field.. especially in startups, but even among established firms working long hours is quite common.
All sorts of people living paycheck to paycheck and undocumented workers are routinely exploited, and working long hours is common there too.
In many parts of the world it is the fortunate minority who can afford to have a healthy work-life balance and get enough sleep.
The way the medical profession treats sleep, in a field where mistakes cost lives, has always seemed absolutely batshit crazy.
There's, I suppose, a weird societal level "getting your money's worth" from their compensation - since their actual hourly rate would plummet on the basis of working 30 hour shifts non-stop and the like.
Not to mention that the institution as a whole has enormous difficulty actually properly handing off care between different providers, yet we would only see benefits from being effective at doing so - not to mention minimizing the impact of bad doctors.
The US medical residency was mostly created by William Halsted, a very influential surgeon. He was partly responsible for this culture of sleep deprivation, insisting that residents be on-call 24/7.
He also was a serious cocaine addict who injected it every day. It's of course an oversimplified historical narrative, but at least part of the reason medicine does things this way is the traditions were set up by someone out of his mind on coke.
The studies that justify it are absolutely bonkers too.
One study compares the ACGME limits (max 24 hour shifts) against a "flexible" system with 28 hour ones. Unsurprisingly, there's no effect--since both groups are totally zonked at the end. Meanwhile, data from lab experiments and virtually every other field (trucking, aviation, etc) shows that performance craters well before that.
The rationale for long shifts (other than money) is "handoff": when a new doctor takes over, details about the patient's condition and treatment plan get lost in the shuffle. In some cases, they might not ever have been recorded (e.g., a subliminal impression of a patient's color or breathing). Many people are weirdly nihilistic about improving this, but it seems like it almost has to be the lower-hanging fruit since solving it doesn't require butting up against fundamental limits of human physiology.
The medical field could really use an overall authority that can force them to adopt safe practices. We treat truckers getting enough sleep as a higher priority, as a society, than surgeons.
Another thing is hospitals adopting air industry style checklists, which doctors fought tooth and nail as 'insulting'. Despite every ounce of evidence massively pointing toward this saving lives.
I remember reading that the reason for long shifts at hospitals, for doctors or nurses, is that most mistakes are made during hand-over. The thing had a study cited, I'm sorry I cannot find the source, so the hospitals optimize for minimal hand-over. I would think they also did a control study on mistakes made during the last few hours of shifts when care providers feel the strongest effect of sleep deprivation, but I don't remember that being compared.
Doctors and Nurses actually have somewhat of a good reason, though I do think they are pushed too far (especially of late). Handoffs during shift changes mean opportunities for information to be miscommunicated or lost, which negatively affect patient outcomes.
In principle though, handoff errors can be reduced with better procedures, training, and technology.
Making tired people less stupid would require a fundamental breakthrough in neuroscience---and it's not for want of trying that no one has found a way to do so yet.
It's unfortunate though that medical professionals have a deep misstrust/hatred for new technology due to bad experiences from poorly run it contracting.
My mum worked for the NHS and I'd regularly hear her complaining for weeks/months on end about new IT systems that either didn't work, were hard to use or were months or even years behind schedule. All while knowing how much these projects cost (it's all public info here) and that the people working on it where getting paid in a day what she would be lucky to make in a week.
> Staying at work till midnight would be seen as not managing time correctly, neglecting family, being overworked, not in good shape, making mistakes and so on.
How is it seen if someone is at work by 7am? Or even 6am? Genuine question.
In my anecdotal experience, seemingly not noticed, as people assume that you came in just a few minutes before.
For a couple of reasons, I spent a period of time going into work at 6AM. Most came at 8 or 9. Far more people commented when I stayed until 6PM one day.
A former co-worker of mine used to do this as well. I didn’t notice for weeks and only because I logged in very early one day.
At my old job I was routinely praised for being a hard worker because people kept seeing me stay to 7pm. I usually heard comments like, "don't work too hard" and "make sure you don't stay too late".
What no one seemed to notice was I was coming in at 11. I never felt the need to correct anyone.
It’s also a great tip to work on your body language that says “I’m very busy with important things” even if you totally aren’t. For example, when you go to the break room or to sit on the toilet or to have a smoke break make sure you move very fast and purposefully from your desk so people think you’re just running back and forth to talk to people.
I'm always skeptical of coworkers who say they get in early. Some really do and are ultraproductive while others would say that but whenever I came in early they weren't there until much later. No surprise though: the former people were clearly productive and the latter ones were not. The hours aren't what really mattered.
In my anecdotal experience, arriving at work around 7 or earlier and leaving before 16:00 is absolutely not a problem. Arriving around 10 is also possible for those who prefer starting late.
People try to group the important meetings in the middle of the day to accommodate everyone. Working overtime when needed happens but those hours can be grouped to take a few days off.
I don't know if it is generalized but it's the case in the two companies I worked for in Germany.
How much do these ultra successful types actually over-work and how much is just posturing to trick the underlings to over-work?
In American Psycho Patrick Bateman has it pretty chill, spending all his working hours on watching TV, reading magazines and talking trash with his peers. I used to think it was just another example of how unhinged he was, but maybe it’s a comment on some kind of double standard on workload vs. compensation in the corporate life.
It is basically a status and class indicator in American society, particularly for the upper middle class and the upper class.
If you read "The Meritocracy Myth" by Yale University law professor Stephen McNamee, you will understand the game being played here quite well. There are upper class Americans in particular who basically work extremely long hours (80-105 hour work weeks) to game the system, with no net productivity gains whatsoever compared to the middle and upper middle class who typically work 40-60 hour work weeks at maximum. In fact, the productivity gains generally wane off at about 32 hours per week, and we really do not need longer work hours in modern society, unless it is for the upper class to "protect" their status. Just like sleep is critical, rest is critical too, for recharging, so you can do a good job at work. The health effects of working extremely long hours, even if it affords you things and experiences others do not have, are just simply not worth it.
My father, who grew up as a very indignant American youth, who literally paid for all of his clothes starting by age 12, knew how to play this game very well. He was able to transcend the poor, working, and middle classes, and was comfortably in the upper middle class as senior level management, in the private sector, in finance, as a certified public accountant by training, by the time I was born. At my grandmother's funeral (his mother's funeral) people wished they were industrious as he was in his youth! The sad part about it is he died before he turned 60, and before his mother. It comes at a huge price.
IDK about even 32 for my self, with wfh lately work feels so streamlined, a day of work is only like 4 hours of focused work. The rest of the day is just being available, so i can help other people with their 4 hours i guess lol
It is the exact same story for me. I don't know how people are able to stare at code, walking through those complex patterns, for 6 hours a day, let alone the entire 9-5 time or the overwork hours the tech industry seems to love.
I love technology and I enjoy my work, but it doesn't define me as a human being. There are opportunities I've had to do some work at what people would consider "prestigious" companies but I've turned it down in order to have better work life balance.
I've had various issues with unrealistic requests and timelines from those to whom I report, and it feels as if I need to, somehow, "work harder" (whatever that means) to prove that I'm trying to execute their impossible plan.
When I get home, however, the mere presence of my wife and kids, and even pet(s), remind me of how I actually define myself, WHO I AM.
I like art. Be it paintings, music, film, TV shows. That's where I find "myself". I'm good at things I do for work, but I don't care about it the way I care about the meanings of life I can find staring into a painting, or listening to a song (anywhere from Mr. Bungle to Debussy) or watching a TV show (anywhere from Adventure Time to For All Mankind).
I'm privileged enough, and have planned ahead enough, that I could significantly downgrade my already not-very-prestigious, but quite demanding job, and live well.
My job doesn't come close to defining me, to myself anyway. That's probably the other "thing" - how people want to be able to define themselves to others. I'm relatively unaffected by that particular neuroticism.
I like coding. The thinking, the problem solving, the expressiveness, the chiselling out of a solid block of emptiness. It is my art.
I made it my trade. It's a double-edged sword, with which I badly stabbed myself a couple of times. I tried to drop out, but can't help but come back to it.
The job's not me alright, the coding is a big part of me for sure.
> able to stare at code, walking through those complex patterns, for 6 hours a day, let alone the entire 9-5 time or the overwork hours
I can do that kind of deep focus, I just can't do it two days in a rows and expect any efficiency the second one, let alone a full week.
Truth be told, I somewhat have to do that due to some sort of mild attention disorder (I can't imagine what life must be like for those with a more serious condition).
Thankfully over the years intentional practice of a great deal of sports taught me that long term consistency is what matters, doesn't matter if I do things in bursts as long as I don't overexert and rest appropriately (and especially don't bash myself for it).
But that requires full agency over my work time, something that I took a decade to unlock via being remote: in a 9-5 office people can't help but wonder why you're slacking all day and dragging your feet in order not to straight up not turning up for work.
The feeling of wasting time and the judgemental attitude (both from others and myself) just made me feel miserable, even though overall I was outputting the work and then some.
I don't care about prestige, I just care about my well being, and not being disparaged.
I don't know how people are able to stare at code, walking through those complex patterns, for 6 hours a day, let alone the entire 9-5 time
By not coding for 8 hours. There are many more aspects to being a developer than writing code - documentation, code review, testing, planning, mentoring, etc. Even if you're quite junior and don't get involved in things like planning you can being doing "low mental workload" tasks like writing lots of repetitive-but-necessary tests or manually QAing your own tasks before pushing them to a PR. Your day absolutely should not be 8 hours of extremely focused dev work except on rare occasions when it's needed.
This I tried, took me a long while to realise I should not have, because "low load" is still load, and what I really needed was rest because I had myself throughly mentally exerted.
On top of that "low load" doesn't mean the task is of less importance. Mistakes come by easier when one's already exerted.
I don't think the parent meant it that way but suggesting that solution can come out as demeaning for people that already are on the edge of exhaustion and internally questioning themselves.
>There are upper class Americans in particular who basically work extremely long hours (80-105 hour work weeks)
People in the upper class don't need to work because they're able to live off of, and build wealth from, their assets.
The lower and middle classes are defined by their economic precarity that hinges on their ability to sell their labor. If someone needs to work to "protect their status", they're upper middle class at best.
The aristocratic class in America is mostly gone, with a few notable exceptions. This is where the Meritocracy Myth comes into play, where wealth is "created based on merit" (when people are just gaming things to the extreme). Meritocracy is used as an argument for keeping things status quo, where working non-stop (and other practices) is justified. At least the aristocratic life allowed for a leisure lifestyle for the upper class. Now, it does not.
I agree with most of that but I would think there are probably more, per capita, aristocrats, socialites, celebrities, and otherwise idle wealthy people today than at any point in history.
> There are upper class Americans in particular who basically work extremely long hours (80-105 hour work weeks) to game the system, with no net productivity gains whatsoever compared to the middle and upper middle class who typically work 40-60 hour work weeks at maximum. In fact, the productivity gains generally wane off at about 32 hours per week, and we really do not need longer work hours in modern society
There is some confused language being used here. If you're saying the marginal productivity of the 81st hour worked in a week is 0, then that is almost certainly wrong.
If you're saying that the marginal productivity of the 81st hour in a week is less than that of the 32nd hour, that may well be true, but if so, nothing else of what you said follows from that.
> There is some confused language being used here. If you're saying the marginal productivity of the 81st hour worked in a week is 0, then that is almost certainly wrong.
No, I am correct here, and there is no "confused language" in my writing. This has been studied by prominent economists at Stanford University, which is ironically one of the worst Universities in the US for encouraging "working nonstop".
Once you work over 55 hours per week, your productivity at that point effectively becomes zero [1]. You effectively cannot accomplish anything more, productively, as a human, past 55 hours of work per week.
I suggest that you become more aware of human limitations, along with becoming more aware of human behavior, especially human tribalistic behaviors. Then you would not fall for these kinds of falsehoods. It would help you play "the game" more successfully, which you seem to take interest in.
[1] The Productivity of Working Hours (Stanford University study by economist John Pencavel): http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
Once you work over 55 hours per week, your productivity at that point effectively becomes zero [1]. You effectively cannot accomplish anything more, productively, as a human, past 55 hours of work per week.
This is just false but I suppose it’s all a matter of what you call “work”. For some people, going to client dinners and golf outings is “work”. I agree coding for 55+ a week is difficult but there are plenty of folks that have this ability to sit down and grind.
The idea that some economist at Stanford discovered a secret 55 hour breaking point for productivity that generalizes to every human on earth is beyond preposterous.
I suspect like many economist papers this does not replicate and is simply a means for generating headlines to help this person get tenure or funding for their work.
I just imagine a guy who spends 10 hours a day cracking rocks with a sledge hammer, 6 days a week. It's too bad those last 5 hours worth of rocks just don't count....
Obviously, the last rocks don't unsmash themselves. However, if someone plans to work 60 hours a week, they might work 9% slower--perhaps even unconsciously--thereby causing their output to be be the same as if they were only supposed to work 55 hours.
Figures 1 and 2 (page 2060 and 2061) show that, across four cohorts doing different tasks, output plateaus at about 48 hours/week. Indeed, output from 70 hour week (10 hr/day x 7 days) was slightly lower than a 48 hour week (8 hr/day, with Sunday off). These workers were pretty motivated by the circumstances and doing skilled but not particularly creative work, so I suspect this is likely an upper bound.
There's lots of interesting data about working conditions from the the Health of Munition Workers Committee.
Is it that the 56th hour you don't do anything, or that the 56th hour makes the other hours 1/55th less productive, therefore making it seem like you are getting something with the extra hour?
Yes, exactly this, obviously in the 56th hour next week if you want to you can 'do something'; the point must surely be (to mean anything at all) that if you attempt to sustain that, the 'first 55' suffer more than the 56th rewards.
As another commentor says, it simply can't be that marginal productivity drops to zero. At least, if you're trying to produce, there's some external motivation, then it'd take something really serious (starvation, massive sleep deprivation, etc.) to make it actually zero; more than just 'a long week'.
It's like if you're super motivated and work all-night on something exciting: if you were rational for a second, you'd realise you'd probably accomplish more on it with a few hours' break to sleep. But that doesn't mean the alternative is doing nothing in the last x hours.
> As another commentor says, it simply can't be that marginal productivity drops to zero.
It can even fall below zero. Imagine the totally overworked surgeon killing his patient because of fatigue and total exhaustion. His net productivity has fallen, reducing the outcome of the last 12 hours.
No, that's 'just' a bad outcome of his productivity.
His contribution to 'product' is providing the service of surgery; he has done that.
But yes, overworked and tired surgeons are more likely to kill patients; killing patients bad; overworking surgeons bad. (It's just not a 'productivity' issue.)
This notion is absurd on its face. When I was a young man, I helped my grandfather build a house one summer. We worked from sunup to sundown, with breaks for meals, and Sunday off, which comes out to much longer than 55 hours in a week.
After the 55th hour, there was certainly productive work being accomplished. Less productive than the 1st hour I am sure, but the amount of valuable work being done was more than zero. It was observably evident.
You don’t need negative marginal productivity after the 55th hour to see a negative impact of more than 55 worked hours a week. Things like exhaustion will affect you all the time and decrease overall productivity. So sure, you might still do some useful work after 55, but over the course of the week you’d do still less than if you worked 40 hours. There are caveats and exceptions as usual, but it is not as ridiculous as you make it sound.
The point here is that if you know you're stuck at the worksite "until it's done", you'll work at a more manageable pace.
BUT if you know your workday is exactly 8 hours with a 30 minute lunch in the middle, you'll pace yourself differently.
The difference between two equal people doing the same thing, one working until they drop and the other working 8 hours and leaving, isn't big enough to warrant the longer hours worked in the long run.
The one working longer hours might get more work done for a day, maybe a week or two. But after months of work the first person is burned out and the second one is still going strong.
I definitely want to check the book out because I love playing the game but I think there is a certain amount of nuance to account for.
I work a full time job and contract for at least 25hrs/week.
In my full time job I’m paid for 40hrs but not all 40 of those are productive. I take an hour lunch, we have a bunch of meetings and social things, etc.
If you ask, I work 65+ hours per week. If we’re being honest I probably only work 40 or less between lunch, catching up with coworkers sitting in meetings not doing anything, etc.
This oversimplfies things a bit. Law firm associates generally receive a salary and a bonus. The bonus can be substantial (six figures) if they hit various performance targets. These targets are largely based on the number of hours billed, although work quality is also relevant.
Law firm partners also don't generally make the same money on their 80th hour. Partnerships will split up the profit at the end of the year, and the number of hours billed and size of the partner's "book of business" factor in heavily here. The size of the book of business depends on the number of hours the partner bills (overseeing associates and paralegals, as well as doing independent work), so working more will increase a partner's share of the annual profits.
Also, a partner whose time is in high demand can raise rates (sometimes done by reducing discounts or charging clients a "NY rate"). So a partner who has plenty of work and doesn't mind not having more work can simply raise rates and make the 80th hour more expensive for clients.
you should point to a specific part of your link to the 55 hours. searching for 55 doesn't get a productivity graph, and figure 10 has some interesting notes below it.
I think you need to be a lot more specific citing 'evidence'.
The 81st hour's productivity might not be 0, but if you worked 81 hours last week, that will impact your productivity in the current week, including reducing your productivity in the much more important first 32 hours.
I am sure there are instances. I can't really speak for everyone and generalize for an entire management class, but in our company, it does not appear to be just posturing for managers and middle managers. Getting someone for 15 to 30 minute window can sometimes be rather hard. I see my manager in and out of meetings all day ( some are pointless so he can do some of his actual work ), some are a shit show where he needs to actively participate just to keep things afloat, some are something in between. I do not know if he is an exception, but buddy that just got promoted said she is having the same issue. Metric ton of stuff to do and no time do it in. Doing more after 6 or w/e your 'end time' is seems common here.
And I had a taste of something similar myself. Project dropped out of the sky on my plate with due date a little too close for comfort. So what do you do? If you want to deliver, something has got to give..
> Project dropped out of the sky on my plate with due date a little too close for comfort. So what do you do?
Obviously, this project wasn't important enough to be given to you with enough time to get it done. Deadlines are often artificial, and this is probably what it was. In the absence of any specifics, I'd say push back on the deadline, negotiate for what you need to deliver something acceptable within a reasonable time, and don't kill yourself for it. If you do kill yourself for this one project, that just sets an expectation for next time that you don't want to have set.
I've worked with a lot of environments before where these deadlines aren't artificial. Usually these are projects dictated and agreed to by non-technical staff, then handed to technical staff to figure out. I assumed they were artificial, then I look at official signed contracts with deliverables and dates and die a bit inside.
"We said we'd give them X, Y, Z by A for $N. Let's see how close we can get to it." Is not abnormal from my experience with major clients as well. I work in R&D so there is usually an expectation of delays and failures but in this world, the client has an idea of what they want and an upper budget if what they'll spend. People try and feel this out to get as close to their budget as possible and as little as the client with agree to for that budget. Actual budgeting based on requirements and planning doesn't happen, you simply grab the opportunity and run with it. Yes, much of R&D is complete shit show.
Sure, there are such a thing as real deadlines. Regulatory deadlines are one example. Contractual deadlines with penalty clauses can be another.
But, the type of deadline you point out (we said we'd give them $STUFF by $DATE for $PRICE) is often flexible, if not artificial. For instance, maybe you can work out a schedule where by $DATE, you deliver $SUBSET_OF_STUFF for $LOWER_PRICE, while continuing to build out features to satisfy the original request, ending up delivering $STUFF for $PRICE.
Admittedly, this can be tricky. But, it can be done. I've done it before. Once a client has already agreed to a deal, they're generally inclined to stay with you, provided you're working in good faith with them. This can be somewhat of a sunk cost mentality, but it doesn't really matter as long as you're not taking advantage of that to soak them for cash.
I guess the moral of the story is that any contract is amendable and re-negotiable, if you approach it right. If it's not possible to deliver by $DATE without killing yourself and your team, then it's time to consider re-negotiating. And, as you said, in the real world, delays happen; clients may be willing to accept some small delays.
Even regulatory deadlines can sometimes be a little flexible, but that's a whole higher level of negotiation, and government agencies sometimes don't have the discretion to delay enforcement of new regulations, or the incentive to work with you to get you into compliance. In that case, the choice comes down to either a one-time push to deliver what's needed (and, you should be explicit that it is a one-time push), or temporarily eating the fines while delivering on a realistic schedule. I've never been in this type of situation, but I have dealt with government agencies before, and it can be a pain.
I see the same thing. Granted as an individual contributor I'm only privy to a small fraction of meetings, so it may be not be representative. But they usually start with higher-ups arriving late, groaning about back-to-back meetings, and if we manage to settle the matter before the allotted time, they usually pad the rest of the session with more speculative discussions not on the agenda, ensuring it will be back-to-back with the next one as well.
Who would be afraid of having to sit and twiddle their thumbs for half an hour waiting for the next meeting, if not someone desperate to uphold an image of being an over-worker?
Genuinely curious: What do you think would be the outcome of this reply?
In my previous team, it would have been "yeah I'm sorry, but there is a fire, this customer is paying us XYZ and threating to take their bussiness elsewhere, ...". Saying "no" would at best give you some additional resources.
(Note that I did say "previous" team and the reason this kept happening is precisely why that team is no longer my current one)
If there really is a fire, they should be paying "put out fire in a hurry" -rates. Especially if the hurry was caused by someone else up the chain not doing their job properly.
If a problem needs solved by end of week and it takes at least 3 weeks to do properly, you document what you can do within normal office hours by the deadline and ask if that's enough.
If not, then they either need to approve overtime or extra resources. There's exactly zero chance I'm going to be using my free time to fix someone else's fuckup without proper compensation.
I think in American Psycho Bateman and his friends are already super rich before even going into work, having been born into wealth as "trust fund kids". I am pretty sure, unless I remember incorrectly, that Pearce & Pearce, the firm they all work for, is part-owned by Bateman's father, or he at least had the connections to get him the job there? They all have a Vice President title too, so it seems like in that instance they are all just given cushy jobs with nepotism.
I've noticed a lot of americans actually are posturing about work hours. I was very surprised, me a French supposed to do 35 hours, to see american colleagues leave around 5pm
That is a great take on it! My take was the higher up you go, the more meaningless the work is. As in paper pusher vs innovator. Though I imagine near to and at C level it may be different.
It's all posturing. Why wouldn't it be? Leadership is all about "leveraging great people" right? So it makes sense to keep up the appearance if it means an extra X% output.
And that's not even considering the management of expectations to prevent complaints about income inequality. I mean, you didn't work 80+ hour weeks, so, who are you to complain?
> is just posturing to trick the underlings to over-work?
This. There's nothing bad in wanting to do a great job but most often you're not the one to benefit from that. Especially software devs, some of them can work miracles almost for free, just to get some recognition (but not too much, we don't want them to think they provide something extraordinary )
Theory: overwork culture is a 'race to the bottom' when workers feel more pressure to (1) compete against each other instead of (2) organizing together to promote mutual interests.
Put this way, 'overwork culture' would be a collective action problem in the context of an economic system where owners have more leverage than workers.
So what about tech, where workers seem to have high leverage? Why do they still overwork? One factor that may be overlooked is this: workers are not only competing against their contemporaries but also future workers (which may be more numerous and perceived as less expensive).
There's also no tech union. And even though many tech workers are at the top of the working class bubble, it's still working class. You have more in common with someone working minimum wage than the executive who writes himself a bonus and hoards equity.
> So what about tech, where workers seem to have high leverage?
Do they?
In my experience, most software engineers do experience a better work/life balance, especially at startups where they have more leverage. Even so, we can do better.
1. Efficiency wages. Highly motivated and skilled programmers are so much better at their jobs than unmotivated and unskilled replacements that it's best to "overpay" above the market-clearing price, giving employers meaningful choice in applicants and regain some of the negotiating power in the relationship.
2. Tournament theory of compensation. Quantifying performance of engineers is difficult, but rank-ordering them (especially without an explicit stack-ranking) is relatively easy. So an efficient solution is to overpay the best-performing "winners" and underpay the rest, getting the same incentive effects as piece work without the cost of quantifying work output.
During lockdown I was feeling pretty burnt out myself which got me thinking: why are basically all jobs 9-5, 5 days per week? Why is there no variation on this model?
It annoyed me so much that I decided to create https://4dayweek.io/ - Software Engineering jobs with a better work / life balance
I've been asking this for decades, because I hate rush hour. It's now more obvious it used to be a huge problem with an easy solution... employers need to give employees more options as to when to work. Synchronizing 9-5 is incredibly short-sighted and puts so much strain on the system for no reason. Many roles don't need that window of time and could easily open things up for those that really need those times. I really hope 9-5 goes away and people just "show up" to work for meetings and maybe agreed office hours of some kind.
How do these companies scale down the workload for 4 day a week employees? Estimates in the software field are based on intuition. I could easily see this becoming, "get 5 days of work done in 4 days and get paid less for it" if the people involved aren't used to estimating based on 4 day work weeks.
Can you elaborate on your context maybe? Asking because to me this intuitively doesn't make sense but my context is agile software development with sprint and story points. Since story points are a relative complexity measure they don't care about how long the work week is. The velocity measured over each sprint in these points also doesn't. Velocity is just an average number of observed story points delivered per time period. How many days were 'work days' and which, doesn't really matter.
The company I work for runs almost in the same way, the difference is that we have a 40h/week working hours as a "reference", which is pure BS since everyone end up working easily 45+ hours/week.
It’s just the socially accepted pseudo standard. Shorthand to avoid complexity.
Where I’m at 10am to 4pm are the core hours and the rest is flexible. Overtime can be recouped in half days or full days off if you’ve organised appropriately with the team.
My suspicion is that it’s simply easier to make disgruntled noises generally about 9-5 than actually negotiating seriously at the smaller end of the scale on behalf of you or your team.
Cheers mate - really appreciate it! More jobs (e.g ML) getting added soon, just need to convince more companies to consider applications for a 4 day week
Do you intend for the site to be mobile friendly? Couldn't see hardly anything except a menu and there's a little "agree" button that makes me think that the cookie notification is getting hidden by the menu
I think a better response would be "why are you proud of having less free time than me?" I remember in school people would often brag about how little sleep they got and when they said that to me I'd say "why are you proud of how unhealthy your life is?" I would NOT say "sucks for you that you're too dumb to study enough and get to bed by 11". That would be a dick move.
I’m not proud of it, just so happens that 20% of the employees on the team do most of the work and work more and the other 80% talk about how they have such a great life outside of work.
Not the OP here and I agree with you (that's why I never say that) but can you honestly say that you never _thought_ it when they complain? I know I do most of the time. There are the workoholic exceptions that just can't help themselves.
I agree with other commenters that it might not be the best thing to say if you want to keep your friendships.
It's a very true sentiment though. Another one that often comes to my mind when people brag about amount of hours work is something along the lines of: "Do you know that you're effectively being paid at near minimum wage?" (obviously not true for everyone, but some people's salary goes from 'decent' to 'minimum wage' per hour worked)
But it's even worse than just being paid less per hour worked:
For each hour you work, you lose an hour of 'life'. Working 10 hour days instead of 8 hour days means that you lose 10 hours of 'life' a week.
>When somebody brags to you about how much they work, answer with “Maybe if you were better at it, you wouldn’t need to work so much”
Sadly here in the US that's seen as bad or unproductive. The whole chasing the productivity numbers has become a fetish in this country where we can't imagine that productivity is better measured in how little we waste our time versus how much more profit we make. If it takes an hour to make the same profit versus last year that should be celebrated and rewarded but it seems the latter part, the reward, is always withheld. Even if it's something silly like pizza for lunch or a gift card. There's just more of the "well work more" attitude which is just nonsense to me. The whole "line must go up" cult needs to be expunged from the human species, I swear.
This presumes that the amount of work you can do, or money you need to earn, is capped, such as producing x widgets per day, or earning y dollars per day.
Others have already pointed out what an asshole thing this is to say, but I think a more important thing to note about it is that it's simply incorrect. If your income/wealth is directly related to total output, and your capacity isn't capped, then regardless of how good you are at it, doing it 2x as much means 2x the value produced.
I'm good enough at what I do that I never have to work again if I don't want to, but I still work 10+ hours every day because it's fun and I like it, and maybe it would be nice to have a boat one day.
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
Richard Feynman
It sounds like giving up on "working" can sometimes be the first step to high output for some people. I know I've had that experience.
That’s funny, we must’ve read that chapter completely differently. It’s what made me think of him as an example.
I see it as a rediscovery of how Feynman’ work was his true calling after all and how he chose to do more physics, instead of more reading, for pleasure.
It just seemed like it was 1/10th the normal speed, somewhat Luddite... and every task seemed oddly fundamental.
I've also encountered towns like this in Spain, Greece, Austria, Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Uruguay, Thailand and Cambodia.
After reading these comments, I would never have believed that so many small towns exist that seem untouched by 24-hour stores and everything cheap and on-demand. It sounds inevitable that everyone is eventually pushed into hyperinflationary always-working mode. But yet, these places persist. I might even chalk it up to depressed economies and "third-world" nature, but my samples include all sorts of economies.
I think we choose what kind of lifestyle we want, but it needs to be done at the community level. Without going all "we should all be farmers hippie dippy portland nature fetishist", it does seem like decisions have consequences and it is possible to steer away from hyperactivity.