I think a lot of the replies in the thread so far have focused on tech (understandably, this is HN after all) but that's missing something obvious - the 4 day week would apply to everyone.
In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren't contending with pointless meetings and busy work though. They can't do 40 hours of work in 32 hours by removing some of the hours they're not really working. What they do doesn't compress like that.
Consequently looking at this from the context of tech workers is far less interesting. The Japanese government isn't saying "Let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work!" In tech removing the pointless nonsense isn't actually reducing the amount of real work people do. Instead, Japan is saying "Our country is wealthy enough and advanced enough that our people can actually do less work." That's fascinating.
If you see this as "removing the wasteful time spent on things that aren't useful like meetinga" then you've missed the point. It is that, but it's much, much more than that too.
I fully agree with your comment overall, but as someone who lives in Japan I'd like to point out that specifically "people who fill in the holes in roads" is a running joke in Japan since small street constructions always seem way over-staffed.
It's amazing because they do finish a lot faster than in western countries, but you can definitely remove 20% of the people in street-level construction and would see little difference. An example: they hire 2 people on every sidewalk just to tell people to continue walking the way they are walking and make sure they don't fall into a pit while looking at their phones[1].
From what I've learned, this specific job is normally filled by people who have already retired but don't have enough to live, so they are paid peanuts (I believe they might also be paid a bit extra by gvmt to go back to work, but I'm not sure I understood this point properly). They have started to be replaced by "robots" though [2].
Edit: in general everything in Japan seems overstaffed compared to the western counterparts, not just road construction. I believe this is how they can maintain very low levels of unemployment here, but I don't yet know how the incentives work to make it possible.
Sometimes I think what passes for appropriately staffed in the West is actually understaffed. What's called optimal staffing in the West is just at capacity, which is a nice way of saying "with no spare capacity."
Of course, with Japan being the land of just-in-time, one could argue that spare capacity is bad -- but that's an oversimplification. Necessary spare capacity is good. What's bad is not being able to address the reasons the spare capacity is needed. Maybe when it comes to humans doing road work there's no way around the need for spare capacity?
From my experience visiting, there were lots of jobs that were "nice to have". Like the man making sure people don't fall in the hole, or the person standing by the carpark exit making sure the way is clear. You could probably do without them, but it's a nice thing to have.
There's lots of examples of that, people doing things that you would see brutally optimized out of western city and those cities I feel are worse off for that optimization.
One way to look at it is that with their wealth they've decided to employ more people and do more good, versus pocketing the profit and calling it efficiency.
The famous railway networks in Japan are actually privatized rail companies which was very surprising to me. When the rail companies privatized in my country they immediately became worse, as they were suddenly serving a very different purpose. Staff were let go, the trains are cleaned less often, services were cut. That kind of thing.
> From my experience visiting, there were lots of jobs that were "nice to have". Like the man making sure people don't fall in the hole, or the person standing by the carpark exit making sure the way is clear. You could probably do without them, but it's a nice thing to have.
How would liability play out for the construction company in a Japanese court? It's already a low margin competitive industry so passing risk management costs onto customers (the cost of the people monitoring the holes) is likely more practical than risking all profits evaporating and years of litigation, especially if insurance has anything to say about it.
I don't know the answer to that sorry, you're right to point it out though. Perhaps there is actually some prior court case that defined a liability to make those individuals necessary to be compliant.
In Australia we certainly don't have those people, construction companies just use a few signs, some cones and barricades and that's all that is required to be compliant. If someone falls in the hole they shouldn't have walked past the cones!
> In Australia we certainly don't have those people
Not the case in Victoria. Pretty normal to see a couple of workers standing near the site entrance making sure pedestrians don't get run over by a truck. Or standing in front of a closed footpath, directing pedestrians to cross the road.
There's pretty strict rules around keeping the public out of construction sites and excavations. Putting a couple of cones around a hole is definitely not all that's required.
How many people? The more people you put (let's say fixing a pothole) the safer it is. Would you put 1 extra? 10? 100? 1000? At what point do you stop?
There's absolutely a limit where adding another person only adds marginal safety. For instance, children who don't know they should not jump to jump a barrier and then go into a pothole should not be allowed alone on the streets. We are not talking about a random hole in the street, these things are already heavily warded in Japan with barriers and signs AND on top of it there's also workers AND on top of it the mentioned security guards. My argument is, many or all of these security guards are not needed.
In my country the government used to run the railways, but it had been run down for decades and was at the verge of closing all but the busiest commuter lines into the capital. It was privatized, and since then usage has skyrocketed (well pre covid) to over twice the level pre-privatization, so clearly something's gone well.
The privitization is split into different companies, the best having had a 30 year contract to revitilise their line, and they've done wonders with it, while one of the worst was (pre covid) run to the exact orders of the government
My pet conspiracy theory is that Toyota's liberal knowledge sharing with competitors is really a psy-op to keep the competitors perpetually on the edge of ruin while they laugh all the way to the bank.
They don't even have to be deceptive about it. Just in time is obviously about not having undue spare capacity, not about not having any spare capacity at all. But Toyota knows this nuance is going to be lost on buzzword-loving PHBs and greedy management consultant firms. You see the same thing happening with corporate Agile.
Toyota knows it competitive edge is its culture. Culture to change, to be retrospective, to improve. Lean, JIT, Kanban etc were derived from a culture of striving for perfection and to develop the optimal processes for a specific company is something that takes decades and is never ending, not something that can be read in a book, taught on a course in a short period of time.
There's also that story from back when Toyoda was making sewing machines or whatever it was, and a competitor stole copies of the engineering drawings for their latest model. Toyoda shrugged and said something to the effect of "So what? The really valuable knowledge are the mistakes we made coming up with those drawings, and that's not in the drawings. By the time our competitors have managed to get their copy of our machine to the market, we will have innovated away from that for our next model. And that innovation is informed not by what our current model looks like, but by the exploration we did to get there. None of that was stolen, so after this model, they will just keep repeating the mistakes we made."
I have no idea of whether this is true at all, but I really like the story anyway.
----
What I do know is true is that modern day Toyota doesn't mind sharing the solutions they have come up with to various problems, because they think the real value is in the people and processes to (a) identify the problems in the first place, and (b) come up with solutions suited to those specific problems.
Blindly applying Toyota's solutions to Toyota's problems to your organisation, just hoping that you have the same problems as Toyota and that their solutions will work also for you is a recipe for confusion, and not what matters. (Yet virtually every "development methodology" is a specific solution to a specific problem blindly applied to an organisation.)
You see this a lot in IT companies if it works for google, Amazon and Microsoft, It will work for us while we have like a millionth their load or complexity.
> None of that was stolen, so after this model, they will just keep repeating the mistakes we made.
The competitor probably could have purchased a sewing machine and replicated the engineering drawings themselves. Teardowns of competitor products is common today, and I'm sure it was back then as well.
I think Toyota's "helpful" attitude comes from the Western paranoia in the 70-90s that Japan was going to completely dominate worldwide manufacturing. After all, their rise was fast: in the mid 60s, Japanese manufactures were practically begging to sell rudimentary formed metal components in the USA, but by the early 80s, they were a leader in the high-tech manufacturing. That rise caught many people off guard and I've heard it said that the "lost decade" in Japan was the result of American trade policy specifically designed to curtail Japan's growth in manufacturing.
Viewed in that light, it makes sense that Japanese companies would appear "helpful" to American ones. Why else would Toyota co-build a plant with GM in order to teach GM their Kaizen philosophy for manufacturing?
According to the book The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer by Jeffrey Liker, one of the motivations for Toyota was to repay the debt to American manufacturers who participated in the postwar rebuilding of Japan and taught American manufacturing techniques to Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers.
I’ve heard recently (in a video that I don’t know how to find again) that that’s exactly what happened with the automotive industry’s chip shortage: Toyota was the only one that built a stock of chips in advance, and now are the only ones that can keep producing cars without being limited by the shortage.
> Just in time is such a simple principle, but the pursuit of the elimination of waste is now the central mission of any major manufacturer.
> However, most did it wrong. Manufacturers globally saw the headline “elimination of inventory leads to massive efficiency gains” and jumped on that without actually determining what made it work for Toyota.
> They ignored that Japan's small physical size made for short domestic supply chains, less vulnerable to things going wrong.
> They ignored the company's production leveling: finding the average daily demand and producing that regardless of short-term changes and demands.
> They ignored the fact that eliminating excess inventory is different from eliminating all inventory.
> They ignored the principle of growing strong teams of cross-functional workers
predicated on respecting people.
> They ignored the culture of stopping and fixing problems to get things right the first time.
> They ignored huge swaths of the Toyota Way and created a system that’s less effective and less resilient but can impress shareholders through short-term savings.
> How Toyota has effectively implemented this system fills books but many are just reading the covers.
> Even Toyota though is not perfect.
> In 2011 japan was rocked by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake the fourth strongest ever recorded anywhere.
Not only did this cause immense destruction to life and property but it also led Toyota to recognize a flaw in its own system.
> As japan recovered some supply chains were quick to as well. For example, securing plastic resin for door panel production is not difficult: there are plenty of manufacturers globally creating easily substitutable alternatives.
> That’s not the case with, say, semiconductors: the hugely expensive facilities that create these chips require years to construct and after the 2011 earthquake it took many months to mend them back to operating status.
> This surfaced a truth that had never been fully considered: not all supply chains are made equal. Plastic resin can handle supply chain disruption, semiconductors cannot. Therefore Toyota made changes: all along, their mission was not to eliminate inventory full stop; it was to eliminate excess inventory.
> Supply chain disruption is inevitable. It's inevitable in the same way that Titanic's flawed design would eventually encounter an iceberg, or the structural economic vulnerabilities of 2008 would eventually collide with a market panic. Therefore semiconductor inventory is not excess because inevitably, due to the inevitability of disruption, excess semiconductor inventory will eventually become necessary.
> Recognizing this, Toyota in recent years has started to build up a stockpile of two to six months worth of chips and that's why the company is the only major vehicle manufacturer that is unfazed by the semiconductor shortage.
> Toyota followed its own principles. It did not stray from them, and it did not reinvent them. It’s no surprise that Toyota excels at implementing its own system, but it is a surprise that the entire manufacturing world has so wholeheartedly embraced flawed implementation of the system.
I thought I'd rather watch the video than read your long transcript, I clicked it, it's Wendover with his weird speech pattern (some syllables loud, some syllables he runs through, but some vowels he drawls on...).
> Just IN tiime, is such a SIMple principlee, but the purSUIT of the ELIMination of waste...
He probably got some sort of speech coaching because he didn't like the way he sounded. A bad one, I would say. I looked up a video from 2017, he sounded ok, I could hear some long syllables but they weren't as long as they are now. It also sounds like he got a different mic.
What is amazing about this is that it is a super simple game of "what if?". What if our current supply of chips are disrupted? It would mean production halts, there is a non negligible risk and we cannot source new chips in less than 6 months, so stockpile that to keep uninterrupted service. That conclusion probably take quite a while to get to, but the kick off question is really simple.
It's not that simple, though. "What if our supply chain of X is disrupted?" always leads to a problem where one of the most obvious solutions is "Stockpile huge inventories of X!"
That's what manufacturers had done ever since Ford tried to scale up his initial (very Toyota-esque) operation, and scaled it incorrectly but managed to inspire hordes of other manufacturers to repeat his mistakes.
The novelty of Toyota et al. was not that they asked the what if question, but that they answered it unconventionally: they worked on making the supply chains more reliable instead of adding buffers.
That's what makes this next move counter-intuitive to so many people: when Toyota encountered a supply chain that couldn't be made more reliable, they chose the previously-conventional response, apparently in defiance of their whole thing. Except it wasn't.
You're right in that it is simple, but in trying to show that you're making it too simple.
I think that is the easy way to answer that question. Obviously the first "What if .." should be try to source from somewhere else, or perhaps have multiple supply chains. For instance cloth is a commodity, and if they know they can get the quality they need from multiple vendors on all 7 continents - they don't need to do much except perhaps validate the supply chain of some selected to ensure they don't source from the same place. But if they are using a particular mineral that is only available from one location, something else must obviously be done.
Just stockpiling is not really an answer as much as it's trying to just do the least amount of problem solving and thinking.
Yes it's well know in manufacturing management that there is a trade off between utilisation, capacity and cycle time.
Naively it looks like it's cheapest to get close to 100% utilisation by removing all slack from the system.
If you do that though you can't deal with shocks to the system and it costs you much more in the medium term. In the long term your company dies.
This is very well illustrated by John Sterman's Beer game[1]. That's aimed at supply chains in general but works well in any system you can make brittle via cost over optimisation.
This happens a lot because initially over optimisation makes accountants and managers look good to share holders. By the time the chickens have come home to roost they've moved on to another job.
> Just in time is obviously about not having undue spare capacity,
Also about making spare capacity undue. The lazy solution to unreliable delivery is inventory. The efficient solution is working with the supplier to make delivery more reliable.
The West seems to target a "skeleton" staff for nearly everything these days. Management theory piles it as a best practice under "just in time delivery", but the reality is that there no longer is the distinction between fully staffed and skeleton.
I spent some time in Belgium a few years ago and was amazed to see that the two people on road projects who turn the "slow/stop" signs to control traffic on single-lanes were replaced with robots. So the EU has managed to figure out how to go under skeleton at least.
Meanwhile, when I was in Japan, there were indeed lots of seemingly "useless" people doing "useless" jobs on similar sized projects.
The minute we got off the plane in Tokyo we were met by a greeter pointing people to the escalator. Not that you could miss it, that was the only exit.
In the city you could see people guarding potholes. Bus stations (not particularly busy) would have a couple men at each station that would help arrange the passenger luggage: something usually helped by the driver in the West.
Once we took a night stroll in the city, meeting a roadwork on a deserted street. There were 3 men along the fenced dig basically showing us to walk around it.
Can't see any of that sustainable if you pay people full wages.
Does it make sense from an economics standpoint? Perhaps not. But there are benefits to society as a whole. Quite often the people doing those sorts of jobs are getting on in life, if having that job means the person can stay active that could represent a few additional years where they won't be a burden on the health system.
Honestly, giving people these unproductive jobs seems to me like a way of giving out UBI without people even realising it. Because at the end of the day, these jobs are just UBI. They don't add much to the economy.
You seem to be misunderstanding what UBI is. This sounds more like a job guarantee, which is the opposite of UBI. The main point of UBI is to make sure nobody can ever be pressured into accepting such a job.
Those jobs hardly add any value to society (let alone economy). If you just hand out money instead, some people might find something more useful to do, or at least be better off for themselves. See also David Graeber's essay "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs".
The overhead of employing properly compensated people instead of signage and traffic cones is fairly high, while the work they do is not necessary in any meaningful sense. Which is moot anyway as apparently these folks are paid a pittance.
The US provides EU-level social safety net benefits (healthcare, housing) to the lower classes—via employment in the military, which is in part a stealth jobs program that both major political parties support paying for.
We provide a jobs program for white-collar folks through our excessively-large and exceptionally expensive healthcare system. We pay for whole categories of jobs that don't need to exist and are only adding costs. A double-digit percentage of our healthcare costs are a white-collar jobs program paying people to do nothing useful whatsoever, and we spend a lot on healthcare so even 10% makes it a fairly big program.
Yeah, I'm aware. It's a really sick way to give working-poor families access to universal healthcare, housing, and free education, which other OECD states mostly manage to do without that. But, it's what we've got.
There are similar measures in many EU countries. For example hiring unemployed people to help kids pass particularly busy streets near primary schools.
That's called welfare, which has an advantage of not masking unemployment. (but to be fair am unsure if people doing traffic cone jobs in Japan are considered employed)
Anyhow my point is it has little to do with system redundancy.
Welfare / UBI ignores that one of the realities of the human condition is that we are social creatures that have a desire for purpose and utility to those around us, and having that purposes in a society that recognizes us helps give us dignity and a place in society.
It's not important that all jobs are high value, it is important that we as a society have a way to create and recognize purpose for individuals to support their mental and personal wellbeing. While welfare / UBI may ensure they have basic needs met to sustain life, it does nothing to support their mental and personal wellbeing, which is why these systems often results in the creation of delinquent behaviors that are mostly absent in a system like that in Japan.
It may be the the same economically, but socially it is much better to have someone doing an "unnecessary" job that is recognize as valued by society vs simply collecting a check.
There's definitely a cultural element. I made the point that these jobs must be recognized as valuable by society for a reason.
You say they're standing there in place of a traffic cone, Japanese society instead says that they're there to provide a friendly face ensuring safety of passersby around the dangers of construction work. A traffic cone cannot assist someone who has trouble walking to traverse rough ground because of the work being done. A traffic cone doesn't smile or acknowledge your presence.
That sociocultural element is what has value, and as long as it has value, the job is valuable.
It's what the market demands in the end of the day and why I don't understand Japan too much (yet). If a company hires 4 people just for road signaling, and another 0, I'd hire the second one since it's going to be cheaper.
That's why I believe these market forces push to at-capacity, because if someone has spare capacity or a lot of profit another company is going to come in at a lower margin and win the market. Yes this leads to breaking at some situations that happen once every 20 years, but otherwise you die from competition so that's what we are stuck with.
> I'd hire the second one since it's going to be cheaper.
You would. But the guy doing the hiring is just giving the job to his drinking buddy, sure that the favor will come back in some way or the other.
There’s also the social factor to consider. These extra people could be superfluous, but if they’re not there everyone walking past will condemn that construction site as being unsafe.
Definitely not (except for the most egregious cases), long-term construction sites in Japan are already fully covered by white panels that don't even let you see inside and short-term ones have at least two barriers and lots of signals. While them not being there does not mark "dangerous", I do think them being there could mark them as "extra-safe".
I would do some nitpicking here: The market _rewards_ low prices. But the market _punishes_ low quality and untimeliness.
Why do I phrase it this way? Because the only market mechanism is a sale, you either buy or you don't. Low price is visible before a sale, so a new sale is reward for the low price offered. Quality and timeliness are only apparent after a sale, so can only be punished retroactively by not buying again.
The punishment signal is also far weaker than the reward signal, lots of goods are not bought too often and problems get forgotten by customers, alternatives may have their own problems, etc. And prices can be compared objectively for standardized goods, and at least easily for other goods. Quality and timeliness are often in the eye of the beholder, subject to variation. Comparisons in those areas are also systematically prevented by most vendors.
> Why do I phrase it this way? Because the only market mechanism is a sale, you either buy or you don't.
That's not always true. When a rail network gets privatized, the argument is that the market will make sure it's a good service still. But they are usually paid by the government, not the patrons. The commuters vote becomes negligible, and the rail network has every incentive to optimize for a minimum viable network that meets their government set targets while the service gets worse and worse in all other metrics. Seats are shittier, service is less clean, graffiti stacks up, railstock gets rickety etc.
That railway example is just a plain market failure, and an uncorrectable one at that. Markets only work under certain conditions, very important among those: absence of monopoly, monopsony and limitations that work to the same effects. A privatized rail network is still the only rail network in the country or region, so still a monopoly. If you hack it to bits and split it up too much, it will be useless, connectivity is paramount in that business. If you leave it as a large network (or several large networks) it will be a national or regional monopoly. Having only the government pay is a monopsony. Limiting building new stations and tracks (which the government will have to do at some point, if real estate prices don't) will also prevent competition. So having a functioning rail market is impossible, therefore any argument about market mechanisms involving railways (or roads, water, gas and electricity distribution) is nonsense: Those can never be proper free markets.
I think you're right, I went through a E40m construction project once and the leaders kept saying how they have to chose the lowest bidder. But that was actually a convenient lie they did to avoid having to do due diligence on the bidders.
Mid and long term cost actually turned out a lot higher than if they had chosen the better slightly more expensive bids.
I've seen this turn out the other way on a road contract near my house. (rural Ireland)
Some Italian construction company underbid, and slightly later went bankrupt after finishing some of the work. They just about missed the contract milestones for payment too, and got nothing out of it.
Then, the contract went to someone else who bid, with expected costs adjusted. Think there was an 8-ish month delay.
The way I see the successful low bids happen is usually the following:
1. Submit a low bid for EXACTLY what's written in the RFP
2. Submit contract delay notifications with contract amendment offers, explaining that the original bid was incorrect and therefore if the amendment is not accepted the project can't continue.
3. rinse and repeat
No. 2 is basically legal speak to make sure you get paid(or win a lawsuit in the event that you don't) even though you can't continue construction.
It's basically saying, you made a mistake in your original RFP, therefore nobody could have continued the construction anyway and therefore you have to accept my amendment.
Good bidders will actually tell you that your RFP was wrong. As an example in the construction project I was in the main architect requested custom spliced decades outdated Fiber wiring, when I finally got a hold of the wiring company and asked them why didn't just do MTP, they mentioned that a) they mentioned to the architect that the request wiring makes no sense and b) they were not allowed to talk to us(the engineering department) directly. Same happened with the fire protection rules from anything like stair handles to the garage.
That's also why I don't think the Airport delays in Berlin were engineering mistakes but rather gross mismanagement.
Also, while in this whole project there is a lot of physical work that you can't optimize away, a lot of the physical work delays and do-overs were also due to gross mismanagement, which is something the toplevel comment completely ignores in his assessment of the 4 day workweek.
If you can provide a product with those features at lower cost the market would still reward you.
But yes any description of economics is necessarily a simplification. For example market segments where people intentionally pay more for the exclusivity that comes with being charged more.
Manufacturing and construction are pretty different segments. When manufacturing, it's very easy to optimize for cost because you know exactly how much material is required and how much time, probably to the second, it takes to process such material into the final form. Even shipping prices are pretty well known and can be optimized for through effective packaging.
Construction isn't like that. Companies aren't cranking out a million buildings a day, so they can't remove every ounce of unnecessary materials; they don't control the environment, making delays a fact of life; they don't control all of the companies and people involved; etc. There's just so much unknown when it comes to construction. Like software, it can be difficult to figure out how much padding to put into estimates. It's a good bit easier when it comes to things like roads, but companies still need to contend with unexpected delays a lot.
> It's amazing because they do finish a lot faster than in western countries, but you can definitely remove 20% of the people in street-level construction and would see little difference.
Maybe the 20% extra people is the reason they always finish a lot faster.
Or the reason everything in Japan is so clean and actually efficient and reliable. You won't see the casual litter and degraded infrastructure that is commonplace in US and Western Europe - everything is kept in tip-top shape, because why not? When you have the wealth and workforce to spare, in practical terms it's just better to allocate capacity for this sort of tasks in quantities that might look sub-optimal on a spreadsheet.
So there's normally 2x-3x people working in construction compared to western countries. I'm saying 20% of those workhours are not needed, but that'd still leave quite a lot more workers there compared to western countries and why they finish early. An example is that they normally work around the clock (24/7, but fairly quietly at night).
Japan on paper is the wealthiest (non-microstate) Asian country GDP per capita, but if you compare by PPP it's actually not great because of meh economic productivity/import tariffs, and slips behind South Korea and Taiwan.
Um, actually construction appears to lay people as "overstaffed" due to safety, breaks, inspections and synchronization of people, tools and materials.
Yes, I understand some people that seem to not be doing much are actually safety people, or taking a normal break, but in the case of Japan it's quite extreme and that's why I pointed it out.
Living in Japan also, the rumor I heard was that these additional workers actually work as a shadow force for political parties during elections.
To circumvent strict donation laws, the idea is that these people will be "lended" as administrative staff and door-knockers during elections, in exchange of juicy contracts.
And let's be real, that linked in [2] does not point to a job that requires automation, a blinking panel is enough. Often I have seen the sad spectacle of one mannequin handling a signal on the end and a human on the other end. It is totally a bullshit job.
Some notably low-staffed places in Japan are Yoshinoya and Sukiyaki (beef bowel fast food, often 24/7). It seems there usually just one person working there at a time.
Not sure about Yoshinoya, but I've heard that Sukiya is considered a "black" company. Means they run over people, understaff and, in general, it's not a place you want to work in unless you're desperate. That was few years ago, though, so not sure how is it, now.
I went once at about 3-4PM and also came away feeling like it was a bit understaffed. One worker and about 8 people in there eating. I didn't have to wait a crazy amount of time so maybe it's fine though, gyudon doesn't take a long time to prepare if some ingredients are prepped
By low-staffed, do you mean that you had to wait long time to get your order? These places are highly automated so they don't need as many staff, sure there's few people working there but usually more than enough for serving the orders that come through in just few minutes.
You forget that there's an etos of work in Japan. Besides of getting some small amount of money, those people get a chance for being useful. That is a mental effect as well and should not be overlooked. Not to mention it reduces unemployment.
If you look around there's plenty of such a "pointless" jobs. The same with people steering the traffic at the parking lot entrances/exits at any bigger entertainment or shopping center. Sometimes with almost no pedestrians around and yet those people are standing there in sun or rain alike. Or people who's only job is to smile and open doors for you, less common, but happens as well.
To be honest, though, as a "consumer" of such jobs (pedestrian in this case) I do feel they took an extra mile to make it as safe and comfortable for me as possible. And I do feel better about it.
It may look pointless at the surface, but I think those jobs are extremely important for society at large.
I don't know if Japanese construction projects are overstaffed or not, but if they are, do you think that would change? My guess is that they would continue the same staffing arrangement and get less construction work done.
They even have signs that look like people that day watch out for the sidewalk that stand next to the guy that says watch out for the sidewalk. But everyone who wants to work should have a job.
> The Japanese government isn't saying "Let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work!"
Maybe, but if you've worked in Japan, or even just living here, you know about the long, pointless meetings, desk warming and busy work. Thus, it's highly possible the government is saying "let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work". Things are that top-down here that often companies won't do anything unless the government has said something (and it's likely that it was the big companies that control the politicians that told them to say it).
There are plenty of examples of this kind of thing, one is when the government had to do the same to force companies to let/get employees to use their holiday entitlements. Western principles such as truth, innocence and self-reliance aren't foundational here - the moment you accept that you understand so much more about the culture, in much the same way you won't understand Buddhism if you use a mental model constructed out of your understanding of Christianity.
> Western principles such as truth, innocence and self-reliance aren't foundational here
... nor in the West, to be fair. Lies and cheats are commonplace in any Western workplace.
I think you are over-generalizing. Self-reliance is big in Japan too, even while egoism is not - it's drilled into people basically from birth, with things like students cleaning their own schools. Innocence is always politely expected until openly questioned, at which point it turns almost automatically into guilt; but it doesn't mean it's not "foundational" - in fact, it's much more entrenched, it's just that the act of questioning it carries so much more weight on all sides (an unfair accusation, if determined, would be extremely shameful) that nobody wants to go there until absolutely necessary.
They just play the game with a slightly different set of practical rules.
Perhaps I should've used the word ideals instead of principles, as you're right, plenty of liars and cheats around (we're all human). Aside from that I'm happy with what I wrote. You can't have innocence and truth as fundamental ideals of a shame culture.
Just a nitpick. We all are playing the same game. Any society is a set of abstract rules and beliefs. We may agree or disagree about the rules on the other side of the globe, but nonetheless we all are bound by some rules.
I'm 4th generation Japanese-American, and in no way whatsoever qualified to answer your question, but I'll gladly do it nonetheless: they prioritize the collective over the individual.
No, there are jobs where you do rote things on demand or at particular intervals with no fatigue at 40 hours per week.
Examples from my own employment experience:
- front desk clerk at a hotel
- fuel pump operator
Both of these are pretty dull work that doesn’t exhaust you at all at the 40 hour work week. Most of the time is spent idle and the time spent working doesn’t require much going on upstairs.
I have done a job that was 80% dull work. I can guarantee you I have never been more exhausted when I came home from work. Don't ask me how it works, but doing 'nothing' can be extremely tiring. And this was a desk job.
Most of these customer facing jobs will be abandoned or optimised away in the next few decades.
Front desk work could be done away with mostly by electronic systems (most of the time when I "check in" it's just picking up a ready made room card as I checked in online). You could even centralise the "talking to a human" part in a call center operating a number of hotels, who delegate to staff on the premises (house keeping, maintenance, room service, etc). Of course luxury hotels will still have humans.
Fuel pump operator hasn't been a job in most Western countries for decades, as you just pump fuel yourself (and often even pay at the pump). Is "EV charger operator" a job?
As far as I can see. These front desk jobs exist as theft/crime deterrent and to handle edge cases. Sure you could fully automate fuel stations but who is going to call the police when kids start spray painting the windows unless you have someone sitting at a desk watching cctv all day. And who is going to deal with customers who are trying to report something is wrong with a pump. These jobs have already been automated to the point that one person can handle a large store/hotel.
Where are you from? I thought fuel stations in most Western countries were fully automated already. In Sweden there are loads with no people at all but even the ones with a store you just pay at the pump. You only go inside if you need to buy something else.
Very strange example to use and kind of invalidates your whole point.
No need to get out of your car and deal with a dirty pump. You can also get out to go in the store while they fill your tank, or some smaller places you can buy stuff right from the attendant. Gas doesn't cost any extra because of it either. We used to have some of the cheapest gas in the country before a recent tax hike. Basically a free service, no tipping either.
One downside is that if it is busy you might have to wait, but the guys are usually pretty quick.
The deterrent effect is less because clerks are more effective than cameras at detecting crime, and more because people don't like committing crimes when there are other people nearby.
Obviously that's not an absolute statement, especially considering that armed robbery is a thing. But in general humans are better crime deterrents than security cameras or robots.
In a lot of cases, that's the sole reason for employing security guards, since the only thing they're actually allowed to do when they encounter crimes in progress is ring the police.
If we can afford to keep people alive surely we can arrange for them to do something useful too. Unless we intend to condemn large numbers of people to chronic poverty we have to pay more than starvation wages even to those who do nothing.
It seems to me that the question to be answered is: how can we afford to not have full employment?
It's quite simple: they can afford it by having full employment.
Full employment means lots of good things: a population that's richer per-capita and spends more, less expenses on welfare, less poverty, less crime, less billionaires, etc.
> Fuel pump operator hasn't been a job in most Western countries for decades, as you just pump fuel yourself
Nope. See Oregon and NJ, unless you don’t these American states to be part of these “Western countries”.
In general, don’t respond to examples of jobs that actually exist now with a hypothetical world where they don’t exist to state something about the current world.
> > Fuel pump operator hasn't been a job in most Western countries for decades, as you just pump fuel yourself
> Nope. See Oregon and NJ, unless you don’t these American states to be part of these “Western countries”.
Two states out of fifty. Maybe, in general, don’t respond to examples of jobs that hardly exist any more with a tiny and dwindling part of the world where they’re still just barely hanging on and pretend that has any relevance to the world economy.
(As for the US as a “Western country”... Well, sure, at least geographically.)
These jobs are disappearing as part of the constant search for productivity increases. A front desk clerk will now spend their “down” time doing admin work for example
Since we are on the topic of Japan and hotel front desk, this video shows an example day of a Japanese hotel staff who does a whole bunch of multi-tasking:
I agree that not all jobs are like that, but the comment I was replying to was talking about retail workers, factory workers and people who fill in the holes in roads, which do suffer from fatigue.
Sometime I don't get enough sleep when I start at 8am. It makes the result of work so much worse when you aren't rested. Sure, I could make sure to go to bed earlier, but life happens and honestly I don't live for work.
Tine's Heimdal factory in Norway did do 30 hour work week for a while - with good results in efficiency (and employee happiness). It was unfortunately scrapped due to cost concerns (workers kept same pay as for 37.5h work week).
Its not clear if the change back to "normal" week was entirely rational - there were other suggestions to make the cited target of 80M NOK/year savings.
It is more like: our people are overworking themselves to death and taking holidays is not socially acceptable. Let's force everyone to work less, and hopefully they will have time to make more babies.
> In tech it’s very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don’t do productive work all the time they’re present.
While someone working a reduced schedule in an office where other people are working a full schedule may be able to set a schedule that misses some of the things they consider nonproductive (and may actually be more productive/hour for doing so), I don’t think that actually is likely to scale to the whole office switching schedules. If the people in authority that think that the meetings you feel are nonproductive are essential are still in the same positions of authority, they’ll still have the same meetings at least the same share of working hours, though there is a substantial risk that some of them will instead take the same number of hours per calendar week, regardless of the reduction in working hours.
There was another thread on 4 day workweeks, and I’ll reiterate what I wrote there: people had the same concerns when society shifted to a 40 hour workweek and productive actually went up. Fewer injuries and illness, etc.
Completely true. Working has become a race to the bottom. For substanance, we should today be able to work three days for that matter. Volunteers for more are fine too. Problem is, that all economies must find common ground, or you will indeed get behind.
This is also a curious method for opening more employment and reducing potential income inequality. If a factory needs to produce X things, and each worker produces Y things per hour you will always need X/Y working hours. If workers reduce working hours by 20% then you'll need to hire 20% more workers or improve Y (productivity) by 20%.
If the majority of the economy follows a linear production curve in hours worked, then this opens many jobs. Not a bad deal for a mature economy like JP, but will be interesting to see what un-forseen dynamics emerge.
That's really going to depend on the business. Plenty of businesses-- specifically ones with a lot of customer-facing staff-- would not be able to sustain labor cost increases up to 20%.
To take an easy example where I already know the #'s in the US, labor costs at a fast-food restaurant are around 25% of costs. Net profit margins range from 5% up to around 20%, but that top end is for McDonalds, the rest are on that lower end.
Increasing labor costs by 20% means a 5% increase in absolute operating costs. Sure, McDonalds may still run at 15%, but other places that increase for many others would erase profitability.
Even with a McDonalds, those franchises don't go for less than $1million each, often a lot more, and 20% profit on them seems to be about $150,000/year. So an owner is already looking at 7+ years to recoup their investment, and that's before accounting for any additional capex costs McDonalds may require when they roll out mandatory renovations.
Certainly there are many more businesses than fast food, so the above equation won't hold for every thing. But any low margin business with moderate customer-facing labor costs won't be able to manage this without raising prices, and then we're just shifting the money around to different piles. In fact as a result of those increased prices, the lower paid workers, while they may be able to work less hours and may work for a business that didn't cut their pay, they're still paying the price for that decision in their overall increase in cost of living.
Low margins are indication of saturated supply. If _everyone_ raise their prices, consumers would likely eat that, in my opinion, because people who really count food money usually don't go to restaurants anyway.
Fast food was what I knew off the top of my head, but this applies to all businesses with low margins and moderate customer-facing labor costs. They can't all just raise their prices to pay higher labor costs, because then the people getting paid more just have to pay more for everything as well, at least partially if not fully cancelling out the benefits.
Then there's the fact that raising prices will still lose fast food places customers: For every person not buying it because it doesn't fit their budget, there's someone who just barely fits it into their budget that will stop buying it when prices rise.
This isn't theoretical: Companies analyze the price elasticity of their customers and understand roughly how raising prices X% will lose them Y% customers, and the amount of revenue Y customers represent, and whether that is higher or lower than the revenue generated by X. I don't work in the food industry or retail, but I have run that analysis myself in my own field.
I'm all for a living wage, but simply paying low paid workers more & raising prices to cover it is by no means a complete solution. Raising minimum wages is a bandaid solution. (And I'm not saying we shouldn't do that-- only that it's short term, and we need more comprehensive answers)
I'm honestly not sure what you mean by this comment. I used a real world example of businesses with high customer-facing labor costs relative to their net profit margins.
If you're getting into the everyone-deserves-a-living-wage side of things, that's a different conversation, one I tend to agree with, but is much more complex than the current discussion about whether current business could manage this if they operate with low margins and moderate customer-facing labor costs.
Then roughly 4,500,000 fast food workers lose their jobs and have no income. As relatively low-skilled workers flooding the labor market, their job prospects are not very good. Many go from poorly paid and over worked to penniless and homeless.
I think these are useful conversations to have, but this is not a problem that submits to easy one-size-fits-all solutions. I'm all for a living wage, but simply raising minimum wages without doing anything else is a short term solution that will bring things back to roughly where they are now over a period of time as prices for people with newly increased hourly pay rise to the point where it is, once again, no longer a living wage. Sure, go ahead and do that anyway, but only if you have other plans in the works to stop that cycle.
As a side not, emotional appeals to slavery do not help promote a reasonable conversation either. Having to work two jobs to make ends meet is a far cry from slavery. We don't need to look far in the world to find people living in conditions that are actually identical to or not far different from actual slavery. A person in the US working a low paying job 60 hours a week that can barely pay there rent or afford unexpected expenses is nowhere close to those conditions, especially when "barely getting by" in the US still mostly includes the bare bones amenities of living in a modern western country that are significantly better than conditions in many developing nations. Comparisons of this sort simply inflame tensions instead of conversation.
It doesn't matter as long as all competitors have to do the same. The price of a burger could go up and it wouldn't matter as long as every other burger goes up the same amount.
Don't focus on burgers. That is a specific example. This dynamic would play out with countless other items, raising the cost of living and partially if not fully cancelling out the increased wages of the people we're trying to help.
If we're just talking about restaurants in France, at least part of the higher employment costs are cancelled out-- relative to the US-- by not having to tip 20%, so the menu prices can be higher without actually passing all of that increase on to the customer.[1]
As for demand, it is always elastic. A lot of people eat fast food, and a lot of those people are going to be in a position where they're just barely fitting it into they're budget. Raise prices, and they're gone. That's not even getting to the actual elastic part where people actually have the money to decide either way if they're willing to pay at one price but not another-- that bottom group is simply gone.
Also you shouldn't focus just on the one example I chose. I happened to choose a discretionary spending activity because I knew fast food #'s off the top of my head, but the same thing applies to every single business with low margins and moderate labor costs. Even if you were right and every single one of them could raise prices without losing customers, that would also mean that the exact people we're trying to pay a living wage then have significant increases in their cost of living as everything around them raises prices.
[1] France may also not be the best example to compare to the US. Despite staggeringly astronomical wealth inequality in the US, it still has a lower poverty rate than France. Canada would probably be a better example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentag...
Careful, that table does not use a unified definition of poverty… so someone making 80USD a day with no health insurance is not considered “poor” in the US
And the French definition of poverty is equally useless, it’s just a percentage of the median income
> Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren't contending with pointless meetings and busy work though. They can't do 40 hours of work in 32 hours by removing some of the hours they're not really working. What they do doesn't compress like that.
It depends.
In China, the tech companies are testing AI telephone support. My banks uses it, JD.com uses it, China UNICOM use it. If you dial to those companies, an AI will take the call and guide you through the process, no human interaction needed. Not only that, some AI will even call you to schedule appointments etc.
Another example is the supermarkets. Almost all supermarket in our city has deployed self-checkout stations, and some of them even laid off almost all but 1 or 2 of their checkout workers.
I assume this trend will eventually expand to other labor types, so the workload of those workers will be lighten as result. (But of course, we can keep the load the same, but laid off unnecessary people instead, which is more likely if the government don't intervene)
That doesn't change the principle though; the actual workers need to do 40 hours or even more; it just means there are less of them.
And really, people need to be wary with automation. What people don't realize is that relying on it utterly paralyzes you when it goes down, because its a higher order fault than most staff need to handle.
If the AI telephone support breaks during an update, you've just sidelined your entire operation. If you only have a few checkout employees, and your POS service needs to connect to the internet, and it goes down, you have virtually no one to reply to it.
By reducing headcount you really run the risk of what were tolerant faults becoming critical. My own job has been running on a skeleton crew, and thank god one of us hasn't become sick or left yet. Eventually relying on automation and minimum staffing may bite you hard. A lot of retail stores would be up the creek if the store manager up and quit or was sick for multiple weeks.
If we choose the "Good route", then companies can hire the same amount of people and those people can provide good service to the others while the majority of the service is handled by automated systems.
For example, a road worker can now focus on fixing the part of the road which is more likely to be damaged, while the rest of the road is serviced by machines automatically. 4 hours later, the worker finished fixing the critical/difficult part of the road, then he/she go home to enjoy their life, the machine takes the rest of the routine to finish it off.
But of course, more likely, we will go down the "Bad route". Workers will be fired, just like those in the supermarkets. And if machine fails, people will be re-routed to a "backup" -- a human or another machine, to be queued up for a even slower handling process. Few hours later, the machine is fixed, and the event is marked as one-time incident -- stability still above 99%, everything stay the same, except more workers will be fired due to redundant stability.
I don't think it's true though. A lot of jobs you simply can't reduce the hours no matter how advanced you are without corresponding loss in service. There's also serious staffing issues in many blue collar jobs which simply won't be able to be filled by enforcing them to work less hours; there isn't a huge supply of people wanting to do menial labor to pop up to work part time and pick up the slack.
Retail and factory work already has low wages and high turnover, forcing them to try and make up a 20% loss in staffing hours is probably not going to happen over just cutting operating hours and shifting to models designed to work with less staff; retail stores for example may just be open 20% less or be constantly understaffed and understocked.
Or eventually a lot of them just close and the bigger ones absorb the surplus workers to keep full hours.
Grinding everyone done in a 40 hour work week is a bigger problem though. And it's not like you work highly efficiently in a 40 hour work week. Or if management did enforce that all 40 hours are busy time, the people burn out.
I've worked a factory job and have seen it there, I work in white collar now and it's the same.
If you say 40 hours you'll only get around 30 because workers have to bounce between working and getting down a little or else they burn out.
> In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren't contending with pointless meetings and busy work though. They can't do 40 hours of work in 32 hours by removing some of the hours they're not really working. What they do doesn't compress like that.
Indeed, but going to 4 day weeks will require employers to hire more people then to fulfill the same work.
It's absurd that even with all the gains in productivity we're still stuck since decades at the 5x8=40 week. Time to redistribute the producitvity profits towards the workers.
That's the title says, but we see similar initiatives in EU as well, and it would basically mean that the employee can choose that he wants to work only 4 days. Of course, even now anyone can also have 4 days workweek, if employer agrees to it. But in this case it is something mandatory.
Another way of looking at it is efficiency hasn't changed and need stays constant, you need 20% more people to do the same work. This is an interesting way of affecting mass employment.
It's an open secret at least in the tech world that absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week. This was true well before the pandemic and is more pronounced than ever now. Everyone needs to be "present" for 8 hours a day 5 days a week, but spends their time in pointless meetings, preparing documents and powerpoints that no one will read, faux social/teambuilding events, hour long lunches, goofing off on the internet, all to maintain the pretense of office culture.
Companies that shuffle things up to prioritize productivity over simply showing up will be set to succeed over the next generation.
We did this at my new company. One 30 minute scheduled standup. That’s the only meeting we have all week. Of course people are free to jump on a video call to work through stuff, but scheduled meetings are generally discouraged, and to date we only have the one.
Since everyone is contract, we’re seeing an average of about 26 hours per week. It’s by far the most productive team I’ve ever been on or have built. We ship new features weekly. It’s truly an incredible pace, but doesn’t feel hectic like you might think.
I think the contract only + no meetings + no HR (no culture bullshit, no “get to know people” social events, no bullshit) company setup is going to be the future. If you give people the opportunity to work on things they like working on, and don’t make work about anything other than work, you get amazing results.
It’s certainly not perfect, but I genuinely think it’s much better than being an FTE anywhere else. Of course I’m biased.
I mentioned benefits in another post, so I wouldn’t say it’s gig economy.
What other environment could give a developer $100+/hr, ability to make their own schedule, and essentially all legal protections to work on side projects, work for other companies, etc. at the same time?
Is it for everyone? No. But we’ve had more quality devs interested than we can employ at this point, so I’d say it’s attractive to a good portion of the market.
You've forgotten the core tenet of every engineering discipline is the master-apprentice relationship. The reason why what you describe is really the gig economy is because you've turned contractors into autodidacts to cut costs. You're not only expecting engineers to work for you, you're expecting them to learn their craft without capitalizing that yourself. Someone has to pay for that too; it probably won't be your other contractors -- otherwise you'd be something like a real company again.
Your success in this direction to turn software development into some kind of cattle feedlot is only a mirage. Let me make it clear in economic terms: you're up a few chips at the casino, for now, because the market allows you to be. In the long run it's not sustainable, and won't yield any major feats of engineering with any level of competence.
At what point did I say or lead anyone to believe that we 1.) expect developers to be autodidacts? Because we don’t have meetings? Seems an odd way to measure engineering culture and 2.) this had anything to do with cutting cost? Our hourly wages are high enough to where the cost savings is negligible compared to fully loaded salaries. I’d be happy to share the numbers over email.
Your idea of the master-apprentice relationship seems overtly romantic. I never said we don’t train staff, or haven’t brought on younger engineers. I literally onboarded an intern last week. They’ll likely make more working less than any intern at any FAANG is making this summer.
> Your success in this direction to turn software development into some kind of cattle feedlot is only a mirage.
I have to straight up disagree on the premise that it’s a mirage. Nevertheless, this is certainly an experiment, and one where we’ll adapt as needed.
I feel as if you’re focusing too much on the contractor concept. Would you be as opposed to this model if say I hired FTEs at 20 hours per week? So essentially half salary. How is this any different (note my previous comments about benefits).
College is not job training. I'm not sure why this misconception is so widespread. I have a degree but my employers do pay for relevant training for my job. It's not like the industry stopped evolving 10 years ago.
It's what we want. I wouldn't work any other way ever again. I don't think FTE jobs are going anywhere (companies always push to have us as FTE, not the other way around), let us be.
If you would treat devs like warehouse workers right now,all devs would run away. I mean force them to be 100% effective all the 8 hours and track every move they make. On the other hand allow warehouse workers flexible schedule and decent pay so they could live decent life by puting in 20 hours a week (even while measuring every move they make) and i bet there would be devs who would convert to warehouse workers.
If you would treat devs like warehouse workers right now,all devs would run away. I mean force them to be 100% effective all the 8 hours and track every move they make.
CleverControl employee monitoring pitch: "This software offers powerful features: keylogging, screen recording, live viewing, remote settings, clipboard control, Skype monitoring, and more. The software records time that was spent on this or that activity and shows you stats in graphs. Besides, the app captures screenshots at all important events like right-clicking and window change, and it can record activity near the device with the help of a webcam and microphone. Moreover, CleverControl records employees’ active and inactive time, letting you detect lazybones and reward hard work."
This would trigger Italian strike in me (as a dev) immediately :)
"Another unconventional tactic is work-to-rule (also known as an Italian strike, in Italian: Sciopero bianco), in which workers perform their tasks exactly as they are required to but no better."
I heard about these tracking software and I sincerely hope they won't get any more prevalent. As I see they are somewhat present in the contracting world.
I treat it as a total, humiliating devaluation of creative engineering work (and thus their identity!) to that of unskilled factory workers.
Eventually, maybe developers will realize that they have a lot more in common with those "unskilled" workers they disdain than they do with their capitalist owners.
can they already do this with all the data they have in github? Not that I would endorse it, but that sounds like better data for tracking. Instead of enforcing time you enforce activities.
No this is massively more invasive than checking your commit history. Github doesn't know moment to moment what you're doing while these invasive tracking programs do.
Commit history only tells them when you do commits... these tools tell you what people are doing between commits. There's no way a single tool's history gives more information than logging every keystroke and monitoring the screen... At best it's a less noisy stream but doesn't contain nearly as much information.
You missed the OPs point in all your heavily laden snark.
There are (sad, imo) people whose entire lives revolve around work. Their friends are there, and they enjoy social outings with their work colleagues.
To me, social outings are just an unnecessary risk. I do not talk to my coworkers like I talk to my friends, I do not want my coworkers knowing too much about my personal life, and especially when booze is involved it's too easy to find yourself on the receiving end of something awkward, or witness to something awkward.
Meetings are simple: if it's important enough to take an hour of my day it's important enough to count as seat time. When my productivity drops and my manager asks why I tell them that meetings are taking up too much time. It's their job to make sure I have what I need to do my best work. If they tell me to work later I start looking for other jobs. It's so easy to get a senior developer job now, and there's really no long term benefit staying anywhere, that I'm not exactly sorry for leaving in this case.
I have literally zero interest in "culture". I wouldn't even work for a company if I didnt need the money to live. I don't understand how you've derived the dichotomy that you can either have mindless time sink "culture" bullshit OR an amazon warehouse slaveshop.
Call me a pessimist. I think people obsessed with "work culture" are sad. You shouldn't hate the 8 hours of work you do, but you also shouldn't center your entire life on it. Afterall, it could be taken away from you with a penstroke the next time the CEO needs to make room in the budget for their salary.
> If you give people the opportunity to work on things they like working on, and don’t make work about anything other than work, you get amazing results.
That line started off well, but ended off terrible. I really don't want to be working in a place where I'm treated like a replaceable machine. You do you, man.
> I really don't want to be working in a place where I'm treated like a replaceable machine.
This seems like a leap. Where did I insinuate that anyone is a cog in a machine? Just because I said work should be about work? Why does it have to be about anything else? If you need your job to provide a social aspect to your life that’s completely fine. It’s just not a part of the business I’m building. It’s why I think having options is great. Everyone works differently.
You're getting a lot of negative feedback so I just want to say I can relate a lot to the model you're proposing (and practicing).
I interview fairly often with potential employers, sometimes just for the experience and insights. Never once did I consider taking a job for other reasons than the type of work and its pay (commuting time and factors not directly in control of the company aside).
I'm not even the type of person who hates team events and the like, at least at the companies I have been working at these usually were a lot of fun. It's just nothing that keeps me from moving on from or motivates me to take some job.
> I think the contract only + no meetings + no HR (no culture bullshit, no “get to know people” social events, no bullshit) company setup is going to be the future.
But in the US you see the opposite happening at a lot of large companies. I think what you described would be the future of a company with a homogeneous type of worker. However, we are humans we are not machines ignoring that we are humans can be detrimental. Not to mention worker equality is becoming important to be a stable work environment. It’s important to forget you have other roles and industries that simply cannot function the way you described (doctors, nurses, flight attendants, pilots, plumbers, etc.)
Also, I want I’m not saying the current technology corporate environment doesn’t need optimizing. It certainly does but it seems that we are moving towards that and trying to focus on what matter in HR as well.
How much were you willing to sacrifice in salary in exchange for additional vacation? Was it a net-positive deal for your counter party (employer)? I ask because I hear this kind of thing all the time who want to make the same money, for less time at work.
Most people need spare time to be happy, productive, not burn out. And as a company or society, you don't want to encourage people to work too hard for money because most people are stupid and will actually work too hard for money, and not be happy, become less productive, and burnout.
That's how it works in Europe. It's common that a boss will ask an employee to work less, because the amount of time they work is not even legal sometimes, or to force people to go on vacation for weeks to use their vacation days. It's also more fair and don't put pressure for other employees that value their life outside work.
Of course I would be willing to reduce my yearly salary for 2 or 3 weeks of extra time. Should not be that hard.
It’s worth more than the proportional time I would take off. It’s very valuable to me. Like 5k / week would be a good price tag. I have no debt and more stuff than I need. Now let’s me enjoy life while I still can ( and keep working on that job that I actually enjoy )
I’m not sure to understand about the net positive. The response I got was that taking time off without pay would 1) set a bad « example » or something of that sort and 2) make it hard to plan for resource availability.
The crux here is, of course, that one week of your time is a lot more valuable than 5k to your employer if they pay you 3.7k per week, and probably a lot more than you would be willing to part with or find reasonable (think 20k+ a week)
It's a pretty infuriating setup. From the employers perspective, the amount of money you lose by having someone not work is so obscene, so quickly, that you have to fight your monkey brain pretty hard to not be a total asshole about it.
Even in this well paying industry, you could give everyone obscene raises, before time off makes any financial sense for the average employer. I don't think enough employees realise this.
Even if their time was 5 times as valuable to the company as their pay, it seems very unfair to pay someone 3.7k per week, but require 20k from them if they want to take a week off? That basically means that if you took 3 months sabbatical, and worked the rest of the year, you would actually pay your employer 100k for working those 9 months...
Customers and clients of all sorts obtain consumer surpluses; if they were indifferent, they would not make purchases... Employers are just a different sort of customer.
Honest question: why does it “cost” the employer so much to have you on leave?
I heard this argument in North America but not here in Australia. I mean, small businesses might require critical people at critical times, but generally in larger orgs this shouldn’t be too hard.
Say your employer makes 20k a week of the produce of your work. This means you having a single, unpaid week off will directly cost your employer 20k. Even if you would willingly take a (from your perspective) pretty hefty pay cut of 4k for that week off, the employer would still be down 16k compared to before.
This is the weird and intuitively wrong stuff that happens, when employers make more through their employees work than their employees do, even after factoring in their salary.
Is your employer going to write down a loss of $20k on the books when you take a week off work? Probably not, because opportunity cost isn't actually an expense.
I would love to understand that better to negotiate my next job better on that specific issue.
There is something that make me think something is fishy in that approach : why are more and more places switch to unlimited PTO if it’s that costly to give folks time off?
I had unlimited PTO a couple of times, it can sucks ( pressure NOT to take any PTO for the company sake )
Or he just fine.
> There is something that make me think something is fishy in that approach : why are more and more places switch to unlimited PTO if it’s that costly to give folks time off
"Why do people get more time off now than ever before in human history (which they do)?"
There are now more forces than ever, that work against unlimited exploitation of human labor. For example, human beings in most countries have enforceable rights and they want time off, and the market that has to compete for those people. Humans are shitty machines. If you piss them off, they do shitty work. If you treat them poorly they leave. (In reality, "treating them poorly" translates to "treating them slightly less good then someone else") Since having someone quit working for you is pretty fucking expensive (assuming, of course, that they are actually being productive), you better make sure they do want to continue working for you and so you make it worth their while.
Another important example would be worker protection laws, that simply dictate certain amenities.
"Why is everyone doing unlimited PTO, specifically?"
Less clear on that one. Part of it is certainly it being a trend. If other people do it and employees want it, then you might have to go along, again, to not get pushed out of the market.
But since it clearly does not ever actually mean "unlimited PTO" (you'd be out of a job pretty quickly if you tried), an interesting followup question might be what the fuck it actually means and who benefits? Maybe employees are a little confused about how much time off to take and take less than before? Or maybe they feel pressured to underbid each other? Maybe it's also just that the flexibility it adds to the job leads to more loyal employers, which is pretty nifty in a market starved for workers.
By ‘net positive’ I mean willing to take a cut larger than is directly proportional to the reduction in hours worked. The reality is that reducing each person’s annual work will increase costs for the company overall, as it needs to pay additional overhead and benefits, which are related to employee count, rather than hours worked.
I think that everyone is a bit wary of setting difficult precedents in employment situations, as well as the possibility of creating rifts between people with different ‘deals’. That said, I think we should all place a higher priority on coming up with mutually beneficial arrangements.
Except that it increases employees morale and motivation and thus productivity, and reduces chances of burnout. There are benefits for the company too.
This blows my mind. Throwing your prime (or prime-st remaining years) at an office. Can you put your foot down and take unpaid leave whether they like it or not? Come up with an excuse if you have to. They will always try to push you to follow their line but will you regret that later in life?
Don't forget to live your life now as well. All fine and dandy to save for 'later', but if you keep going until you burn out you won't be enjoying your later that much. That or if you get run over by a bus tomorrow it was all for nothing.
I could be wrong, but it seems that there's no great shortage of companies offering 4+ weeks of PTO per year in the US. Or are you expecting more vacation than that? (Or are perhaps otherwise constrained as to the choice of employers?)
I've got 4 weeks paid vacation. It really doesn't feel like much. That's only 1/13th of your weeks being work-free per year. I personally would like more. I think something like a 20-25 hour workweek plus 8-12 weeks of vacation would be good enough that I would stay in the workforce long term. As it stands today, it seems more feasible to continue working full time, hit FI in a few years and retire early rather than find such a good work-life balance.
We offer equity comp, health stipend, and equipment stipend for anyone contracted on a 20 hour per week minimum.
Sick/vacation days are harder because we pay for whatever I get an invoice for. Since we don’t track what people do on a day by day basis (I often don’t even know if someone is working that day until I reach out to them or slack, or vice versa), there’s nothing stopping them for billing me for extra hours. And to be honest I really wouldn’t care. I just care about output and quality of that output.
Where I'm currently working, we use Discord. Discord is similar to Slack.
It is explicitly for asynchronous communication. We are supposed to not expect immediate replies to questions and comments on Discord, especially as other teammates are in different timezones. Sometimes there's real time chat, but it depends who is on at the time.
I posted some comments yesterday. There was one reply within a few hours, and two more this morning.
Email is pretty much deprecated. Nobody uses it, except to set up calendar entries for meetings, and formal things like HR and invoices.
Well the point isn’t to not care. We want devs that care about the quality of their code and genuinely want to focus on _just_ that. I get some people want more out of a job, and that’s totally fine. But I think there’s a good portion of people that just want to do work and spend the rest of their time with their family, or hobbies or whatever.
At this point is mostly a filtering mechanism for me. The types of people that want contract are typically more used to (and want) an environment without the HR bullshit.
Some, not all, but certainly some people use work as their only form of social life and interaction. Which leads to a lot of time not working. I’m not saying this is inherently bad. It’s just not the type of company we’re building. Filtering for contract work has taken care of this so far. Will continue to evaluate as we scale up.
I work at a company where it is encouraged to use the fitness facilities during work hours. 15 minutes walking to one of the gyms, 5 minutes changing, an hour working out, 10 minutes in the sauna, 10 minute shower, 5 minutes getting dressed, 15 minutes walking back. That is 2 hours of my work day right there ;-)
For intellectual work like we what we do, the brain doesn't just stop "working". I tend to be able to come up with good solution while driving/working out/taking a walk/drinking tea...
Only at low levels that I see time-at-keyboard important. Now it's all ambiguous/large scale problems that spending time at the keyboard is a very small portion of my time. It's more productive to keep the problems in mind, then let my mind wandering and arrive at the solutions later. After you design/test/run the solutions in your mind, it only takes a small amount of time to write it out (design doc or code).
They are smart, the employees are likely to be more productive if they are healthy. Many companies squeeze up employees like tubes of toothpaste then discard them and hire a younger gen. It is sometimes not intentional, just create a stresful environment and dont allow enough time to employees to catch their breath so to speak
I felt pretty wrecked when I, mostly because of lack of affordable housing, moved to a team in a location near my home town, and found out every single employee aged <35 had ended up on sick leave. Didn't have any choise but I wish I could have just gotten out of there as fast as I ended up in it.
That sounds marvelous! I'm looking at a job at the moment that is mostly WFH and working out during the day is something I'm looking forward to most of all.
This has changed me - I WFH, but every 2 days I take a 2 hour walk, I walk about 7.5KM to the beach and back and while I’m tired at the end of the walk, it’s hugely invigorating and I often end up coding until well after midnight on my own projects with all the extra energy I have.
Have lost quite a lot of weight too … and it’s only been a couple of months. Go for it! Can’t recommend it enough.
I think it makes sense to have people available for regular hours, just so that if I ask someone a question I can expect a response today-ish. But, I agree that a lot of meetings should be emails, teambuilding events are usually poorly done, and procrastination is hard to avoid when you've got access to the internet.
Minor nitpick: Is an hour long lunch really that bad?
I think the point is not that there’s something wrong with hour long lunches, but that people have to find ways to fill up their day if they’re expected to be “at work” for 8 hours a day and can only be productive for a fraction of that.
As a “productive” software engineer, in the sense that I have gotten positive feedback in my career and never had a problem “getting enough done” to satisfy my superiors, it took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I cannot productively apply myself to work for 40 hours a week. When I have to be in the office for that long, I end up slacking off for hours and hours (like reading HN). I thought for a long time that maybe I was just flying under the radar and I would eventually “get caught” but at this point I’ve made peace with the fact that my productivity comes in bursts and as long as my employer is happy with my output I don’t sweat it too much.
I’m the same way. I’m very efficient - when I get in an actual full day of coding it’s amazingly productive, but my usual output is still enough to satisfy my manager.
Over here lunch time is not part of worktime. Per law we need to have at least half an hour for lunch, but we can take however long (if the company allows). Dunno how it is in other countries. (I am from austria, europe)
Yeah, and hour long lunch is pretty long. Most people I know take less time than that to eat at a restaurant, let alone just grabbing your sandwich from the fridge.
35h workweek is absolutely great, but I personally wouldn't fancy a two-hour lunch break. Would _much_ rather take a shorter lunch and get out of the office earlier.
(Just highlighting that different people have different preferences. :))
I can't speak for other developed countries but here in the UK it is very much company- and industry-dependent. At my first 4-5 jobs (mostly in the finance sector), everyone ate at their desks. At my current employer (FAANG), no one does.
> absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week
You are being a little broad with this statement. One can easily put in 60+ hours for weeks on end and be incredibly productive while doing it. Its all circumstantial. If you have no family, are the sole founder in the company, and really enjoy what you are doing, why the fuck would you stop at a 40 hour work week?
Not all of us loathe the thing we do for the majority of our waking hours.
Yes, if you're starting your own business then it could help you to work as much as you can.
However, most people do not run their own business. Most people are low-level code monkeys in large firms where individual efforts aren't business critical. When your project gets cancelled for the 3rd time and you still get a raise, it finally clicks that your work doesn't really matter. This takes a psychological toll. As a result, most people I know in FAANG who are 28+ years old will sheepishly admit that they do very little actual work (30 hours max per week). That's the whole point of hiring people straight out of college: you get ~5 years out of them before they realize what the game is. The ones who are happy with the "truth" become managers, and the ones who aren't opt to keep their head down and coast, or just quit from "burnout".
> It's the sort of thing you only do drunk on kool-aid
Did not realise believing in a mission is akin to joining a suicide cult.
Work doesn’t have to suck. It doesn’t have to be everyone’s calling. But it is for some of us, and sixty+ hours a week can be time well spent. My time at start-ups has been time around colleagues I love, work I enjoy and a mission I believe in. (I was also decently compensated while there and exorbitantly so on the upside.)
There are countless public servants, non-profit employees, artists and public-company workers putting in those hours and more finding reward in their work. No need to deem everyone who doesn’t fit your lifestyle an idiot.
There's a balance between passionate hustle and diving into burnout. Some people can do more than others. etc etc. It's more sustainable for mental health to not make every waking minute about work, and take breaks and vacations. If you don't have a life, there's no point to working.
It doesn't have to, but the most likely outcome in a startup is it goes bankrupt, what you did disappears into the dark hole of failed ideas, and no one sees it.
It's a suckers game: the default behavior needs to be "when the founders get greedy and kick me out...what will I do then? How will I feel about that time?"
> what you did disappears into the dark hole of failed ideas
If the work is for financing a life outside it, yes. But if the work is rewarding in itself, then said failure is—while highly disappointing—balanced by the relationships, stories and skills gained therefrom.
This is absolutely a risk tolerance and personality matrix thing. I just want to push back against this recently-popular philosophy which idealises the Western European work ethic and lifestyle. It is one among many local optima.
I would say the opposite - the only job I can imagine (outside of the first two years of investment banking) working 60+ hours/week would be a startup - where each and every hour in those first 2-3 years can make the difference between building a Billion dollar company or just getting left behind.
I mean, a lot depends on your level of seniority, what type of equity you negotiate, how likely it will be diluted, whether you are likely to have a $100mm/$500mm/$1B exit. A lot depends on the integrity of the CEO in the event of an acquhire (probably the most common exit) and how well the Principle engineers will be compensated (Retention Bonuses usually).
I will agree with you - it's probably batshit insane for a working stiff without a good chance of a $2mm+ payout to be working 60+ hours/week for years on end.
Define screwed over? Because in my view getting screwed over is joining the industry on promise of working on deep tech and ending up a tiny cog in a machine.
And do a lot more work for way less money? Your work will have more impact, that's for sure. But at some point you'll have a higher-level realization that you're still working in a capitalist hellhole and you're not being fairly compensated for the risk compared to the VCs or the founders. If I was going to work in a startup or FAANG from 22-30, I'd pick FAANG for the guaranteed million dollars in the bank.
The only exception I'd personally make is to found a startup with people I enjoy on a problem that I'm personally motivated by. This is basically a band for capitalistic nerds. Even then, you still have to allow VCs to suck out your soul.
I read it more as "no one is having 40 hours per week of productive work continuously".
Even in your example, being productive for 60+ hours is possible, but for how long? There might be extreme (extreme!) outliers, but I think it's fair to say that at some point you will increase your productivity by putting in less hours.
In the marketing agency world 50-60 hour weeks are the norm and 70 hour weeks occur once a month or so. It isn’t really sustainable. Most people burn out and leave the agency world within three years. Those that stay often make work their life or have a way where they can set their own schedules, which is usually because they have reached marketing executive level and the work becomes different.
It is a very unhealthy industry. I am not sure if it can be sustained in it’s current form, but I don’t ever see the hours being reduced either. 4 day work weeks would just mean 12+ hour days and you would have to hope your clients aren’t open on Fridays or whatever day you decided to make your company day off. Staggering days wouldn’t work that well as most agencies have little to no redundancy by design.
How much of that is working time, and how much of it is sitting in a room not being productive? Every productivity study I've read finds that per-week productivity drops off tremendously with that level of overwork.
Productivity per hour drops, but it doesn't matter to the agency because all of their employees are salaried. It is not people sitting in a room not being productive per se, but it is a bunch of burned out employees not being as efficient as they could be.
Again, this leads to burnout and employees that are sufficiently burned out either quit or are fired for no longer being able to meet the productivity requirement and/or making mistakes. The agency does not care because the supply of recent college graduates in marketing and communications is never ending (it is one of the most popular majors at almost any college/university).
Interestingly, slower work to a point is better for the agency since they bill the client per hour. That reverses when the quality of work suffers or the employee is no longer able to get everything done that was promised to the client. The agency gets more value out of a single employee when they work longer hours. Bonuses are common in the agency world, but they are typically meager compared to the extra hours worked. Burning out their junior employees is then to the advantage of an agency that bills by the hour.
I can work 55 hours a week in perpetuity as a founder, with the exception of four off grid, week long vacations a year. Even two weeks over 60 hours (e.g. fundraising across timezones) and I rapidly lose it.
But is your overall productivity higher with 55 hours than it would be with less hours?
It's the kind of question where I wouldn't really believe your answer, unless you've actually tried to experiment yourself where is the cutoff (for your specific situation) between hours / productivity.
Not because I think you would answer in bad faith, but because it's a really complex question. What if working less hours over multiple years would let you pursue some hobby, turn you more sociable and thus a better leader/CEO?
Or maybe it would make you just very slightly better at decision making. You would have less time to manage your company, maybe relying more on others, but in exchange you would have more energy for the really crucial decisions. Or enough energy for extending that 2-weeks international crowdfunding effort into a 3-weeks.
Yes, over the course of a 12 year full time career, if I go above 55 it gets worse, but I can sustain 55. In terms of trade offs, there's something to be said for parkinson's law. If I have way more than 55 hours a week of stuff, I know I have to fit it into 55 or I'll burn out. If I aim for less, I find I never end up working less than 40, even if the absolute amount is much lower.
I would just say that choosing to work more than 40 hrs per week is very different to being forced to work 40 hrs per week. Simply because someone can happily choose more work hours does not mean that the de facto standard should be that high or even at 40 hrs.
> One can easily put in 60+ hours for weeks on end and be incredibly productive while doing it.
Do you have an objective measure of that? I've worked with plenty of people who thought they were being productive for 60+ hours/week, but none of their productivity actually stacked up. Founder/CTO types were the worst, they'd bypass process and cause outages but because of their position everyone had to coddle their ego and pretend that they were doing good work and the trouble wasn't their fault.
I can do 60s in bursts, and the bursts have lasted as long as 2 months before. I usually burn out as soon as we hit the finish line, and work 10-20 hour weeks for a while until all the comp-time is used up. But I can really do a fantastic amount of programming when I dedicate my entire brain to the project and completely exclude all other thoughts. OTOH I have to admit that both of the biggest production screwups I ever made happened in those crunch times. But seeing myself hit those levels of productivity actually gives me a ton of satisfaction. Some of my normal 40 hour weeks when my head isn’t in the game are so un-productive that it depresses me.
You asked about objective measures, but I’m not sure how programming can really be quantified. All I can say is my “hyper-mode” has caused projects to reach deadlines that others on the team thought were unlikely.
Can you give us some advice on how you recharge effectively between such bursts? Since starting receiving salaries I am staying within 40+ hours work weeks but it does depress me because indeed my head is not always in the game. I thought about only doing the necessary busywork for some weeks because I want to get difficult projects done that just won’t work out if I’m not full-in. But I get feelings of guilt whenever I do that, and that prohibits recharging.
And with this we narrow it down to maybe 1% or less of the workforce.
He can be broad because your conditions don't apply to the overwhelming majority of workers. Statistically, your conditions cover an insignificant group.
"Absolutely no one" and "1%" have entirely different meanings to me. I thought it important to highlight the "insignificant" case (of which I am a member) to avoid some notion that this applies to 100% of people in reality. The way we usually go on about work around here concerns me, and I fear we risk alienating a very energetic and well-meaning segment of the community.
It is normal, but if you think about it, it doesn't really take an hour to eat lunch - and sometimes it would be preferable to eat in 5 minutes and leave at 4:05 instead of taking an hour to sit around the office. Every reasonable employer would permit this but I have learned from reading HN comments that not every employer is reasonable.
Break times also tend to be regulated in most countries I believe. I.e. here in Japan 60 minutes break time is required if you work for more than I think about 6ish hours.
When I used to work in Japan I hated that rule. One day I feeling not so great, so I took the morning off. But we had an important release, so I still went to the office in the afternoon. The release ran into few issues, so I had to stay past the regular finish time of 6pm. I started to feel no so great again, so I wanted to finish the release and head home as soon as possible. But at 7pm, my boss came running towards me and forced me to take one hour break. I tried to explained to them (unsuccessfully) I only have about 5-10mins to finish the release. So I spent another one hour with watering eyes, massive headache, and chills, just to finish 5mins of work.
I mean, it's a sensible regulation but there should be some leeway for edge case situations like yours (if there aren't already - since you were actually sick that should make it OK for you to leave ASAP one would hope)
If and when companies stop treating employees like children and more like adults who can decide for themselves when to take breaks, work, and take vacations, they might just watch productivity and morale soar. Netflix generally has the right idea on this.
Can also highly recommend Google (from first-hand experience). While there are pockets where this isn't 100% true, internal mobility is first-class so it's easy to improve things if you don't land well.
Once upon a time, I worked at a nuclear engineering consultancy. One engineer ate a hamburger and french fries over his keyboard, using it as a placemat, and never cleaned it up. In order to fix his computer, I first used a bottle of alcohol to clean the brown and black muck and hunks from the keycaps. It honestly smelled like a dumpster.
In that case whenever I need to do anything on his machine I would just bring my own keyboard. Regardless that’s gross and unsanitary, probably attracted all sorts of pests.
An insurance company I did some work for had a bell go off for your two coffee breaks and lunchtime. You spent half of your lunchtime waiting for elevators.
I saw something similar in Tokyo. It was at a telco office. A bell would ring (at 1pm IIRC) and an entire skyscraper's worth of office workers would get up and try to get to street level. Every day.
I was visiting a Western company that was renting a small space in the same building. Their routine was to never get caught up in the great migration (in either direction).
That was the routine at Safeco in Seattle well into the 90s. My wife temped there over summers during grad school. Although she says they played Muzak instead of bells. So, in fact, it was much worse.
I have never ever worked a job where 9-6 was not the standard, and I don't really know anyone who took an entire hour for lunch either, at least not as a regular thing. This is in NYC. Do 9-5 jobs really exist these days?
My biggest issue is, that in an office environment I can't use it as effectively as I would like to. At home I tend to spend 20-30 minutes taking a short nap and it really pays off as it boosts my productivity for the afternoon. At the office, I don't have that opportunity :-/
At least in the states most places require you to "make up" your lunch. So normally you'd show up at 8 and work until 5 to make up for an hour lunch. This is true for both hourly and salary.
That’s insane. I’m in the states, but my company treats us like adults. I roll in when I want, work out in the gym for 2 hours during the day, leave whenever I want. I can’t imagine working for a place that tracked my hours.
You've never worked at a job where you had to submit time sheets at the end of each week? Lots of "professional" gigs where people have to do that in order to accurately track time to customers - particularly when they are billing you out at $500/hour on the contract.
"Billable hours" != "Working hours". A lawyer may work 70 hours/week to produce 40 billable hours/week. That doesn't mean that they aren't working for 70 hours per week. It just means that the "8 for what we will" and "8 for sleep" have been shaved thin and added to the "8 for work" by shady accounting of time.
Yup - I stumbled into consulting in my first job and carried on doing it in my second, timesheets are the main source of misery/annoyance for me. Non-consultant, non-sales roles are hard to find for people who are technically focused but not actual software developers.
Most software employers I’ve worked for had us fill out time sheets, and they didn’t do hourly consulting so no need to calculate hours for clients. I only recently found an employer who does not require a time sheet. I thought this was pretty standard, at least in the USA. There will definitely be someone who replies to this comment and says “I’ve been working 20 years and never had to fill out a time sheet.” So it’s probably not universal.
Lucky for me, I’ve had the same experience at multiple jobs. I’ve kept these kinds of “lax” habits at places where other people spend 9+ hours at their desks every day. I always thought it was a waste for other people to work long hours when it wasn’t even a company policy and I never got flak for my hours. Maybe more people at bigcorps can do this if they explain it and show they can still be productive.
True in a lot of places, e.g. even in pretty labor-friendly Denmark, most union agreements in the private sector call for a 37-hour work week, but with lunch not counted as working time. So workers typically take short 30-minute lunches to avoid extending the day more. The public-sector unions have managed to get 37 hours with a 30-minute lunch counted though.
I think the question is whether that "make up" time is always 1 hour or can be adjusted. At my previous job I would regularly take 15 minute lunch breaks and leave 45 minutes early (compared to a 1 hour lunch).
Where I work now local laws require taking at least 1 hours of breaktime per day so I can technically not do that.
> Companies that shuffle things up to prioritize productivity over simply showing up will be set to succeed over the next generation.
I tend to disagree, but don't argue either way for four or five day weeks, but because it seems success and productivity are only loosely coupled.
Company financial success, and / or long term viability, I believe, is largely random. Large, already successful companies will, largely, continue to be so, small to medium enterprises will survive the next five years at about the same rate they historically have. Small business will continue to fail all over the place.
People will continue to be super intelligent, flawed and incompetent, easily distracted, lack focus, and easily corrupted by power and vice.
And start ups, to anyone who's been paying attention, is almost entirely a branch of gambling for a specific type of whale.
I predict that on the whole the next decade will be largely like the last ten years, and there's approximately nothing to be gained from chasing tiny productivity gains.
It is an open secret that people who are productive only 2/3 of the time in 40 hours/week would be productive only 2/3 of the time in 32 hours/week as well.
I hear what you're saying, but anecdotally I just cut my days back and find myself a lot more energised and engaged when actually at work. I haven't really compared my degree of output yet, but I can at least say I'm a lot more emotionally invested in the results of my work and my job satisfaction is higher. One's mileage may vary.
That's patently untrue: most of my colleague working 3 or 4 days a week are more focused their days in.
The invert is true though: a task will evolve to take the time alloted to it, I see that regularly with "unconstrained" project running amok. Those with fixed time are way more efficient and finish with a minimum of overtime.
I work as a lawyer. When I do brain work such as research, contracts or court meetings, I believe 3-4 hours a day is the max I do continuously. If I have more phone calls, client meetings etc., it's easier to do the 8 hours.
I spend 2-3 hours working, and 3-4 hours commuting, and other time in staring each other and rumbling in some meeting, and have a rather relaxed lunch with friends talking nonsense...
It is normal for Chinese to sleep/take a nap by the desk during the day.. Pretty sure they are catching up because of other reasons than being most of their waking hours at work..
As someone who has worked in a dev office in Beijing for a bit - no. Devs routinely took up to 2 hours for lunch breaks, and took numerous breaks in a day. I didn't blame them, mind, because the reason was obvious - for most people, it's just not possible to be completely engaged and invested for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, forever. I'd estimate there was about 4-5 hours a day of properly productive work going on.
Winning what? A totalitarian government where the people are all treated like shit? They may be winning the GDP game but that's not translating to any improvements for their citizens or the world.
The only people winning in China are the people at the top of the communist party.
It's law, but it still gets abused quite frequently (outside of tech, at least).
Anecdotally speaking, all my mates who work in private construction office jobs regularly do quite a bit of unpaid overtime. It's very much a combined cultural and managerial issue, clocking off at the correct hours gets you the stink-eye, and the volume of work assigned necessitates overtime.
I feel like I generally am reasonably productive for 40 hours. Of course I'm not constantly super focused, but if I were to work fewer hours I would get less done. Every once in a while you have a meeting that isn't totally necessary, but reducing working hours wouldn't get rid of those.
Yep, I've had full time six figure jobs where I was literally working 5 hours per week including meetings. I've never had a job where I worked more than 20 hours a week, including a hectic 7-employee startup.
> It's an open secret at least in the tech world that absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week.
Be grateful for your privilege. Most employees aren't tech.
The workers at companies that schlep things around are working a real, non-stop 8 hours. This is why Amazon warehouse jobs are so shitty.
Teachers are pretty much non-stop as well. This is why so many of them have medical issues with their bladders.
The vast majority of workers are in positions that really do put in 40 hours of hard work a week--and they don't get paid anywhere near as much as tech.
Indeed, there’s a sort of Moneyball aspect here. Companies that can accurately pay out only for productive time instead of assuming all 40 hours of a work week are spent producing will make huge savings in payroll, increasing cost efficiency and making it feasible to hire larger cross functional teams. A software engineer probably only really works about 20 hours a week. That’s a 50% savings right there.
I once told a freelance client (hourly) that I solved most of the tough problems while I thought about things in the shower. On that project, very little of my time was spent coding. Client then said I ought to pad my hours by 5 per week. He “got it.”
If simply “coding” is what constitutes “really working,” that seems problematic.
Why would any software engineer take an equivalent paying job that micromanages their every minute to make sure the company gets a full 40 hrs out of them, unless the pay were much better than what they'd get otherwise (eating in to that 50%) or they were desperate?
This would be a huge mis-optimization IMO. Good luck attracting "top" workers and retaining them with this model. It's just "butts in seats" taken to an extreme.
I mean what you’re basically saying is you want to work at inefficient companies that pay more than they actually need to.
If you’re not working, you shouldn’t be paid. Fair is fair.
Perhaps instead of paying per hour a company should offer pay per week, and it’s up to the developer to decide how many hours they will end up actually working that week and if the offered pay is worth it.
Equally speaking, if I realise how to fix that bug when I'm out with friends one night, should I present my employer with an extra bill for those hours spent drinking and relaxing, putting my mind in a state where it could fix the issue?
They're not assuming/under the impression that all 40 hours are spent working. This wouldn't work because this type of tacit admission works for everyone when they need it, even if that happens to be continuously.
You can't actually enforce that. The standard is salaried, at-will employment. The savvy, skilled remote worker is going to be able to put 20-30 hours in - literally just take off 1-2 days a week. But get paid for the "40hrs."
Basically, the rules of the game mean a salaried, remote employee can easily work half time at full pay - gg
You are subtly implying incorrectly that people are working lesser number of hours while working from home. This is farther from the truth. If anything all the time saved in commute is spent in coding
In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren't contending with pointless meetings and busy work though. They can't do 40 hours of work in 32 hours by removing some of the hours they're not really working. What they do doesn't compress like that.
Consequently looking at this from the context of tech workers is far less interesting. The Japanese government isn't saying "Let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work!" In tech removing the pointless nonsense isn't actually reducing the amount of real work people do. Instead, Japan is saying "Our country is wealthy enough and advanced enough that our people can actually do less work." That's fascinating.
If you see this as "removing the wasteful time spent on things that aren't useful like meetinga" then you've missed the point. It is that, but it's much, much more than that too.