
Google Founders Talk About Ending the 40-Hour Work Week - riaface
http://mashable.com/2014/07/07/google-founders-interview-khosla/
======
rancar2
Page supported this view while Brin disagreed with Page. As such, the title of
the original article and its body are misleading. Below are links to [1] the
point in time of the conversation referenced in the article and [2] the
original discussion of this interview on Hacker News.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdnp_7atZ0M&t=17m34s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdnp_7atZ0M&t=17m34s)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7992795](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7992795)

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sxp
There is also a transcript if you don't want to spend time watching the video:
[http://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-
co-f...](http://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-
larry-page-and-sergey-brin)

------
ph0rque
Meanwhile, Google engineers work an average of 50 hours a week:
[http://www.quora.com/Google/How-many-hours-a-week-does-a-
typ...](http://www.quora.com/Google/How-many-hours-a-week-does-a-typical-
Google-engineer-work?share=1)

~~~
DannyBee
Errr, based on one 4 year old data point and a guy that says "there is very
high variance"?

~~~
ph0rque
I'd love to see current and better data for how many hours full-time Google
employees work per week.

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2pasc
France did that (the infamous "35-hour work week") in 2000. This has proven to
be a disaster on multiple counts: \- it created a mess in public hospitals
where it completely screwed up the organization of shifts for nurses and
doctors and lead to French hospitals decline \- it benefitted profesionals and
middle managers who got more vacation with maintained good wages \- it ended
up being horrendous to people with lower paid jobs as it became an opportunity
for their wages to compress. It lead to a significant stagnation of wages
among lower class workers, and eventually their impoverishment.

I am actually surprised and disappointed that some of the smartest minds of
our generation think that the best way to solve long term unemployment is to
reduce the work week hours...

~~~
clavalle
Sounds more like a cluster of tactical problems that can be solved
individually than an overall strategic failure.

I don't think it is a matter of the smartest minds of our generation trying to
solve long term unemployment, but rather solving the problem of human
effectiveness and happiness.

The idea is that we don't have to waste peoples lives on everlasting drudge
work.

We've created this economic system collectively. We can change it. We have
before. Around 1900 we were, on average, paying 40% of our wages for food and
working a hell of a lot of hours to do it, mostly with farm work. Now we pay
an average of 6% of our wages for food and work around 40 hours a week to do
it.

It is better than it was and there is no reason it can't get better still.

There are people who will still work a lot -- I'm sure I'll be one of them,
but we shouldn't really _have_ to with how productive we are per capita and
how truly cheap it is for people to live.

~~~
2pasc
Maybe, but the fact that food is cheaper as a % of income today does not mean
we have less poverty overall. It just means we have a different kind. First of
all, lodging is still a very important budget item, and not one that is bound
to decrease for high employment areas, as city regulations make it hard to
increase housing supply at the necessary rate. Second, new needs have appeared
that have replaced food among the necessary spending. Mobile phone plans and
Internet are one of them.

We are the ones who work a lot and make a good living with that. The problem
is at the other end of the spectrum with people that are barely making ends
meetm and need to work as much as possible to earn enough to feed their family
and survive.

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xienze
The cynic in me sees this as a way that Google could e.g., pay someone 80% for
an "official" 4 day work week knowing full well that the competitive types
working for them will end up pushing themselves into a typical 5/40 work week
(and beyond) anyway.

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chippy
I'm sure the founders would say "well 20% time of five days is a whole day"
and say that the engineers therefore work a 4 day week already...

