
Working hours: Get a life - deusclovis
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/working-hours
======
henrik_w
Related: Bring back the 40-hour work week. 150 years of research proves that
long hours at work kill profits, productivity and employees:
[http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...](http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/)

~~~
capisce
Let's not stop there:
[http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours](http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours)

~~~
toomuchtodo
[http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/)

"An average worker needs to work a mere 11 hours per week to produce as much
as one working 40 hours per week in 1950. (The data here is from the US, but
productivity increases in Europe and Japan have been of the same magnitude.)
The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a worker
should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker in only 11
hours per week. "

~~~
ctdonath
You sure you want the same standard of living as 1950? No A/C, high-
maintenance car (1, if any), fast-perishing food, data bandwidth orders of
magnitude of orders of magnitude (not a typo) lower, half the living space,
health care by which I'd be dead four times over by now, 45RPM records, etc.

Methinks you're getting your 4x standard of living's worth.

~~~
toomuchtodo
You're assuming costs have remained the same for goods and services consumers
demand. The cost of electricity is plummeting due to renewables, digital
services and IP have zero marginal cost, Moore's Law, etc. People are
eschewing cars, and in the next 5-10 years cars will be a service, not
something you own.

The issue is there are still inelastic demand services that need their costs
driven down _drastically_ : Education and healthcare. I'd also suggest
petroleum being displaced for transportation as well. Reducing the cost of
these services reduces the amount of work needed to consume said services.

I argue an 11-15 hour work week is still possible as technology and innovation
continue to move forward.

~~~
cgore
People aren't eschewing cars, outside of a few specific urban areas. SOME
people in NYC, SanFran, and a few other cities are eschewing cars. This has
always been the case. Renting cars is now just getting a bit easier. But most
people in the developed world will continue to buy cars and own them.

~~~
toomuchtodo
[http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2013/08/dot-vehicle-
miles-...](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2013/08/dot-vehicle-miles-driven-
decreased-04.html)

"As we've discussed, gasoline prices are just part of the story. The lack of
growth in miles driven over the last 5+ years is probably also due to the
lingering effects of the great recession (high unemployment rate and lack of
wage growth), the aging of the overall population (over 55 drivers drive fewer
miles) and changing driving habits of young drivers."

[http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/nhts.cfm](http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/nhts.cfm)

Why Young People Are Driving Less and What It Means for Transportation Policy
[http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/transportation-and-new-
gen...](http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/transportation-and-new-generation)

~~~
cgore
The Great Recession will hopefully stop eventually, and then you can expect to
see the unemployed 18-35 year-olds get jobs, buy cars (among other things),
and drive again.

~~~
toomuchtodo
It won't end, and we don't see people driving in a big way again.

Data has shown that between 55+ retiring and younger potential drivers
preferring not to drive, vehicle sales have plateaued. If self-driving cars
take off in the next ~5 years, that'll be the death of a large part of the
auto industry.

~~~
cgore
I'm optimistic. Economies go up and down, sometimes in long cycles, but I
think this is bound to turn for the better eventually. I'm doing fine
financially and have a good job even in this economy, software development
still seeming to be a growing field, but I have some friends with other
degrees (or no degrees) in a lot worse shape than me. So I hope for them my
optimism isn't wrong.

~~~
dennisgorelik
You are missing the point: it's not about recession (which is behind us by
now), but about change in habbits/needs. People rely more on digital
communications and less on driving.

End result - car sales stagnate.

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jmduke
A big distinction for me is "programming as work" and "programming as play". I
can spend eight hours at work and be absolutely drained when I get home, but
still leap at the chance to say, take a bite out of my functional programming
course
([https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun](https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun)
\-- it's awesome, and taught by the guy who designed Scala, so he knows a
thing or two) because its a completely different context for me, or scroll
idly through GitHub issues as I eat dinner.

~~~
redblacktree
Taking that class now. As a professional developer, it pains me to say: That
class is _fucking hard._ I haven't managed a perfect score on an assignment
yet, though I'm still working on Week 2. Good luck to you! It should be a
great adventure regardless.

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alter_ego
I would love to see a mandatory scheme whereby employees are free to work more
than forty hours per week should they wish to do so, or are required to do so,
but overtime payments are guaranteed, on an increasing scale, so by the time
the employer has their staff working 100 hours per week they have had to pay
more than say 6 weeks salary, possibly 8. This would quickly shake out the
bulk of big corps who simply encourage presenteeism and other negative
cultures.

~~~
nhangen
As an employer in the tech industry, I would never hire someone that
complained that more than 40 hours/week was too much, and I don't own a
Fortune 500 company.

~~~
eterm
As an employee in the tech industry I would never work for a company that
thought more than 40 hours a week was reasonable.

Oh, and I hate clocking in/out, I wouldn't work for a company that time-
tracked like that either. Trust me to get the work done, don't worry about my
hours.

I won't be an ass and leave at 5pm while there's something that needs to be
finished today because "it's my hours" and you don't be an ass if I turn up
after 10am.

My current company is great, flexible working hours and a lot of trust around
working hours and working conditions. You on the other hand sound like you run
a terrible place to be employed.

Edit: "My" as in the company for which I work, I just re-read this and it
sounded like I run a company which isn't the case.

~~~
nhangen
I disagree with you on the first line, but the rest is reasonable. No manager
(at least not me) wants to measure hours, but when an employee's production is
waning, that's one of the things you CAN measure to see if that's part of the
problem.

But if I find someone constantly looking at the clock when the hand strikes 5,
I know they've already checked out, and that's not the kind of person I want
on my team.

~~~
flatline
I'm constantly looking at the clock when the hand strikes 5 because I've got
to pick up the kids from daycare. Sometimes if I finish whatever I was working
on 10 minutes early, yeah, I'm checked out. What does it matter? You either do
good work in the time you're _at_ work or you don't. There are definitely
places that want people to put in an appearance of slaving away as they don't
know any other way to gauge productivity. The other thing I've seen (and done,
in the past) is working 80+ hour weeks because everything's out of control, no
one has a solid pulse on the business, and the job is a constant putting out
of fires. Granted, some of this is endemic to start-up life, but if the shit
is constantly flowing downhill, not a good sign.

~~~
nhangen
But that's a completely different scenario, and one that I'm sure you would
discuss with your hiring manager before accepting the position.

------
nhangen
Working 40 hours per week would kill me. For me, work IS learning, and writing
code is no different than a paintbrush on canvas.

The only thing that will turn my brain off is some sort of lean back
entertainment, such as TV or video games. Otherwise, why read about how to do
something when I can practice it?

It's a fallacy to believe that work and play can't be the same thing.

~~~
cliveowen
Well, you write code working on your thing? Then it might be that you enjoy it
and you classify it as "play" time. But what if you, like most software
engineers, are working on a 20 year-old piece of spaghetti code where your 50
lines function needs to be inserted between pages and pages of complex code
written by your grandpa's peers? That is not play, that's not even work,
that's a straining effort in futility.

~~~
jakejake
The best part is when the project you're working on is of absolutely zero
interest to any of your friends or family so you can't really show anybody
your hard work! My current situation is somewhat interesting to the general
public, but in the past I've worked on back end system for insurance and
health care. Try showing that off to your friends!

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jessepollak
I'd be really interested to know _what kind_ of work this analysis is done on.
Is it manual labor? Or repetitive data entry? Or writing code? I'd be
interested to see a breakdown between these different categories.

On this note, does anyone know the original paper where those graphs came
from? I clicked through to the linked paper at the end, but no such graphs
appeared.

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diminoten
Why _must_ I stop working because other people don't like their jobs? The
title tells me to "get a life", but maybe I like working 50 hours a week.

I'm getting _incredibly_ sick of people defensively justifying their own
perceived laziness and then trying to tell me to work less. No, I fucking like
my job, work _is_ play for me.

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thejteam
One takeaway from the article is the importance of proper scaling on your
graphs. The chart does not convey the real difference between the countries in
any meaningful way except pointing out that Korea is an outlier. It should be
scaled between 1000 and 2000 (with the caveat that Korea is off the scale) to
convey the real difference between the countries. Otherwise it doesn't look at
a glance like we work a whole lot more in America.

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pstack
As someone who loves his job and loves to work, these articles always strike
me as "I'm lazy and want to whine about it, because I would rather be sitting
by the side of a pool somewhere, doing nothing".

I'm sure it is a justifiable complaint if your job sucks and you hate
everything about it, but the solution is to do what you can to find a better
match between what you enjoy and what you do for a living rather than somehow
demonizing "too much work". What almost everyone does who is posting here is
not digging ditches or flipping burgers for 40hrs per week and we need to quit
acting like it is.

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umsm
After working in front of a computer for 8+ hours a day, you need to have a
good work/life balance.

When I get home, I stay away from computers. I even contemplated not having a
PC at home.

~~~
4hthth4
I got rid of my TV, but not my computer.

