> Q : What kinds of work could potentially be dropped to increase productivity? A: Meetings
This is really lazy and boring. Yes, many meetings are a waste of time, but I don't think you're productively cutting out an entire day of work out of the week by just cutting meetings. It's also very difficult for organizations to understand which meetings are "pointless" or could be re-arranged, or we wouldn't have the problem in the first place.
A past company I worked for tried a global initiative to reduce the amount of time, particularly engineers, spent in meetings. They mandated no more than 20% of your week could be spent in meetings. The effect was instead that things that needed to be meetings ended up happening in a myriad of side-chats and personal messages, making things way more time consuming in the end. Sometimes getting everyone together in a room or call to agree on a course of action is needed. If you want to cut time out of those, cut the political BS out of them aggressively and call people out for grandstanding or wasting time in meetings.
Yea, to me, it needs to be a top down cultural thing, every meeting needs someone actively "quarterbacking" it and needs to be aggressively steering the meeting back on topic. There needs to be a culture of, "If I have nothing to contribute to this meeting, I do not attend or I will leave." Meetings need to be scheduled for an hour with the goal of finishing after 30 minutes, and if there's "extra time" you are simply done. Things like that. The problem to me isn't the number of meetings or the meetings themselves, just how many unnecessary parties get added to them or how much time is wasted in them by having no one actively leading/steering the conversation (which absolutely no one wants to do, especially in cross-functional meetings where there is no clear lead)
I would also add the instinct of making meetings recurring, and then never reevaluating whether that meeting is still needed at the same cadence or even at all. As an EM in big tech I am guilty of creating my fair share of meetings, but I do my best to cancel or turn down their cadence once they’re no longer useful.
If a person is so productive that he can do in 3 days, what others can do for 5 this person can go to the owner and negotiate directly. No need for government to enforce a thing. I know some highly skilled programmers that are on 10 hours/week paid retainers. No unions or governments helped with that.
Also if the economy wasn't global and each country lived on an island may be this "might work".
However, suppose you own a company in the country where you are mandated to employ people no more than 4 days/week. You are upright citizen and are supportive of the regulation. But your competitors, those greedy bastards, use low-paid offshore labour and undercut you in price or in time to market. Their costs are lower, so they're stealing a market share from you. The government has effectively increased the price of the labour in your product by 20%. What would the effect be for a person who wants to work 5 or 6 days, or 7 days if he'd like, he can't do that. He can't sell more than 4 days of work to 1 employer and would need to find a second job or start working as a contractor paid by project, not by hour.
With the global economy & AI tools, the IT sector is especially vulnerable. Your job will be outsourced as long as the company finds a way to do it cheaper. It's either this, or bust. But IT jobs aren't don't have the constraints other material goods have.
No legislation is stronger than invisible hand of the market. It's time to grow up...
The US government has enacted tariffs on many goods from China, at upwards of 100% in some cases. This can be done for cross border labor as well, to prevent a race to the bottom with regards to labor regulations through exporting the externality. An economy need not be global; nation states control their markets, and access to them.
> No legislation is stronger than invisible hand of the market. It's time to grow up...
The strength of legislation is a function of its civil and criminal penalties, as well as its economic incentives (positive or negative). Craft policy accordingly.
If you don't trade you won't have all the things you need. You can't legislate other peoples costs, subsidies, environment disregard, slave labour, natural resources and technological advances.
As seen in DPRK in 1990s or Albania in 1950. If you don't produce something other countries want, you'll starve to death. Import raw materials, export finished products, that how the wealth of the West was built. Now with no technological edge this would be harder to achieve.
There is no free lunch. You need more efficient government with less restrictions, and a good workforce with imported highly skilled people from around the world (ready to work, ready to earn, ready to generate taxes). Technology will create the profit margin the society needs and with this it'll be able to take care of he ones that can't produce and need help.
> You can't legislate other peoples costs, subsidies, environment disregard, slave labour, natural resources and technological advances.
You absolutely can. The evidence of this is clear. If you want a recent example, see the Inflation Reduction Act, that requires domestically sourced supply chains for batteries, EVs, and solar panels, as well as union labor. TSMC now builds semiconductors in Arizona Apple uses, with US labor. Fiber optics being installed for rural bandwidth is mandated to be sourced from US providers. Steel is sourced from Nucor in Gallatin, Kentucky for domestic use. Policy drives outcomes at scale.
You say it cannot be done when it is being done. Policy works, and it can be used to bend economics to what the desired outcome is. A shorter work week can be a desired outcome.
Do they really? They may be intended to do that, but if you think from the basic law of supply and demand the effects are clear.
This policy will lead to more expensive batteries, EVs and solar panels. This will be the effect. Policies can help, when they improve the competitiveness of the industry, usually when there is less regulation and taxation.
Chinese EV's cost 10K, comparable US cost 25K. Yes, we can legislate to forbid these communist law-breaking people to stop selling us their cars. But the effect will be more old clunkers on the road, more pollution and less money to spend on something else. And the Chinese will build and sell them to the rest of the world and grow their companies to such size that the moment you remove the tariff US companies will be dead. To fight this only productivity and technology will help, not legislation. You can't legislate your way to a full belly. Profit should come from somewhere. And if the US hadn't had the US dollar as a reserve currency shit would have hit the fan much faster.
If you have a global market and somebody can produce this cheaper than you it doesn't matter what a local government/union or an owner will mandate. The market will decide that.
The 8-hour work day was possible in the British Empire, because it's an island with a lot of technology making their product at the time the cheapest and highest quality with great productivity per worker. Yes, unions helped with redistributing part of the profits to them with better conditions. That was good back then. Now, no such technological/productivity divide exist.
Look what happened to US steel industry or auto industry. Global competition killed them. All wages are paid from the profit the company makes. If the company can't compete on the market no jobs for anyone. If you own the local power utility and power can't be easily imported/produced, you'd be able to pay higher wages and afford unions.
Now if you build a SAAS business and pay 140K/yr to your programmer and your competitor pays 14K/yr for the same programmer in Bangladesh, who would survive?
The 8-hour work day and even 4-hour work day are possible (as some government bureaucrats know) if you don't compete in the market. If you do, the profit will go to the person doing it for less. So technology is the only way forward.
BTW, that is the way market economies allocate resources much more efficiently than centralized organizations. Brutal, but efficient. And for people this might mean cheap Chinese phones, but no job sadly.
That's why it might be better to become a plumber than a react JS developer longer term. The big google profits are not forever and investors money will end someday.
I have to say, 3x12, even if I had to stretch it to 13.3 hours to get it up to an even 40, was my favorite. I’d go back to that in a heartbeat.
For those 3 days I didn’t really do anything other than work and sleep. However, I then had 4 days off each week. It was almost like not having a job.
The time off left me well rested, and the long hours meant I could get a lot done and really dig into stuff. When I went down to 8 hour days it felt so short, like I didn’t have time to really doing anything… but it was everyday, so it was a grind without ever feeling like I had a break.
4x10 was ok, but in some ways the worst of both worlds. The days were long, but it still felt like a bit of a grind compared to 3x12.
I worked 3x12 in grad school. It was the most productive i have ever been. Relaxing is actually kinda critical for solving nontrivial and complex problems.
The desire to return to 3x12 is one of my biggest motivations i consider when contemplating becoming a contractor instead of a fulltime SWE.
Over a decade ago, I was a salaried electrician, 9.5 hour days, MT-RF (considered "full-time"). Wednesdays "off" was absolutely incredible, and it brought refreshed energy to my team... major issue was that most of our clients always wanted us to be available/working on Wednesdays; sometimes we'd get blamed for "delaying project" simply because a PM thought we should be working every day of the week =D
When I was IBEW, I'd work 60 hrs/week... beginning the day at 5AM and still getting home before sunsets (usually). I do NOT miss only-Sundays-off.
Bit of a long game. Gen Z has very high support for unions (which can bargain for rights, like remote work and a shorter work week) at 80%. About 1.8M people over the age of 55 die every year, 5k per day, about half of which are in the labor force. 10k Boomers retire per day, ~3.6M/year. 4M people turn 18 every year, slowly working their way into the labor force. No one big change happens, small wins over time as old people with old ideas exit the labor force, and new people with new ideas enter. For example, all culinary staff on the strip in Vegas are now unionized. The lone hold out was The Venetian under Sheldon Adelson, who was staunchly anti union. He's dead now (2021), and The Venetian is now owned by the Apollo Group, who had no problem with their staff organizing. Progress occurs one funeral at a time (Max Planck).
Think in systems; in this case, demographics are a system.
This is really lazy and boring. Yes, many meetings are a waste of time, but I don't think you're productively cutting out an entire day of work out of the week by just cutting meetings. It's also very difficult for organizations to understand which meetings are "pointless" or could be re-arranged, or we wouldn't have the problem in the first place.
A past company I worked for tried a global initiative to reduce the amount of time, particularly engineers, spent in meetings. They mandated no more than 20% of your week could be spent in meetings. The effect was instead that things that needed to be meetings ended up happening in a myriad of side-chats and personal messages, making things way more time consuming in the end. Sometimes getting everyone together in a room or call to agree on a course of action is needed. If you want to cut time out of those, cut the political BS out of them aggressively and call people out for grandstanding or wasting time in meetings.