What is interesting is the breakdown of motivations between men and women. It seems readily apparent that women on the whole prefer flexible work arrangements because of child raising obligations. This is exactly the same argument lobbed across the wage gap discussion for years now. Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when compared to their male peers.
I'm not a social scientist and nor am I particularly well versed in the quagmire of social & gender obligations, so I'll keep out of making a normative judgement on this topic.
Suffice to say, in Tech, the longer you spend at the office, the more you appear to be motivated and hardworking. I fear that might just be too ingrained in management psyches for a solution to be readily available.
I would prefer flexible work arrangements for the very simple reason that there are lots of things I want to do with my life in addition to my job. Nobody ever offers this, somehow. It would be a better world if flexible work hours were a normal thing, not something you have to justify based on traditional gender roles.
I feel a little bitter when people go on about the importance of "negotiation" over job offers, because the thing I would want to negotiate for is never on the table. (And yes, I have tried.)
What exactly are you asking for? At ININ, we have core hours of 10-4, and you can fill out the rest however you want. Seems a decent compromise for a salary employee gig.
If you want real flexible hours you can always do contract work or start a business.
I don't want to do contract work or start a business (again). That would make the problem worse, not better, because I'd have to spend more of my time on my job in order to make a living, and the additional time would be spent on tasks I enjoy less and am not as good at as the work I do which is the focus of my career. The point is that I have a wide variety of interests and to me a good life is one where I get to pursue them. Focusing exclusively on a single activity (coding!) might be better in terms of making money, but what am I making that money for if I can't use it to live a good life in the other ways I want to live it?
Your response illustrates the problem I was describing: why, when I suggest that the standard packages don't suit me, do you think it is helpful to suggest that I just pick one of them and deal with it? Why shouldn't we accept, as an industry, that different people have different needs and different motivations, and consider it normal to work out whatever mix of time, responsibility, and compensation suits each person?
The paradox of the salaried job is that you can either have money to spend or time to spend it in, but you can't have both, because nobody will let you trade some of one for some of the other. Well, why not? If we adopted a flexible attitude about work hours, as a culture, it would not just make things better for women who are stuck with traditional family-care tasks, but for everyone - whether they want to use that flexibility to raise a family or for something else important to their life happiness.
It could be, if "part-time job" simply meant an ordinary job which one works for fewer than ~2000 hours per year; but "part-time" also means "no benefits", "no stability", and "no respect", and in any case there are no part-time jobs to be had as a software developer. If there were, I don't imagine they'd be much good for making a living.
What I want is more about flexibility than about a smaller number of hours. I'm happy to work 50+ hours in a week when it's called for; I just wish I could take a month off to go travel, when that's what I want to do, or take Thursdays and Fridays off for two months because there's some project I want to work on, or take a week full of half days because we just shipped a release and I feel like goofing off a bit. I mean, sure, I could probably just do the last one, unofficially, but I'd like it if this were all above board and OK, instead of just something you try to get away with and hope nobody complains. And there's just no solving the problem of wanting to travel: only once in my career have I gotten a month off, after almost seven years at a single company, a tenure I will probably never repeat. Why is PTO always non-negotiable? I don't get it.
>Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when compared to their male peers.
Unfair obligation my ass. I'm sure most dads would jump at the oppurtunity to have the paternity leave equal to maternity, for example.
IIRC, after around 60 hours of coding, developers start introducing bugs faster than they fix them. This obviously varies from person to person, but yeah, you can do negative work pretty easily in software by not thinking. It took me a long time to learn to just quit for the day and get a good night's sleep when i'm struggling with something for an excessively long time.
It's not remotely facetious. Regularly doubling your hours in the office generally does not even remotely double a person's productivity.
However, appearing to be a "team player" and always being in the office makes a person appear to be a hard worker. So people who put in long hours are generally rewarded with more bonuses, promotions, and retention, even if there isn't a strong correlation with their actual work output.
I think the point he was trying to make still holds without such absurd multipliers as "doubling", it's just an intuitively easy to grasp multiplier. What he's saying is that increasing your number of hours may get more absolute work done, but proportionally a person accomplishes less as more hours are worked. Thus, the correlation between time in office (hours) and productivity (work accomplished per unit time) is a negative correlation.
You are implying that childcare and other non-work flex time activity isn't work. This is, in the frame of this discussion, in itself implicitly sexist.
Women aren't asking for flex time in order to relax: they want flex time in order to do work that isn't business related, like taking care of their family.
So the same number of hours are being worked - the question is whether using these extra hours to do company business is more beneficial to the company than doing something else.
Quite frankly, it's kind of a ridiculous discussion. I can't see how it isn't driven by implicit benevolent sexist assumptions.
Woah woah woah, slow down. You are infering that childcare and other non-work flex time activity isn't work. I was not saying anything at all about time spent outside the job. I was trying to clarify the argument that you were responding to by demonstrating how it is not a straw man.
To follow the argument from it's origins, you led with
>I'd be amazed if there wasn't a correlation between time in the office and productivity.
And you were later responding to SamBam saying
>Regularly doubling your hours in the office generally does not even remotely double a person's productivity.
Which I was clarifying was not exactly a straw man because the fact that he chose "double" the hours was merely a hyperbole to demonstrate that productivity (in the office) does not scale positively with time spent (in the office).
So we are talking about correlation between time in the office and productivity (in the office). The negative correlation that was spoken of is a very measured effect, multiple studies and articles can be found [0] using the same tool that you so kindly used to define benevolent sexism to me with.
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What is interesting is the breakdown of motivations between men and women. It seems readily apparent that women on the whole prefer flexible work arrangements because of child raising obligations. This is exactly the same argument lobbed across the wage gap discussion for years now. Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when compared to their male peers.
From my graduating class, going into the same company, men earned more money. I know first hand that earned 10k more than a female classmate going into the exact same job title with the same expectations.
I'm not a social scientist and nor am I particularly well versed in the quagmire of social & gender obligations, so I'll keep out of making a normative judgement on this topic.
Suffice to say, in Tech, the longer you spend at the office, the more you appear to be motivated and hardworking. I fear that might just be too ingrained in management psyches for a solution to be readily available.