One of the interesting things that happened at my company is that productivity instantly doubled when we started working remotely. The reality at my company is that people are only getting 20 hours or so of work done in the office - the rest is socialization, pointless meetings, lunches, or trying to look busy. When we went home for lockdown and kept working 40 hour weeks, not only did productive output double, but everyone burned out in a few weeks.
In my opinion, the reality of working from home is that 20-30 hour work weeks need to be acceptable and we should use the rest of our time on non-working things, just like we did in the office, but now that time can be more meaningful to us.
Pointless meetings have multiplied for me in the remote world as they are no longer constrained by conference rooms. Also since it’s so much easier to get away with multitasking, you have engineers who are ostensibly in meetings all day still checking in code like everything’s fine.
I think the ability to maintain a convincing presence in all-day Zoom while still getting your work done is the new meta-game for engineering. And I hate it.
I’ve been doing fully remote teams for years and one thing that took about 2 years to get used to is how to utilize meetings differently than in person.
Some of the biggest disadvantages of remote work is that it is harder to “just grab someone”, social isolation, and communication isolation (ie- people not talking to each other.) Meetings can partially solve all those issues and get used as such. However, because they are such a useful tool they get over used and I had to figure out how to say no to meetings, how to end meetings early if they’ve accomplished their purpose, encourage people to leave meetings if it turns out they aren’t needed and how get better at ad hoc remote communication without pulling together a meeting.
It took a while but I think I’m actually spending less time in BS meetings then before because there is much less pressure to stay or preserve a meeting no one had to walk to or book a conference room for.
One of my pet hates is meetings without an agenda, or that don't stick to the agenda.
If you're done with the agenda, then the meeting is finished and everyone can leave. If that happens after 5 minutes, then that's good.
I have been in meetings where the organiser has said "well, we've finished, but we've got this room for an hour, so let's just hang out for the rest of the time". That can be tough to respond to. Just saying "Sorry, but no, I've got work to do" can be offensive (though it shouldn't be).
Frankly I think people not being immediately reachable is the big percentage gain of remote work. That's it. They've finally got the space to go and get on with the actual job.
Many meetings only require a low level of attention. 90% is 1 or a few stakeholders discussing things, and the rest are there for occasional input. In a good chunk of my meetings I find myself actually tuning out too much, where I miss some important nuances because it was buried in the rest of the shit.
In an office you are forced to pay attention (laptops away…). It’s a new skill to balance between paying attention to irrelevant shit and missing the important details
My solution has been to take nearly every meeting possible outside while on walks. It helps me focus where I would otherwise not be able to focus, and acts as a good way to get some additional exercise throughout the day.
Modern smart phones are computers which can for some (read: most) meetings be good enough. The multitasking features in android are helpful here, with things like split-screen and picture-in-picture.
If the meeting calls for it, I take it on a proper computer. Most meetings don't, in my experience. Just a lot of listening and maybe 5 minutes of talking.
I've found that my remote work meetings neatly break down into 3 categories:
- direct engagement -- 2-4 participants
- broad forum -- 5-12 participants
- fly-on-the-wall -- any number, but my contribution will be 0-4 sentences
Of these, the broad forum has the least clear attention level requirement. The usefulness of these meetings is determined by the skill of the moderator, to steer the conversation flow towards the primary subject and ensure the relevance to most attendees. Unfortunately, many colleagues are still reluctant to have their cameras on, which makes gauging the interest level very challenging for the moderator.
I can frequently take fly-on-the-wall meetings (and sometimes even broad forum) while out walking, which is a nice plus.
Well I find this really good. Maybe because I am younger and used to multitasking.
But before pandemic just sitting in person meetings and trying to focus for 2 hours to not let my mind wander was really exhausting. Not since everything is remote I can also do some work while 2 hour meetings are being done. And afterwards I don't feel as tired as I did when we had physical meetings
Multitasking is just rapid attention change, and it can be jarring going from rapid changes in focus to lower stimulation and longer term focus, but both frames of mind are valuable, situationally. You might get more value multitasking but you might also bring a lot more value to some meetings by staying deeply focused, and I think that highly focused, high participation meetings are the ideal. Other communication can happen other ways. To help me with long & deep focus, I've found that reading novels or other long form writing helps me tame the impulse to bounce around so much, somewhat.
That's the case in traditionaly organised meetings, where I work we pull people in and kick them out pretty quickly. Meetings are 2-5 people max, everyone is contributing, and you get told you can leave if the topic pivots to something that doesn't apply to you.
Urban Airship meeting rules. Don’t just mention them or be inspired by them. Just… use them as you see fit. Walk out on meetings, or decline them, if they don’t benefit you or your work. Don’t tolerate meetings that could have been an email (or equivalent communication). Don’t fill the time. Don’t repeat things that were already communicated.
Lots of egregious violations of #4 and #5 where I work. Leaving a meeting or not even showing up to one even if only to just "observe" comes off as passive aggressive.
"Don't repeat things that were already communicated": This sounds good, but it takes several repetitions for information to sink in with everyone everywhere I've worked. I don't know a way around this.
>I think the ability to maintain a convincing presence in all-day Zoom while still getting your work done is the new meta-game for engineering. And I hate it.
The other side of this is just doing minimal work but being "available" which I've heard from plenty of friends & acquaintences
My first few months WFH was like this so I hear you. Since then however I've been more proactive about declining attending meetings or dropping off if I am required, which has made a massive difference.
Did it really double, or did boundaries erode? My company has been very clear in that they are measuring our productivity and also our working hours. Managers are being instructed to be very clear about establishing work/life boundaries (with the specifics being based on individual need). We similarly saw an increase in productivity, but the increase was far smaller once normalized for hours worked.
I'm surprised this perspective is not made more often. It's now much easier to work past 5 or 6pm or whenever you would normally end. Needing to return home to your family is no longer an excuse to stop working because you can be with your family while at work. All it takes is one developer on your team working evenings or weekends for the other developers to feel like they need to be working late too. There's also the fact that managers right now are more concerned about whether their team is working enough, rather than being concerned about their team working too much.
I find myself doing the opposite. It's much easier for me to step away at 6pm sharp knowing that if anything happens I can jump back in an instant, vs the worry of being the first to leave the office, and being stuck in a train for a half hour.
When I worked in an office I never worried about being the first to leave, and didn't even realize other people do.
For me, the biggest downside of working from home is how easy it is to get distracted by non-work. I go grab a coffee and end up putting dishes away, cleaning up, etc. and next thing I know an hour's passed by so I'm working late or feeling guilty.
I've been working on my time management, in general, and that's helping.
> For me, the biggest downside of working from home is how easy it is to get distracted by non-work. I go grab a coffee and end up putting dishes away, cleaning up, etc.
Sometimes taking a short break like that is the best way to make progress on a difficult problem though. Realistically we probably get 2 or 3 hours of actual work done in a day. Everything else is a bonus and it comes and goes over time.
I've been running rescuetime on my computer for most of a decade, and "my developer time"(time on terminal, few documentation sites like SO, editor etc...) goal was initially 1hr 30 minutes, but nowadays it is stuck at 3 hours.. and been not filled except for rare days.
> When I worked in an office I never worried about being the first to leave, and didn't even realize other people do.
A lot of it is scarcity vs abundance mindset. Many people are quite scared to lose their jobs. I know people making six figures who would be in deep shit if they had a month of no paychecks while switching jobs.
I've seen both responses from people I know. One person has always been a bit of a workaholic, and used work as sort of a coping mechanism for anxiety. As one might imagine, they started working much much longer hours. Another person I know got in the habit of working from about 10 to 3 or so, to the point where I was worried for their job. I think the lesson is that people's relationship with work is just a highly individual, and people will have very divergent outcomes.
Both of those are rational responses to the modern work culture.
The two extremes are:
1. Working as hard as possible to get a promotion over the next person working as hard as possible.
2. Doing the bare minimum to not get fired.
Anything in between is, logically, irrational, because you're doing more work than necessary.
Luckily, companies have found the levers for most humans and tend to get them working in between the two extremes.
Completely agree. It helped that I have a recurring meeting in Outlook that starts when I leave work, and goes for an hour. I find that this block prevents people from scheduling surprise last minute meetings, and keeps me from working longer than 8 hours a day (I start at 8 AM and go until 4 PM).
I liked the fact that when I left the office it virtually impossible for me to jump back into anything until I got back to the office the next day. Now all my work is just sitting there in the next room just waiting for me to jump back in any time 24/7.
It's just the feeling of not making yourself unavailable during what are still working hours for others, not about being available after say 7pm. And I haven't actually needed to do that more than once or twice.
As someone who has done full time WFH for more than 5 years one skill you need to pick up is the ability to shut down around 5-6pm and avoid work on the weekends, which actually takes some self-discipline.
Same here. That is why my wife's office is on a main floor of the house and mine is in the basement. She's been remote for at least 10 years I think and I ran my own product development business since 2000.
its only an issue for my girlfriend and I when we're both on calls at the same time. I use a wireless 2.4Ghz headset so I can go outside on the patio - solves the issue nicely :-)
> It's now much easier to work past 5 or 6pm or whenever you would normally end
It is much easier but I also believe it's something people will get out of the habit of (or at least I hope). It really isn't a difficult habit to break.
Since working from home I do exactly the same as I would in the office:
At the same time every day I close the laptop and put it away.
It's actually easier for me to get away because no one is stopping me on the way out to ask me some questions or to just have a quick chat.
Productivity at my workplace went significantly up (and stayed up), but management has been clear that personal time is sacred, and I hardly ever see anyone on slack after work hours.
Honestly, the biggest impediments to productivity at my workplace have nothing to do with where we work and everything to do with management style (heavy-handed Agile/Scrum, micromanagement, the works).
Would anyone like to expound on how productivity is being measured? What metrics are used? What unintended consequences come up from the metrics? Can they be gamed?
It's pretty easy to game "working hours" when you're remote. Even an always on camera probably isn't enough and I wouldn't want my team to work under those conditions.
I'm also curious what productivity measures are being watched, especially for developers.
Yes, yes, yes. I am totally convinced that we can all start working 20 hours per week starting next Monday and the world will just keep going as normal. Only we will be healthier, happier and richer.
This is a very HN comment, because it ignores that a lot of people are paid for being physically present somewhere (not for their output).
I love the idea of a 20 hour workweek, but I also understand that the harsh reality is that it would make things like construction, building security, janitorial services, etc. 2x more expensive.
I personally think that would be a boon for society, but given how much everyone is worried about (largely transitory) inflation today, IDK how willing they would be to accept that inflationary pressure.
> a lot of people are paid for being physically present somewhere (not for their output).
Right. A FireFighter or an on-call IT Tech are excellent examples of how we can have 40 hours of presence while only requiring 20 hours of work. Making it acceptable for people to read a book if working 40 hours makes things better.
> love the idea of a 20 hour workweek, but I also understand that the harsh reality is that it would make things like construction, building security, janitorial services, etc. 2x more expensive
I'm not sure that's true. As I understand it, a lot of construction time is spent dealing with looking busy because of blocking tasks. But if we transition those jobs from hourly to piece-rate it solves a lot of problems.
Even building security only doing rounds/checking tapes 1/2 the time seems sufficient.
Funny that you mention it - piece rate in construction means 60+ hours a week. The more you do, the more you get paid and there's always work available. Not in all cases, but definitely a lot of them. As a contractor, you finish on one site/job, you have six others lined up.
I want to make sure people can live comfortably on the money they can earn in 20 hr/week. If want to work 60 hr/week for 15 years and then retire early good for them. I just want to make 20 hr/week the norm.
It doesn't work like that... many of life's biggest expenses are priced based on market rates (e.g. housing). If more work is available and some people choose to work more hours, they will be able to outbid tier who don't and drive up the cost of living.
One thing that the pandemic lockdowns have revealed in glowing detail is that the vast majority of the most critical and important jobs in society are among the lowest-paid: retail and foodservice.
> the most critical and important jobs in society are among the lowest-paid: retail and foodservice
Pay has nothing to do with how critical or important a job is. Nothing.
Pay is determined — like everything else — by supply and demand.
Nails are the most ‘critical and important’ component of a house. They are also the cheapest. Because the supply is endless. The chandelier in the entryway, on the other hand, is neither critical nor important, yet it costs a great deal more than a nail.
Nah, it's status. We have a teacher and nurse shortage in the US, they're critical professions, and they're super underpaid. Supply and demand doesn't explain the low wages.
Yeah but step 2 of that is "wage increase" (then step 3 of that is "either school A increases wages or school B increases wages and gets all the teachers, etc.) You can't arbitrarily pick a point at which you stop making an appeal to authority to Econ 101; it's all or nothing.
The point here is, the situation should make us ask ourselves "huh, I wonder why wages aren't increasing." But I can save you some time and tell you the answer is mostly we don't think those jobs are high status enough.
I'm compensated fairly, and my pension makes it actually quite well compensated. The career does suck and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but for someone needing mobility from generational poverty it can work.
The career opportunities upon retirement are nothing to be trivialized either. Compensation there may not be SWE level, but it's WELL above median.
Military isn't paid too badly once you factor in pensions and benefits. The amount of salary that you'd have to save to construct something similar out of 401ks is... high.
I don’t think many people understand just HOW high.
Aside from monetary compensation (which can range widely, and typically is made up of 25-50% tax sheltered disability pay) there is health insurance at a maximum out of pocket of $3600/year for a family ($600 premium plus $3000 catastrophic cap), tax free shopping, discounted fuel, free flights, remarkably cheap lodging all over the US and in allied countries, and the list goes on.
The last calculation I saw for an average Senior Enlisted retiree was that you would need a lump sum of in excess of $3 million to hope to compare, invested at a decent return. Albeit that’s not completely accurate, but it’s as close as we can get given such different financial vehicles.
It's more like the requirement to do the job without being able to quit for at least a few years (and then they can call you back anytime for another few).
Yeah, but if you decided to pay nurses/firefighters the same salary for putting in half the hours, you'd have to hire twice as many to cover the same shifts. Net result is your labor costs would double.
>This is a very HN comment, because it ignores that a lot of people are paid for being physically present somewhere (not for their output).
Are you saying you think most people on HN do piecework? Because I sort of took for granted they were salaried.
At any rate, different companies within an industry area can be quite different.
I have had jobs involving programming that were:
- salaried
- hourly, with overtime
- required time entry of billable/nonbillable projects worked on in 15 or 6 minute increments
- required using a time clock (but not intraday time entry)
- union
- non-union
Only the time clock one (salaried, non-union) was primarily focused on "butts in seats". They also had something in the orientation about sleeping at your desk not being allowed.
A friend of mine was about to interview at a company when he found out from Glassdoor they required salaried engineers to swipe in and out (among other micromanagement). Cancelled the interview and the recruiter was really miffed and acted like punching a clock is normal for software devs.
Some people did dislike it enough to leave online reviews about it.
But everywhere I'd previously worked, I had to account for every minute of the day so clocking in at the beginning of the day and out at the end was a million times less micro-manager-y from my viewpoint.
I was a part-time, paid firefighter in Woodinville, WA for seven years. That was about twenty-five years ago now.
I worked twelve hour overnight shifts about ten times a month, supplementing the full-time crews (24 hour shifts.) I was a signed off as a firefighter, driver-operator, EMT Basic, and acting lieutenant.
Maybe it's different elsewhere, but in our city no one spent their time doing nothing. There was always training and drilling, classes to attend, physical training, station, rig and equipment maintenance, and usually, a few calls to run.
Most people were friendly most of the time.
We did usually watch a couple of hours of television or a movie most nights before we racked out.
Secretaries aren't an obvious case in my experience. A good number of them appear to me to work as hard as the boss they assist. And in some cases they appear pretty much as capable (but they never carry anything like the same responsibility).
This is not true. Not only is the Big Mac in Denmark nominally more expensive, but so is almost everything else. Actual purchasing power after taxes is not necessarily higher, but it also varies with the city.
Per https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index, in December 2020, “A Big Mac costs DKr30.00 in Denmark and US$5.66 in the United States.” Using the listed exchange rate of DKr 6.12/US$, that’s $4.90 in Denmark, so in fact somewhat less. Which implies that the DKr is undervalued vs. the US$, at least for this particular one-item basket of goods.
All the Scandinavian countries have high cost of living. Go to one of their supermarkets, you will be shocked. I think on balance they are better off though.
I was really surprised how expensive basic food is in New York compared to UK[0]. Things like fruit, veg, cheese, cereal were more than twice the price. The only things that were cheaper were hotdogs and hotdogs buns. Eating out is very expensive in scandinavia but I don’t think supermarket food is expensive compared to the US.
[0] Prices at the large supermarkets don’t vary much if at all between shops across the UK
I had the opposite experience. I suspect people spending time abroad temporarily, but long enough to go grocery shopping, tend to arrive at the most expensive grocery stores during their temporary stay.
I'm not talking about Wholefoods, that's overpriced here as well. I'm talking about a slightly grubby supermarket in an unfashionable part of Brooklyn about 5 years ago. Maybe food prices vary a lot across the US, they don't really in the UK as the big 4 supermarkets all advertise their offers nationally. Smaller supermarkets can be more expensive, but an extra 20% not 300%.
Yes, yes, yes, yes! I've been doing 20 hour weeks (on average) for the past 1-2 years and I can say with great confidence that I finally seem to have achieved a sustainable work/life balance. And of those hours worked there has practically been zero waste.
20 hours at 100% efficiency is so much better than 40 hours at 60%, for all parties involved. Even if the latter has slightly higher overall output, when you look at it long term (health/happiness) the former wins hands down.
This is probably true - the problem with modern post-industrial economies is weak demand, not supply. We've juiced supply to the absolute hilt, but people are too busy spending their time at jobs and not consuming. We could easily scale down to 20 hour workweeks and the economy would keep on growing.
It's a prisoner's dilemma situation though, as others point out. Some people are going to insist on wasting their new extra free time at another job. The solution would be to put a hard cap on labor hours per person, mandating an overtime pay requirement that follows the worker from job to job.
> people are too busy spending their time at jobs and not consuming.
You are sitting on a trillion dollar marketing opportunity here.
The problem is that our culture does not strongly encourage consumerism during work hours. Beyond a couple of decorative trinkets on the cubible walls, people don't spend much on or at their workplace.
Capitalism teaches us we must fix that glitch.
The right solution is to create a culture of "office bling". You don't want to be the only person in your office without a gold throne, do you? Are you really writing on the whiteboard with a fucking Expo marker from Office Depot when you could show your worth by using the new $17,000 Montblanc Whiteboard Excelsior? Oh, you had a Starbucks latte on your break? Plebian. I had a flat white made with kopi luwak and gold flakes.
Why should we only burn cash distracting ourselves from our miserable home lives, when we could also burn cash distracting ourselves from our miserable work lives too?
My point is that we don't need to waste irreplaceable moments of our lives so heavily focused on production in service of a consumption side that is wildly out of balance. We can produce far more than we can consume, and cutting back on labor would restore some balance and arguably increase prosperity and happiness across the board.
How about..a salary based on the resources you need/want to survive...so that those who work less (indirectly contributing more to society by sharing their job, childcare, volunteering or just being mentally healthy enough to think of the"next big thing" and directly by ecologically diminishing consumption) get paid more ...? Tax the higher earners and subsidise the "work less" ...then suddenly wages and automation go up as businesses have to compete for a diminishing work pool...
> so that those who work less (indirectly contributing more to society by sharing their job, childcare, volunteering or just being mentally healthy enough to think of the"next big thing" and directly by ecologically diminishing consumption) get paid more ...
Yeah, several of my friends “indirectly contribute” with their extra free time by smoking pot and watching youtube and Netflix. They don’t really consume less ecologically either since they drive around more with their free time. This is not something I see paying off as a societal investment.
Sorry to hear that, it's anecdotal evidence, seems very cliché too..... I guess the question is how would one set up a system of checks and balances...in the case of your friends, sometimes pot is a good phase to go through, it certainly helps the informal economy....and driving ...well seems like they're bored..maybe need more likeminded "friends" to do something creative?
>> Yes, yes, yes. I am totally convinced that we can all start working 20 hours per week starting next Monday and the world will just keep going as normal. Only we will be healthier, happier and richer.
Well no. Because some people will use that to work 2 jobs and make twice as much money. Then inflation will take that into account, prices will rise, and everyone will end up working 2 20-hour jobs. If you ever want to work significantly less hours I suspect it will require laws forbidding people to work more than X, and even then people will take that second job under the table.
I used to work 60-80 hours a week in the summers and 60+ between a full credit load and a couple of part time jobs. I went to bed twice a day for a couple of years because I was working swing shift and going to school.
I now have a 9-5 office job. I am apparently capable of working at least twice as many hours but I choose not to because I don't have to.
There are already people making twice as much (and more) than I do in as much or less time.
I don't think a 20 hour week for knowledge workers would have the effect you claim.
This is called the hedonic treadmill, and is why we don't have a more leisurely lifestyle in general.
John Maynard Keynes famously predicted something like a 10-20 hour work week by the year 2000. You can actually have that today... if you are willing to live at the standard of living of someone in the 1930s.
That would mean a much smaller house, much less technology, a very cheap car or public transit, vanilla food, only a few suits of clothes, and bare bones health care.
Instead we tend to use our gains to get more space (houses today outside dense cities are huge), more tech, more education, better health care, designer hipster food, more entertainment, and so on.
Living in a 1930's home with a 2010 Toyota Corolla in the garage I somehow doubt that. We're talking (where I live) $600-1200 before tax income. In the dead of winter the utilities alone can be close to $500.
Your 1930s house is almost certainly not typical of the median house that people lived in the 1930s. One third of Americans didn’t even have full indoor plumbing in 1930.
For one the fact that it’s preserved likely means it’s one of the finest homes of the era. Two it’s heavily updated inside. Air conditioning, modern appliances, high capacity electrical circuits, fire safety, better windows and insulation, etc.
In 1930s people wouldn't heat the whole house and wouldn't heat it to 70 degrees in the dead of winter. People would heat one room to 50 degrees and stay there most of the time, and put on a jacket. Walking around in a t-shirt in the dead of winter is a very modern thing. You don't realize how much higher your standard for comfort are.
In the 1930s you would have a wood burning stove for heat and, if you were outside of a city, possibly limited or no electricity. Almost certainly no phone or a party line.
You can get those utility costs down by living right. :)
You comment implies that utility costs would be significantly lower if OP used 1930s technology, but I’d assume that using a wood burning stove to heat their house would be much costlier. Modern technology typically allows one to use resources much more efficiently, even if we tend to use much more of those resources.
The key is to use anything not just efficiently but sparingly. The heat may not be on at night, you can use thicker covers.
But the cost of wood isn't bad. The worst winter bills appear to arise from heating oil from what I've heard anecdotally, which is common in old houses in New England.
I have stepped off the hedonic treadmill. I prepare nearly all of my own food and I eat extremely well. Ingredients are cheap. I don't live in the USA so my healthcare is unaffected. The internet is a thing so I can (and do) continue to educate myself for free.
But yes, I don't have an extensive wardrobe or a large house. So what?
What be gone further. Live on a sailboat. I be free electricity. All I pay for is the gas for cooking, and a bit of diesel. Anchoring is free. And it’s paradise. No cars. No pollution.
If corporate profits were lower, you wouldn't have the giant companies of today pushing USA' economy so high, and pushing the wages to the highest in the world, bar some tiny states.
When looking at those tables, keep in mind that taxes in most of those countries (except maybe Switzerland) are significantly higher than the US taxes. In fact, the US median wage earner pays almost no income tax, only payroll.
Corporate profits are after wages. They could have the same profit before wages - but if the share was distributed more evenly, overall profit would be lower, and the worker would be better off.
It's not like this would've affected companies at all. R&D is at an all time low compared to profits. It's not like they couldn't afford to invest in R&D to keep an advantage if workers were getting paid more.
Seeing as inequality is higher than during the Bell Epoch in France - and any other time in recorded history, this doesn't seem preposterous.
> It's not like this would've affected companies at all
How can you be so sure? Tens of billions of profit every year/quarter make these companies very appealing for investors, allowing them to spend unlimited cash to expand their business.
A well run company that has limited profits and expansion will then in turn have less R&D. Think IBM, Oracle - they haven't kept up the pace and got seriously behind MS, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google etc.
I don't have a crystal ball or a degree in economics, but to me it's pretty clear that a successful company will make life better for everyone, including R&D and menial jobs. Say what you want, but Amazon warehouse jobs are better than other no skill needed job in their respective areas.
This isn't how investing in an established company like Google today works (where most people invest most of their money). When you buy Google stock, it almost never affects their R&D budget.
You could argue that startups wouldn't be able to raise as much money, sure. And they DEFINITELY wouldn't be able to if interest rates were higher.
But the America of today (>95% of corporate profits) came from companies that weren't able to raise ridiculous amounts of money because of low interest rates from the last decade.
Startups from the last 10 years might have a lot of market cap - but their profits are very, very small compared to just FAANG+M - let alone the rest of the S&P 500.
> That would mean a much smaller house, much less technology, a very cheap car or public transit, vanilla food, only a few suits of clothes, and bare bones health care.
I'm not too far from this, 30 square meter apartment, no car, make most of my own meals, have only a few inexpensive clothing and don't have private insurance (because universal healthcare is better). I have a fair bit of technology but that barely makes a dent in my overall budget, in the last couple of years it's just the internet and the electricity to run them.
10 hours a week (assuming I could get divide my current salary by 4) would barely pay the mortgage/rent due to inflated housing costs. With 20 hours I could pay food/water/electricity and probably have enough left over for some indulgences.
So this is feasible for me, but I just creep into top 10% income bracket in my country, it's definitely not achievable for most people.
Hedonic treadmill is different. This is about labor flooding the market and driving its price down, and auction-priced (supply-constrained) goods being bid up in price (like housing).
| a much smaller house, much less technology, a very cheap car or public transit, vanilla food, only a few suits of clothes, and bare bones health care.
You would have to be highly skilled to do that, the average worker couldn't get anywhere close to that lifestyle on 10-20 hours a week.
By that logic, you should be enforcing a 60 hour/week, to achieve even better goals.
The problem is that job != job, because different jobs have different requirements.
A doctor needs to be available continuously, but he doesn’t necessarily need to be working continuously. An on-call doctor needs to be available 24/7. A general practitioner may only need to show up for scheduled appointments in strict timeslots.
A programmer on a long term project needs to eventually put in hours, but precisely when he puts in those hours matters less. A senior developer is productive anytime he’s available for advice (and there are others working to be advised — with off-shore resources, this can mean extended availability)
A warehouse worker is productive only when he’s explicitly doing labor. Being available for labor, but not doing any, is worthless.
A programmer on a short term or last-mile phase of a project needs to put in the hours, but on a strict timeline — there’s no room to skip a day and make up for it tomorrow.
Companies already acknowledge this, albeit implicitly. The higher you are in the hierarchy, the more valuable your availability and the less your labor. CEOs don’t get to have strict no-work vacations, but they also don’t have strict 9-5 work/life split, because they need to be available all the time. At the same time, they can go normal days without any real work to do, because they aren’t needed for anything.
You're kind of begging the question when you take "The 40 hour/week company will get more done" as a given, because that is exactly what's at stake here, isn't it? People upthread are theorizing that those extra 20 hours a week really don't make us get more done, because (to quote one of the comments above), "the rest is socialization, pointless meetings, lunches, or trying to look busy"
I used to think this. But, I've learned that it assumes a bunch of things that aren't really true at many, many companies:
- Clear goals that the team is bought into
- Productive people who can sustain emotional enthusiasm for extended time periods
- An environment where intrinsically motivated people can thrive, and/or incentives for extrinsically motivated people
- A healthy feedback loop so people know when they're improving and are rewarded for it
- etc
Looked at this way, a team of 5 people working 20 hours per week in this type of company can vastly outperform a team of people working 40 hours per week at a company that lacks the above items. (And I'm probably missing some)
That isn't how comparisons work though. You can't compare a 20-hour/week company with good culture to a 40-hour/week company with toxic culture. You have two variables uncontrolled in that comparison.
Compare both companies at 40 or both at 20. The good-culture-40-hour would outperform the both the good-culture-20-hour and bad-culture-40-hour so why wouldn't all companies aim for 40/hours with a good culture?
It could be argued that it is impossible to have a good culture and 40 hours, but that needs a lot of analysis.
(You are working to argue that the comparison being made isn't useful and haven't gotten there. For instance, if I was going to build a company, I'd certainly want to know what parts of a culture were important to a company that compared so well against the longer working company)
I'm saying if you have the above items checked off, then you're ahead of many, many teams. (It feels to me like 99% of teams but that's just looking out my own eyes)
> Also, imagine if your doctor only worked 20 hours a week.
That would be fabulous. Much better than doctors working to a regime designed by a cocaine addict that sees them punch-drunk from a lack of sleep by the end of their rosters.
I've come to believe that big software projects are like a marathon. Burning up your maximum energy every step of the way simply isn't going to yield better results. You need to create a pace and keep to it. Sometimes you speed up, sometimes you slow down, but saying 60 hours/week from start to finish is gonna be counterproductive.
I remember reading some studies on this, I think it was in the world of game development. 60 hrs/week delivers more than 40 hrs/week for the first few weeks, but then it reduces and after about 6 weeks, you're delivering less working 60 hrs/week than you were at 40.
Of course, there are lots of related issues, like are your employees getting enough sleep? Very varied work might tax employees differently. Is 8hr days, 5 on, 2 off necessarily the optimal pattern? Can people work more efficiently for longer if they're working on something they truly believe in?
Given how many people die from medical mistakes, many of which can be traced to fatigue, maybe we'd be better off with two doctors instead of one tired/exhausted fatigue zombie.
This is the same problem as people working 40 hours a week have competing with people working 80 hours a week have; they mostly can’t. Even if the last 20 hours are so marginal that really, you might as well not have bothered the person who worked 80 hours a week got 1.5 times as much done, and in any job that isn’t totally routinised the knowledge and skills gained from working compound. They compound faster for those who work more hours.
I think the point of the original post in this thread is that 40 hour weeks are in reality 20 hour productive weeks. So a company working 40 hour weeks where 20 hours are productive have the same output as a company working 20 hour weeks where 20 hours are productive.
But isn't 20 hours/week or 40 hours/week a negotiated agreement when you got hired? If you want 20 hours/week, get paid less and stop whining about companies should pay more for less amount of mandatory work hours. The discussion should have been more like employees should have more options on choosing how many mandatory work hours they are willing to offer a week when signing agreement with a company.
I am utterly surprised, though not all people here are from the capitalism driven world but majorities are talking like they are living in socialist world.
I can't convince myself that would work. What if it isn't that people hit a peak of productivity at 20 hours of work per week, it's the minimum they try to do and still be acceptable to their boss. This could happen if bosses just assume that people work close to 90-100% of the time during working hours. I am sure no one is honest about it.
If 20 hours were the new weekly target instead of 40 it could negatively impact people if productivity declines on crucial things. That could happen if the new minimum acceptable amount of work to management were, say, 10 hours. So people would similarly spend 50% of their 20 hour working week avoiding work. So there could be a temporary shock throughout the economy as supply of things decreased until things adjusted.
My company’s core philosophy is that there are only 20 productive “creative” hours of coding in the average week. We employ our devs and ask that they aim for 17 hours of billed time to our clients; the remaining 3 hours is spent on our internal sync and calls with clients. The rest of the week is theirs: if they want to keep coding, do it; if they want to mow the lawn, that’s great too.
After almost 8 years with this model, I think the evidence is overwhelming that we maintain somewhere between 85 and 90% of the productive output of our 40+ hour/week counterparts.
I’m excited at the prospect of a positive shift in work/life balance coming out of the massive WFH experiment that’s happened over the past 18 months.
Seconded. I've never had a place where I wasn't supposed to bill a full 40 hours and it's hell. Any distraction or disruption ends up eating into your not work time, or you fudge the numbers and bill for work when you're not working. I could absolutely be fully productive and provide the most value to the client for 20 hours a week.
I’m a cofounder. At a surface level this is a running joke between me and my team: they won’t unionize no matter how many times I insist they do.
More fundamentally I come from a strong Union family. My father is a professor, my grandfather worked for petrochemical companies after the war, his father came from West Virginia and so on. I think that the high salaries and plentiful amenities gloss over the need for a real strong union presence in software. It’s exactly when workers have the power that they ought to capitalize to entrench that power. All we have to do is look at how companies like Amazon churn through H1B workers to see how brutal dev work _can_ be. While development skills are still a relatively scarce commodity we owe it to the next generation of bit pushers to create a strong voice for the rights of labor. Our power as a workforce can then be better leveraged to improve conditions for workers everywhere.
Unions are not — and have never been — perfect, but that shouldn’t be a reason not to fight for fair labor practices in every industry.
> they won’t unionize no matter how many times I insist they do
Wow ... I would think if management is convinced it would make life better for the workers, management could make the case, bring in the organizers and get it done. There are definitely some ripe topics: H1Bs as you mention; age discrimination for sure; wage fixing. Of course the labor-friendly status quo disincentivizes "job security" but I'm sure you agree that's not the only or even primary reason for a union.
I'm not trying to imply it's simple or easy -- I'm pro-labor, a founder, and a dev, and I'm _very_ confused about what unions mean for us and would like to build a cohesive narrative.
The opposite happened in mine: people missed socialization so much that the number of pointless meetings exploded.
I just checked and I've been on the phone for 19 hours last week (out of a 35h work week), and I'm only attending like half of them that are actually related to work, i.e. skipping meetings that are just for coffee and talk, lunch break videogames, and whatever they do in the discord (yes, they created a discord to "keep in touch").
The best was last summer when we had a 2/3 office/home split, which left people happy in terms of social contact and at least I could work from home without nonsense for 3 days.
Remote work productivity mid-pandemic won’t necessarily translate post-pandemic because in the pandemic the other ways we could spend our time were so limited. In contrast, right mow I could be at the gym, having a long lunch with a friend, doing errands… The new freedom and temptation to do those things will gradually undermine the remote option, until
bosses finally tire of the cat and mouse and everyone must go back to their cubicles.
>>Remote work productivity mid-pandemic won’t necessarily translate post-pandemic
None of the 'problems' you mention will necessarily come to pass either. Unless you have a crystal ball, you're future is no more likely then any other...
Having worked from home for 20 years now, I can tell you that hasn't been my experience.
Don't forget commute times, which can be bad especially in high cost of living cities where you have to live really far from things to afford a decent place.
For us it saved everyone an average of 1-2 hours per day.
Also consider the energy savings. Commuting by car every day uses tons of energy. Of course this is somewhat offset by more HVAC being consumed by houses, but I highly doubt that totally erases the savings from not driving so much. Cars are very energy intensive.
This is a refreshing perspective that takes into the reality of what humans are able to do, over time. Quite a good idea as well, why not spend some time taking walks, doing housework, and being in nature rather than standing and chatting by the watercooler/coffe machine, having meetings with no benefit or trying to surf the web without anyone noticing.
I've worked remotely for years on and off from the past two decades and I understand that you can't just work remotely. You have to socialize as well. Many companies think 'remote work' is about work, and that is far from true. Every aspect of 'work' needs to be done remotely. If you're not socialising and doing fun things remotely then people will grow increasingly isolated and eventually quit.
Not the person you asked, but work has objective measures of the organization (bugs closed, number of commits, etc), and those doubled.
Then management said they thought planning and roadmap would implode, but those also (subjectively) went much better than usual this year, with written down decisions, and discrete decision points instead of useless repeated verbal syncs.
Also, it seems as though fewer high profile things slipped than usual, but that’s hard to measure year-to-year.
Finally, surveys say a large majority of the employees strongly prefer indefinite part or full time work from home.
In my opinion, the reality of working from home is that 20-30 hour work weeks need to be acceptable and we should use the rest of our time on non-working things, just like we did in the office, but now that time can be more meaningful to us.