I’ll play devils advocate. Say you work 40 hour work week with 20 hours of “productive” time. If we moved to a 30 hour 4 day work week would you actually only have 15 hours of productive time per week? I say this because I don’t think all the non productive parts of working life would go away, instead we would just get less done.
I've recently negotiated a 4-day work week with my employer. It's been a huge quality of life improvement. Whether I make $80k/yr or $150k/yr, it doesn't matter as much to me as quality of life. Maybe I'm an outlier, but money isn't everything.
If smaller companies can't compete on the huge salaries and options that larger companies provide, they can certainly compete on flexible work schedules. A developer working 4 days a week is pretty much just as useful to me as the engineering manager as a developer who is working 5 days a week. Budget and schedule.
if everyone does it, labor will become more scarse, and wages should go back up too to recover the some or all of missing 1/5, so please everyone do this!
Only if total production goes down. If productivity increases enough to compensate (what really looks like the case), it should have no impact on wages.
> If smaller companies can't compete on the huge salaries and options that larger companies provide, they can certainly compete on flexible work schedules.
They certainly can compete. Just raise more or adopt a stock comp model.
If we adopted a four day work week do you think people would feel a burned out feeling at Thursday at 11am? I honestly _don’t know_ and think some long term experimentation is needed
There's a labor shortage in US right now. You can feel it everywhere: from having to book car mechanic appointment weeks in advance to construction projects going to standstill.
Everyone I've ever known has loved working 4 10's and honestly 4 8's would be even better. They never complain about burnout and a 3-day weekend every week leaves them energized and recharged for the next weeks' work. I only ever hear complaints from people working 4 12's which at that point you'd hear the usual complaints of anyone working 8 hours of overtime a week.
The fact I've never once heard a complaint about 4 10's from anyone I've ever known to work them says a lot compared to the usual 5 8's which I hear complaints from about everyone (including myself).
Possibly, but at some point it has to stop, right? Take the extreme example of working 4 hours, one day a week. If you are even marginally interested in what you’re doing, I can’t imagine anyone feeling burned out by that. I just don’t know what the threshold is (and it’s certainly different for different people). A lot of it probably has to do with how busy people’s lives are outside of work, and if they feel like they’re able to manage their lives at least somewhat stress free.
Yeah it would have to stop obviously. But let’s take it the other way! Do you think working 20 hours a day 7 days a week is optional efficiency? We need to find the right balance!
I honestly don't think I would. I am exhausted by Friday and then the weekend is basically just Saturday so there's hardly any time to recharge during it.
My experience is that the burnout and wasted time comes from all the crap that distracts from real work -- the meetings, emails, bug boards, etc. When I don't have all these things getting between me and the IDE, I'm far more productive and get a lot more enjoyment from my work. Of course, if all the crap were cut out, I'd probably be looking at two days of work per week, never mind four.
In the past several years most of the burnout and wasted time I’ve experienced has come from libraries, frameworks, build/CI systems, architectural patterns, and so on that simply suck, or at the very least fail to properly work together. Unfortunately, they’re all mainstream technologies that people seem to think are perfectly okay, and that fighting against your tools simply in order to develop good solutions to the actual domain problems is just what coding is supposed to be.
I'm genuinely curious which of those items you consider as sucky and why. I am asking because I've recently been moved from a C++ to a JS team at my current workplace, and now I am exposed to this wide range of new tools which are all alien to me.
I contacted and spoke at length with the Austrian Kosumantenschutz. https://www.arbeiterkammer.at/beratung/konsumentenschutz/ind... The product is clearly and at minimum a case of false advertising as there is nothing approaching a computer chip inside. However and though sympathetic the KS/AK said they couldn't do anything and couldn't refer me to anybody who could. I found this rather surprising.
I don't understand what the problem is: The data in the double-blind study clearly shows no statistically significant effects (just look at N and the standard deviation bars) and the company doesn't claim that there would be such effects.
The company only says there is a "positive trend" which there indeed is.
Doesn't matter if the SD bars make it obvious. No layman can read such a chart. The text 110% makes it sound like the study PROVES without any doubt that the product had an effect.
"the lactate measurement shows a difference"
"The lower lactate value with Powerinsole means longer performance and a later onset of muscle fatigue."
and finally
"Even with the first application of the power insole, a lower skin conductance is evident compared to the placebo. This means that the power insole can help reduce stress levels."
Nowhere are they talking about statistical significance.
Yep, I'd love to do that, but I'm squarely in the health sector, no getting around that sadly. I might end up cutting some of the main features to qualify as a lifestyle app though. Sad but better than not launching I guess.
Not to mention almost all pharmacies selling homeopathic rubbish. I find this particularly irritating given the ridiculously regulations and control around things like buying paracetamol or ibuprofen.
Medical and ethical standards are in complete free fall in European pharmacies. I was told by my vet to rinse my dog’s eyes in sterile isotonic saline solution. When I went to the pharmacy to ask for it they didn’t know what it was. They suggested using chlorhexidine wound disinfectant instead.
My poor dog would have probably been blind or worse if I had taken the advice. But they don’t care, they just want to move products, whatever the cost.
Thanks. I’m sure regular table salt and googling the concentration would have done the trick, but there’s something to be said for those 30 ml plastic vials you break off a ribbon that you know have the right stuff and is sterile and stays that way until you use it. I don’t want to take risks with things I don’t have enough knowledge to make them calculated risks. But it worries me when some of the people we defer to wouldn’t even pass high school chemistry.
After having checked five pharmacies with nobody having heard of it the vet took pity on me and gave me a handful out of their supply closet.
These products including powerinsole are marketed by a local tv station and program https://www.puls4.com/2-minuten-2-millionen/staffel-8 which pretends to be a startup investment show but is really just an infomercial for woo products.
What ridiculous regulations are there with regard to ibuprofen and paracetamol? Are you talking about the fact that medicines are not allowed to be sold in supermarkets?
I think it's a good thing, since it's a pretty good guarantee that you actually get what you buy.
You can get ibuprofen and paracetamol at any pharmacy in Austria for a few euros without a prescription. And in every district there's always a pharmacy that is open 24h.
they can and do give proper medical advice on the medical products they are selling but at the same time they are selling homeopathic products and other magic pills, powders and devices from the same counter. This seems conflict of interest / ethics. I am not sure why pharmacies are not regulated but that is the way it is in Austria.
It's unfortunately surprisingly common for doctors and nurses to recommend all kinds of quack treatments in Austria. The pharmacies are not the only profiteers of these scams.
Define fair and unfair. If it was so "unfairly" lucrative, I would have to ask why everyone does not invest in pharma? Why are tech companies where much of the VC funds land?
Perhaps it is because there a huge amount of risk involved?
The reason why Vienna is so liveable is because it's the heartland of the Social Democrats. They governed the city from 1919-1934 and ever since 1945. As much as I don't like the current Social Democratic Party, their predecessors transformed Vienna into what it is today. A good place to live for everyone.
In fact at it's imperial height, Vienna had a higher population than today(2.1M then 1.9M now), living in significantly less space. The living conditions of the poorer part of the city were pretty grim. This is what got the Social Democrats to gain power in the first place.
This history also means there's a lot of pre-1914 city per capita today. The urban planning of that era has tended to result in more liveable neighborhoods today, compared to districts & cities built from scratch more recently.
His racing antics and desire to win at any cost aside, Schumi was brilliant. There were way less real time metrics of pit stop strategies, more variables like refueling and less sensors in the car. He was a master strategist and now with each team having dedicated teams around data and strategy, I doubt we will see a complete driver like him.
Calling your pit stops makes sense, sort of, for drivers. Top drivers like Vettel (well pre-Sbinalla Vettel) have a better "feel" for the tires and can gauge how they are doing. But this often times is risky and breaks down in races because the human brain, especially under the pressure of F1 racing, is not going to be tracking thousandths, hundredths, or even tenths of seconds off lap times over 4-5KM of traveled distance. You can hear frustration in engineers voices when trying to convince a top driver they need to get new tires after ignoring previous calls to "box" (come in for a pitstop).
