Slashdot Mirror
On Point On Slacking
Wellington Grey writes "This week the NPR show On Point has an excellent episode exploring slacking and the American work ethic. (note that it's audio) It touches on some issues that may be of interest to geeks such as outsourcing, the church of the subgenius and the eternal conflict between wanting to be a lazy bum and wanting to work hard. What do slashdotters think: does America need more slack or more work?" It is summer vacation after all, right?
What do slashdotters think: does America need more slack or more work?
Hmmm. Which category does slashdot fit into? That's what I thought...
This guy's the limit!
That this even is being asked illustrates a very serious problem in this country. We are a nation of slobs and lazy asses.
:D
I say this WHILE posting to slashdot.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Sincerely,
Your boss.
Does the fact that I'm on Slashdot give you any indication of how I'm leaning?
Slacking is easy. Working is hard.
:-)
And my lunch break is over, so I'm off to work now.
I was too lazy to listen to it.
That noone that's reading Slashdot and listening to audio reports on a Wednesday afternoon is actually slacking.
Funny, but I am in the process of trying to figure out how to schedule the work I need to get done this summer around my european counterparts 8 weeks of vacation. Eight weeks, not including holidays! Funny, they never get labeled as lazy.
... that it's in audio. Gonna have to wait till my lunch break to listen to it.
I've found that in all of my jobs there are people willing to work and do their job and their are people who will just do what they need to get by.
Personally, I feel this has to do with how they grew up. Rarely do I find someone that was spoiled during their life become a good worker. I think that America needs isn't so much more slacking or working, but the kids do need to be raised to earn what they get so that once they get into a true paycheck job they have the mindset to actually work and do their job and be team member.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Michael Bolton: You were supposed to come in Saturday. What were you doing?
Peter Gibbons: Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be.
My studio - www.graylands.ca
Channel your inner Wally. He'll help you decide the best course of (in)action to take;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Audio format? What the hell?!
;-)
Sheesh! Can't someone post a summary. I don't want to wait to download a friggin' audio stream, I just want it paraphrased for me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It isnt work ethic, it is enviornment in the IT sector, IT is the whipping bys of every dept in the orginization, we are told to enforce security policy then bitched at by those who issued the order while we carry it out, we are on call all the time, we are somehow responsable for every userland mistake, spam, popups...it all falls to us. The users f**k things up, the IT guys give up their weekends to fix it.
Comments? How can there be comments already? Clearly these people didn't LTTFP :)
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
I've been an avid Slackware user since about 1999. I've been buying all the CD releases that I can so I can support Patrick Volkerding (Slackware Project Lead) in this best Linux Distribution ever!
Oh wait... That isn't what you mean by "Slacking"?
Next, you're going to tell me that "Hacking" has multiple meanings too, eh?
Work use to be about getting something done, being proud of one's effort and seeing a result. As a consultant I "fix" networks and systems. I didn't built them. I didn't buy them. I don't even use them. I just fix them. I am "good" at what I do but my "work" is a far cry from something my parents would call "work".
I am sitting in the office of one of most powerful men in our state (past tense, he now runs a firm) and I see what he has done and what I have done. I get kudos because I can tap on a keyboard pushing around a mouse. I hate it.
Now, in my spare time I have taken on creating content. Photogography and documentires. That's "work" and it isn't all fun at times but when I am done, there is an outcome with an emotional component.
Most westerners, and Americans in particular, are sleep deprived as the norm trying to get in some semblence of a life between work. The majority of us have also become stimulant addicts in an attempt to make this easier, which in turn makes the stress of the day even more severe. On top of all that, we live in a society where it's increasingly difficult to stay abreast of the latest changes in science, society, and the world and where most of us lack the time to comfortably allocate study time for the sake of pure learning. There's little time for quality family time, especially with those not in our own household. And there's precious little time to work on independant and alturistic projects which in theory could be of benefit to soceity. And if one finds any of that objectionable, he's instantly tagged as lazy.
The world is one messed up place sometimes.
Everything will be taken away from you.
does taking a break so as to relax the mind and body become slacking? /. might be considered excessive...
Ive noticed that some of our office tenants enforce a 'no web browsing' rule, but allow employees to head outside for a smoke break...
It blows my mind that certain activities are considered slacking activities whilst others are as necessary as going to the bathroom. Of course spending 4hrs looking over
Excellent Phoenix AZ Office Space - Thistle Landing
Obviously. If I'm doing something awesome in work, then work feels less like work, and I'm hammering away. But if it's a ton of little BS tasks like I have today, and/or programming in VB or VBScript, then I'm slacking. Doesn't matter if it's summer or not.
My name is Wootzor von Leetenhaxor
It's not that Americns are lazy, rather there is just no reward for working hard anymore. Gone are the days where initiave, hard work, and a little ingenuity was rewarded. Now it's just a another day of busy work.
When was the first time you regretted hearing the phrase "twenty four by seven"?
How many weeks of vacation do the Europeans get?
Goddam right I need some slack.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
can't work! must post!
This guy's the limit!
WTF? i thought Slackware-11.0 was just released!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Without a doubt, America needs much, much more Slack.
It seems to me that Americans work for the sake of working. We never take any time off to enjoy the fruits of our labors. I think we need to learn to enjoy the things we work for rather than just working for them and moving on to work some more.
I have not met a single soul outside of the medical and legal profession whose actual and typical workload could not be accomplished in 30-40 hours of real honest work. The problem is that most of them spend at least 2 hours a day screwing around, reading Slashdot, reading CNN, chatting in the aisles, or doing make-work while waiting for somebody else to deliver something that they need to continue their legitimate work. Now and then we get a rush ("I told the client you'd have it by tomorrow." "That's 2 weeks of work!" "Well, get started!") but by and large I don't know anybody who doesn't spend at least 2-3 hours of their 10 and 12 hour days goofing off to one degree or another. Or, more commonly, 2-3 hours of their 8 hour days, which means they have to come in the weekend. This is invariably blamed on the boss, who is also goofing around but never shows up on Saturday.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
If US companies gave their employees more reasonable vacation allowances, they wouldn't need to slack so much at work to stay sane.
Yes, I have answered the question rather than listened to the program. I'll download it later and listen in the car.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
We need more resting when we're supposed to rest, so we aren't completely exhausted when we need to work. When we're not at work, we're doing a million other things, never resting.
We're a country of poeple that are burnt out, trying to make up for it by working more.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
TFA: "Every man is, or wants to be, an idler," wrote the great Samuel Johnson in 1758.
I don't think this is necessarily true.. if I didn't have to work, and had a complete life of leisure, I wouldn't be happy. I'd need to do work of one form or another. It would definitely be something I enjoyed (no doubt for bad/average pay - enjoyable jobs seem to have that kind of relationship). I may be in the minority here, but, you know, a surprising number of people who win the lottery here state the same thing.
Then again, both my parents came into this country (England) from overseas (China, France) so maybe it's the immigrant ethic. Who knows.
We are a nation of slobs and lazy asses.
Yah, I guess. I work hard, though -- I ain't no slob or a lazy ass. This means that sometimes between jobs, I can go weeks without needing any pants.
Remember, kids: Vacation is the distance between jobs!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
The Goal : A Process of Ongoing Improvement.
Who Moved My Cheese?
Most people don't like change. Especially in the tech world, you adapt, or you go under.
Seriously, we need more vacation. If we got more vacation, we wouldn't need to slack off at work at all. We'd be rested enough to do our jobs. But we don't get nearly enough. We're not slacking - we're dog tired, burnt out, whatever you want to call it. Give us more time off and I'll bet productivity will go up more than enough to compensate.
And cut out PTO while you're at it. Only thing that does is lump your vacation days and your sick days together. It'd be a good idea if we got enough of them but we don't. So every time someone at the office gets the flu, they think "If I take sick days off I'm losing vacation days - and I want to go to the Bahamas this year" and come to the office anyways. And get everybody sick.
Stop treating time off like a loss to the company - it isn't. Healthy and happy workers make for a better company.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It's not workload. It's stressload. BIG difference.
I can have a metric shitload of work on my plate, and still enjoy every last second of it, and truly enjoy my job --- However, on the other side of that coin, I can have one thing on my plate so stressful that i'll become physically ill.
High stress = depressed immune system response = more likely to come down with garden variety cold/flu bugs. I tracked it once -- During a long-duration "we really shouldn't be implementing this but management says to do it" project, my blood pressure went up 25 points, and stayed there for two months solid. I also left work early at least 3 times during that period, out of frustration or simply because I felt horrible, and had to call in sick/work from home for at least as many days.
Solid work ethic comes when stress is low, regardless of workload; There have been times when being on call and coming in at 3 in the morning is actually fun. Slacking comes when stress is high, regardless of workload; At 3 in the morning, sometimes I wish I could just flip over and go back to sleep.
We're all procrastinators of varying degrees, and thankfully, there are remarkably few truly worthless slackers. Most people have a surprisingly good work ethic, and are devoted to their jobs.
The solution to eliminating slack is not to heap gargantuan problems on the shoulders of one employee, but rather try to identify what tasks really should be shared among several individuals in order to distribute the stress impact. Otherwise it's feast or famine for the average employee's workload, and the door is open to building styrofoam cup and paper clip sculptures.
Cheers,
Bowie
Whether we need more slack or more work is the wrong question to ask. In America we are failing at a very basic level to provide our employers (and the economy) with quality work output. I don't mean products, but the lack of effort and pride that I see each and every day. Think back to the last day you had to run errands and have a meal out. How many stores and restaurants was the service poor at? For me it is the norm, not the exception to find people doing the bare minimum to keep their jobs. Do a job you like and do it as well as you can. Doesn't matter if it is building software or waiting on tables. And if you have employees that are barely passing muster - it is your job as their manager to help them do their job better or to replace them. It seems no matter how much you pay you can find terrible service or performance at all levels and sectors of our economy. Get everyone doing a good job and out work output would skyrocket. As employees create more output they are worth more to the company and will get more compensation. Then each of us can determine where our income is that will let us take more time off of work each year.
The Church of the Subgenius is being outsourced! What a travesty. It figures, they were just a bunch of slackers anyway.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
One day a gang of energetic citizens was diggin a trench with their hands, but a slacker said "That's too much work" and went off and invented the shovel.
Time passes. Hard-working men are digging a canal with shovels. A slacker stayed home one day and invented the backhoe.
Etc.
Eli Whitney? Slacker. Too lazy to lift a flail.
Fulton? Too slack to row.
Edison? A slacker with good a good PR department.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
well, it's not the summer vacation in England (damn exams until 13th of june), but when i read "slacking" I though first and foremost of Slackware; have I been spending too much time on /.
/. just a way of slacking off whilst learning just enough to feel like your not wasting you life, backed up with the occasional approval of people you don't know (which is nice)... nice to see the cycle complete.
Which brings me nicely on to my point... isn't
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
For the years I worked in the US, I worked more national holidays, unpaid overtime, and from home than any job, including my own business, in Canada. I believe that studies find Americans work more hours than almost any where else, but are ultimately less productive than most other countries. Hours at work do not equal productivity!
I know people who work/worked at a certain US hardware vendor where members of the software *engineering* group are forced to work 24 hour on-call as FIRST LEVEL support on over 5,000 servers at various sites around the US in addition to their regular work. Is it any wonder why they keep on loosing members left, right and center, and can't recruit people? Is it any wonder why their engineering work frequently slips and or is badly engineered?
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
I feel in America we are loosing the ballance. And it is not just about vacation time. We need schedules that are flexible enough to take a day off on quick notice, without penility or feel like they put a stop watch on you. But on the other hand if we have that flexibilty we need to make sure we don't abuse it as well, like not showing up because you drank to much the night before, or you just don't want to go to work. We live in a culture where there is enough people who abuse any additional freedomes or benefits we get.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If you are a boss, and worried about your employees slacking off, just pile up their workload. You also have to make some ridiculous deadlines that you know they won't meet, but that's ok, because you don't expect them to meet these deadlines. This way, they know they are under pressure to get their work done. The key though is not to burn them out, which is done simply by not getting angry when they don't finish on time, that way, they won't stress. The reason I slack off is because I don't have enough work to do, or I have too much time to do the work. (There is also the case in which you don't feel motivated to do the work you are given, in that case you need to find a new job).
I use http://www.slackware.com/ for work.
Considering I have accumulated almost 45 days of annual leave and 2 days of personal leave (out of a possible 4), I have no idea what a vacation is.
Oh, you mean time off from dealing with the people who annoy me with their problems. In that case my vacation is when I leave work.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
What about the guy who comes in to work, does absolutely nothing from 8-noon (Besides drink coffee and read /.), yet manages to do more work in the last few hours of the day than most do in an entire week... Would he be considered a slacker?
I'm not fat, just big boned...
What I have noticed, and this has held true for everyplace I have ever worked or been to, is that in any given organization, 20% of the people do 80% of the work. That is ANY company, NGO, government, or organization on this planet. This means that the other 80% are slackers, screw offs, or just stupid. In other words, filler. The is right. 80% of the human race is nothing but filler.
Sorry, but this has never been a conflict let alone an eternal one. People and even other animals don't want to work hard, they want the rewards from working hard; preferably without all that work.
When you walk, just walk...when you run, just run...but above all, don't wobble.
--Some old Zen guy whose name I've forgotten
If you need, you can download it as a podcast.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Here in North Carolina we have the shitty labor laws around. Their are no concepts of breaks and or mandatory time off from work. They can work you 15+ hour shifts and you dont have to have a break.
Breaks are only given at the discretion of the company, the company I work for does not allow breaks, cigarette or otherwise. Lunches are included with this, not mandatory.
Also, days off are not mandatory. I worked for 2 months one time without a single day off....61 days of straight work.
Dead tired is the only thing I can explain my life as. People in China may or may not have it worse. But Jesus fucking Christ, this is the United States, land of the free. Where are the breaks for the people that make this country profitable?
Not that I'm against it, mind you. I think the so-called American work ethic -- in this age where we're not even ruled by imperialist lords but by faceless corporations that seemingly have no responsibility to society whatsoever -- is misguided and poisonous. I'll take those eight weeks off, thank you very much.
Breakfast served all day!
Just 3 1/2 decades until retirement. Woohoo! ;P
--Begin Sarcasm--
Hopefully Social Security is still around.
--End Sarcasm--
Make your own cheese, you freeloading rodent!
I don't think there's anything more rewarding (and few things more restful) than working your ass off doing something you love and believe in. Contrariwise, it's hard to work like a dog doing something you think is stupid or worthless.
I always figured most people don't really like their jobs, and slack off as a form of passive aggressive rebellion. It's understandable, but counterproductive. It ends up taking more energy to be lazy than to improve your own situation, whether that be getting ahead where you are or finding something better.
It sounds retarded, but I swear it's true.
Ah, screw it, this post is too long already.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
We worked our asses off in the 80s and 90s to create the Internet economy so that there would be good jobs for the American middle class in the new millennium.
Carly Fiorina, Craig Barrett, Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, and Bill Gates then betrayed us by shipping those good jobs to the cheap-labor centers in India and China.
Carly even stood up in a public meeting and insisted that it was the right thing to do.
A trillion dollars in investment, gone in a few months.
If it had been a war and we'd been harmed to the cost of a trillion dollars in writeoffs and lost jobs, we'd be nuking someone. But the war was lost because the people who were supposed to be on our side were on the enemy's side.
There's a word for that.
* * * * * *
I'm sure I put the Python libraries around here somewhere...
--Me
Does this mean that the name of this site needs to be changed to Slackdot?
Friends don't let friends line-dance.
"It's a job that's never started that takes the longest to finish." J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)
I also think it has to do with whether or not you like what you do. If you enjoy your work, then slacking is hardly a thought. I currently really enjoy what I'm doing. Then again, I've taken the time to make this post and google that Tolkien quote I remembered....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
If we look at history and culture, it would appear slacking started occuring during the baby-boomer generation. Some people's parents or grandparents.
The transition from loyalty and hard work all of a sudden shifted to feeling good and rebelling. Since then the mindset is still the same just evolved to match the current time we live in.
The maximum efficiency you can regularly get out of people is around 80% unless its crunch time or there are other factors.
80% is sustainable, in most cases. Any more and people will start getting tired, then stressed, then sick, then out. Eventually they'll quit.
Most people, however, do not realize this and figure that every moment the person is at work they must be bombarded with stuff to do or demands, or goals to meet, etc.
When I first got here the philosophy was 'always be working on something' which is basically 'always be half-assed working on something'. Instead, I turned it into work hard for a while and then chat for a bit and be social, then work hard for a while more. Wayyyy more is getting done now than it used to. People are happier, and less stressed.
One poster said that it was all in their childhood, but where do you draw the line? If I force my (not having any, but still) kids to work 10 hours a day every day of their lives until they move away, then putting in 8 hours of work will be nothing to them. In fact, they'll probably end up putting in 10 hours a day thinking that its the coolest thing in the world that they're getting paid for it. What if I forced them to work for most of the day? Good workers, sure, but good people?
We're not made to be 'good workers'. We're people. We don't live to work, we work to live.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I think most people work too hard to earn the right to slack too little. I work 8 of 24 hours, 5 of 7 days, every week, so that I can have off for 1 week of every year. And there are folks who do a lot more for a lot less. I like to remind myself from time to time that there is more to life than work and more to me than a title.
We're sorry, the signature you have dialed is not in service.
Most studies (going back to to one done in 2001) show that Americans put in many more hours at work than Europeans - not only that but the difference has been increasing for decades. New Yorker published an article in 11/2005 about this citing that Germans put in 25% fewer hours over the course of a year than US'ans. French put in 28% fewer hours.
One consequence is that Americans take the "extra money" to hire folks to do the things Americans no longer have time to do: mow the lawn, cook dinner, do the laundery, nanny for the kids, etc.
You'll PAY to know what you REALLY think!!!
--J.R. "Bob" Dobbs
"...I could retire, not that I would. What's life without work?" -- Jubil Early, Firefly, Ep13: "Objects in Space"
I hadn't heard of Samuel Johnson until you quoted him, and by his Wikiepdia entry, he looks to be a bit of a curmudgeon. Are we really going to refer back to 18th century English writers for insights into modern society?
" provide our employers (and the economy) with quality work output" But are you providing your employees with a quality work environment. If they do more then the minimum are they rewarded in any sense (monetarily, verbal praises, a pat on the back)? Are they allowed to share in the benefits of a well performed job? Does the minimum amount needed mean a 20/30/40/50/60 hour work week? "As employees create more output they are worth more to the company and will get more compensation" I've seen valuable productive employees not compensated. I've seen worthless employees compensated. Its not simply thier output. Its thier relationship with the person who handles compensation as well as the goals of the person handling compensation.
What is the idiotic point of asking such idiotic generalizing questions?
Is not it obvious that this is a personal issue for each American? Some people need to take a break, some people need to work harder.
What is the whole point of these general questions?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I moved to the US 5 years ago and have been running my own IT consultancy business for the past 4 years. I came from a largely socialist country and recently I have been trying to quantify my quality of life.
) .
While I spend 12+ hours a day in front of my computers, I only have to leave my home/office for maybe 10 to 20 hours per week to maintain my income. I pay my mortgage and car note but am still not earning enough to cover my medical insurance costs - for me and the Mrs this is more than my mortgage and car note combined.
I worked for a small networking company when I got here. My experience taught me that working hard for someone else will simply not be rewarded in this capitalistic society. Sure I could get a better paying job with benefits but the costs associated include driving through rush hour traffic, getting up before 6am, workplace drug testing and missing all that computer time - which in my opinion is required just to maintain my level of expertise and aducation.
I consider myself more a procrastinator than a slacker but this is a trade off for the lifestyle which I obviously prefer.
Slacking in the workplace is not for entrepreneurs, it is for people that buy into the whole working 40+ hours a week for someone else. It's not that I don't have time for slacking off, but I get bored very easily and prefer to keep myself immersed in technology and anything I find interesting.
So I guess my answer is that if you reach the point where you want or do slack off in the workplace then you're doing the wrong thing. Every day for me is spent on the daily challenges of making sure I can pay my bills and the careful balancing act of making sure my quality of life is consistent with what I expect to get out of life.
I've found the wikipedia article on the American Dream to be very helpful (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_dream), especially if you read the synopsis to the play "Death of a salesman" that's linked there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_Salesman
Every person has different motivations, dreams and goals in life. Mine don't really include slacking, although they don't include working for faceless companies that will try and screw me out of my benefits and retirement before making me redundant with nothing. Ask the employees of Enron, which I believe was nothing more than a way for a board of directors to steal all of the money that had been set aside for the employees?
I find my work very rewarding, I love eing a useful member of my community for the businesses that can't afford to maintain their own networks. I'm also very fortunate in the way I can support myself.
YMMV
U work hard rto send me ur jobz.
I donot take ur jobz. U send me jobz plz.
U work hard to send me jobz.
U send jobz offshore 2 me.
I donot tak ur jobz.
U send me.
No one wants to come out and say it, but the outsourcing thing is probably driven a lot by our lack of work ethic. I think it's actually driven by a couple of things:
1. Cost (duh)
2. Lack of competence in existing labor pool
3. The outsourced labor pool is able to work harder than the existing one for less money.
When you outsource work to a culture where hard work and intelligence is superior to everyting else, it's hard to come back to your native labor pool and watch them leave exactly at 5 PM. Even when they've screwed up something, my experience is that the foriegn outsourcers will work non-stop to fix the problem. We just don't do that, for a variety of reasons. Partially, we're inherently lazy. More so, we don't see the point. People in this country who work hard don't get rewarded like they used to. Worse yet, those who spend the most time avoiding work tend to rise to the highest positions.
It's just a totally different situation in countries like India, Japan and China...you're pushed to the limit frmm an early age to succeed in those cultures. If you fail in school, it's a disastrous thing. Ever wonder why we can't produce competent scientists and engineers? That's why. We're not into pushing kids...but you can bet any kid I have will be a study-robot to keep up with the rest of the world.
Slacking is great, but it will eventually undo the entire technical labor force here.
Solving a real problem is interesting, tweaking the solution because someone prefers a blue font isn't. A lot of work is simply not that interesting.
The sad truth is that most work can probably be done in short order, but we're not movitated to do it 'cause it's dull. As a result, we surf the web (and /.), looking for more interesting things to ponder and put off work until the moment it absolutely needs to be completed. Even if we got things done promptly, there would just be more crap to do to fill up the work day -- gotta work those 8-12 hours or your not being "productive".
Perhaps, we're all a bit lonely, sitting at our desks (or cubes), typing, typing, typing. The mandatory work schedules and extra off-hours IT work often don't leave much personal time. Slacking at work gives some of this back.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to modify some programs to change the location of the log directory...ooo the next Slashdot story is ready!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I have worked as a nurse the last 8 years. It is insanely difficult not to work overtime even if your ideal is only 32 hours a week. I often look wistfully to the European work ethic where you are not called a slacker for only wanting 32 or so hours a week. Asking for a week off of your already earned vacation time is not like asking for someone else's left arm, etc.
I am currently looking for a job, and trying to find a less than full time position. It's probably not going to happen, or they will tell me it's part time and up my hours. It's happened before with constant calls to come to work on my days off.
I know other professions aren't as bad, but my husband is going to get his CPA soon, and has been told his dreams of working less than 40 hours a week were impossible. This remains to be seen, and we are still hoping.
Nothing hides evidence like a stew. -Gus Pratt
Personally, I cycle through very ambitious work periods and then into very home/family oriented periods. I still work hard, but I'm less focused on my career and "getting ahead" and more interested in the tasks at hand. During the ambitious times, I'm usually pushing my managers, owners, coworkers, and myself to get better at everything.
I think Americans work hard, but I think there's also a selfishness across the board. Corporations are less inclined to care about work/life balance and employees are less inclined to care about where they work or for how long.
No one is really investing in this relationship anymore.
Maybe it's because more people now understand that the only way to make "real" money is to own your own business. Or maybe corporations have become greedy bastards that don't care about our communities anymore.
I think we all know how to work hard, but only do so when the need arises. We're not a country of hardworkers just because that's what you're supposed to do. We cut corners because we can and because we see everyone else cutting corners.
It's probably not a healthy thing for the future of our country.
http://chicagodave.wordpress.com
Being in the working world, I find that corporate society frowns on pleasure time. Companies give workers earned vacation time but yet, when the rank and file workers want to take the time off, there are road blocks imposed. In addition, many executives/managers want their workers to work overtime without pay or comp time.
I can theorize that it is based on our "Puritan Work Ethic". One of the rules with the Puritans was besides on looking down on enjoying sex was the looking down on enjoying life. Their premise was life was suppose to be miserable. This Puritan attitude permeates American Society to this day. In any job, if all the work is done, it is frowned upon to do something that you enjoy but instead, some useless, busy work is assigned even though it accomplishes nothing. Many people in Gen-X & Gen-Y piss off executives since they don't buy that bullshit and are vocal about it.
Just my opinion/viewpoint.
the eternal conflict between wanting to be a lazy bum and wanting to work hard
I like to point out that every lasting invention Man has ever come up with has had one goal on common: to help him be lazy. Airplanes? We want to get somewhere faster with fewer bumps. Computers? We hate doing math by hand. The wheel? Dragging things on a sledge is so last ice age. Sliced bread? Who has time to slice by hand?
It's strangely appropriate that Man is willing to put in more creative work now in order to do less work tomorrow and every day thereafter.
Why is everything a podcast now? It's an mp3 file you download from that link. What's wrong with downloading an mp3 file?
Man, you really need that seminar!
I think there's an old comment that sums it up: "I don't want someone who'll work his ass off doing a job over and over and over. I want a lazy bum who'll figure out a way to not need to do the job again.". The industrious scribe invented the typewriter so the roomful of scribes could hand-copy documents faster. The lazy scribe invented the photocopier so he didn't need to hand-copy another document. The really lazy scribe invented the document-feeder and sorter/stacker attachments so he could go get lunch while the machine made 14 copies of the 357-page stack.
Note that being lazy can involve quite a bit of work. The trick is to remember that you're not trying to minimize the amount of work you're doing right this minute, you're trying to minimize the total amount of work you have to do over the long term.
What we need is to get out of the always-on-the-go worker bee mentality. Sure, some people are constant hives of activity, and work so hard all the time - but do they actually get more done than those who take the time to smell the roses along the way? And who has the better life while they're doing it? Which is more important, anyway?
I've always felt that the best way to get something done efficiently is to get a lazy person to do it. They will find the way that involves the least amount of work.
Think of the French notion of système D. The art/science/national sport of landing on your feet and getting what you want, preferably with a minimum of effort.
Smart people, those French folks. They get lots of holidays, too.
...laura
Let's flip the coin. I think "look busy" is a bigger lie. People should work at a reasonable ** and substainable ** rate. We are not in the widget business anymore so work is not valued at units * cost. It is now cost of emergency - cost of solution. Unions finnaly said to heck with it and were openly lazy to show contempt. As a manager I would find someone who wasn't busy and check to see that they had done what needed to be done. If they had and it justified they pay, they should eb rewarded. Then I find their manager to see that everything had been delegated. Then find the workers / manager who seem in over their head and check over their work and find the difference. Of course I was fired for not looking busy, but everything got done. Business by nature just want profits. Saying they want good lifes for employees is easier than telling the truth. Whatever HR says.. put parens and a minus sign. When something requires long work I will do it. I just won't do long work for its on sake. More importantly I won't drag things out to look like I need to keep my job. Too bad, noone respects that.
We should be doing more work that we feel is truly important to our lives, man kind and the world around us. Seriously. Who wants to be a cog. If our highest level of acheivement is that we just saved somebody a bunch of money on their car insurance, no wonder people would rather slack.
People need to understand the economics of the issue. From the point of view of a company, they are willing to pay X amount of dollars for Y amount of labor. If the labor is done by 2 highly payed employees with little vacation time, or by 3 lesser paid employees with more vacation time, makes no difference at all to the company - so long as their costs are the same. There is no comspiracy to make you work more - companies will give all the vacation time that employees want, if enough employees want it that way.
If people were willing to be paid less, they would get more vacation time. The thing is, as much as people SAY they want more vacation time... people like having a nice car, a big house, lots of new clothes, a pair of jetskis, a big screen TV, and all the things that an upper middle class lifestyle brings. People choose material objects over vacation time.
Europeans get more vacation time, and work less, but they also have a lot less material objects than Americans.
There is nothing wrong with either system, so long as people are actually making the choice for themselves. I know that it isn't hard for an American to have a lot of free time if they were willing to make do with less material goods. And I am assuming that Europans could work more and make more money if they wanted to (although I am not knowledgable enough to say that with authority).
The main thing is that Americans need to understand that there is a trade off. There is no way, short of imporvements in technology/automation, that we can work less and make the same amount of money. Like all things, there are costs and benifits, and one needs to balance the two.
If they aren't working harder than everyone else, they feel guilty, which pretty much means everyone feels guilty. That guilt is all that pushes them on in a job where what they think or do could not possibly matter less, outside of following the dotted line of process to the finish line. They hate their jobs and feel like they aren't even doing good work. This opens the door for more guilt. If you don't believe managers take the Dogbert approach from here all the way to the bank, (when they got their unfair raises) then you are kidding yourselves. If you show up every day, complete every task that's asked of you, screw anyone else who criticizes how you spend your time. You are an employee not a slave or a CPU which must be at 100% utilization at all times. That leads to burnout, low morale, and a very low quality of life. Have a little self respect.
On Point is not produced or distributed by NPR.
US people have to fight for their jobs and so tend to do "extra" to maintain their job because it is easy to get fired. The UK is not so easy, and countries like France it is near on impossible to get fired (and even if you do you get paid for a year...they also get 35 holidays a year and 35 hour work weeks mandated by law, any more and you can recover in extra days off)...
SO the moral of the story is that the people are to blame for a) not preventing your government for bringing in anti-social work ethics (a.k.a capitalism) and b) for accepting the situation enforced onto you by your employee (bring back the Unions).
Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
From the chart, it looks like the sweet spot for productivity is somewhere in the range of 25 vacation days.
But American used to be more productive in terms of hard-goods output (I have a hard time counting managerial positions as "productive"). And vacation time of two weeks for entry level workers, 3 weeks for upper tier, was the norm. Yet that's no longer enough, judging by the level of burnout we see today.
But back a couple generations, we didn't have Soccer Mom syndrome, where every moment of every day is planned and filled, lest we feel like we're not "doing enough". What happened to just vegetating (which is to say, taking downtime to regenerate) once you came home from work? hardly anyone does that anymore. It's no wonder we've become stressed, and in need of more vacation days.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
With all of the labor saving devices that have been added to the economy, the whole world should have been on a standard 4 day 32 hour work week decades ago. It would encourage leisure related consumption, create more jobs, help redistribute wealth toward the poor, expand the economy and improve the quality of life. So why don't we do that? We must compete with places whose labor laws are rooted firmly in the 19th century.
The fact is that we are post industrial revolution, and are just starting to be post information age which means that people should be more than able to take care of themselves with only a few hours of work per week. The reason that is not so is because we are having our freedoms nickeled and dimed away almost as fast as human productivity increases. Not to mention all the sosial systems in place that reward lazyness, and all the financial banking systems in place that reward overindebetedness by loaning new money into circulation faster than people's productivity increases the currency's value.
Zebra über alles.
Were that I say, pancakes?
I need more slack at work. How else am I supposed to kill 30 undead ravagers and return to Brother Anton at Nijel's Point. I keep getting interrupted and it is really pissing me off.
sig here
In my opinion, the reason workers in general, but especially tech workers, have such a craving for "slack time" is not, generally speaking, because they're overworked, but because their "work time" is wholly unfulfilling. IMO this is an unfortunate side-effect of modern society. In times past, people's "work time" was often directly related to their survival. Growing food or raising animals to eat, or to sell in order to buy essential things. Such work conveys a certain level of psychological fulfilment, since it's necessity for survival elevates it to a level of extreme importance. If, when I don't do my job, my kids starve, then that provides alot of motivation. When I've done my job I've done something "important"- I've provided for my family. This becomes less true as one rises in the financial strata. When the software developer does his job, he doesn't think to himself, "I've fed my family," he more readily thinks, "I've bought my kid an Xbox." Not quite as satisfying.
Another thing that affects motivation and fulfillment is productivity and one's views the product being created. If I'm a craftsman who makes furniture, and I consider the furniture I produce to be of the very highest quality, then it can become a source of pride for me. I know I'm creating something beautiful, or at the very least functional, and that gives me a sense of fulfillment. Productivity is also easily measured, since I produce X units in a given day. Not so in the tech world. As a software developer, not only is my work "not very important" in the life-or-death sense, it's also hard to measure how much I've "done" from day-to-day. And the quality of the final product is almost always "less than optimal". So the developer thinks of himself as spending alot of time not being particularly productive in order to produce a piece of low-quality unimportant crap.
When you have this large pool of workers who 1) don't care about what they're working on, 2) don't feel like they're particularly productive, and 3) find it difficult to take any pride in what they eventually produce, that's a recipe for dissatisfaction. It's no wonder such workers want more "slack time"!
Unfortunately, I don't have any solutions for this problem other than, "Find a job you like and do that," which isn't always feasible for all people.
Actually, working too hard is not just boring, it's not good business sense either. Think of it this way: when management purchases goods or services, they try to get as much out of the supplier for as little money as possible. Conversely, when providing goods or services, they try to give as little as possible for the most amount of money. The better you are at this, the better your business works. Do you think management respects you when they see you working your ass off knowing
full well that you are being paid shit and have little hope of a salary increase that adds up to little more than bread crumbs and a tickle on the ass? No. They think you are a fool. They say to them selves, "What a sucker! This person knows nothing about business."
I figure most Americans need to work at least 75% less. In fact, if you really want to get ahead, you should probably start stealing stuff from work. In fact, steal from your co-workers. Show management that you have that amoral, cut-throat attitude that you need to succeed in the business world.
There's no such thing as "slacking off". Let me explain:
People have a need for rest. Biology, instinct, call it what you will. Your body and mind need rest and they will take it. If you can't get enough rest into your day or sleep into your night, your body and mind will compensate for the loss. Either by what's seen as slacking or if you still don't give in by physical or mental breakdown.
There's no "slacking". Your body and mind are just taking what they need. If you want to eliminate "slacking", you need to make sure everyone gets enough rest. With a rested and motivated workforce, there is no "slacking" problem.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
SOX has taken care of any lack of work for the typical IT person. Not that it's productive. It's just busy work to keep the auditors happy.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Now if Rush did a show about Bob Dobbs, that might be interesting. But that would be as likely as Stallman being the emcee at the Vista rollout...
I seriously doubt Limbaugh could present anything of signifigance to a tech audience.
Apologies if someone has already mentioned this. And I know this point has been made in previous posts.
American's are simply over-worked. It isn't that we can't do a good job and it isn't that we just want to be lazy. It is the fact that we're killing ourselves by working too much. Some of the more progressive countries (European countries) allow at least 4 weeks of vacation a year and in return their workers are sharper when they are actually on the job. American's on the other hand know they're over-worked and feel the stress associated with that. Whether it is a concious decision or not, it leads to slacking off. Not because "we're just lazy", but because we have no choice. If you're over-worked and stressed out, sometimes you can't do anything BUT slack off, and the feeling that you're doing something wrong by resting that brian, those eyes, and them wrists, only adds to stress.
Basically the bottom line is this, American's don't need to slack off more, we slack off just enough. The business behind the American workers need to realize that Americans need more slack time and actually provide it as more personal days or more vacation time. We're going to do it one way or the other, so it might as well be recognized as a true need of the American worker to have more down time.
I don't think I understand what you are saying...
If you are saying "rich people should get more breaks" I disagree big time. Rich people have proved they can get rich in the current system and therefore don't need any breaks - they are already successful and the system is working for them despite the disgusting crybaby attitude so many of them seem to have.
If you are saying "people who build houses and do woodwork don't contribute to profitability" I still disagree. Wealth is the product of labor - people like yourself (and illegal mexican migrant laborers, for that matter) are the root source of wealth, and should therefore get some profit. Fat cats smoking dope in penthouses shouldn't get all the profit at the expense of their employees.
As for "billion dollar corporations", they aren't people and so I don't give a rats ass about their whining. Why should I? They are already successful and everything's going their way. They don't need me (or anybody else) to give them any "breaks". I applaud their success, sure, but I'll give them a hearty "fuck you" when they ask for more tax breaks and more government handouts.
Who else gets paid to play or do their hobby? Who else will spend hours creating a program to scrape data from websites so they don't have to do any data-entry/manual labor?
Who else "scripts" their job away so they can spend more time "playing" with the technology they really want to learn?
Programmers are by their very nature lazy. It's the only profession that would allow you to do nothing more than write 20 lines of code a day and still be considered "productive". And yet it's the only profession where you can write 20 lines of code to write 20 lines of code... so even though *your* productivity stays constant, your output multiplies.
I love it.
-CF
...is another man's slack.
Personally, I think watching sports is a great waste of time. Would rather be out in the shop making something or messing around with the household server.
I drank what? -- Socrates
7 yrs, on the job - I finally qualify for 3 weeks of vacation/year.
Last year, I managed to take almost 1 week, around X-mass.
Vacation days don't roll-over, from year-to-year, nor are we compensated for unused days. It's a "use it, or loose it" policy (read: "Salary-Exempt"/Sucker).
An aquaintance of mine is a high-school teacher. She works ~180 days/year. It really annoys the hell out of me when she complains about how over-worked she is.
(btw: I spent close to 7 years teaching, myself (amongst other jobs), so I am aware of the work that is required out of the classroom (e.g. grading, prep., &c.).)
Why does it matter how many hours you put in?? Is the work getting done? If not, do it, if it is, then what is the problem?
Coming from an I.T. background myself (system administration, PC support, etc.) - I usually find that my workload varies wildly, from "wasting all day surfing the net" to an avalanche of work that's due as quickly as it can be completed.
It doesn't really have much to do with my own "work ethic". Rather, I often have my hands tied waiting on others who might be out of the office or busy with something else, or perhaps a project is stuck until a bunch of paperwork is approved and signed off on.
For example, today, I was supposed to get an old Unix-based inventory and sales application modified so the users can email quotes out to customers, instead of just faxing them. I was all set to devote most of my day to the task, until I found out that nobody is sure what the administrator account is to the box, or what the command is to get to the fax software's configuration screens that would let me set it up to do POP/SMTP mail. I had to put in a call to one of the people who helped develop the app, but they're traveling someplace today and can't get back with me until at least tomorrow.
I've got most of the day-to-day things operating smoothly, and the rest of the isuses on my task list involve meeting with others (who aren't available today either) and compiling lists of changes they want for things like our web site.
So voila! Another unproductive day that could have been busy.
Holy cow. Japan gets *double* what we get in vacation time? Unbelievable.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
Let me chime in.
About 200 days into my trip living and working in Beijing you get a different feel for things. Now I am not saying in any way that Chinese isnt the language to learn and that China isnt going to run the global economy for the forseeable future. I dont have room to start on that complex matter. But... ill relate all ive learned and say "Yes" to both sides..
There is a construction army here that I am listening to build the next generation of high rises (inculding the tallest building in Beijing about 1 mile away) at 2;28 am. It never stops. And its everywhere within a twenty mile radius. An amazing thing to watch unfold.
One the one hand.
On the other hand I walk past and through these crews everyday and see the same amount of laying back that I see on a typical highway crew in the States except horrendously worse. Office workers on a whole appear to have the same rep: lotsa hours, same amount fo work. I dont think they are inherently (or culturaly or otherwise) more productive / less lazy than anyone else ive met - but seriously, and think about this - there are that many more. China is a beast, it has been for the last 3000 years, and unified riding a wave of nationalistic expansion there isnt a lot it cant do. And its doing it, now.
IMHO, from what I have seen. But in my defense I have been looking pretty hard through a variety of different lenses.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
I couldn't agree more.
I was recently offered a job doing what I'm already doing now except that I would be tasked with stablizing and rebuilding existing infrastructure, upgrading OSes on Macs and PCs, creating a new backup schema, setting up all new mail servers to replace the failing ones, and one and on... work that could keep me hyper-busy for more than a year provided the funding didn't slow down. And in exchange for my existing skills and experience with PCs, Macs, Linux, other Unixes, phone systems and routers, they offered a mere $3k more than I'm making now + a bonus structure I cannot trust and "PTO" instead of real vacation time at a rate that treats me like someone who just walked in off the street unemployed.
I'm sorry, but more vacation time IS needed and highly desired. When trying to recruit a skilled worker from another company to work at your own, don't be an asshole when it comes to crap like that.
I turned them down more than a month ago and they still don't have an IT guy out there. Stupid cheap-assed bastards. It was pretty insulting though I realize it's simply because they're stupid and little more.
Part of the problem is how work and play are partitioned, or not. We've traditionally seen work as part of the productive part of our lives, and play as the kick-back-and-do-what-I-like part. When we were young, you came home from school. put your play clothes on and went out to make mud pies or whatever. There was a distinction. It has been mostly that way for adults, too - work 9-5 then kick back or wait for the weekend.
Now it's fuzzier. Technology has done two things - (1) made work ubiquitous and (2) it is allowing us to micro-manage our leisure. Your phone (allegedly a productivity tool) now can be your TV and hi-fi and you can have it anywhere always. Which means you have a personal TV and hi-fi whenever the mood strikes. You used to haev to go home to do those things. iPod even more. I can't remember the last time I fired up an actual stereo stack just to listen to music.
And we take entertainment in smaller bites, because it's available, in many forms. Restaurants are increasingly entertainment venues, as opposed to functional greasy spoons. Your car is now an entertainment center. My instant-on laptop is a theater, hi-fi, arcade, and and and... I have XM radio, and I use exactly three stations - 150, 151, 153 - the comedy channels. That turns my two 45 min commutes into entertainment. So I get to kick back and laugh out loud for a small chunk of time that I can't seem to afford otherwise. Ditto podcasts. That's a change that's far more entertainment than dialing around hoping something comes up, or screaming at Rush for three hours....
I still think we're on a net gain with the mix. but it could turn around in a very short time...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
We work more hours than any industrialized nation on earth.
We need shorter days, we need more guaranteed vacation, we need more slack.
I don't recall, during my childhood in the 60s and 70s, ever skimping on vacations, holidays and assorted downtime.
The real "slacking" that takes place, is in the workplace itself.
Such as ME writing this response on /. when I ought to be working.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
I worked for Samsung in Korea for a few months, and I can tell you a few things. Their employees don't "slack" in the traditional sense. They work almost 24/7, and all that time they spend working and not reading Slashdot. However, the lack of sleep and low morale leads to horrible results; the programmers (all with fancy degrees) produce code on the level of script kiddies, the engineers are even worse. I'd rather have a programmer who spends 6 hours a day writing quality code, than a programmer who spends 12 hours a day poking around the code and not giving any results.
I've been in IT since 1984 (while still in college). Most of my jobs have been ok; some interesting, like adminstering a Cray II at NASA Langley, or being lead Unix SA at the NYT SSC in Norfolk, VA and remote admining their production systems in Boston; some not so interesting. There were always things to be done, and never enough time to do them.
I met my wife in 1985. She was a teacher, an excellent teacher. The kind of teacher teachers should be. She was always well prepared, and kept her students challenged and interested. She taught English and Gifted Education. She was often even busy during the summer keeping herself prepared for the next year. I routinely helped her with things, especially on the computer. We were always busy.
As a result, we had very little time to actually enjoy the fruits of our labors. Sure, we spent a lot of time together (shopping, movies, house/school work, etc), and tried to take long weekend trips (during the summer or school breaks). Those times I cherish. We enjoyed every minute of our 20 years together, but it wasn't enough - not nearly enough. We simply expected to do more "real vacation things" when she retired in the summer of 2006.
Well, here's how it went. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor in November of 2005 and died January 13, 2006. She never got to enjoy her retirement and we never had the opportunity to really travel or do the things we had put off until "later".
Perhaps we should have tried harder to dedicate more down time, but that's not the work ethic under which we were raised and it's difficult to ignore. Lesson learned, though too late for me.
I think there's too much emphasis in the US business world on doing more work, with fewer people -- you know "worker productivity". As a result, people feel pressured into working more and guilty about taking time for themselves or their family.
The traditional Eurpoean model is much more family friendly. A month off every year with no work strings attached sounds pretty good to me.
I know that work is important, but you can always find another job; you can't find another family or another life.
Remember Sue...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I had occasion recently to travel with the president of the company I work for to attend some meetings (bleah). After the meetings, over a beer, he asked me what I thought of him taking the entire company (~100 employees) to a mandatory 30-hour work week.
My twofold response was:
1. Sign me up.
2. You won't notice a drop in overall output (ie, perceived productivity would go up).
He agreed with me on point #2.
It remains to be seen if he will go through with his nefarious plan. I sure hope he does.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
If it's actually a conflict between the two then you're on the lazy side.
Just pay me.
--
make install -not war
Yes, and one day everything will be taken away from you.
.sig abuse.
Sorry, couldn't keep myself from
Anyway, if we all spent less time thinking about what other people label us as, we could label us happy:)
Defining Statistics and Social Research
24 days a month, 7 months a year.
Sounds good!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
These guys are TOTALLY slack, they have another website, but I can't find anything other than the myspace shiz. I believe one of them, at least, used to be a computer programmer before he burned out, quit, and joined this band/slack-evangelism outfit:
http://www.myspace.com/slackestra
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
When you take away greed you are left with laziness.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I picked a career in the airlines because I found nothing quite as soul-draining as the prospect of being a cubicle-person 9 to 5 (or as is increasingly the case, 8 to 8 or more), looking forward to my one or two weeks of vacation where I'll see some palm trees in an overpriced tourist trap before resuming my run in the hamster wheel. I mean this as no denigration toward the large majority of people who are in that life by choice or circumstance - I simply point out how it creeps ME out.
To get the lifestyle I currently have, I spent about ten years after graduation in the "apprenticeship" phase, meaning working two jobs for a combined total of (typically) 60 - 80 hours a week to pay the bills, get relevant experience, etc. Ten more years and I'm now working for a major airline.
Now, I average about 16 days off a month - not including vacations. Mind you, there are still costs associated with this. I make less than my peers seniority-wise - but it is by MY choice. I usually work most weekends, and having off holidays is so rare that I tend to forget most holidays anyway. I spend about 10 nights a month in a hotel room away from home - and usually not the nicest of hotels. And lastly, of course, is the fact I might wake up someday, read the headlines, and discover my company/job/career has just vanished.
But what I enjoy most is that there is CHOICE involved. I know many pilots who need to have the large mansion, the multiple racing-car collection, etc., and they work HARD to get it. I chose the opposite extreme and try to minimize my work, so I can tinker with computers, travel to different countries, read and play with math, see my friends, and enjoy my life. I'm fairly frugal with money, so I can do this with less pay. If I wanted to switch to the other extreme, and max out my pay in exchange for minimum time off, all I have to do is bid differently starting next month.
Anyway, my long-winded point is that it is the CHOICE that I think is missing at most American workplaces. It seems that the amount of work you do is quite disconnected from your paycheck, and what is counted as "work" seems to be showing up for long hours at the workplace, somewhat independent of what you do when you get there. And if you say you want to work half as many hours in exchange for half the pay in a month, I suspect the management would laugh.
The current system in most companies where you MUST work a minimum number of hours a week in exchange for two weeks of paid vacation seems geared towards the age of factory assembly lines. I suspect most "mind" workers would be tremendously more productive (not to mention happier, more well-rounded individuals) if they could take a month leave twice a year in exchange for two months without pay, or a week every month for half the year, or some other permutation.
Thoughts?
It's amazing, isn't it? Japan. Gets twice the leave time that US workers get.
And these guys take their work seriously. Do a little Google searching about corporate suicide in Japan. Occasionally, if a Japanese salaryman screws up at work, he'll kill himself for absolution.
Examples here, here, and here.
These guys take work so seriously they're willing to die for it. And they get twice the vacation time we do.
It's pretty shocking.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
... then Powerball would be bankrupt.
I wholeheartedly agree. Why do people slack at work? Because they don't get enough dedicated "slack" time in their vacation.
Excellent statement. I have a few friends who majored in a rigorous engineering or other technical field, just because those fields had the highest starting pay. A year or two into their first job out of college, and they quit to go back and find what they actually want to do.
i only red the headline so far, but i dun buleev the slacking problem is as bad as the artikul probablee made it out to be. For in stanz, we have leejuns of Slashdotters who RTFA, can solidate their analisus, parse it 4 falibiliteez and inkunsistenseez, and present it to their fellow geeks in a properly notated and cited fashun, thus giving rise to thawt full n rashunul die a log. 4 the most part, peepul take the time to
They want more and pay less every day. Almost everyone I know is over qualified and over educated. I've read indigenous people actually foraged, farmed or hunted for about 4 hours a day and the rest was gravy. I bet if one of those guys got stuck in traffic he'd think he was in hell.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
Why do these so-called geeks need to get their marching orders from NPR? If NPR is leading the way for slashdot to become more informed about tech, this site is pathetic and irrelevant...
First, let me get the definition out of the way: "slacking" is "not working when one is supposed to be working". Vacation, therefore, is not slacking, but reading Slashdot at work probably is.
;D), because it allows them to do better work.
There are certainly times when slacking is an issue. If an air-traffic controller is playing her DS when she should be watching the radar, there's certainly a problem. When people slack so much that they aren't meeting the requirements of their work, there's a problem.
But I'd argue that a little slacking in most industries is actually good for business.
The problems really enter when management sees work as quantitative when it is qualitative. Knowledge workers are typically qualitative workers -- that is, it's more important (in general) to do their tasks well then to get a lot done. These people should be allowed to have some unstructured recreation at work (if they were allowed, it wouldn't be "slacking" any more!
It's pretty unusual for someone to be able to simply sit and work for long periods of time, every day, on something that requires a significant chunk of brain power. Anyone who's done significant development knows that the best way to solve some kinds of problems is to do something completely unrelated for a while. When I get stumped, I play Lumines for a while. It's usually only a few levels in when I suddenly think of something helpful, and can get back to work.
I've also noticed that the most talented and truly productive (measured in terms of quantity * quality) developers, business modellers, architects, engineers, etc. have long ago recognized this need to "percolate" on occasion. Good management lets people "slack" a little during work time, because they know that these same people are often "working" during their fun time. I know that some of my best solutions have occurred to me late at night while playing Final Fantasy or browsing for fun from home. If work is going to encroach on my "fun time" (and really, it can't be helped in knowledge work, because you can't turn off your brain), then it's reasonable to get in a little fun at work, too.
We don't need more work, or more "slacking" -- we need to stop forcing the dichotomy when it doesn't make sense.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Six days a week and Sunday, dawn to dusk. Especially the immigrants.
Builders have a bad reputation because they never fisish jobs, but that's mostly because they're starting new jobs all the time, just to stay ahead.
The blue collar world is not like yours.
... the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done".
--Linus Torvalds
Of course, you could have spent an hour on another day making sure that you had everything you needed to get the job done alone, today....
You wouldn't be slacking then. Foresight does wonders. Lack of planning isn't an excuse.
I think a lot of the work ethic of immigrants is because of desperation.
I think a lot of it has to do with background, expectations, and opportunity.
Immigrants had to work a lot harder in their home countries for a lot less. Imagine what it would be like to work 50% of what you do now for 200% more money, doing work that is way less menial and way more enjoyable than you were used to doing.
Wouldn't you just about kill for that?
I also think that there is more "slacking" because one person's work rarely benefits him directly. Sure, getting paid is great, but there's a big disconnect between level of work and compensation. If I work twice as hard tomorrow versus today, it all washes out in the end come review time.
It's funny. My father was a business owner, and he always urged me to go work for a company so that I wouldn't have to experience the ups and downs that he did. But now that I work for a company I find myself longing to be a business owner so that I have the freedom, flexibility and control that my father had over his life.
I think this country could be so much better if there was more opportunity for a person to be able to apply his or her talents in a way that personally benefited them. But our economic system is more and more discouraging entrepreneurialism because of things like oligopolies and monopolies, huge barriers to entry (even expensive technology can be a barrier), and global competition.
Yeah, I wanted more vacation too, but they weren't going to let it happen. So I decided to shoot for the moon. I told my boss that I (truthfully) would be more productive if I could work from home several days a week. They said, "OK".
Cool! Amazing Toys.
The problem isn't so much the number of hours you work, it's more a matter of if you enjoy them or not.
I was a SysAdmin for years, during which time I worked 50 hours on a *short* week. A typical week was closer to 70, and I had on many occasions done in excess of 100. I had to take a laptop with me when I went on my 3-weeks-after-10-years vacation to Arizona in January (Arizona in January sure beats Ottawa!). I ended up working 1 to 2 hours a day while on "vacation". Every damned day.
I hated my job, but I was too busy to look for another one.
Then I got cancer, and lost my left kidney. (Well, I didn't _lose_ it; the surgeon took it out, sent it to the Lab and the report came back "malignant'). As part of my recovery, I was *forbidden* to lift anything heavier than a 10-pound bag of sugar, *required* to have a nap for at least 1/2 hour a day, and it was suggested I find a less stressful lifestyle. I was basically confined to the house for 6 weeks. The after-effects of the anasthetic left me unable to concentrate on much of anything for more than a few minutes at a time. I could read the newspaper's comic page, but that was about it.
There's a lot to be said for a short nap in the afternoon. All of it positive.
When I was able to go back to work, I could handle it, but now the 100-hour weeks annoyed me. So, I quit SysAdmin-ing (I don't think that's an actual word...), and now work as Tech Support for a much smaller firm. I do on-call sometimes, but mostly I get to do a 40-hour work week.
Eliminating stress _does_ make a difference. I've noticed it. My wife's noticed it. My son and daughter-in-law noticed it. I get fewer cold/influenza bouts, because I'm not so run down. I _swear_ I'm wiser now, but that could just be because I'm alive (and therefore older) and appreciate it more.
If you aren't happy with what you do, it'll kill you, regardless of the hours/days/weeks schedule.
If you enjoy what you're doing for a living, the amount of time spent doing it doesn't really matter all that much.
30 hour week - five six hour days.
Minimum(!) 30 days vacation per year. Two weeks is stupid, and I consider it to be theft of my time.
When discussing salary, make you're talking about what you net and other benefits that you actually see. If the amount is not on the check, then it doesn't exist. If they tell you otherwise, then they are lying.
I would also suggest that there be a demand for good public transport. That alone would probably wipe out 90% of the road rage. Driving should be for vacations, not everyday commuting.
Note that you won't see any of this without a united workforce speaking as one.
Only then will you possibly see a return to sanity and good humor. Otherwise the anger and hate will just grow stronger.
What?
The book The Lazy Way to success by Fred Gratzon has some interesting ideas on this. Gratzon has started 2 successful million-dollar companies, all without ever working a day according to himself. Book: http://lazyway.net/ My review: http://positivesharing.com/2006/03/book-review-the -lazy-way/
Nobody has talked about what work is and how we measure it. Is it measured in dollars signs, and if so, doesn't that show that a Lawyer does hard work? Wait! No it doesn't. There are situations where they might have at one time but can now depend on other hard workers to get them paid more.
Or is hard work staying up 48 hours and then doing a 20km hike humping a sack? Wait! No, that can't be it either.
Just what are we talking about here? Is there lazy people. Dam right there is. I take a look at a Japanese college student and I wish them the best--they work their asses of for little wage with tons of compititon.
To me, work is what I need to feed myself and have the basics. Outside of that it doesn't matter what I do for work. I am someone naive though. I have worked in factory jobs building boats for 8 hours sucking in fibreglass dust, and then worked 12 hours on a hot roof laying shingle on a 12/12 pitch. I've worked as a web designer and now I do call center work. I made the most sitting on my ass 8 hours relaying calls. I hardly call it work though.
Depends on your goals though. I see some people who put everything into their job because they want stuff but in the end they only talk and live for what--stuff. (Stuff includes family desires, not needs though)...
Then again, What do I know. Maybe I've never worked.
[J]
of a most excellent book written by Tom DeMarco; ISBN: 0-932633-61-7. I highly recommend it.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
I grew up thinking "9 to 5, an hour for lunch" was normal and expected. At the time (early 80s) it probably was. Little by little, it has eroded, a half hour here, fifteen minutes there. Most "normal" workdays are 8 to 5, half hour for lunch, and staying late is expected -- if you take off right at 5 in most places, you're going to get some looks.
Remember when only certain, time-critical jobs required people to carry pagers? You could tell someone was a doctor or a stockbroker if he was carrying one. Everyone else left work at work. Nowadays, you're expected to answer your cellphone at any time day or night if the boss calls.
Vacation time gets slowly whittled away. Years ago, maybe you accrued one day of vacation per month. Then it was half a day. Then you couldn't roll those days into the next fiscal year -- use 'em or lose 'em. (You probably lost 'em.) Sorry, it's for "productivity" reasons. We need more "productivity" from our worker bees. I don't think you're typing as fast as you could be. With another 3wpm you could save thirty seven seconds per quarter, you slacker. Is that a personal call I see you making? You're not on the interworldwebnet, are you? That's a productivity loss! Why aren't you being productive? I know you've been here since 8am, worked through lunch, plan to stay late, and probably take client calls from your cellphone while sitting in traffic, but goddammit, be productive!! Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger!
Americans work insane amounts. (I realize we are not alone in this, so cork it.) It's especially insane when you realize that "productivity" hasn't really increased that much. We show up earlier, stay later, take less breaks, but in any given day, the average office yob only has so much to do. Now they just have to spread their bit of work over nine hours, instead of seven or eight.
The push for almighty profit has taken a lot away from society. Contrary to what conservatives love to believe, there is more to life than making money. Not long ago I was listening to some doofus on the radio prattling to the host about what a lazy bunch of losers France was. His justification for this was that their economic growth isn't as fast as ours.
There seems to be an awful lot of this mentality, and it sickens me. Sure, they get tons of free time. What is it, eight weeks of vacation a year? Ten? 35 hour workweeks or something? In other words, time to enjoy life and do something you enjoy? Oh, but their economic growth isn't as fast as America's! WHO GIVES A SHIT?
Most people are not doing anything so important that it requires five eight-or-nine hour days. I have my doubts that most people would admit that, but that's another problem in our culture of profit profit profit -- that we tie our identities so intrisically to our jobs, that it feels insulting to hear that what we're doing really isn't all that important. But I'm telling you, and all the other Joe Timesheets and Eddie Punchclocks out there, that really, if you only wrote TPS reports four days a week instead of five, nobody would notice. Things would still get done.
I take that back -- the only people who would notice are those who directly profit from your efforts. So while 99% of the workforce would like to go the fuck home and enjoy what life has to offer, we're trapped in soul-crushing hellholes by the 1% that controls these things.
Right now it's a beautiful day outside. I can see it from my window. I could be out there sunbathing or reading or falling in the water as I try to learn to use a kayak or getting sighed at by my friend as he tries to explain for the tenth time the difference between these knots as we prepare to go rock climbing. I could be playing with my cats, throwing Frisbees at my girlfriend's dogs, or just taking a nap. Instead, I have to stay here. There is nothing for me to do in the office today, but I have
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Give me slack or give me food.
With big red straps of course...
So you can find out that someone is a middle manager or a TCO Analyst or Regional Director of Corporate Affairs or whatever. Who cares? No one ever wanted to be that when they grew up. These are jobs people take because they became available and they needed to put food on the table, not because it's some passion that drives them.
With a few exceptions -- the lucky people who somehow manage to turn drive and passion into marketable work -- what a person does is the least important thing about them. They, like most everyone, spend 1/3rd of their life doing something they'd rather not do, but are forced to because they need money.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
At my last job, they had a 'use it or lose it' vacation policy. But they also had me in a job no one else could do. For three Goddam years I worked Monday through Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Christmas, Easter, my birthday, New Year's, etc. I was grinding my teeth in my sleep; my wife very nearly left me, and I my life was pretty generally bad.
When I left, our my boss wasn't going to pay me for all that time, because of the "use it" rule. Human Resources actually did a good thing, and threatened to call the corporate office if I didn't get paid. I used my last paycheck as a downpayment on a new house. Not long after leaving, I realized I was having dreams again; apparently my mental state had so deteriorated there that I was no longer dreaming.
It wasn't until about a year later than I realized that because my pay had gone up about 50 percent during those three years, the company had paid a LOT more than if they'd just paid me at the time.
I still keep that last pay stub in my wallet, to remind me that vacations are important.
Marching Orders? Rush gives Marching orders, NPR just tries to tell the news. They have been on such a tight leash by the conservatives that dole out their funding even independant studies show they are more likely to be biased against liberal views than for them.
1 9635/
But really that is beside the point. If anything, it's quaint that NPR is putting up a story about the subgenius movement. It shows that it is just entering the radar of the American conciousness. Last night they had a story explaining to everyone what a Chav was and now this. Wow.
I don't think Rush would cover either of these topics. For one, he is a non-ironic Chav Two, he is a non-ironic subgenius and three he's an ironic conservative. He's definitely deep undercover. http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=
The Baby Boom is getting ready to retire, which will reduce the size of the available American workforce by about 60 million over 10 years. You could bring in more workers but the public sentiment right now is against any immigration, let alone the massive immigration that would be needed. So companies outsource--they go find the workers since the workers can't come find them. The only other alternative is to shrink and die.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Aside from the fact that humans need to take breaks to continue to be productive I find it hard to blame anyone who slacks at a job with fixed pay who are never going to make more than they are now while the CEO of the company is stripping away their benefits and giving themselves a raise while they jet around the world on company money. Anyone who is paying attention to the economy(or watching Oprah) knows that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer. That can only lead to bad things.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
"My friend just got back from a 10 day business trip in China, and he had one piece of advice: Learn to speak chinese, because these people are going to take over the world!"
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That's what was said about Japan, 20 years ago. Most mfg is done in China, yet they're still ~4 trillion behind us in GDP http://www.photius.com/rankings/economy/gdp_2004_
I wouldn't bet on the US being toppled anytime soon.
is to get it right the first time so that while everyone else is redoing their crap, you can sleep. ....i wish it really worked that way
We all get over 120 "off-days" in a year. Really. 52 weeks * 2 days of weekend + 10 days holidays (Christmas, July 4, etc) + paid-time-off ... That easily adds up to over 120 days. (I won't count sick time).
/.) even now, end up working atleast 10-11 hours each day and work for sometime on the weekend. 10-11 hours for 5 days (M-F) + the weekend time = over 56+ hrs per week.
... ;)
That works out to be almost 2:1 ratio (work:holiday). So I have been contemplating working 2 weeks (months) with not a single day off and then take an entire week (month) off. All I need to do is put in 56 hour weeks.
Better still. Per me job description I need to work 40 hours in a week. However, I (like most others here on
There without making any change to our current work habits, we should be able to get 4 months of vacation each year.
Now all that is needed is way a convince the pesky manager
Shower the parent with mod points.
My mom says I'm cool.
What do slashdotters think: does America need more slack or more work?
Man, do we have to think about this right now?!?
Can't we contemplate it later after my nap?
"Learn to speak chinese, because these people are going to take over the world!"
To do that China will have to export culture and influence. Do you really think Americans will be dreaming Chinese dreams and seeking student VISAs by the millions to get into their country?
When they want to build the largest dam in the world (which is an engineering marvel that will put out as much electricity as 15 nuclear power plants combined), they just do it, and don't worry about the environmental, social, or historical implications.
It is suspected the Yangtze river will silt up the lake behind the dam quickly. The lack of silt deposits downstream in the Yangtze plain will hurt their agricultural output. In ten years this may not seem like such a good idea.
China has 35 people for every one of ours, so they could invade with nothing but chopsticks and probably win. But they also have huge natural resources and are progressing very, very fast. Their navy will be as big as ours by 2012 (though not as advanced).
I assume you meant 3.5. The human wave tactic wave used in the Korean War. The result was over 500,000 Chinese dead for Great Leader and a stalemate. Even they are not dumb enough to resort this on a modern battlefield. China does not possess huge natural resources. It will be interesting to see if they take a territorial interest in the mineral and oil wealth of sparsely inhabited Siberia in the coming decades. Comrade wolf will be a small problem for Russia in comparison. As for their navy, at this point they are just fine targets.
an ill wind that blows no good
BTW, that is just a link to the book on Amazon, not a click-back or whatever they call their tracking "make money fast" system...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
here's a link to the mp3:p odcast/330/510053/5440699/WBUR_5440699.mp3
http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/
I was going to post my opinion, but that's just too much effort...
Paul.
We need more guilt free slack. I should not feel guilty for only working my contracted 40 hours a week. I will work the long weeks when required, but that should not be every week. I should also be able to take my coffee and lunch breaks, and have a quick chat around the "water cooler." The alternative to these little breaks is longer sneak breaks taken when no one is looking. These breaks are not as productive as the worker is worried about being caught and can't take 10 minutes to relax.
What do slashdotters think: does America need more slack or more work?" It is summer vacation after all, right?
More work is certainly not what Americans need. I think its Italy that leads with vacation days a year - the average is 42. America's average is 8.
I know all of you are going to say it sounds like I'm lazy. Thats not true. I enjoy working, but I enjoy my personal time too. The problem is the balance isn't correct, and most often, people tend to be less productive when they're unhappy. I'm unhappy because I don't get enough time to myself. Too much of my time is spent making the boss rich, so he can work 3 days a week, and spend the rest at his lake house, taking it easy. That just breeds resentment, and productivity is less.
We'll work our asses off until the age of 65, then spend the rest of our time on earth taking care of failing health, because we've spent too much time working, and not enough time enjoying life. We end up with a mortgage, a car, and an empty soul.
Yes, I'll go get ready for all the problems that are going to come up tomorrow. Let's see....
There's this guy a couple cubes over -- his computer will crash, and he's going to come to me for help. I'd better make sure I'm not out of the office at that time. Wait, what time will that be? *engages magcial foresight* It'll crash at about 12:30, so I better eat lunch a bit late.
What's next... My boss is going to finally get the email with the new project specs, but the email is a bit late by now. I'd better start working on that project now -- don't want to push the deadline too far. Sure, I don't have the specs yet, but I can divine what they will be with this here crystal ball.
Oh, and my friend's car is going to break down too. I'll remind him to call the mechanic and ask them to have a truck ready for his car. I'll also make sure to look along the side of the highway for him. Actually, I'll get there early and wait for his car to break down. I know by my magical predictive power that it'll break down just past the exit at Route 68.
Yeah... everyone should be able to forsee problems and be prepared when they come up.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
On the other hand one can make the reasonable observation that in another sense Americans don't always work as well as they should. We have a lot of wasted/slack time. Perhaps if we rested (sabbathed?) more we would better apply ourselves when we truly are at work. (Work when you are working, and play when you are playing.) There are notable exceptions of course, many Americans apply themselves most diligently and work hard when they are working.
Quick anecdote to support. During 3 week trip to south India, our team helped paint a new school being built. The locals were amazed that we when we were working, we just worked worked worked, paint paint paint, with hardly a break (in tropical weather, it was hot/humid down there by the equator), sweating like crazy. They said, "An Indian worker will paint for a few minutes, enjoy a cigarette, chat with his buddy, paint again for a while, rinse and repeat". Not that Indians (at least in that state) are lazy or Americans are better - we simply have different cultural emphases on WORK-don't-socialize versus work-but-also-ENJOY-OTHER-PEOPLE.
By the way, most internationals work extremely hard, especially when the work is academic/working on a degree. The point is not "they are lazy" but "they notice how hard working Americans are most of the time".
So my general answer is Yes, Americans need both to slack and work harder.
Sure, we are the most productive people in the world and our economy generates wealth like no other, but growth in the cost of health care is outpacing the growth of the economy. The long hours and to little time to relax are pushing us toward a life style that is fundamentally unhealthy. Down the road a decade or so there will be a medical bill to pay and a couple of weeks in the hospital already costs more than most prosperous Americans can make in a life time.
What America needs is a change in the public school system. The immense amount of pressure placed on schoolchildren encourages them into rebellion upon adolescence. During the recent spring break, four suicides occurred near my area due to the massive amount of pressure.
But it's not really the pressure that is the problem. The libertarian Charley Reese observed that "Boredom is the devil's workshop" -- school is way too boring, and such boredom leads to rebellion: slacking. If it could be made more fun, and if teenagers were treated like adults, perhaps the pressure problem would float away.
Another cause for the slacking may be that school attendance is compulsory. I've always found that I am more encouraged to finish projects to their completion if I chose to do the project voluntarily; perhaps if school were voluntary, the total, helpless idiots would just be kicked out (which would make class more challenging), and the people who do choose to educate themselves will be the most motivated, and thus, more successful.
Of course, the ability to spell helps eh? Their not Thier.
Shouldn't that be....
"Of course, the ability to spell helps, eh?"
You forgot a comma. Don't harp on my spelling, I won't harp on your grammer.
I would of complained more about my lack of line breaks, myself.