Slashdot Mirror
Bring Back the 40-Hour Work Week
Barbara, not Barbie writes with this quote from an article at AlterNet about how the average work week is becoming longer, and why that's not a good thing:
"... overtime is only effective over very short sprints. This is because (as Sidney Chapman showed in 1909) daily productivity starts falling off in the second week, and declines rapidly with every successive week as burnout sets in. Without adequate rest, recreation, nutrition, and time off to just be, people get dull and stupid. They can't focus. They spend more time answering e-mail and goofing off than they do working. They make mistakes that they'd never make if they were rested; and fixing those mistakes takes longer because they're fried. Robinson writes that he's seen overworked software teams descend into a negative-progress mode, where they are actually losing ground week over week because they're so mentally exhausted that they're making more errors than they can fix. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there's one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn't. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we're supposed to by law. We will not turn this situation around until we do what our 19th-century ancestors did: confront our bosses, present them with the data, and make them understand that what they are doing amounts to employee abuse — and that abuse is based on assumptions that are directly costing them untold potential profits."
1. It costs more to have two employees who work 40 hours each than one who works 80 hours.
2. The public has been convinced that it is more important to protect consumers by lowering prices than it is to protect workers by hiring more people.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Mandatory overtime for like the last 3 years - it was fun until they stopped paying for any overtime. Only way I escaped was to work remote to pursue an MBA. And now what do I have to look forward to? Management Consulting or Investment Banking careers that have 60+ hour weeks as the norm.
Please... Don't listen to this drivel. I have kids and an angry wife at home. I want to be at work 80 hours a week.
We can whine all we want about the 40 hour work week, but no one is willing to unionize in order to get back to it. Can you imagine a white collar middle-management union? People would rather put in 80 hours as an "assistant manager" at McBurger Queen rather than be classified in their own minds as a worker.
As for IT, goodness no. It would require a reshaping of the laws that have been created. There are many laws in place that keep IT workers down. The luddites couldn't dare have an intellectual revolution on their plates, after all.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Until we have a health care system that is not tied to employment, this will never happen. It is MUCH cheaper for an employer to squeeze more hours out of several workers than to higher an additional worker.
The argument in the summary should have stopped at using the argument based on productivity. If your worker will make less mistakes and be more productive by working less, you want your worker to work about 40 hours.
"For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there's one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn't."
This, however, doesn't follow. If a 40 hour a week worker is more productive I might not need the extra worker if I'm getting more from my team. However, that may mean I can put my capital to better use in a different area, not necessarily software development.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
On the contrary, it would be more work, more efficiently. If you honestly believe hours working correlate to product you have no idea how knowledge work works.
we will let the market decide what the proper work week is for our workers. it solves all that ails. workers who cannot keep up will die and be replaced by those who can.
three comments and I am forever at terrible karma
France made the work week 35 hours long, with the expected (advertised ?) benefit of creating jobs.
People just have more free time, but do in 35h what they did in 39 before. Often meaning less coffee breaks, etc. But overall, employment did not move a bit.
But this is also a particular situation, and not simply transferable to other countries/economies as the cost for employers in France is much higher in France than it is in the US, I think, and the Work Law (and all social benefits that came in in periods of economic growth) is probably hindering the process of reducing unemployment.
That's not what the article is saying (it's not talking about the Greek welfare state model). It's pointing out that if you work too much overtime, you get burned out, less productive, and more prone to error.
Well, duh.
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
This facile analysis falls for the trap, so brilliantly outlined in The Mythical Man-Month , that throwing more people at the same software problem will result in increased productivity. Because of networking and communication problems, the reverse is often true. While I don't doubt the problems of overtime are a serious issue (and should be minimized), the reality also is that his "cure" isn't. It continues to amaze me how people know so little of our own history in this realm.
Come down here and talk to my boss, he thinks that working 12 hours shifts, 4 days on 4 days off and rotating between 07:00-19:00 two weeks days and then 19:00-07:00 two weeks nights will increase productivity!
You think they don't know? they know. They don't care.
Lets move away from an hour based work schedule to a task and accomplishment based work/pay system. Base salary and flexible hours. Penalties for work not completed or as a corrective measure. We don't measure lives in hours, why should our job's measure what we do for them in hours?
Mandating an "hours per week" for employee's is the problem, not the solution.
Careful what you say around me.. I will assume you mean it.
In European counties such as Denmark where on the whole the standard of living and quality of life are better than the US, people work less than we do. They have more time with their families enjoying life instead of killing themselves at the office. Americans are trained to feel like they have to overwork in order to get ahead, we should really strive towards following the European model.
I worked in IT since 1986 and I have never had any fixed hours or overtime. It has always been about performance - how much you do.
Fixating on one factor that affects productivity is stupid. Let people decided themselves. If someone can do more in 40 hours than in 80 hours - fine. Let him do it. If someone wants to work 80 hours, fine let him doing. Ask about project progress, not how many hours he was logged in or occupied the chair.
Unless you are talking about Chrysler shop in Detroit.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
women yijing hui zhongwen
I don't expect many people would disagree with the assessment, except those pesky "people" called corporations. For many companies, their workforce is paid a flat salary and any concept of "overtime" doesn't mean more money paid out, let alone time and a half.
To hire an extra worker for those extra hours means spending more money, something that does not align with the capitalistic goal of earning as much as possible.
So you could hide out from your wife and get stupid with your friends.
It depends. What if you're billing customers by the hour?
rather than hiring new employees. Why incur the cost of more overhead then? The largest overhead is medical benefits, about $10K a family. then comes other benefits, office space, computers, etc.
I'm on a 35 hour week and I make sure I stick to it, partly because I don't know when I'll ever be on one again but also because I'm of the opinion that after 7 or so hours in front of a screen your ability think logically diminishes and no amount of over-time is going to fix the bug.
Leave the office, the chances are that you'll figure out the problem on your commute home, during dinner or on the john and you can fix it the following day.
I've found there are three main reasons why people may end up working beyond their contracted hours:
1) The work that they have to do cannot be done during the hours they are contracted to work.
2) The work that they have to do can be done during the hours they are contracted to work, but the organisational or office culture puts pressure on people to be seen to be in the office outside those hours.
3) They have their own reasons for wanting to be working, which may range from a genuine passion for their work through to problems at home they would rather get away from.
Of these, 3) is generally not something the employer/manager should get involved in (unless home problems are starting to bleed over into the office).
I think that in most non-militant workplaces, people accept that 1) will occur from time to time and that, if it's for short periods, it's not a huge problem (particularly if the employer takes steps to recognise it and reward employees accordingly, be it financially, via time-in-lieu, or some other method). If it's not for short periods, then it absolutely will lead to morale and productivity problems and the employer/manager needs to think again about resourcing, or accept high staff turnover and problems with the quality of their outputs. This seems to be an endemic problem in certain industries (such as video games development) which are seen by outsiders as desirable places to work - meaning that there are always lots of eager young things waiting in the wings to replace burn-outs.
I suspect that the most common cause, however, is 2). Certainly, in the decade or so that I've been in full-time employment, I've come across quite a few offices where the work could be handled within contracted hours, but where the nature of the workplace culture meant that people were "padding" their working day; making tasks take longer than needed, or spending lots of time browsing the web in the afternoon. It's particularly noticable that workplaces like this seem to prize "being at your desk late in an evening" over "being there early in the morning". In part, I blame the shift to open-plan offices for this - there can be a "walk of shame" factor to leaving the office when your colleagues are still at their desks.
In one of my early management posts, I did try to tackle a culture like this in the office I was managing. I made a big thing about tracking how heavily loaded each team-member was and getting people to report when their workload reached the point where it would require them to work out of hours. I also made it gently but firmly clear that if your workload wasn't at that point, I expected you to get it done during normal office hours (happily, there was a wider organisational push at the time to reduce our power/lighting bills, which I could hook that onto).
For a while, it worked reasonably well. There was a bit of grumbling from a couple of people who, I suspect, thought that being seen in the office doing very long hours was a substitute for being any good at their job, but most people were happy to go along with it - and the quality of the office's work (which was mostly casework, requiring little creativity, but a lot of attention to detail) actually rose.
Then word got out (falsely, as it happened) that there may be redundancies headed in - and despite reassurances to the contrary, everybody assumed that they way to avoid being singled out was to be seen in the office every hour of the day - so all the work I'd done went to waste anyway. Overnight, things went back to being as bad as ever - and productivity fell off again.
Managament can be a pita at times.
You can always work the 40 hours, then spend the other 40 somewhere else.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Greek people work more hours per year than anyone in the world (other than Korea)... it's just that they are less productive...
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS&utm_source=weibolife
Untold profits? Hiring someone new will cost money and when business slows you can just fire that person? That is not how you profit . It is not that easy.
You can hire temps perhaps but for most operations they will not be up to speed quickly enough. But wait....You could outsource to a place that does not have restrictions on the work environment and then you could keep up the low prices for Mr and Mrs while complying with some new work hour regulation!
I may complain. Actually I complain a lot. But in the end I could settle for less and find a new job. Or I could be a bum. There's a whole lot of options in between. I guess I'm saying I would prefer to have the freedom to choose to be a bum rather than have more and more regulations from the government when it's just not that easy.
on a side note, i did not rtfa, I am not sure if government regulation was mentioned at all in another comment either. That is just the endgame for ideas like this and I just hate reading about business topics on slashdot.
Where in this magical world do you have the problem of too much overtime?
Most everywhere I look, I see people getting shafted with 20- hours, not 40+.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
In my current job it is the bosses :)
But I've been in many jobs where it's the workers. Where workers constantly and repeatedly overcommit (I can do this in 4 weeks). Then the customer is waiting and the boss (not unreasonably) expects the date to be met. The boss could do better at limiting this but the workers do usually deliver then commit again.
In other places, a few workers want to "get ahead" or just enjoy what they're doing and work more hours. Many of these people CAN and want to work 60 hours (actually around 50 is the limit I've seen and there's less productivity increase doing more month-after-month). The problem is that other worker start to try this to compete for the next promotion - and they can't do it.
yo mayo pee-jyo? Danshi, bu Mei Gua pee-jyo. Mei Gua pee-jyo shi huai. Mayo pee-joy? Wo shang ar-gaw-toe.
I'd like to say I do fine in China, but honestly, I can't remember much after the first two days anyways. Don't drink the water!
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Like the steel industry in Pittsburgh had. One week of 10 hour night shifts, 24 hours off, one week of 14 hour day shifts and a 24 hour shift to switch back to the night shift... See http://www.clpgh.org/exhibit/ptpa.html -- it was so good for productivitiy!
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
Ah, now you're talking! Manservant! My eugenics rifle! We shall see to it that the workingman of tomorrow is fit for a 50-hour week, and his offspring capable of 60! In time, perhaps even 80 or 100 shall not be beyond the glorious reach of Science!
If by "bring back", you mean force companies to limit the hours of workers that want overtime, and forcing companies to hire more workers (and the attendant tax and insurance cost increases that would bring), then hell no.
From the article: "Yes, this flies in the face of everything modern management thinks it knows about work"
So, yeah, by all means, let's ignore them and do what someone on AlterNet says instead. Business will be booming, then.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Actually, as a norwegian, my first thought was "Why would you want to increase work time?" - As our laws are very strict on those things, and is set to 37.5 hours a week (lunch is calculated as half an hour off each day).
The rules allow working overtime, but only in short periods, and only to a maximum amount over a certain period (don't recall exactly now).
In fact, I know people who were forced to take two weeks paid vacation because they've worked too much, and had to stop working a period to not break the law. The companies usually puts this in quiet periods when needed, so they have the option of overtime when they need it.
Seems to work well for us, at least :) You know, as a civilized country and all that.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Don't worry. Our financial chicanery skills are way better polished than Greece's.
If overtime truly resulted in negative productivity, wouldn't that spur job growth, rather than depress it?
He will begin talking to you about his ideas for a proposed pay cut for staff so that more can be hired. Still want to do this?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
The idea that you could end unemployment by spreading the work around assumes that people are fungible -- that they are completely interchangeable -- which they most certainly aren't. While it may sound like a good idea for Craig and Nate to share the job of coding System X, the fact is that Nate is 10X better at programming than Craig is.
In fact, it's arguable whether Craig can even do the job at all.
I don't understand why such a naive question should be asked. The real caveat is that the person who works 50 hours per week is not paid at the level of 50-hour. At best he is paid at 45 hour. Most people who are putting 50 hours per week are white collar workers, not hourly workers. So the businesses are getting away from paying less. (Remember all the news about worker productivity?) I remember a few years ago I visited a friend in Silicon Valley. He told me he has to work half a day during the weekend. Why? because everybody showed up at least once on weekends. If you didn't want to do it, you were more than welcome to find another job. How sweet!
Why? I'm from the UK.
I work a 37 hour week, we're all very much enjoying the rich western lifestyle.
All the money is in design, licensing and marketing. What use it a 60 hour week there?
In time, perhaps even 80 or 100 shall not be beyond the glorious reach of Science!
169 hours however...
I have good news.
The CEOs of the fortune 500 companies have all just met and decided they are going to push for a 40 hour work week. The only slight catch is- they're pushing for a week to be redefined as 3 days long and weekends are being abolished.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
How dare these people suggest that the One Percent must hire 20 percent more development staff and cut further into their already meager profits! Just who do they think they are?
While the article has some interesting points I find it very hard to take completely seriously due to some fallacious logic. "For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there's one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn't." This seems to assume that the cost of another employee working 40 hours a week would be identical to the cost saved by cutting the first four employees down to 40 hours. Here's a few problems with that: Even if you are paying the original employees overtime it's still probably cheaper to keep paying them than hiring/training/providing a desk for/medical etc. Also if you decide you need to cut back a little bit it's much easier to end the overtime than it is to fire somebody (which can be fairly expensive). Finally my previous argument may not even apply since the first four may be salaried and not being paid any extra. All that said the increasingly large number of hours worked by people worries me, I just wish the article didn't stick in little bits like this that don't add up. I at least, find this sort of fallacy incredibly damaging towards the article's credibility.
This has got to be one of the most obviously nonsensical submission summaries I have seen. Firstly it talks about how people would get more work done if they didn't do overtime. Then it suggests that overtime is responsible for cutting down number of jobs. The second points very existence relies on the first point being false. If people doing 40 hrs are more effective then less overtime would increase the work done per person and thus decrease the need to employ more people.
Enough with the propaganda. I am 31 yo Greek in the IT industry and the last time i worked a 40 hour week was more than 4 years ago. Last month i worked 44 hours more than the (normal ?) 160 hour month. Right now (2012) my retirement will be when i turn 65, that is with the latest measures adopted 3 years ago. This age gets increased every couple of years. And even if i get to that age, the state will not be able to give me my pention because they gambled all the money the taxpayers have been paying for the last 20 years in stock markets and bonds around the world and lost. And surprise-surprise, most of the taxpayers in Greece do pay taxes because the tax ammount is being kept straight from our paychecks.
Educate yourself before opening your mouth and stop reciting what you hear from the news, guess what, most of it is lies.
And yeah, having time for yourself does increase your productivity in whatever business you are in to. Not so long ago and i do thin it was on slashdot, there were reports of VW blocking emails being forwarded to their emplyees blackberry because the thought that this did not allow for personal time and resulted in exausted and unhappy employees.
This way employeers could eliminate things like health care, 401K, etc.
That study is over 100 year old. Lots of things changed from 1909 to this year ya know. Second thing is I feel fine after 40 hours and this means I can still work more than 40 hours but this is not for everyone I agree. Personally this depends on your type of jobs as certain jobs are very demanding. Also theres the income tax situation. If you do overhours, in my province anyway, you pay more income tax so in my situation it's not worth it so i don't work more than 42 hours because of that. If it wasn't that case, i would glady work more than 40. But because this article is based on that 1909 text, i don't fully agree with it. But it has some good facts though.
If workers were extremely efficient, then employers would need fewer of them. You might reply that employers could use the efficiency to grow faster and use more workers. However, you assume that the managers would be as proficient at managing complexity (a larger organization) as the employees were at working. That is another tread and a far more unreachable goal.
Meanwhile, from a civilized country, I prefer my 35 hour work week.
No, no... America needs to work harder for lower pay!!! I mean it's working in all other countries, such as in southeast Asia and all other poor countries.. why no here??
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Only if I am working overtime. At which point my rates are negotiated as a percentage of the offending country's GDP.
I am John Hurt.
In Germany they don't retire at a Greek age (~50) but they do work shorter weeks. That's why their unemployment is low because the workers get just ~32 hours per week, forcing companies to hire more people. (Or so I've heard on RT's Capital Account.) Once the economy improves then the hours will rise again.
As for overtime here in the U.S. it might suck for employers but it works GREAT for my paycheck. I love the extra money overtime gives me (although it's actually straight time it still is nice to have the extra cash).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
We will not turn this situation around until we do what our 19th-century ancestors did: confront our bosses, present them with the data, and make them understand that what they are doing amounts to employee abuse — and that abuse is based on assumptions that are directly costing them untold potential profits."
He left out the actual means used to do this - unionization.
Costs of health insurance and other items that are incurred for each employee don't extend to working more hours. Such costs run at least 25 percent and can be as much as 40 percent. And as just one more example, consider the costs of finding and hiring that next employee.
Before you start extrapolating how to spread work across more employees, consider the added costs of hiring that next person. This is why companies are reluctant to incur those costs until they are sure those costs will be recovered over the long term.
Ibid.
If we're worked to death, does it really matter whether it's by people who speak English or Chinese? The only allegiance that really matters is worker solidarity.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Seriously? Any time someone mentions that some people are better at certain things than others we immediately jump to eugenics? That's a bit disingenuous to say the least. I've been working 50 hour weeks for pretty much my entire adult life, and it's never really bothered me. If I cross 60 hours for a couple consecutive weeks, I get pretty shot and need a day or two off. My brother works 60 hour weeks almost every week, and it doesn't seem to affect him, but if he crosses into 65-70, he becomes an intolerable prick. Meanwhile, if my ex girlfriend worked a single 50 hour week, she was an incoherent bitch by the end of it. Now, I wouldn't argue that the average person's productivity drops off after a 40 hour work week, but only a fool would actually draw the conclusion that every single human being on earth is somehow hardwired to be unable to work more than 40 hours in a week.
I am in charge of IT at my office; staff under me are paid hourly, this has been dictated down from our human resource department. HR keeps telling me that there are new regulations not allowing IT staff to be exempt from overtime as salary employees because of massive abuse in the IT field. They also are telling me that oversight organizations are heavily monitoring for abuse. Additionally, HR forces me to have my staff get overtime approved 2 weeks in advance. I think HR read some random article somewhere and is turning opinion into fact, but I am not an expert in the salary field. I have great staff, but technically when we have a service fail late at night and my Senior Engineer restarts the service remotely we are breaking all sorts of internal rules. It is my wish to move all non-tier one staff to exempt salaries, but I need information to combat HR’s ‘they have to be hourly’ stance. Anyone out there an expert on these rules that could explain them in a comment?
Please... Don't listen to this drivel. I have kids and an angry wife at home. I want to be at work 80 hours a week.
Have you tried golf? You can swear all you want, and young, pretty women drive around the courses offering you beer. It's a win-win, and a lot better than being at work.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
May I suggest:
Hobbies
Charity work
Exercise!
Go back to school for an extra degree
Or, if you really want 80 hours, a second job.
-GiH
"For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there's one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn't."
Unfortunately this isn't reality. Its not just the FTE and the Salary for said person, but the benefits package, bonuses, physical space, equipment (blue or white collar), and a host of various other things of the sort that an employeer has to take on the books. Add it all up and its often cheaper for the employeer to expect 4 people to work overtime. Please don't come back with the "well if the other four accept a little less benefits, etc...to allow for the fifth" arguement. Personally not interested in socialism.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
If you adopt what you claim is the Greek model you might not like the result....
i.e working harder and more than any other European and getting paid less and still end up the joke of every foreigner who can't piece together information about what is really happening.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44944435/Greeks_Work_Hard_So_Why_Is_There_a_Debt_Crisis
Wait 'till the oil runs out, just like the Saudis. Then what?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I worked betwenn 100 to 120 hours a week for three years back in the late '80s. The first two years were awesome, as what I was doing was playing with lasers, electronics, sound gear, alanlog systhesis and computers to my hearts content. I eventually got burnt out and dropped my hours way down. Then I quit.
Yes, we'd never compete with those other industrialized countries ... most of which mandate 40 hours a week or less.
If you're competing for jobs with unskilled Chinese farmers, you're doing it wrong.
-GiH
Talk's cheap, go for it.
Both good ideas. But it'd be hard to correlate them causally.
I am an American and I also work 37.5 hours a week. I work in the IT department of a large well known manufacturing company, and our hours are typically 8:30-5. And people here are almost always gone at 5. However, before this place I worked at a few different small consulting shops, and they worked tons of overtime. That is probably why I didn't last long in those places and ended up here.
How about instead of focusing on eliminating the 40 hour work week we look at the vacation time given instead. Germany is probably the best example of this, given they get a lot of paid vacation time and are STILL one of the best off countries in Europe!
Practice Static Safety - Hack Naked
Not married to an angry wife, are ya?
To the creature that is the angry wife, the ONLY justification for not being home, catering to her every wish, unloading the dishwasher, and cleaning the garage, because you're lucky to have her to cook shitty potatoes for you, buddy, is if you're out bringing in more money so she can buy more things for you to carry home for her. Any other activity is tantamount to infidelity. This is one of the major reasons my angry wife is now an angry ex-wife (which still sorta sucks but not nearly as badly).
I kid, but some people (of both sexes) really do live this way.
I had the exact same thought. I'm a contract software developer, so I charge hourly. Today my goal is to put in my first 40 hour week in the past 3 months. Even though working less hours hurts my bottom line, I simply don't see the value of giving up my time beyond a ~37 hour work week, and I don't see a productivity increase when I do work a full 40+ hours.
Have you ever worked with Chinese people? Like real Chinese people, from China. My wife has - she's a graduate student, and a lot of the other grad students came from over there. She's even been to a Chinese university for a couple of months, to do some field and lab work over there on a grant.
At first, she was really disappointed in herself; she could see that the Chinese kids got to work before her and left really really late, and they'd even have lunch at their desks instead of going outside to eat.
Then she paid a bit more attention, and realized something: those Chinese students weren't getting shit done. Even though she put in fewer hours and would take a break for lunch, she was getting at least as much work done, if not more.
It's not that they're lazy or incompetent or anything like that, it's that they push themselves so hard they're all in this steady state of being half burnt out.
The thing is, it doesn't matter how hard you're willing to work; there's only about eight hours per day of physical labor in you, or six hours per day of mental effort. Sure, you can put in more work for a week, maybe two, but after that the quality goes way downhill.
Hey with redbull and double dipping someday we'll hit 180 hour work week, then we can retire at 28!
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
I'm from the UK, too, and I also do a 37 hour week, and get 25 days holiday, plus the 8 or 9 public holidays.
I wouldn't want to work more than that. I work to live, not live to work.
When the sleep-substitute drugs that have been in testing over the last decade hit the shelves, that's when shit will really hit the fan. The market will readjust to the availability of labor and you'll have to work 18 hours a day to make the same pay.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Dear GOD please use pinyin! The sounds in chinese correspond to different works depending the accents used!
Similar to how the word Oh can be used differently in english.
Oh? soft sound with a lifting to the end of the sound
Oh! Sharp sound, clipped ending
Except that in chinese, the different sounds correspond to completely different words.
If you don't indicate the right tones, both of you just left yourselves open to some seriously nasty jokes......
Prices on commodities are skyrocketing because .Gov is borrowing, Printing and spending like a drunken sailor. This in turn causes high inflation and investment money then decides to go into middle-manning commodities such as Oil, Food and Energy. That in turn increases costs for businesses.
The only way to reduce hours is to cut pay and benefits to existing staff.
Problem: Per-Capita Income hasn't kept up with inflation for over 15 years. Cutting pay is not only bad for morale, but the staff you kept from the last 10 layoffs are the top of the company and those you let go are the fluff. You drop pay down and you open yourself up for being sniped by headhunters and compeditors, or for employee reprisal.
What bosses are doing is cutting budgets, and in turn not giving out raises to people, wherever they can. They also invest in scheme's that save time for the employee such as work-from-home scheme's. They're hiring less, eliminating positions when people leave, offering less for positions that open up, investing heavily in IT Projects to make their best employee's better. The problem is, down the line you have major hiring problems because now your company and employee's have specialized so heavily that when one of them leaves for some place else you have no idea what their responsabilities are and what the requirements are to replace them. How many systems are left undocumented as to how they are built?
Or you get the top 1% oddball in who does a job in 4 hours what takes others 8 to do and refuses to do more work because the pay they spend the other 4 studying/self-educating.....
Your socialism is a totally unsustainable model, and now you want Germans, the lone EU members who are responsible, frugal, and hard-working, to pay for it! Keep protesting and burning stuff, that will change reality!
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money." -- Margaret Thatcher.
I love this "gambled your retirement away" nonsense. How the hell did you people think you were going to get the necessary returns in your pension Ponzi scheme? Investing in 2% T-Bills? 1950 called and wants its retirement model back. Pensions don't work. Go ask Jimmy Hoffa, if you can find him.
Get to work! And real jobs, not steal-from-your-meager-private-sector-redundant-public-sector-jobs. And get a defined contribution model for your retirements like Chile.
"playing with lasers"
"eventually got burnt out"
This stuff writes itself.
Retire to the marble orchard
Go look at the mortality numbers of who lives longer. Those who immerse themselves in work and never retire live to 90. Then go look at the people who die a week after retiring. People need a purpose when they wake up in the morning to stay vital and healthy.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
That's very much like saying "For every copy of Photoshop that is pirated, Adobe looses $1000." And it's wrong, for very much the same reasons.
I have certainly worked on projects where if we'd hired enough people to make everyone work 40 hour weeks, the project would have been horribly over budget and would have been canceled. Of course, those projects are usually unsustainable anyways (mine was - it was canceled. :)
I'm not arguing with the basic premise that the 40 hour work week is a good thing, keep in mind.
On the other hand, those who have been working overtime for years wouldn't be able to handle the pay cut they now depend on. So they end up looking for a second job and therefore work even longer hours. Catch-22.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
I've heard that people who have lived in Greece and observed how many hours people actually work think those numbers are a joke. It is entirely possible that Greek people just are more willing than anyone else to lie about how many hours they work.
For hourly employees on government or agency contracts, hours beyond 40 per week are almost all profit. You'll commonly see employers pushing OT near the end of the quarter because it inflates their business unit's (or division's) earned value. The short term metric gain outweighs the long term costs because the metrics are what drives the financial bus. Unfortunately workers suffer. When they've had enough of the burnout, they eventually leave. Now a group working 50+ hours per week are made to work even more to fill the hole. Defects and escapes accelerate from there. Eventually the long-term debt catches up to the business unit through loss of contracts. The costs of escapes drives up their hourly rates to the point another company takes the contract. Sad that upper management never gets it.
That one week in November when we turn out clocks back essentially makes that possible.
I figured that the ridiculous tone of my post would make the fact that I was joking pretty obvious.
That said, the minimum requirements for jumping to eugenics are 1. Heritable variability in some ability(or, if one is feeling looser, stochastic variability and a willingness to overproduce and cull every generation. Not strictly eugenics; but similar) and 2. An incentive to improve the population level capability in that ability.
Ability to work long hours does fit, as do a wide variety of other work-related human attributes.
My partner works 14 hour days every week-day, 9am until 11pm. She then brings extra work home to do at night and/or over the weekend.
She is paid salary for a 45 hour week. It's crazy. I've told her to work smart, not hard, but if she finishes work given to her, she is just given more.
She seems to be handling it ok, but does goof off a lot and wants to quit. Quitting means leaving the country.
BTW, this is a law firm.
My machinists make time and a half for overtime. They get pissed off when I pull back to 40 hours due to lack of work. At 66 hours, they're pay doubles over a standard 40 hour week.
As if they weren't dull and stupid before that second week of OT.
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
All the nordic countries have similar laws regarding overtime.. They don't have much in the way of natural resources. Seems to work out for them as well.
What is the motovation for an Employer to not cause an Employee to work for Free? If it's not jail time, then it's the cost of doing business.
Perhaps he's taking time away from his angry wife to spend it with your angry ex-wife?
I am officially gone from
Adding another person adds payroll costs not directly related to hours worked. And of course, adding another person means more money spent on rent for office space. And at some point, you have to hire another manager. So until someone invents magic pixie dust that causes the incremental cost of adding a new employee to be less than the incremental cost of just having 4 people work a few more hours, this problem will not go away.
When the fake, corporate controlled news this week was saying "how could the unemployment rate possibly be going down and the private sector adding jobs when GDP growth is only 2%???" as if they don't know full well why. It's because the private sector has squeezed every drop of productivity out of every stressed out worker it possibly can and finally HAS to hire (at huge discounts from a few years ago, since you're desperate now). Since there's no labor organization, nobody can go to their boss as a one person union and demand less working hours (they'd laugh in your face), corporations go by different measures of productivity because they know you don't dare. Yeah, that's the reason the hiring doesn't exactly match GDP growth. It's a rotten arrangement and until everyone gets the anti-union sentiment they've had hammered into their brains by *massive* corporate propaganda campaigns for 40 years, this is how it's going to be, so wise up or deal. Luckily the company I work at is privately owned and not subject to the torture of the merciless shareholder whip. That's really the problem with society overall. Corporate charters...and that's what is so confusing to people. They meet their CEO and he's such a nice guy and he cares about the environment and homeless people PERSONALLY, but in his INSTITUTIONAL ROLE, he's subject to INVESTOR LAWSUITS, if he doesn't operate like a psychopath and squeeze every drop of productivity out of everyone and every drop of profit out of anything at ANY COST. All externalities, like people, the environment, morals aside, he is BOUND BY LAW which is clearly spelled out in almost every corporate charter to do anything he can, screw anybody he has to, to get as much money as he can. If you don't get that, you don't understand how things work. Until the structure and mission of corporations are changed, you can whine all you want and nothing is ever going to change. GET IT? Seriously people stop being so pathetically naive. When it's profit first at any cost, problems ensue.
Oh I know that. Who said anything about telling your wife about the reduction in hours?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
You'll be comforted to know that a good deal of the worlds oil production in is done by thousands people who are contracted to work 12 hour days, 6.5 days per week, for 4 to 6 weeks per hitch. This is usually after killer jet lag, since the majority of them fly 8-20 hours to get to work. I know, I did it for a couple of years.
All that explosive, environmentally dangerous stuff managed by people who are impaired due to continuous overtime and lack of sleep? How could that be a problem?
Well, 32 hours per week in Germany? That would be exaggerated I think..
but, a lot of other stuff is true: Germans usually have a minimum of ~25 days of paid vacation a year, the average is more close to 30 (the minimum by law is 20 if you are on a 5 day workweek, or 24 if you are on a 6 day workweek). We also have a crapload of public holidays, which are always off (or you get paid mandatory bonuses above 100% plus)
The typical worktime in Germany I would say is still the 40hr/week.. with a lot of businesses doing 37 or 38, and in seldom cases, 42, so let's say it's around 40.
Also, the regulations on overtime are a lot stricter here than in the US, like a guy above said about Norway.. and, at least for me as an IT guy, I can say that I never had to work an unpaid hour of overtime in my life (even though I'm not paid by the hour, I'm on a flex time model where I'm supposed and encouraged to take off any hour I worked overtime as soon as it is convienient for me. It is even prohibited by law to offer me a payout of my vacation days in the case that I couldn't take it all because I have so many overtime hours to get rid of - they have to give me the whole thing in days off (but for special cases like switching jobs))
Add that to the local social security, healthcare etc. and you have a compelling case of a decent work environment (as long as you are doing qualified work of course, unqualified labor sucks over here about as much as anywhere else..)
Or German, which has a strong and vibrant economy and does not over work its people.
douche bag.
Some years back I chose to reduce from 40 hours a week to 30. Best move I ever made, even though I got a pro-rata salary reduction. I choose to cycle instead of own a car, skip alpine skiing holidays and useless tech. tools, but gained overall quality of life. And I saw more of my kids growing up. And no union required !
And I am confident my employer got the *best* 30 hours of my working-week, not the end-of-day/end-of-week hanging around in the coffee room !!
Brazil has something similar. I don't know the details, but some of my Brazillian co-workers have mandatory off days after they've worked quite a bit.
No one is wired to handle it. Everyone burns out.
Employment is generally considered a 'trailing indicator' of an improving economy. Why? Hiring new employees costs money -- there's the time and expense of selecting the right candidate, screening them, making sure they have space to work, etc.... And then, there's the risk that you hire somebody who ends up being lousy. Plus, when the economy is still shaky (as it is now), you don't want to hire new people because you're worried that the economy will tank again and you won't have any work for them to do.
So, why would employers *ever* hire new people? Well, part of it is because you cannot continually drive your employees to work 60 hours per week, for many reasons that the article points out: you don't get as much out of them, they get burned out, etc.... Plus, at some point, it's impossible to stretch your current workforce any thinner. And, when you have an open position, now somebody from your competitor, whose tired of 60-hour weeks will apply. That competitor, to keep its employees from leaving (and for the other reasons), will have to reduce them back to a more sane work week, which means they'll hire people.
But, that process starts with trying to stretch more out of the people you already have. So, when you see companies starting to do that, it's a good sign that they'll soon start hiring.
Arguably, the USA already has adopted the Greek model. That is to say, excessive overtime combined with low productivity, and resulting higher unemployment.
Facts, eh?
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
I worked in Germany for a year for an aerospace company that had a 35-hour week. My experience was that people got as much (or as little) work done as they would have if they had five or more extra hours. (Though some of the management positions had longer hours.) And we did have a very strong union presence, which as one might expect was responsible for this arrangement in the first place.
Having been to China on a business venture, I think the very last thing we Americans need to worry about is their efficiency. Bottled water FTW!!
"My brother works 60 hour weeks almost every week, and it doesn't seem to affect him"
How do you know? How's the quality of his work? You're only knowledge of the affect is their personality change but you are assuming their work is not suffering.
Stop pulling shit out of your ass.
My thought too. I'm currently freelance, so I typically work under 20 hours a week. I'm going up to 37 in a couple of months, starting a research job, but I'll mainly be 'working' on things I do for fun in my spare time anyway, so I doubt it will feel too much like work. I saw a study a few years ago that said that your peak hourly productivity is at about 20 hours per week. After about 35 hours, the decrease in hourly productivity means that you're achieving less overall than you would be at 20 hours. Working longer makes you feel more like you're working, but it doesn't actually increase what you achieve, except for short periods.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
And not all people are doing Overtime every day.
I tend to work 40 hours a week. Even when I am On-Call 24/7.
If your jobs is forcing overtime chances are you are going to get laid off soon as either it will be outsourced to somwhere cheaper or automated.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Here in Canada, things aren't that good... I work a 37.5h work week (5 days @ 8h per day, half hour unpaid lunch... my two 15m breaks are paid each day, though). In my contract, I get 3 paid weeks off per year, which goes up by 1 every 5 years you're with the company (they have to be taken as a whole week... I tried booking every other friday off when I started and they were unamused) , and I am able to spend my flex dollars from the benefits package on an extra week off. I also get 2 days in lieu for statutory holidays that can be taken as floaters, and I think 9 other statutory holidays throughout the year.
How does your employer treat sick and emergency days? Mine is... stupid. For your first 2 years, your first 2 sick days are unpaid, and you're allowed a total of 10 sick days per year. After 2 years, it's only the first day that's unpaid, and after 4 years, they pay from day one, but it never goes up from 10 sick days per year.... the result is that we have people coming in when they're sick, and that hurts productivity immensely, because they get everybody else sick. At least they're reasonable with emergency days and short-term disability... those are paid from the word go, and I can take up to 20 weeks' short term disability at full pay before I go on long-term at 2/3 pay.
Yup, national statistics from the OECD are easily countered by anecdotal evidence from your friends. That's the scientific method alright!
Football Odds
Wow second hand information versus statistics. I'm sold....
The reason why some workers work 50+ hours a week and other none, is because of work ethics and skills. You can't expect an unemployed janitor to become surgeon or an electrical engineer. Workers that are willing to work long hours are generally in demand because the produce more than the standard 40 hour workers. Rarely are there unemployed workers that are willing to work 50+ hours a week. Simply because they are hard working.
Another issue is that US workers must complete against overseas workers that work 70+ hours a week at a fraction of the pay American workers. Another issue is that American consumers prefer cheap disposal goods instead of quality goods that last. When I comes to more expensive American made product versus a cheap Asian made product, the majority of consumers choose the cheaper model.
This theory by "Barbie" is a farse. France implement a policy to limit the work week to 35 hours so that companies would be forced to hire more workers. It was a complete disaster and productivity in France tumbled. The problem with people like Barbie is that they are clueless about economics and business.
FWIW: back in 1909, Workers worked at least 6 days a week Monday through Saturday. Generally workers that are busiest are the most productive. They stay focused on there tasks and avoid goofing off. Too much slack in a workers jobs leads to decreased productivity because they lost focus and become distracted.
The way to get unemployment down is to fix regulation so that US companies can complete, and that the gov't prosecutes fraud to send a strong signal that fraud and corruption will not be tolerated.. Currently we have honest companies being buried under red tape, while those committing fraud bypass the regulations and continue to escape prosecution. Laws are pointless if they are not enforced. In addition the cost of US labor need to decline so it become completive with Asia. While it does not need to drop to the same cost per hour, it does need to be adjusted down. If wages and taxes for US labor dropped about 10% to 15% US businesses would be able to hire more workers and sell more domestically made goods.
Ultimately US manufacturing labor is in permanent decline, as factory automation continues to gain traction. Factory automation reduces the amount of factory workers and increases product quality. Workers are assuming roles of managing the machines instead of doing the actual production, which isn't a bad thing, since it reduces worker related injuries and reduces wear and tear on the workers bodies.
So does time travel.
You did what to my Coke?
What you need is a change in the "exempt" laws. Here in Norway the only people that are exempt are those in management and particularly independent positions, simply being a white collar worker is not sufficient. As long as you have fixed or semi-fixed working hours, as long as you have no power of delegation or to organize your own work (really free like where, when, how you want as long as you meet your deliverables) you are not exempt. There are also some laws on maximum overtime but in all honestly both employers and employees often ignore that as long as they get their overtime pay.
That gives the right incentive that employers would rather hire people at full rate than have people work for time and a half. That penalizes inefficient workers and slackers who can't make up for it by working extra time - forcing you to work extra time to stay "even" because employers lose money when you need overtime to finish what others finish in regular hours. As long as the US is full of "exempt" workers whose work is still measured in wall clock hours, you will continue to get screwed because another hour is a free hour. It's like trying to keep the flies away after dipping yourself in honey.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Oh and further down I read a lot of people talking about better salaries in the us etc.. so let me just break that down by my job, just for the fun of it..:
I'm 28, have a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and work as an IT Systems Engineer - Exchange, Unix, VMWare, this kind of stuff.
This is how I get compensated:
40 hrs/week, 30 days of paid leave a year
A salary of $65.000 a Year (before taxes, after taxes I still keep about $40.000 a year,
but note this is Germany - after taxes, I already paid my healthcare, my pension fund, etc)
I also get a $2000 bonus based on how the company performed at the end of the year.
(We also have subsidized meals at the company cafeteria)
Also, every hour I work over my 40hrs/Week is getting billed to one of two time accounts:
one for "necessary, but incentive" overtime, the other one for "ordered" overtime, which get handled like this: For the incentive overtime, I can take absence hours if business is low, for the ordered ones, I HAVE to take absence hours as soon as possible to get my compensation in free time.
Also, I get paid 25% extra on every hour I work after 8pm, 40% on every hour I work extra after midnight,
50% for work on Saturdays and Sundays, and 125% for work on bank holidays - i can choose if I want to have this bonus in money equivalent or time equivalent.
also, I work on flextime, so I can more or less come and go as I please (there is no clock to punch, you just book the time you did on a tool based on your own recalling) as long as business needs are fulfilled and we have the necessary staff on site at all times.
Also, if I have to travel on business - all the time I spend traveling, be it at the wheel of a car, on a plane, on a train, waiting for a connecting flight on an airport etc pp - is considered worktime. so if I leave my home at 6am in the morning and arrive at a customer site at noon, I actually "worked" 6 hours going there - minus the time it would usually take me to go to the office, which is substracted by law.
I guess some people can understand now that we Europeans don't really consider the US to have a good work environment..
P.S. no cubicles, I share my ~220sqft office with only one colleague. And they allow ICQ and headphones at work officially.
I work in IT and only work 37.5 hours a week. Just enough to be considered full time by the government. I don't take phone calls or answer emails after 5pm. I am getting paid about 10% less than the average for my position but the perks are well worth it.
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
Not really. Certainly people can do a better or worse job of handling excessive hours, depending on the person and the kind of work, along with other factors. However, no one is simply "wired" to handle excessive amounts of work. Everyone gets tired, burns out, loses concentration, and makes mistakes. Some people push through it, continuing to make mistakes and be less productive as they wear themselves out, and just keep wearing themselves out.
Easy, we'll just add another day to the week.
The inflation in people's work hours and willingness to work overtime is just a natural consequence of market forces at work in an unregulated market. There are too many people for too few jobs, and corporations take advantage of this situation by squeezing their employees harder.
Now, for the society as a whole, this does not seem to make very much sense, because the result is a scenario where nobody is happy. The people who have work are unhappy because they get very little time to enjoy life and have fun, and the people who do not have work are unhappy because their basic needs are not met.
Just by using simple game theory, the question of "how much should I work" is clearly a game where everyone loses - everyone is compelled to work a little bit more than the next guy, and because everyone comes to the same conclusion, everyone ends up working more - without gaining any competitive advantage. And this is _exactly_ because of the "everyone should be allowed to decide for themselves" type of situation which so many people are advocating, which basically rigs the game so everyone loses.
In order to shape society such that people don't have to work their &# off just to basically survive, then regulation is needed - there's no way around it.
Everyone's different, of course. Me? I felt sharpest and most productive in my work when I started being able to take a morning off in the middle of the week. I usually work overtime and, after a few days, I start to feel unable to concentrate after the 6th hour of work. When I get something done, I take much more time than I usually would and with stupid little mistakes in it. Just taking a morning off, in the middle of the week, really makes a huge difference for me.
This is just anecdotal evidence but there's something to be said about this. In the end, everyone's different and every job is different. Companies don't have the luxury of knowing all the variables about the way your brain works so they have to find an average. Some people's sweet spots for optimal performance, will fall closer to that average, others wont. If you have the flexibility to find it yourself, great! If you don't, arguing with your boss that you should work less is usually out of question.
Hopefully, companies will become more flexible and work more with its employees brains and less against them.
You're only knowledge of the affect
Looks like someone has been working a 70 hour week
Stop pulling shit out of your ass.
Grumpy, too!
Go back to your cubicle, little drone, and let the big boys ruin the world.
FTFY.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'm assuming that's why the word "seem" was in the sentence, to account for the possibility that his work is affected but there are no personality effects.
He effected a bored affect.
It's not that they're lazy or incompetent or anything like that, it's that they push themselves so hard they're all in this steady state of being half burnt out.
I've also heard the same thing said about the Japanese. Hugely long work week, but totally shit productivity, but their society is so geared up to it that rebelling is nigh impossible.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Sorry for replying to myself, but apparently the above post is replying to the wrong post. So, yeah...
He effected a bored affect.
There's only 168 hours in a week. If you could somehow redefine a week to be longer than 7 days...then you'd have your 180 hour work week.
So your only purpose is your work?
It's fine if it's working for you, but I'm not a bee or an ant.
AC posting in case the angry soon-to-be-ex wife happens upon this.
You, sir, have perfectly described my life. No kidding needed. I couldn't spend an hour every three weeks with the guys without being suspected of infidelity. I would get up in the morning, get myself and 4 kids ready to go (2 hers, 2 mine - both of us have custody). I'd go to work, where she'd text me all day and expect immediate answers. I'd get off work, pick up 3 of the kids from daycare in time to get home to get the 4th off the bus, make dinner, entertain all 4, get baths and get them in bed. Somewhere along the way I'd manage to do the dishes and laundry. I couldn't deal with one woman. Why would I want one on the side?
Meanwhile, as soon as we moved into our new house, she quit her job. She'd sleep in claiming to be sick, make breakfast and lunch for herself and leave the dishes wherever she was done with them. And if I dared ask if she'd mind if I went out for an hour with some friends it was like the world was ending. I didn't love her, she'd say. How could I do such a thing? And when I got back ('cause I'd go anyway) she'd head out the door to be with her friends - after claiming to be sick all day.
Come to find out, she'd planned this from the time she met me. Her old neighbor has some pretty good quotes from her. I'm not the first she's done this to and one guy has already landed in prison after marrying her. I am absolutely terrified.
The straw that broke the camel's back was when she started telling her friend that I hit her. Honestly, I'm not a large person. She could kick my ass, I'm sure. She would try to provoke a fight but I never responded. Now she's trashing me to anyone who is a mutual friend and because she's saying how much she loves me but doesn't understand why I'm so mean to her they are all lining up behind her without even talking to me. I actually called the cops on her - big mistake. Of course they came down on her side. She went from physically imposing and verbally abusive to meek, humble, and victimized in no time flat.
I thought my first wife was bad...this one is spectacularly horrible. I think I'm done with marriage for good at this point. I just hope she doesn't try to get a protective order. When talking to the cops they said I needed to be careful she doesn't do that because I'd be forced out of my house. I asked, "What if I get one first?" He said, "You don't have cause." I said, "Neither does she." He said, "Brother, tough shit."
So, in closing, the lesson today is: don't marry a crazy woman. And the second lesson is: you can't know if they're crazy.
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
ITYM "some people have deluded themselves into thinking it doesn't apply to them". Or perhaps their work is so awful to begin with that you can't tell the difference.
People need a bigger purpose to work for than squeezing out trinkets for the ultra rich, or persuing empty materialism. This is why capitalism is fundamentally inhumane. When people are free from having to work to live, they will be free to live to work.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I've been working as a programmer in an enterprise environment for the last few years, but growing up and prior work was in farming. A 40 hour farming week would be unheard of - hell, an 80 hour farming week would be wonderful. Even so, I'd still much prefer farming over the mental exhaustion of programming, email, meetings, ...
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
No, they are not. There are a lot of self-assessed "high performers" that think they are, but they are not. What really happens is that these people become so incompetent that they cannot see all the mistakes they are making anymore.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Flex time is a running joke with my brother in law and I. We often joke that Flex time is "You have the freedom to work more than the hours we demand from you, but no less". We've noticed that even with companies who are flexible in their hours and who DO focus on task/performance based accomplishments, it simply will always boil down to hours and working overtime. This is especially true if you're in software engineering, on salary, and receive no overtime compensation.
The reason is because of your coworkers. If you have coworkers (or bosses) perform much less than you do but "work" longer hours, they will often complain and treat you unfairly if you come into the office later than they do and leave earlier. This is despite the fact that you have completed all assigned tasks and did not over commit yourself into working crazy long hours. These complaints often result in bosses over tasking you and forcing you to work later hours. This turns into a dangerous cycle.
Another big problem is that managers who are in charge of production schedules are constantly getting pressure to finish sooner than the estimated deadline. When you have well thought out deadline that involves everyone working at full capacity and accounting for potential hiccups along the way, shrinking this deadline will almost always involve people working overtime. Sure, you can quit and find another job. But this sort of practice happens everywhere and you run the risk of being unemployed for an extended amount of time attempting to find a new place to work.
What's the solution? Well, for starters, I think the salary positions are a joke and that all employment should be contractual with understood requirements for completion. This would force everyone to understand contracts and some legalese which in general is worth knowing plus it would draw a very thick line as to when employment ends and needs to be renewed. If health-care was not so dependent on employers and telecommuting was more accepted, even better. This works out nicely for employers as they can write up specific contracts for what they want and only what they wants. This would also save them from having to do massive layoffs due to trimming the fat or downsizing because a project is finished, contracts would simply be finished.
Yep, and weren't we promised that we could hang on to our shitty jobs ?
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. -- Willam Blake
If he is, I truly and honestly wish him luck.
However things shake loose, he's welcome to apply for membership in the "She spread her legs for me!" club, currently 1500+ members strong. Free swab tests upon membership approval!
Bitter humor is the best kind.
If your jobs is forcing overtime chances are you are going to get laid off soon as either it will be outsourced to somewhere cheaper or automated.
So, for example, doctors and lawyers?
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The GPS tracker she put in your skull is super hard to argue with. Though I guess you could try drinking enough booze to short it out. ;)
For many of us fulltimers, I believe, overtime compensation is exempt under FLSA Section 213 (a)(17). This gives our employers no incentive to prevent overworking, especially if we are (and "lucky" enough to be) salaried. Therefore I expect nothing to "vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we're supposed to by law". The law protects these abusive workplace habits, cultures, and practices.
Go ask a Swede what they think about immigrants coming in and wanting some goodies without paying into the system.
Sooner or later, all the social democracies will fail. Utterly unsustainable.
Side note, captcha on submitting above commentary was "unjust". LOL
The premiss of the article is fundamentally flawed as the 40 hour work wee really never existed, especially if you had the drive to be successful.
Go look at the mortality numbers of who lives longer. Those who immerse themselves in work and never retire live to 90. Then go look at the people who die a week after retiring. People need a purpose when they wake up in the morning to stay vital and healthy.
Right! Because correlation implies causality!
it certainly is not valid in all. Hell a five day work week isn't exactly valid for many either. I regularly put in past forty hours in IT but I can tell you this, it certainly doesn't feel like it all that much.
With very manual labor jobs I can see issues being raised. However I see more problems occurring the more hours worked in a row than how many in a week as threat to safety, accuracy, and whatnot. I know I am pretty much need a few hours after a long stretch.
Then again I started out on a farm, forty hours would have been a blessing.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If my wife ever did plant a tracker in my skull, I would take great pleasure in letting her know EXACTLY when and where I was cheating on her.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
The Republicans are dismantling unions so people cannot confront their bosses and ask for fair pay or other business practices to be put info effect.
It keeps the obedient workers powerless. Good for business, bad for society.
But it's still funnier if a monkey wrote it.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
@sheehaje,
Hahahaha - I fell off my chair when I read this comment!!!
Can I quote the über-wise George Carlin in a relevant rant I heard once?
"...So... You hate your job?
There is a support group for people like you. It's called "EVERYBODY"!
They hold nightly meetings in your local bar."
I don't know pinyin. I just learned by speaking with people. The only character I can even recognize is double-happiness.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
That's 33hs a day, or 28hs per day if you even work on saturdays, that makes no sense... unless you live in pluto that is. That's be very light work.
There's also different kinds of work. If you're in the armed forces you may work a lot more than 60 hours a week, but the whole organization is structured around that (and I don't just mean in combat operations which I think is a separate discussion).
Some people have jobs where you have to be there if something goes wrong, but there's not a lot to do if nothing is happening. Or you're overseeing other people who are only working 40 hours a week, and your presence is more to inspire fear than it is to actually accomplish much directly.
Or you could be only really doing 15 or 20 hours of meaningfully challenging work, and the rest of it is a long series of trivial tasks.
Or you can burn out and wreck the place or make a lot of mistakes. Which happens, a lot.
I have to disagree. Anyone who makes such broad statements does not understand how widely people can vary. I could personally handle an 80 hour work week if I had enough passion for what I do, too. That is the mindset that allows small business to flourish.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
In my industry the customer gets impatient and DEMANDS the the workers come-in on Saturdays. "Our employees are working the weekends; why aren't your employees?"
As for my productivity it's highest before I eat lunch. So I usually postpone my lunch til 2 or 3 since I know I'll be worthless afterwards. (And then it returns around 6pm.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Well... the question is why don't you just divorce her and get the hell out of there. Cut your losses dude. If you continue on that path you're either going to kill yourself from the stress, or she's going to kill you.
We don't have the entire picture, so it's pretty hard to just take your word for it, but you should be keeping notes. Good god in todays days of "everything can be used against you" why haven't you recorded the abuse she's putting you through?
Ha! Well said, sir. You and I should drink many beers together.
despair has it right
The hidden assumption here is that employee productivity is the most important and over-riding goal in actually making business decisions. It is not -- for the simple reason that employee productivity is difficult to measure and seldom measured, decreasingly so with increasing sophistication of knowledge workers.
While plenty of lip-service can be occasionally paid to productivity, usually other goals are more important. Like the boss pleasing his boss. Or the boss satisfying his psychological need to dominate subordinates.
The point is that whole-business profitability is not the only driver of management decisions, even though none dare admit such corruption.
We get up to 4 week per year paid (at the management's discretion), but there is a Statutory Sick Pay that lasts 28 weeks (set by the government - no idea what it is).
I'm almost never off (probably less than 5 days in the last 6 or 7 years), but the few times I've been off work for a few days, I've just filled in a small form and that's it. I get paid as usual.
all the richest guys I know work 60+ hours/week.
Except the lawyers, they work 80 hours a week.
I don't know how people can simultaneously criticize the rich, and how they got that way. Cognitive dissonance at its best.
If you hate your job, take a risk and start a business. But, beware, it's not as easy as Mitt Romney makes it look.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
It invoves working at near relativistic speeds to get a few extra hours from time dilation.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Man I feel lucky. I've worked in IT for a company for 14 years now where we have 37.5 hr work weeks and maybe one week of the year if even that have to work overtime. No its not a goverment job, its insurance.
The law is 40 hours per week. 37.5 hrs/week is for unionized employees. However, most employers extend this to cover non-unionized labor as well.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
If the work is engaging and interesting, yes, you can work 80 hour work weeks for a while. It's not because you're special, it's because, if engaged in their work, people can work very hard for a while. After a while, you burn out, and you lose perspective. You start making bad assumptions and making mistakes. You might still think you're doing a great job, but you'll be less productive than if you took a break.
You are not magical and you are not Superman. It feels good to be a hero and think, "I can do things that normal people can't, because I'm 'wired that way'!" It's similar to the way people think they're really great at multitasking because they're "wired that way" and they can do 20 things at once without missing a beat. Certainly some people are better at multi-tasking than others, but if you do too many things at the same time, you simply won't be focused on all of them. You'll miss things, but the irony is that you won't notice that you're missing things because you're not focused enough to see things slipping through the cracks.
Angry wives? I love that game!
Uh, no, I know because I work with him, and he single handedly runs operations for a multimillion dollar corporation that basically crumples like a paper bag every time he takes a sick day. The quality of his work impeccable (provided he doesn't push into the 65-70 hour range in a week). So yea, someone is definitely pulling something out of their own asshole, but it's not me.
Not entirely true. There are times when working (for me) is more fun and relaxing than almost anything else I could think of doing with my time. If you've got the right job and the right temperament it can work. That said, I would fall out of love with my job if I was REQUIRED to put in the hours I put in freely. Its a psyche thing.
Where the fuck in Canada do you live that you get that?? I want to move there.
Here in Manitoba, its 2-weeks vacation for the 1st year, 3 weeks for years 2-10, and 4 once you get beyond 10 years.
Oh, and there is no mandatory paid sick leave. No mandatory short-term disability. If I had a serious illness that required real time away from work, I and my family are pretty much financially fucked.
My employer gives a whopping 5 paid sick days/year...so, exactly as you said, everyone comes in sick & gets everyone else sick leading to shit productivity. We have a massive illness running rampant throught he office as I type this, with a multitude of people coughing all over the place. Fucking real productive, healthy environment.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Coming from Hong Kong, it is expected to work 50+ hours a week, there is "no putting in" extra hours, it is practically mandated. Everyone comes into the office Saturday, this is normal, the work week is Monday-Saturday. On top of it, hours in the office tend to drag well past 5 often having to go out to dinner with co-workers and then back to the office. I know from friends working in Korea that this is the same if not worse - a working day drags into night and mandatory drinks after leaving the office at night with co-workers/management. I cannot speak for other areas in asia, but from the general opinions I have encountered they see Americans as lazy wanting to only work 40 hours a week. Its great to point at other European countries and comparing them to America, but what about the rest of the world?
Personally I tend to agree with the article as from my experience people do work less intensely. A typical work day/week revolved around going into the office, going out for breakfast/snack for an hour or two, going out to lunch for an hour or two, going out to dinner for an hour or two then going out for drinks afterwards... The next day people are dragging after getting in so late, so instead of going in to work, they go in to go to get breakfast/recover, drag their heels until lunch and usually don't start being really productive until 2 or 3... then dinner hits around 5:30-6:30. Saturday is more typical of an American work day, they come in 30 minutes late, take a 30 minute lunch and leave by 4:30-5pm.
40? How will I be able to keep up with Slashdot on such a short week?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
That's the scientific method alright!
Actually... yes, that is the scientific method. Anecdotal evidence which disproves a theory (i.e. individual experiments that produce oddball results) are part of the scientific method. It's all about repetition and cross checking your result against others. Of course, the scientific method has nothing to do with statistics or vetting statistics, which are just compilations of data. Statistics /= science.
-GiH
I worked for a Japanese company for 10 years. It was always super-important to be SEEN to be working - even if there was really nothing to do. If caught idle the boss would usually find some menial task for the idle drone to perform. Often quite demeaning. On the other hand, what was good about this attitude is that if there was some menial shit that really did need to be done the bosses and managers would pitch in and work along side the rest of the staff. So there was a sort of equality - all parts of the same machine (not saying that the machine part is good). It is a clearly different cultural attitude to work. As to my Japanese colleagues productivity, I'd guess mediocre at best. My impression is that in a company setting the best way to survive for Japanese workers is to be just average regardless of your real capabilities. The nail that stick up gets hammered down.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Please... Don't listen to this drivel. I have kids and an angry wife at home. I want to be at work 80 hours a week.
You're comment is very cute and funny, but for those of us with a lovely wife at home and two young kids that would like to get to know their father, please don't speak for all of us. I'm tired of our industry's all-hours, fully tethered nonsense.
I am an hourly worker that loves overtime. My wife works 3-5 hours a week due to having MS.
My Grandfather worked 2 - 3 jobs in order to make enough for his family (his wife did not work either.) Overtime allows me to work substantially less hours for the same amount of money than the hours he had to work.
I wish people would stop trying to "help" out by taking away things that a lot of middle class people need.
And here I am yet again without mod points when I really need them. I've said for a long, long time that the best societies are a healthy mix of both capitalism and socialism. Socialism for things that private industry cannot or is ill-equipped to handle (for example, major infrastructure projects, things such as health insurance in which free enterprise has a perverse incentive to screw its customers over, and things that are deemed essential for life or meaningful societal progress), capitalism for everything else.
This doesn't mean that the petty bickering that goes on now wouldn't happen; people would still argue over what private industry cannot handle and what is considered, for example, "meaningful societal progress." Still, the sooner people stop thinking of socialism as a bad word, the sooner we'll actually be able to regain and retain our position as the global superpower. Unfettered capitalism is just as bad for society as unfettered socialism. Look at a place like, say, Somalia, where there is virtually no government to speak of and individual liberty is taken to an extreme--if you want your neighbor's stuff there's absolutely nothing stopping you from simply taking it, provided you have a band of mercenaries that are skillful enough to go get it. Is this really any better than a place like, say, Cuba or China?
That's what's being lost in today's political discourse. The notion of a happy medium, the idea that both systems have things to offer and lessons to learn.
Yeah .. not every country. Of course the U.S. is rich in oil and other natural resources. We're now a net exporter of oil. Oh, sorry, did the facts get in your way? Let's just slide those aside again.
if we simply worked the way we're supposed to by law
Most of the world already does, including virtually everyone in the US. More importantly, just because something is a law, doesn't make it morally right or wrong.
This has nothing to do with the fact that people who can work into their 90s have jobs that are not physically taxing and wearing on the body.
I've also heard the same thing said about the Japanese. Hugely long work week, but totally shit productivity, but their society is so geared up to it that rebelling is nigh impossible.
Exactly. The company I work for had a large factory in Japan until we sold it because our US factories were so much more efficient.
I spent some time at the Japan facility working with the engineers. Yes, they work long hours. And yet very little productive work is done. But they all get overtime pay (the concept of "exempt employee" is laughable there) so of course they stretch out their work to as many hours as possible. In fact, the only time they seemed to actually work hard was the overtime hours between 6pm and 9pm. But they are all very good at LOOKING like they are working all day. Except between 5pm and 6pm. Apparently that is the universal "goof around, smile and joke with everyone" time over there.
Hey, good luck with that. Sounds worse than my experience with my ex, but the craziness and dishonesty are pretty similar. Hope you get through it without too much emotional or mental injury - also hope it doesn't affect your relationship with your kids. It really sucks that the system is so biased in favour of the crazy bitches, but that is how it is. You need to be smart and calm to get through these situations. Deep breaths, deep, deep breaths. Lots of walks.
My only purpose is to work. At the office I work for money. At home I work to keep my home clean and pleasent. I work to raise my children well. I work to keep my marriage happy -- work work work.
-GiH
So that's the attraction with golf!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
To the creature that is the angry wife, the ONLY justification for not being home, catering to her every wish, unloading the dishwasher, and cleaning the garage, because you're lucky to have her to cook shitty potatoes for you
Hey, I don't even get potatoes unless I cook them myself, you insensitive clod!
Where the fuck in Canada do you live that you get that?? I want to move there.
Ontario. While my department isn't union, most of the company is, so we benefit from the union contract. And because we're in an industry that could have a *huge* impact on the economy were we to fuck things up, the government has set up rules that we're not allowed to outsource.
We do actually have offices in Manitoba where you could get the same contract, but it's under a different company banner, and org structure... not sure if the contract is exactly the same there.
While that is true (the first year of life and the first year of retirements are the years with the highest mortality rate) I feel just going on working is the wrong answer to that. I feel it would be better to ease off from work, in order to reduce the shock. When this is combined with the advice to go do stuff you want to do (my dad got into painting and fishing) and at least one of those things should include appointments with other people. My dad has fishing appointments, that is enough. In a couple of months he'll have appointments to babysit my baby neice/nephew (hopefully). These are the things he lives for, and thus his Ikigai, as I understand it. Ikigai is the reason stated by the people who live in the region with the most 100+ olds (wich is in Japan, by the way) for their logivety.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
There is a big challenge with implementing this approach for white collar knowledge work though. Sometimes my boss has no clue what I do all day for a week at a stretch, and often she has no idea what of it is hard and what of it is easy. Often the easy stuff is viewed as hard and vice versa.
It generally evens out right now, so I just get my work done and everybody goes home happy. It's really pretty task and company contract based, and the 40 hour week establishes a baseline level of production. If it's too much to get done on time, I tell my boss and she finds somebody else to help. If the boss gives me easy tasks for a stretch, at first I relax for a bit, then I get bored and start to find other tasks. Most of the time, there's some ebb and flow and I roll with things. And what's easy, hard, fun, and frustrating for me is different from many equally qualified (on paper) employees. That's what the boss needs to understand in detail, because that's where productivity can really be gained.
If they were to get genuinely task-based and do so fairly, my boss would have to really understand my tasks in detail. And that would be a problematic expectation--frequently, explicitly defining the task and a process to resolve it is more than half of the work and really requires the expertise that the company pays me to offer.
Maybe she wouldn't be so angry if you spent more time with her and less at work...
I have a hard time understanding why a single recent graduate with no family responsibilities and a high-enough salary wouldn't be able to handle more than 40 hours per week continuously. When I was at that stage I would have taken the higher-paying job even if it required 60 hours per week, and maybe more. But if your peers are making about the same as you are and going home at 5pm every single day it leads you to wonder if the grass may be greener at the other companies pasture. Things change once you add a spouse, kids, and the responsibilities of home ownership. Again, if salary is high enough to afford a nanny, lawn mowing crew, and prepared dinners, then long hours might still be manageable and possibly attractive if the salary minus these personal expenses still leaves you with a net gain. The problem is that unless you are a high paid consultant working your own hours or the boss of your own company with the potential reward of windfall profits, it can be hard to find the 60-70 hr/wk job that really pays substantially more than the 40 hr/wk alternative. And you still need time out of the office for your own professional development, continuing education, staying fit, and managing your finances.
There's also the importance of having flexible time that you hold in reserve, the same way that a military commander keeps some of his forces held from battle so he can deploy them to mitigate an unexpected threat or exploit an opportunity. Anybody can have personal problems pop up, and these are usually manageable at 40 hr/wk, but not so easy when you constantly work longer hours. If you're already expected to work 60 hours each week, then you may burn out fast if a short term crisis pops up at work. How many weeks will you work 100 hours each week for $0 in additional pay when your peers are going home at 5pm and apparently take home a relatively close salary to what you already make? The 40 hr/wk worker will likely be more willing to work 60-80 hrs/wk to overcome a short term crisis as long as it doesn't interfere with his family responsibilities.
Finally, quality of life is an important factor. Some people are happy living their lives without children, or in some cases, even without a spouse or similar close relationship. Some careers, such as medicine or public service, may have intrinsic rewards and something that a person can devote their lives to and be passionate about. Their work may be the reason they get up in the morning. But after years and years, even these types of jobs can wear you down if you don't have a personal outlet. Even then, may people can sustain 50-60 hours continuously. There is also the possibility of working a high-pressure job in your early years while you build a nest egg or establish yourself into the fast track for executive promotion, with the intent of slowing down and enjoying life later. But for most of us, while we may "enjoy" what we do, we do not derive our life's purpose from our work. Even those of us who enjoy working with technology need some personal time to enjoy it our own way rather than following the schedules, deadlines, and division of labor handed down by management. So for the average person 40 hours per week is probably ideal. Expecting everyone to happily work longer hours will lead at least a significant portion of your work force to resent the hours you require. Some of us are not convinced that we will live until retirement or that we will be healthy enough to enjoy retirement. Myself, I would rather work 40hrs/wk on average for the rest of my career and retire when I can't work anymore. I have a spouse, kids, and a home to maintain. I have the occasional personal crisis (health, legal, etc.), but I am also willing to put in more hours during the short term when the company needs it.
France implemented a strict mandatory 35 hour work week in March of 2000. The hope was firms would be forced to hire more people. Using Google Public data, the unemployment rate was approximately 9%. The law was loosened to allow more overtime exceptions in 2005. Between 2000 and 2005, the rate fluctuated to 8% and then past 9%. Since 2005, it went as low as 7% and is currently around 10%.
A mandatory 40 hour work week is not the sole factor that drives unemployment, and if anything has no real bearing on hiring. Firms, in general, will do without instead of taking on yet another fully loaded cost for a full time employee unless the products they sell are in demand driving additional needs for capacity.
That's not what the article is saying (it's not talking about the Greek welfare state model). It's pointing out that if you work too much overtime, you get burned out, less productive, and more prone to error.
I don't really know if I believe this completely. I would happily work 50-60 hours a week at a tech job where I could be in perpetual dungeon mode: coding, desinging, testing in the lab. I've been able to work like this a few times, it was paradise and I loved what I did and my wife had to bribe me from my job. Once upon a time, that was how some people in the tech sector worked. We used to have very low stress jobs, and we were paid based on ability to manipulate technology. However these days it's 8 hours of daily meetings, where management has taken away every extra dollar, every extra head, every not fully utilized piece of equipment. It is 40 hours a week of constant strife, stress and suffering.
Then, after the 9-5ers who cause all the trouble have gone home, that's when we can get work done. That's another 2-4 hours after the day ends to try to code, design, test. Usually with too few people, the wrong equipment, and no money to make ends meet. As a result our tempers are frayed, our minds are distracted and melted, and we get home a steaming mass of goo.
If this is how it has to be for companies to be profitable, then we need to go back to 40 hour work weeks. This isn't sustainable, having burnt out people abandoning ship periodically. Knowledge retention never seems to be more than 3 years at best, which is often just a generation or two, guaranteeing we repeat old mistakes and products never mature.
This sounds all well and good. The issue that they are not taking into account is that most people need to work the overtime just to make ends meet. I deplore overtime and only work it when necessary, however many people just cannot make ends meet with the cost of living going up and the companies not giving raises for years. I personally have gotten 3 promotions (not my choice) and not a single pay raise in 3 years. I make enough to get by but what about those that depend on OT. Their families/baby mama's/ and homes rely on the OT to survive now you want to take that away as well by bitching about it? There really are worse things in life than having a job and working OT. Just my opinion.
If the corporation crumples like a paper bag every time he takes a sick day, he's not doing his job right.
The article tosses out opinions with nothing to back them up; essentially all he is saying is that unionization will cure everything that's wrong in the US. This myth gets posted on Slashdot several times a year; it's no more true now that it ever was.
No doubt there are some programmers on mandatory overtime, but in my experience it's the exception, not the rule.
Finally - a scientific explaination for Congress!
Wait... What - they don't actually work?
Damn...
I don't think I'm magical and I don't think I'm superman. But to paint a broad brush the way you did is just fallacious. Some people gain muscle without even trying. Some people can last twice as long underwater with the same build/weight/height and the same capacity in their scuba tanks. Some people have far more reliable memories than others. Some people can weave logic better/faster than others. (they make great programmers, btw) Some people can function with 4 hours of sleep while others feel lethargic with a mere 7. Some people fly off the handle with the smallest trigger, while others keep their cool as if all their food is laced with pot. Some people can function well without coffee, others can't -- you've seen them around the office. Some people panic more easily than others. The list goes on.
It annoys the hell out of me when someone makes the basis of their 40 hour week argument the following: "No one's inherently more capable than others to handle overtime." With all the variability across humanity? Bullshit. It's really just code for the following: "I don't want to live in a meritocracy where someone who's more capable of working overtime can get ahead of me career-wise." Deal with it. The free market rewards "good with overtime" person just as it rewards the person who keeps their cool, someone who gains muscle without even trying, the commercial diver with a good SAC, etc. We are not all equal, but most of us have advantages over others. Find them, embrace them, and make money with them. But don't whine because you don't have certain advantages.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
This is nuts. I will just offer this insight: it took Verdun and Stalingrad for younger men in Europe to realize that marching dutifully into a meatgrinder serves no higher purpose. What is it going to take for American guys to realize that marching into marriage as a "duty" and suffering silently serves no purpose?
Come to Europe and see how we live. No marriage, no games, men and women have to pull their own weight. We have some issues but staying at work to avoid The Marriage Empowered Queen of Consumption is not one of them.
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
Employers make note: The same wiring that allows that will also tend to wire for telling customers the absolute truth no matter how much you beg them to fib a little, inability to follow an office dresscode and (sometimes) a bathing optional approach to hygiene.
That is not negotiable.
In Norway, I reckon when the oil runs out they'd choose to maintain their standard of life, but not their personal wealth. They'd have less stuff, but the scandinavian attitude to what matters in life means they're not going to flog themselves to the bone to let them have shiny toys.
I'm baffled by how many hours some people are willing to work (at a job they often don't greatly enjoy) to pay for their shiny new Mercedes.
jh
Doctors are protected by the AMA, which keeps the number of medical schools and doctors in practice limited. No matter what motivation you assign to doing so, it helps protect the income of members.
Young lawyers, on the other hand, are screwed.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/03/01/1021123/young-lawyers-scrape-to-find-work.html
When I start feeling down like I haven't accomplished anything in my life, I'll remember this and be glad that I work only 40 hours on most weeks and actually enjoy seeing my wife. Life is good, who knew?
So you figure you can actually age backwards if you do 16 hours of overtime a day?
There's a HUGE gap between overtime and no time. It's called 40 hours a week.
...I'd be happy getting back to a 50 hours work week and not working weekends!
Yup. People think they can multi-task when in fact we mentally can not. What we call "multi-tasking" is actually task switching. The distinction is important. It's one thing to be multi-threaded in cognitive thinking which is impossible for most people than it is to time slice our actions. Time slice too much and you start dropping balls and making all sorts of careless mistakes. Basically, the human brain functions like a single core CPU. It can only process so much data at any given time. We're also horrible about real-time task scheduling because of external environmental distractions.
We suck at computing. That's why we invented the computer.
Life is not for the lazy.
Speaking of things I'm bad at, properly proofreading my posts. ;) The key thing that really set me off was when you said "They're doing poorly but they don't know it." The "but they don't know it" part is key to the code phrase. I've been excessively fatigued and very, very drunk enough times (and um other...yeah, public forum ;) ) to know when I'm doing poorly. If that's egotistical of me to assert, then I'm egotistical. But I know myself at least that well.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Sure, but the nearest Walmart is miles away.
Why do you keep going for walks? Are you meeting someone? Who is she? Why don't you love me?
I'm in Canada, and I work 35 hours a week. From 35 to 40 we are paid at a single rate. After 40 hours, we're on 1.5x rate. It's the law, so companies have to follow it.
When your overtime is not compensated, your boss will ask you to do overtime because it will cost him less the more you work. His incentive is to overwork you.
When your overtime is compensated, and at a 1.5 or 2x rate, then suddenly your boss doesn't want you to work overtime, he much prefer hiring someone else and having everyone work regular and cheaper hours. Now his incentive is to hire more employee and ask them less work hours.
So legislating the maximum hours per week and the overtime compensating rules is the only way to ensure that companies don't abuse their employee.
No need for a union, I'm not in a union and I don't want one, because my employer is treating me right (he has no choice, it's the law!)
Try it! Library of Babel
Brings a whole new light to the phrase "live to die" doesn't it?
Life is not for the lazy.
There is the problem with your argument! You seem to be implying that the USA is a civilised country.
Well, if you don't want to hire a new person you could just lower them to 40 hours a week and still get more productivity.
It's angry wives all the way down.
Life is not for the lazy.
Who came off with the idea that having doctors work for hours that would be illegal for truck drivers? It's not like the lack of sleep and concentration could harm patients. It might be really interesting to find out how many people die each year, because the doctor could think straight anymore. Lack of sleep has a lot in common with being drunk, but a truck leaving the road makes a far easier news story than a doctor messing up medications because he just had another 24h shift.
The world would be a far better place if those responsible for such things had to face the consequences instead of those who don't really have a choice if they want to keep their job. I'm still dreaming of the day when an executive goes into jail because he risked the life of others by letting doctors (or other critical proficiencies) work insane hours.
When women are young, slim, and unwrinkled, they can get what they want by flirting with or marrying powerful men. Why should they be feminists? When their charms fade, their ability to manipulate bosses fades until it reaches the vanishing point. When they get dumped for a younger trophy wife, their chances for another marriage are, under the best of circumstances, about 2-1 against. If they've gained weight, lost confidence, and don't know how to get asked out for dates, the odds are more like 7-2.
http://www.calculatorslive.com/Chances-Of-Getting-Married-After-40-Calculator.aspx
If you're a programmer over 40, your mental powers and ability to concentrate begin to fade. Your ability to keep up with current technology trends, relative to younger engineers, fades until it reaches the vanishing point. Evidence for this is mostly anecdotal, but try not to be an anecdote and see what happens.
http://www.silicon.com/management/cio-insights/2004/05/28/ageism-in-it-over-40-forget-about-getting-a-job-39120958/
When you're young and female, you can bargain for the best deal at work or in your personal life. Why should you join a union?
When you're young and a programmer, you can bargain for better wages and shorter hours. You've got four or five other potential employers waiting in the wings. You can bargain for yourself. Why join a union?
Moral: If you're young, don't worry. You'll never get old. You don't need collective bargaining. The web has changed everything. Why join a union?
That's because they're both all about face time: showing loyalty to the company/boss by being there lots of hours. It's not about actually accomplishing anything.
I did some work at a company that a friend worked at here in Ontario, and there was always an underlying assumption from the boss about face time: those who showed up early and worked a bit late were seen as more trustworthy and loyal. Whether they got more done was never looked at.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
It's called lying. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
Oh, wait, she spends the fruits of your labor. OK, it's called divorce. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce
You would have to slow your self down, not speed up. If you went faster, your time would slow relative to Earth, cause you to work fewer hours per week.
I do the math and my week still comes out to average 168.115385 hours no matter what I do. Out of that I only sleep about 35 to 40 hours, but I wouldn't call that work. The rest of the time I am cleaning (myself or something in my environment), shopping (clothes, food, whatever), cooking (yes, men can do that!), watching, listening, writing, drawing, inventing, building, or teaching something with the rest of the hours in a week. Oh, and I occasionally get to work out, have sex and most importantly poop and pee when I'm not otherwise engaged in doing something productive.
Seriously, though, when I do work for others I do try to keep that under control. There are periods where I will work 70 - 80+ hours a week getting things done, but that usually doesn't last more than 6 - 8 weeks before I get back to a more normal (40 - 55 hours) schedule. There's always something that comes up to make for more hours in a week devoted to working for someone else. That's life. If it's too much for you then you need to talk to the people you work for. If they are not sympathetic, and it's a hard thing to say in this economy, but get another set of people to work for. Corporations, businesses, institutions, whatever, are heartless, cold, calculating machines that don't give a flying fornication if you're tired or overworked. They want their $$$. If you don't work for one that at least hires enough people to do the work, then you should try to find one. Life's too short to be that miserable.
Why else do you think so many CEOs and executives play golf?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"Loan Wolf". Amazing. Techincally a typo, but it enhances the writer's meaning in ways that the correct spelling would not.
In Silicon Valley anyone decent offered $65k would laugh before walking out the door. Same for any company not paying for healthcare.
also, I work on flextime, so I can more or less come and go as I please (there is no clock to punch, you just book the time you did on a tool based on your own recalling) as long as business needs are fulfilled and we have the necessary staff on site at all times.
Unless you want to work after 8pm, or on weekends or on holidays.
All major public accounting firms have 60hour minimum work-weeks for Jan-April ("busy season") every year. If you enter only 58h during a week, there will be a follow-up inquiry on monday morning for why you missed your quota by 2 hours. This is only a minimum, you are also expected to be available to work all nights and all weekends. Further, such work conditions are not restricted to busy season, and the majority of employees should expect these conditions for at least 6 mo. of the year.
It just becomes the new normal. A 60-hour week becomes a treasured vacation, you get to go home and eat with your family, maybe even talk to them a little before bed. When the hours creep up to 70, 80, and beyond, you have no choice but to eat at your laptop in a conference room with the rest of the team, get home after everyone is already asleep, then wake up and leave before they wake up. Hopefully you can work from home on the weekends and at least have breakfast with your family.
Can hardly complain when I see some clients who have it worse though. SVP of Finance hasn't left the office in 4 days. The finance department just collapses onto a couch for a few hours a day.
These work conditions are demanded by the market. There are set filing dates for public companies, and they, as well as their auditors from the public accounting firms, need to work to match those deadlines. The client I mentioned above missed their filing deadline and filed for a 1 week extension. Their stock price fell by 10% that day.
It's just accepted. This is standard industry practice, and everyone is expected to suffer through it for years, because public accounting experience is the most rapid way to accelerate a career in accounting. Ultimately everyone hopes to leave for private accounting after accumulating 3-6 years of public accounting experience. Nobody was forced to take jobs in this line of work, everyone chooses to give up 3-6 years of their life for the promise of a better life when they can someday quit and take an advanced private accounting position. I hate my life during these stretches of insanity, and I definitely wish I could work more reasonable hours. But like everyone else in public accounting, we take on these ridiculous hours because we know it's the best way to move our career forward. I fantasize about quitting all the time, but I need to make as much money as possible so that I can take care of my family. If I give up early so that I can have it easier, my family won't be able to afford the same kind of lifestyle. I wish I was more clever, or had some valuable talent that would allow me to make a lot of money with a more reasonable workweek, but that's just not the case. In a few years, I will be able to have time with them, and I'll have the money to take care of them. We're all just chasing the American Dream I guess.
I'll be four years out of law school in May. I have an engineering degree in addition to my law degree, and passed both my state bar exam and the patent bar exam. I've have applied to *thousands* of positions - law, engineering, and a dozen other fields - in the interim and I took the time to customize each application, not just sending off generic resumes, etc. I have received exactly one offer, almost two years ago, that I turned down because of the ridiculous terms.*
I had sizable, but definitely manageable debt upon graduating, and figured I could always do IT or engineering if the legal market was slow. Hah. Well, my debt load has almost doubled now. I've managed not to default so far, by hook or by crook, but I can't play this game forever. My health has started to deteriorate, my mental health is definitely not good - I've basically been living and working in isolation for four years - and I don't know what to do anymore. At this point, while I would be grateful for a non-subsistence job, I'm not sure I can handle it anymore.
*before you criticize me for not taking it, while it was a patent law job, it was for $20 an hour, no benefits, no guarantee of work after 3 months, and required me to move 600 miles in the middle of winter a week after the offer. The firm has since folded, so at least I don't second guess myself anymore.
For me the effective working hours is 4..6 hours a day. This is about "deep pondering" tasks, excluding all the non-work related TPS reports, chatting etc. When chatting is included (TPS reports excluded), we get to the 40 hours number, including lunch time.
I am experiencing the same thing in my locale as well.
It seems that no amount of self education/classes/etc. I try does any good unless you have experience. I even have a masters degree in a related field.
Recruiters here tell me that "we can't find the right people." You can't tell me that with all the unemployment/underemployment/etc. that there isn't anyone whose qualified and/or is smart enough and willing to learn.
Something are mandated in law, like hours and overtime for types of work, others are not.
I have lived and worked in both Alberta and BC, and found vacation and sick days depended on the company not Country / Province.
I have had 2 weeks vacation and sick days depended on the work place average (very bad in small offices where other don't seem to get sick) to having 4 weeks vacation and nearly unlimited sick days (at some point it gets considered excessive but could allow for two weeks or more in a year)
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
By which point your family will have already grown-up.
I'd quit now and learn to live with a lower-cost lifestyle. You don't need cable; free TV is good enough. You don't need unlimited cellphones; $5 or $15 a month for a few hours calling is good enough. I'm not sure if you can sacrifice on internet but I do: it only costs me $15 a month. ............ Otherwise you might quit your 70 an hour week job circa 2020 and discover your wife is a stranger, and your kids are teens who don't want anything to do with you.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I'm part of the one percent, the leaders of this country, the job creators, the people who make your iPads and your Corvettes and your Xboxes possible, and I am not ashamed of it. And yet it is fascinating to see after all we have done for you this entitled attitude that you people are developing. Do you even fucking think you would have a job without people like us? Have you ever read Atlas Shrugged? Modern philosophy has advanced beyond retarded ideas like socialism and stalinism, and you idiots need to smarten up and quick.
PS: The day I hear the word "union" in my IT shop, I'll be firing every single motherfucking worker and hiring all new people. You marxists want to play hard ball? I'd literally bet my company that you can't fucking handle it.
You post is utter, citeless bullshit. The US is one of the few countries, unlike Europe, where social mobility is very possible. Even for worker bees, just putting money in a Roth IRA every month in a good Dow 30 dividend stock will make you a millionaire in 30 years.
2011's The Forbes 400 of Richest Americans was An all-time high 70% of this year's list are self-made, up from 55% in 1997>. And many are college drop-outs.
If anything, being born wealthy makes kids lazy and entitled and lacking in the drive and ambition that drove their parents. Last time I checked, Paris Hilton wasn't on the Forbes 400.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Yep..you nailed it..that's why the Welfare system works so well. Welfare recipients are free from having to work to live, and spend so much of their time working for free.
Unlike, say, everyone reading this?
I once asked a graduate student in a lab I used to manage how much time he was able to put in per day on his thesis, he said about 6 hours. I know from myself that I can do about 6 hours of good math. I can stretch if I'm really interested but that interest has a lifespan of about 3 days before it reverts to my normal interest.
All anecdotal evidence, of course, but I wonder if there is any sort of studies on how much daily mental effort is normal.
I said:
Certainly people can do a better or worse job of handling excessive hours...
And then in the next post:
Certainly some people are better at multi-tasking than others...
So yes, some people will do better than others, but they will all have problems if they work long enough hours for a long enough time without enough breaks. As you said, "Some people can last twice as long underwater with the same build/weight/height and the same capacity in their scuba tanks." This is true, but everyone will eventually run out of air and die if they stay under water. Your optimal productivity in a certain job under certain circumstances might be 45 hours per week, and someone else's might be 37 hours per week. Take a different job or change the circumstances, and those numbers will change.
Still, if you think you can go on indefinitely, working 80 hour work weeks, without it taking a toll, then you're fooling yourself. You are not "wired that way". You are, however, "wired" for self-deception. We all are. And while you're working those 80 hours, you might convince yourself that you're a magical human being who can work endlessly.
Wow, dude. That sucks. If she's starting making up abuse you probably just need to get the hell out and worry about getting the house back after the lawyers are done. You're probably screwed there anyway, but at least you won't be in jail.
Productivity is not that important we are just brainwashed into thinking nothing matters more. France obviously had their productivity go down when they stopped their people from over working.
The all important productivity is going to replace jobs with robots and software AND cheap labor while putting a few people in charge of it so "Productivity" can go up. Meanwhile the population goes UP and there are not enough jobs to go around for everybody. How long are we going to blame the poor and unemployed for their predicament.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The lesson here is, try before you buy. Cohabitate for half a decade or more, that's plenty of time for the crazy to become evident.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"It was always super-important to be SEEN to be working"
I know several people working at Microsoft and Google who set up auto-email scripts to fire off random report emails to their reporting supervisors at random times between 1-3am every night.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Is there anywhere in Germany where the cost of housing is as insane as Silicon Valley?
You mean as a country rich in oil and other natural resources. Not every country has that luxury, you smug son of a bitch.
Or as a country of people that mostly realize that having 12 kids is not a good idea.
I'm not quite getting the point of your post, but, yes, Doctors (for example interpreting x-rays, MRI, PET, and CT scans) and legal work (plugging through piles of documents during discovery and financial analysis) are being outsourced.
Average weekly hours of all employees in USA per bls.gov: 34.5 hours. It was 33.8 hours at the height of the recession so it is the inversion of the truth that employers have employees work overtime to avoid hiring more people. 34.5 hours is the pre-recession level so employers have likely maxed out on increasing hours to existing workers.
We're going to force people to be less productive, and make smaller contributions to GDP, just to make work for people to do who don't really want to be working anyway?
Makes perfect sense.
Hey, will you let me in?
I'm serious. I'm getting pretty fricking tired of this country. How does an American permanently relocate to Norway?
Everything I hear about Norway sounds great. And then I watched Lillyhammer and I was sold.
No, don't believe this. This is actually a shallow depiction of the magnificence that is golf.
Golf is a sport that is several hundred years old and beloved by nobleman and commoner alike. It is truly the essence of man enjoying the peaceful tranquility of nature. The swipe of a 5 iron on a cool Spring day. A majestic Titleist ball floating serenely though the air as if it were your very own personal, fluffy cloud. The light "thonk" sound as it descends perfectly on the green, setting you up for that perfect putt that will bring you one under par for the hole. Truly, golf is a sport for OF COURSE IT'S ABOUT THE BEER-SERVING BLOND WITH BIG TITTIES!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Well, of course no one is "wired" to handle "excessive" work (since, by definition, "excessive" is just that -- but varies from person to person, environment to environment).
Einstein often worked long hours - perhaps he would have been more productive if he had taken five weeks vacation a year and worked Monday through Friday 8AM-5PM with lunch from 12 to 1 and a ten minute break at 10AM and 3PM the rest of the time?
People who truly enjoy what they are doing and have certain personality types can often work very long hours and be more productive per hour by doing so. I've had jobs (at startups) where I loved what I was doing and worked effectively 70+ hours a week (usually engrossed in interesting or puzzling problems when I realized I'd been at work for 14 hours and should probably go home). I've also worked at boring and unrewarding jobs where productivity dropped precipitously within 30 minutes after I walked in the door.
I only recall a few days in my life where I was "mandated to work overtime" - it just happens. In those cases where it was mandated by a misguided VP or Director, myself (and others) began to work 40 hours a week plus just the mandated overtime. Within a couple weeks the VP or Director stopped mandatory overtime, apparently having realized that those who were getting the work done were now working less and those who were not getting work done were just around the office more hours distracting those who usually got work done (and both groups were substantially grumpier). So, yes, in these cases individual and team productivity did drop.
Basically, if work is an interesting hobby that someone happens to pay you to do and you're a healthy high energy individual, 40 hours a week is a cinch. Working on an assembly line (or the IT equivalent) rarely falls in that category.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Right now you're the one responsible for allowing yourself to continue to be miserable, you're getting a really jaundiced view of all women, and one day you're going to come home to find the locks ae changed and your stuff is outside in garbage bags.
Then get on with your life as best you can, and maybe when you've "decompressed" (sort of like after a death march), you might find that you're in a better frame of mind to attract someone who won't make you miserable.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Experiments are not anecdotes, and anecdotes are not experiments. An anecdote may be called a datum if you're in some particularly soft "sciences," but even then it's only one datum, subject to lots of noise, error and, since it's an anecdote, bias, lying and hearsay effects, so it's not sufficient to make any decisions with. It's certainly not sufficient to counter actual carefully collected data.
Hours spent at work != hours spent working.
You think the OECD factored in their 27 cigarette breaks, 35 coffee breaks, 18 coffee and cigarette breaks...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
All major public accounting firms have 60hour minimum work-weeks for Jan-April ("busy season") every year....
So what are you doing fucking off reading Slashdot for?
I think you're getting a bit off topic. The discussion is focused on much shorter time frames. Over years, a person will get burnt out not necessarily because they are working too much, but because they are tired of what they're doing. It's common to get bored of something, need change, etc. This goes for work, hobbies, everything...
:)
Not sure if our little back and forth has become a discussion of determinism, but re-read the post this reply is to. Kind of seems like you're swinging both ways with the notion of being "wired that way".
Personally? I'm wired to be a busybody and I do get bored of things after awhile. I can only do pure relaxation/recreation in small doses...excess idle time brings me misery. It's a great big world and life's too short to explore everything that intrigues me.
And yeah, we're capable of self-deception (being a dying individual in a dying world in a dying solar system in a dying galaxy in a dying universe would be difficult without some amount of self-deception), but we're also capable of getting a more grounded sense of self by analyzing the assertions of others alongside any imperial evidence we can find. I'm not going to argue that much further as self-deception is a trap argument. ("You're deceiving yourself." [Two answers] A:"No I'm not. Prove it." B: "No I'm not, cause I know I'm not...err wait." -- irresolvable)
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Actually if you think about it, by natural selection it will happen naturally.
Already most family's comprise of two full time working adults.
If in order to have a family and as a result have children and procreate, is ultimately dependent on the ability of the adults to be able to afford to do so, and in order for that to happen, an ever increasing work week. Only those that are able to handle longer work weeks will have offspring, and only those offspring who do the same... etc...
Fast Forward many generations, and you are looking at a worker breed.
Going on welfare keeps one alive, but it does nothing to help someone find a worthwhile way to spend their lives. Almost every job that exists in this economy exists only to extract value from you and return it to the people at the top. That doesn't produce meaningful work.
As long as exploitation is the basis of our economy, I can't blame anyone for opting out of work entirely. If you want people to want to work, let's create a cooperative economy.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And? So does the US... In fact I would wager that the US has more in the way of Oil, and pretty much EVERY natural resource than Norway does.
What else do they have in abundance? Oh yeah millions of slave labor Mexicans willing to do just about anything for a job. That and a greedy corporate elite. Great combination that.
Okay, you got me at "no cubicles" as they are the biggest productivity killer I've seen. I've been in software development for many years and more and more developers end up sitting in cubicle bays every decade here in the US. There's some small gain in "information flow by osmosis" but I find that's more than offset by distractions (and, most of that "information flow by osmosis" is lost quickly - new hires can't replay the tapes of the "over the cubicle wall" conversations where they could have read the written design documentation describing the "whys" and "alternatives considered" that is now increasingly non-existent).
What I'm curious about though is how the "by the hour" model works -- esp. with "after 8PM" and other premiums? I don't understand how one can "stop working" on an interesting problem - even if I shut off the computer and/or leave the office, my brain is still working on it. If I leave an interesting or vexing problem (new design/development or tracking down a mystifying problem that's not in my code but is somewhere in the big system) unsolved, it's quite common for me to wake up two or three hours after going to bed with an "ah ha" experience (and, usually, a pretty good idea) so obviously my brain is working on the problem while I appear to be "asleep". Does one charge for that time when one's brain is unavoidably working on the problem (while "asleep" even)? If so, how does one know how much of the time the brain was working on the problem was before the start of a bank holiday or after the start (presumably changing at midnight)?
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Agreed. I'm tired of hearing people whine about vacation time and work hours and over time as if they're speaking on my behalf. I work far in excess of 40hrs per week and I love it. I love my job. Why would I want to do *less* of something I love?
Work is an obsolete concept. The only reason why we work is because there is only so much purchasing power to go around, so we give the most to those that work. Nobody works anymore, it's all done with machines running on fossil fuels. The response to a lack of it is not more work, but an alternative to fossil fuels!!
Question "If a machine existed that made everything we needed that ran on renewables, would we all be jobless and unable to afford anything, or would everyone be provided for free?" Answer that question and you will understand anyone wanting you to work more is a moron.
Frits Rincker, inventor of the concept of the Roboeconomics http://www.sunreign.com/info/Roboeconomics
Well, where am I supposed to pull shit out of, then?
I think it also depends on the type of work. If I am doing labor jobs, I have easily worked 70+ hours a week. Working a job that actually makes you think is another matter. If you are so comfortable with your job that you are not really learning anything "new", I could see being able to go beyond this time frame. Working in a job where everyday you are hit with one or more new concepts or ideas could definitely limit your effectiveness. Many studies have been done on how much the brain can handle of new material at a time before becoming fatigued and ineffective.
Meanwhile the proles are actively campaigning for "tort reform" and trying to eliminate whatever accountability actually exists for these kinds of mistakes.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Science is all about reproducing results. This could be at Caltech or in some high school physics class room. Any findings have to stand up to independent verification from a wide number of sources.
If it's easy to find contrary data then it's time to start begin skeptical about some random published result.
You never know what kind of garbage went into it.
The difference between science and religion is that science does not treat the guys in lab coats and red hats as infallible.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
How much time does posting/reading slashdot account for that 80 hour work week? How about doing other things other than working?
There is a consensus.
No brain, no pain.
Oh Yeah, let's do it like the Chinese, kidnap skilled people by the thousands (make certain they know that their families back home depend on the money they make.) Put them up in massive dorms. Work them endlessly until they commit suicide like lemmings. Repeat.
I recently read an article quoting an Apple executive about how America can't compete with China. He recounted how they needed to completely rework the production of a product, and how the Chinese woke their work force up from the dorms at 4:00 am, put them on the line retooling and worked them straight for 48 hours until the entire line was completely re-engineered to the new work and that the same process in America would take a week or more. Think about it, this clown was basically arguing about how great slave labor is when your company is in a bind, and that to compete we need to make our workforce into hopeless slaves without rights or human dignity.
When all you see is short term profit, long term sanity becomes a distant mirage. Until we begin teaching things like ethics, strategic planning, classical logic, critical thinking and comparative philosophy to our business majors as opposed to schools which now attempt to crank out Ruppert Murdoch clones like sausage, we will continue to see an ever increasing lack of consideration for working people, greater concentration of wealth at the level of controlling corporate directors, and a general disregard for society, humanity and the environment we all need to survive. Profit is a terrible mistress and the addiction to her is killing us.
Lets get off 40 hours per week and go to 40 lines of code per week. This week...
.......
double mortgageRate = CalculateRate(principal, interest, currentDate);
mortgageRate = CalculateRate(principal, interest, currentDate);
mortgageRate = CalculateRate(principal, interest, currentDate);
mortgageRate = CalculateRate(principal, interest, currentDate);
mortgageRate = CalculateRate(principal, interest, currentDate);
mortgageRate = CalculateRate(principal, interest, currentDate);
mortgageRate = CalculateRate(principal, interest, currentDate);
mortgageRate = CalculateRate(principal, interest, currentDate);
mortgageRate = CalculateRate(principal, interest, currentDate);
mortgageRate = CalculateRate(principal, interest, currentDate);
mortgageRate = CalculateRate(principal, interest, currentDate);
return mortgageRate;
I think you're getting a bit off topic. The discussion is focused on much shorter time frames.
The article is clearly, starting even in the first couple paragraphs, talking about prolonged periods of long work-weeks. The article begins:
If you’re lucky enough to have a job right now, you’re probably doing everything possible to hold onto it. If the boss asks you to work 50 hours, you work 55. If she asks for 60, you give up weeknights and Saturdays, and work 65.
Odds are that you’ve been doing this for months, if not years
Of course people are capable of working 80 hours a week for a week or two and still be relatively productive. The article is more focused on the issue of workers being asked to work 60 hours/week as a matter of course.
Cool. We can end it with that -- in the context of the averages of the general public. Best to keep away from debating the fine particulars of any individual's ability to handle it while maintaining productivity. I was only bothered by "However, no one is simply "wired" to handle excessive amounts of work."
The summary writer really seemed to have an axe to grind, and there actually are countries that have laws against basic overtime under conditions that would make Americans go "WTF? Seriously?"
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
I haven't worked a full 40 hours in a week since Slashdot started!
Here, here. A great manager clones himself and trust others to grow. The man you describe loves leading but is insecure about growing those around him.
"A rising tide raises all boats..." -- John F. Kennedy
So what makes 40 hours magically the appropriate number of work hours? I get burnt out, dull, and dumb just working a straight 40.
or else!
They probably got an agreement with their bosses. Brazilian law dictates that a person can overwork at most 2 hours a day (a maximum, not average), and work either 40 or 44 hours a week. But you can get an agreement that creates different distributions of working time, given the totals are the same.
Rethinking email
A salary of $65.000 a Year (before taxes, after taxes I still keep about $40.000 a year,
Did you actually convert this to $, or are you paid in €? Because if you're being paid 65.000€, then you're really getting about a $79,000 salary.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Does the article suggest that the only cost to an employer is the wage they are paid? You have training, health care and other expenses involved. Overtime is less expensive to an owners bottom line, than hiring a bunch of new people. But, in our socialistic driven agenda, profit is bad. You "occupy" clowns just don't get it do you. How many poor people have given you a job? Plus, how many poor/homeless are that way BY CHOICE. I see them every day. Standing on the corner with a sorry look on their face, dirty clothes with one of those will work for food signs. Usually they put god bless, a cross or some other symbol on it, just to tug at your emotions. Time and time again, you see stories where so called homeless people are not homeless and are not poor. They even caught one guy who was "homeless" holding up one of those signs, and the police ran him off, and he was spotted getting into an almost new car. And you have that "human wi-fi" article that was posted a few days ago, and some homeless people said they would NOT do it, since they make more money from welfare & panhandling than they would for the wi-fi gig. It's all non taxable income.
Please... Don't listen to this drivel. I have kids and an angry wife at home. I want to be at work 80 hours a week.
My good sir, perhaps you would be interested in joining the Royal Order of Water Buffalo?
It's unlikely that he's being paid in USD. So, his salary is probably 65k€, which works out to about $79k. A reasonable salary in places of the country that have a reasonable cost of living.
Also, who in Silicon valley is offering 30 days paid leave a year right from the start? As well, who in Silicon Valley is ensuring that you don't work more than 40 hr/week including lunch time?
I would rather take a lower pay for less stress at any job.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
I was onto you as soon as you referred to it as a sport. Nice try though.
You get more of it.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
If in order to have a family and as a result have children and procreate, is ultimately dependent on the ability of the adults to be able to afford to do so, and in order for that to happen, an ever increasing work week. Only those that are able to handle longer work weeks will have offspring, and only those offspring who do the same... etc...
Fast Forward many generations, and you are looking at a worker breed.
Being able to afford to have kids has nothing to do with. The number of kids in a household is in fact inversely proportional to the household income.
Besides, we could make an exact opposite argument of what you made above. In order to have a family and as a result have children and procreate, is ultimately dependent on the ability of the adults to be able to have time to do so, and in order for that to happen, an ever decreasing work week. Only those that are able to have shorter work weeks will have offspring, and only those offspring who do the same... etc
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If you went fast enough, you would age 40 hours, while observers on the Earth would age 60 hours. So if you work fast enough, you can quit after 40 hours, and it will appear to observes on the Earth that you did 60 hours of work. I believe that is what the grandparent was going for.
That even works when you are not making a joke about the speed of light. If you do your job well enough, it appears that you must put in more hours, because the other people take 60 hours to get that amount of work done.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Eliminate unemployment? Hardly... Capitalism needs the "flexible" labor force to exploit for profits and drive down wages... Simply "bringing back" the 40 hour work week won't work, and that doesn't happen without mass action and public demonstrations anyways... He's going to persuade people that this will produce better workers? Maybe from his bourgeois perspective this seems practical, but, he's ignoring the majority of the working class... Many places don't care if workers are denigrated and burnt out, because the flexible labor pool allows them to abuse as many people as they want...
This is a bad perspective to have...
Meanwhile the proles are actively campaigning for "tort reform" and trying to eliminate whatever accountability actually exists for these kinds of mistakes.
No, Tort Reform is not to stop accountability for mistakes. It is to stop people from suing when an operation goes wrong even though the doctor did everything correctly and the patient was made well aware of the risk. If a doctor makes a mistake, feel free to sue them until the cows come home. But if you were made aware of the risks, and you accepted the risk, and your body just didn't respond well to the procedure, then that is not something you get a big payday for, it just sucks to be you.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
OMG bro....Please do yourself a favor and 1) clean out the bank accounts, 2) pack your shit, and 3) just disappear. Please get out of that horrible situation, which will NOT end well for you, while you still can.
If the work is engaging and interesting, yes, you can work 80 hour work weeks for a while.
I think it depends on the work in addition to the person. I could certainly do mindless tasks for 80 hours a week, but I don't think I could do coding 80 hours a week. In fact, if I am concentrating hard on trying to find and fix a bug, I can burn myself out for the day in only a couple of hours. After a few hours of that, I won't even consider trying to work on a major project. I'll just find some simple programming tasks for adding some simple features or cleaning up something simple.Or I'll help out our production team on something that is not even a programming task, because that type of work in our company doesn't require much brainpower.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Ok, fine, you're the magical human being who can work endlessly with no ill effects. Sorry for doubting your inherent superiority.
The customer
How much time does posting/reading slashdot account for that 80 hour work week? How about doing other things other than working?
I spend about 5 hours a week reading slashdot while at work. Usually, this is while waiting for a program to start up, or during lunch. As far as other things, other than working, I spend only about 10 hours a week actually doing my job. The rest of the week is spent helping other people who aren't able to do their job without my help, recovering from network issues and SQL issues, meetings and so forth. I would say about 10% of my day is doing my job, 25% meetings, and 25% helping other people do their job, and 40% fighting fires.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
A salary of $65.000 a Year (before taxes, after taxes I still keep about $40.000 a year,
Did you actually convert this to $, or are you paid in €? Because if you're being paid 65.000€, then you're really getting about a $79,000 salary.
I would imagine he converted it into dollars ...65,000.00 USD = 49,692.50 EUR, which is a good salary from the UK point of view (41,372.50 pounds)
... when I read the title: more and more people must be working less than 40. It's what I see here in Holland, almost everyone with kids work 32 hours or 36. I myself work 40, no more, because I want to keep my career going. How different are things here...
So file for divorce, change the door locks, and put her stuff outside in garbage bags. First to file isn't just for patents ...
While I agree he needs to get out fast, it's already too late, most states you can't file for divorce that easy. In mine, for a no-fault divorce you have to be separated. He should get a lawyer now and follow that lawyers advice. The lawyer will know better than any of use what to do and will certainly save him money.
In the midwest, anyone decent offered $65K would think about it. But then again, my new 3BR house only cost $200K. How much for a shack in the valley?
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Perhaps working those 80 hours is why she is so angry?
Women have different needs than men and spending time is important. Not the paycheck. At least that was true with the ones I have been with.
http://saveie6.com/
This is a process of indoctrination. We've been trained since birth to want more, need more, eat, drink, and medicate more. We've built an entire society on the point of a pyramid which is just about to come crashing down around us all. The Wallstreetification of our society and the placement of a little box in every home which tells us what to think and who to like has resulted in a uniform social disaster. Society shaped by the stupid and narcissistic. It would actually take balls and vision to provide better for the future and I'm not at all certain we have the will or the intelligence anymore to see that goal. I mean we let Dubyah steal... er, borrow the presidency for 8 years. how stupid is that?
"These work conditions are demanded by the market.",
There are millions who have been laid off due to the financial crises out of work who have accounting and financial experience.
The market doesn't demand it. Your CEO and shareholders demand it. What time do they leave? My guess is 5. If they want people not to quit and work for private companies or start their own small accounting firms they need to hire more and lessen the hours.
It was necessary in 2008 to cut staff, but it seems they kept the hiring freeze and just made free money and probably more mistakes.
If you love your marriage I would quit and work elsewhere. The extra perks and pay are simply not worth it if you spend all your time at work.
http://saveie6.com/
I swear, all you Slashdotters had better start learning Mandarin with this attitude.
Mandarin is a good example of what this article is talking about. Watch the compilations on youku of crashes caught on street intersection cameras in China. People on three wheeled delivery bikes who work 7 days per week pedal numbly into intersections full of traffic and get run over all the time. People may drive cars like maniacs there but you see so many that are clearly just people just unable to pay basic attention.
I would imagine he converted it into dollars ...65,000.00 USD = 49,692.50 EUR, which is a good salary from the UK point of view (41,372.50 pounds)
Except that pounds is different form euros, and from dollars. ... Ah, but only about 1,20€ per 1 £... and I see that you did convert it...
Ah, I see that Americans just expect to be paid disproportionately more... probably because... you know... they have to pay everything out of pocket...
s/they/we/ I'm American...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Are they getting paid for all 60 of those hours?
If they're only getting paid for 40 of them, then it might be worth pointing out to the inquiry that their customers are probably paying for all 60 hours work, so that extra 20 should be passed on, or it won't be worked.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
My situation is similar. Sometimes I work remotely. In order to sleep in for an extra hour or two or to simply enjoy breakfast, my alarm sets off certain tasks so colleagues think I am present but occupied.
It works.
I find these labor laws things repugnant. It is MUCH more effective for me to work my people long hours, especially if I can charge them to rent dorm rooms between shifts and sell them food in my company store. These namby pamby socialists are interfering with the free market. Overtime? why should I pay more wages for longer hours, because the workers get less effective towards the end of their 18 hour shift. In fact, I would prefer a piece rate, so that unproductive workers get paid less.
Why should *I* invest in safety guards, protective equipment and such. If the workers are timid and shy and cowardly and feel the need for padding or protection, then they can provide their own, as long as it doesn't get in the way of their assigned task.
And another thing.. when my workers get injured, I want them out of here quickly, so they can be replaced by someone who's not so careless as to get hurt. They were stupid and careless, why should I pay for their care? I derive no profit from it.
If I give up early so that I can have it easier, my family won't be able to afford the same kind of lifestyle.
"Same kind of lifestyle" -- you mean "not living in the ghetto and going to a decent public school," or "having to chose between Aspen and Hawaii instead of both, and going to a second rate private school"?
If it's the former, I salute you. Though your life could probably be made easier simply by moving out of the high-priced metropolis and into a smaller, more affordable city.
If it's the latter, well... I would seriously re-examine my priorities in life.
"Golf is a good walk spoiled" -- apparently falsely attributed to Mark Twain. http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/28/golf-good-walk/
(I haven't actually played real golf. I remember "Tin Cup" actually made me want to try it, but I never did.)
I think that one's called "Angry Birds" in the UK.
By which point your family will have already grown-up.
There was a headline on The Onion: "Wild, Unattached 20s Spent at Work."
Is alien to 3rd world countries. Only exploitation matters. Because, the foremost aim is to hammer down any glimmer of hope and insubmission. All forms of exhaustion, depersonalization, mindlessness, and distraction are "profitable". While the real plunder and unscrupulous pillage of the poor 3rd world "country" runs amok in its merciless rampage.
The "American Dream" = money? Not much of dream then.
I do not want to live in an economy. I live in a society. I agree that an economy is important but do not accept that money / profit should come before all else.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
According to the survey, the number of medical school enrollees grew from 16,488 in 2002 to 18,390 in 2009 to 20,281 in 2014, a 23% increase. That is augmented by a faster percentage growth in osteopathic student enrollment, from 3,079 in 2002 to 5,104 in 2009 to 6,271 in 2014, a 103% increase from 2001. By 2018, the report says, medical school enrollment "is on track to reach the 30% targeted increase by 2018."
http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/content/PHY-250808/Increasing-US-Medical-School-Spots-Wont-Increase-Physician-Supply#%23
Increasing the number of doctors would require that hospitals create and the government fund more residency slots. Not likely in the fight over budget deficits in the short term, despite the long term good it would do for the country.
Management clearly had nothing to do with the decline of the U.S. auto industry? Saying the problems that the auto industry has is the all the fault of unions is a bit like blaming Sarah Palin for the woes of the Republican party. She may have played a role, but I doubt she did the whole thing herself.
"no one is willing to unionize"
It is not legal for professionals to form unions in my jurisdiction.
Someone who writes "pee-jyo" probably doesn't know what Pinyin is.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
...ICQ? That compensation model is clearly never going to work in the US.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
I live in Australia and the working conditions described in Germany seem almost identical to what I experience here. I've never felt pushed to work beyond what was reasonable. I get the occasional weekend job, or late night but never been expected to do overtime without being compensated in some form, and never had to do so many hours that I felt burnt out. Add to that the fact that I love what I do, so I'm happy to put in some extra without being coerced - so it's a win for everyone.
Hmm.. Maybe she would be less angry if you actually spent some of your waking hours at home? ;)
So what does this have to do with working hours per week?
Clever signature text goes here.
There are times, yes. Every now and then, yes. Not all the time.
Clever signature text goes here.
28 - you turn 28 years old when you get married (and have completed all requirements for ages above)
I stopped having birthdays when I turned 29, but this is even better.
I am eternally 28, and nobody's going to tell me any different.
With the attitude towards working hours it's no wonder ageism is so rampant and the efficiencies experience brings is lost.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
As our laws are very strict on those things, and is set to 37.5 hours a week (lunch is calculated as half an hour off each day).
Interesting, I knew Denmark had a 37.5 hour work-week, but I didn't about Norway. Here in Sweden we still have a 40 hour work week, when the new Left Party leader suggested we should finally start gradually reducing our work-week again (last time was in 1970) with a 37.5 hour workweek as a first step. Right wing media and parties went crazy, claiming that we have to work more, not less, or civilization as we know it would fall. Of course this was the expected response, it was the same when we abandoned working on Saturdays in 1970 and when we got the 8-hour day in 1919, it's always doom and gloom, the economy will fail, etc.
It's not just about more or less brainpower being used, though. It's different kinds of brainpower. It's harder to code for 12 hours straight than to code for 5 hours, have a meeting for 2 hours, brainstorm different product ideas of 3 hours, and then code for 2 more hours.
For the sake of comparison, as I'm working in U.S...
I'm 27, no degree, 7 years of professional experience (more if you count the occasional contract jobs during and before uni), working as a software developer - about 80% C++ and 20% C#, with a mish-mash of technologies, libraries and frameworks ranging from raw Win32/COM to WPF.
I work 40 hours/week, and that's how it works out in practice - i.e. I'm not pressured into working more, and I come at 10 and leave at 6 pretty much every day, and have half an hour for a lunch break. Paid leave is 15 days per year - it grows with more years spent working in the same company, but pretty slowly (i.e. you have to work for 15 years or so to get to 30 days). There is no clock punch, and working from home occasionally is pretty common, whether due to bad weather hindering commute or some business to take care off at home. That said, any overtime I might theoretically do in the future would be unpaid.
The salary is $120k/year, which leaves me with slightly over $90k after all income taxes (but then there is a sales tax - mine's ~8%, I would expect Germany to have it higher). This covers my regular healthcare needs, though obviously not some super-expensive surgery should I ever find myself needing that.
In addition to that, I get bonuses - last year was $10k in cash (so around $7.5k after tax), and about as much in stock options that vest over 5 years. That was a better-than-average year, though.
No cubicles, either, I have an office to myself (with a door and blinds, so I can close off entirely if I don't want to be disturbed).
All major public accounting firms have 60hour minimum work-weeks for Jan-April ("busy season") every year.
No wonder so many companies get away with cooking their books...
Not married to an angry wife, are ya?
To the creature that is the angry wife, the ONLY justification for not being home, catering to her every wish, unloading the dishwasher, and cleaning the garage, because you're lucky to have her to cook shitty potatoes for you, buddy, is if you're out bringing in more money so she can buy more things for you to carry home for her. Any other activity is tantamount to infidelity. This is one of the major reasons my angry wife is now an angry ex-wife (which still sorta sucks but not nearly as badly).
Sigh, I wish someone would have told me that beforehand... so true.
The company I work for is the US subsidiary of of a much larger Japanese company. We have several colleagues from Japan that oversee and/or work with us. If they want something, we pretty much have to give it to them.... and they are the friendliest and most reasonable people I have ever worked with in my life. They don't really interfere with anyone provided the job seems to be getting done, they let me get away with absolutely anything with regards to my schedule, they trust and respect my expertise, they enjoy socializing within the company (as well as the language barrier allows them)/helping others with problems when they can, and they would absolutely never ask me to do anything demeaning.
Basically they treat me so well that I'd feel like a complete ass hat if I didn't do the best work I can.
I once worked a contract job where we were expected to program for 12+ hours a day 5 days a week, and another 8hrs on Saturday. It was a cool assignment, so the majority of my team were talented people, as talented as I have worked with at any other company. Yet because of the (vigorously enforced) long hours our productivity was shit. We spent the first four hours fixing the bugs we had inserted the previous day. The next four hours were genuinely productive. At that point we were all exhausted, and spent the next four hours writing horribly buggy code to be fixed the next morning.
This arrangement worked out great for the bodyshop employing my team. They got to bill insane hours, and the project dragged on forever. The company hiring the work, however, fared rather less well. While I left after 2 months of that bullshit, I heard from friends the project was cancelled as a failure after a year and a half. FWIW, the bossman of the project was a case study unto himself in repulsively ineffective management techniques.
Another point is estimation. If we estimate things to take 40 hour weeks but use 50-60 or more hour weeks then technically nobody wins. We end up deluding ourselves and often overcharging clients, causing delays in schedules, turning out sub-optimal work etc.
If you didn't realize ... thats really a pet peeve of mine.
Be honest ... track *all* of your time ... and report it! Also make sure on the other end that your company actually counts that time!
[1950s announcer voice] But now, thanks to the wonders of the modern internet, this unfortunate soul has a keyword to an entire new realm of knowledge! [end announcer]
Most people don't realize this, but there are 3 types of information.
Things you know
Things you are aware you don't know
and
Things you aren't even aware exist.
This last category is the reason for almost all cases of "reinventing the wheel".
Also, assuming something must have been done before and searching for it doesn't mean you will find the magic term in a reasonable amount of time.
Now our good friend who writes "pee-jyo" (and the other 300 people who see this thread) has the opportunity to look up pinyin.
Additionally, even if they don't look it up today, now they are aware that it exists and may remember that fact in the future.
I'm so relieved I don't live in America. In Australia we work 40 hour weeks and are a very wealthy nation with a great deal of equality, and well adjusted people as a whole.
This is likely true for people who aren't passionate about the work they do. But, there are many companies, like Apple, that succeed because their employees are giving it their all. Think of all the Apple keynotes where Jobs thanked his people for all their hard work, over evenings and weekends.
Also, think of startups where founders and initial employees work significant hours to get something off the ground.
If YOU want to work 40 hours a week, and no more, that's fine, but please don't impose your work ethic on everyone else, because we need those hard working folks to create all those 40 hour a week jobs.
My last full time job had me frequently doing 25+ hour double shifts.
& if it was a busy week (a holiday or something) i'd have to work on the weekend too. 7-day work weeks for months-long stretches were not uncommon.
I worked 363 days in 2008.
It was a huge problem, and due to company safety policies, there was really no way to fix it since new employees were pretty much useless for the first 6 months of their employment (not allowed to do most duties until this "training period" was over)... and most new employees never lasted that long anyway.
Thats why i dont work in aviation anymore... something to think about when you're looking out the window of the airliner at the guy pumping jet fuel.
You think your mind softens after 20+ hours at a desk coding... try 20+ hours standing in freezing rain. But hey, at least the company was keeping us "safe".
So, you're advocating that customers be cheated? They should pay for a lot of unproductive hours just because you can bill them by the hour?
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Hey if they are stupid enough to force over time I'm mean enough to work it at 1.5 times my regular rate. My bosses did the same thing all after firing the most recent group of new hires to try to skew their data numbers to look better in the cash flow department. The consequence is with out the fired new guys we cant make our production numbers so now we're in mandatory over time. funny how that works out.
That and pretending that you're working while even if you are with a client neither of you want or give a shit about talking shop! Golf is not the lone activity that can get you out of the office while still being on the clock, Strip Club, Convention, "Training"!
He spent actually 60 on Slashdot, Poker, Porn and lolcal!
I've been working 40 hour weeks as an application developer for the past 15+ years. Usually I'm contracting, but I've also had some perm stints. I typically only do 40 hours. If you are contracting hourly, then usually there is a budget based on 40 hour weeks which the manager will want you to stay within. They really don't like you to go over 40 hours. Works perfectly for me.
I had four years perm that ended last summer when the company emerged from bankruptcy for the 2nd or 3rd time since I'd been there. I can count the number of weeks that I went over 40 hours in that 4 years on one hand. Any employer will take whatever you are willing to give them. One clown I worked with would start sending emails around bedtime, and then people would start responding. I'd come into the office in the morning and find this huge exchange of emails spanning the entire night, which frequently ended up with the shocking discovery that there was no problem at all, and that a mountain had been made of a mole hill. Idiots, getting dragged into something like that. This guy would find some error that had been logged months ago by some obscure system, and he'd start sounding the alarms. Eventually the CIO would get involved, and all sorts of people would start commenting. It made for great comedy as I did the mass email delete from my inbox to start the morning. I was grateful that people were willing to throw away their lives all for my morning amusement at least once a week.
Einstein claimed to sleep up to 11 hours a night.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
You hit the nail on the head with your comments. Bravo.
For a few years, when my younger son (3 siblings) was a teenager, I had to work for a long time as a consultant, supporting a product. The customers were in different timezones, (gmt-4 to gmt-8). You can imagine the 5:30am start and the 8pm end. My wife and I decided that the family was more important than this job, and I changed careers. I can say that saved my son, because dad was home to act as the role model. The son also needed to ask questions that mom could not answer, and I was there.
Today, my wife and three siblings and grandkids all live in my city. We do without tablets, vacations to the south or boat cruises, and we note that we do not miss these material based things. My wife and I have no lack of any essentials, and we have the love of our children and their significant others.
Bravo again to cpu6502. Call me rich.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
It must be legal - after all, lawyers do it, lobbyists do it, teachers do it, construction contractors do it, social media marketing "experts" whole careers are just a collection of unproductive hours selling horse manure ...
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
1. "Because we don't have incompetent managers."
2. "Because we work more efficiently" == polite way to say "Because we don't hire incompetent managers."
3. "Because we maintain adequate staffing levels to ensure high quality and the minimum of mistakes." == another polite way to say "Because we don't hire incompetent managers."
4. "We're unionized." (even if it's not true, it will get them to ST*U).
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
If you had bothered to read the find article, you would have found that the longer the hours worked, the more time people spend in non-productive activities. You simply can't be "in the zone" continuously, 16 hours a day, day after day, week after week, month after month.
Do you really believe those FoxConn workers are working at their peak potential during those 12-hour day 6-day shifts? The owners accept lower per-hour productivity in return for the employees not having free time for "distractions", like having a life.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
In other words, both he and his boss are so incompetent that they should both be fired for allowing such a situation to persist for so long.
So how is your job, and your co-workers jobs, going to last when he dies of a heart attack or is laid up by some catastrophic disease or accident? All of a sudden, the whole company is non-competitive, loses contracts, and you're out on the street as well.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Managements, dummy! It's the law of supply and demand - they have the supply, and they make the demands. And remember to include that in your TPS reports as "facilitating managerial functions and mandates related to job code # (pick random client job code)!" It's all billable hours.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Lawyers can bill 180-hour work weeks, thanks to the fraud known as "minimum billing unit." Why do you think they have an all-hands partners meeting every morning? They can discuss a dozen clients in 10 minutes, then each one gets to bill 15 minutes * 12, or 3 hours.
Then each one works the phones for half an hour during lunch, to call back a dozen clients (they call during lunch time in the hope you won't answer) - and gets to bill another 15 minutes * 12, or 3 hours for "client communications" for 15 minutes of "work".
So, they've each done 6 billable hours in 25 minutes or less. Throw in double-billing, rounding up, etc., and 180 hours a week is easy-peasy.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Maybe it was your aftershave?
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Tired enough to take this article and shove it under your boss's nose and show him how overly long hours is costing the company real money, even if they don't pay a penny more in salary?
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
I used to work for a company who refused to allow overtime. However, the workload they gave you forced you to work overtime for free, or they would fire you for not doing what they assigned you to do. Thankfully, I quit before I lost it.
In order for America's Billionairs to be competive, their workers need to adapt themselves to the Foxconn production model and lifestyle. Drs. & LLBs need to take a pay cut too. What good is it to have a mega yaught if you can't afford the $10,000 per hr for fuel because you pay your workers too much?
No, since that leads to the European model where nobody bothers to do any work since more benefits will get cut. Not good at all.
The better thing is to (largely) remove their ability to not do anything except hire in good faith, under FTE/benefit terms. That brings the long-termers back in the fold as productive citizens of their own choosing, thus making the sum of the parts productive. It would come through relieving the existing people as well as restoring a lost trust through legislative force.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
By asserting your own arrogance to actively avoid hiring, you are part of the problem. Suggesting productivity isn't a magic thing you can invoke to dispel a proper measure, if only one that doesn't go fully to bring businesses to a humility not seen in a generation.
It is not an aberration to see workers and business be balanced unlike your suggestion; it is an aberration to see business operate with excessive favor as you advocate.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
On average, Greeks work about 50-hour weeks, among the highest in Europe. The average is higher than in wealthier countries largely because so many Greeks work at small family-owned businesses, while Germans are more likely to work at places with regulated work hours, like BMW. Greece is poor because small tavernas don't make as much money as BMW, not because Greeks aren't spending enough hours working at them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A CEO who shows up to work late and leaves before most of his employees is likely not going to be a CEO for very long as they will either run the company into the ground through bankruptcy (and not paying attention to the employees) or the board of directors is going to notice that things are being seriously neglected and will get fired. That isn't to say that a good CEO can't on occasion take the day off early to pursue something of a life, but my experience is that a typical CEO is very much a workaholic and tends to put in even longer days than most of the employees... usually in meetings to find out what is going on in the company or interviewing employees. Really good CEOs tend to even "get on the line" and do some occasional grunt work.
Examples of good CEOs in the past were folks like Dave Thomas (of Wendy's restaurants) who made it a habit to put on the apron and grill hamburgers at least a few hours each week, and Sam Walton (founder of Wal-Mart) who didn't hesitate to spend a few hours simply stocking shelves in some of his stores if for no other reason than to meet customers and find out the work environment of his employees. That is how you get to know your company and get it to grow.
Yes, there are lazy CEOs that also don't care about the companies they are running. Those companies are also ones I think you should look to short sell their stock if you know about them too.
Another example of a CEO that is a major workaholic is Elon Musk, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Then again he wrecked his second marriage (as well as his first) simply because he spent so much time at work that he hasn't been able to deal with his respective wives and their needs. I admire what he has accomplished, but his personal life is going to hell because of what he does to earn the money he is making. I'd also suggest that most successful CEOs are much more like Elon Musk than a lazy idle rich child working for "daddy's company".
One boss I had stated a 40hour week was counted as sick or vacation time.
He also thought anybody who came in at 7AM shouldn't leave until 6PM==Weekdays--YES, that's 11 hours so long as you are willing to eat lunch at your desk. Weekends then it was OK to come in as late as 9 in the morning and leave by 3 or 4PM. It was the weekend after all, and he'd be satisfied with 12 to 14 hours total.
Or get a job where you have to spend every other night out drinking.
If you are going to get anywhere you need to become a loan wolf who's ready to do whatever is necessary to get ahead in life.
I don't know if that pun was intentional or not, but "loan wolf" works brilliantly, either way.
Socialist? Managed economy?
On what grounds do you call the US "socialist"? Socialism implies worker control over production. Where is the worker control? Worker power has been in decline since the 1970s.
And how is this a managed economy? (which is not the same thing as socialism.) The US economy during WWII was a managed economy. It isn't now. No one is telling factory owners to make smidgets instead of widgets. I don't see a price or wage control regime.
Just because you or the Koch bros. cannot do everything you want doesn't make this a managed economy.
Both Gates & Trump were born into money. Gates' father was a successful lawyer, Trump pere a real estate baron.
Not to protect the employer, but realize, that YOUR overtime many times are caused by the very person sitting next to you - slacking off...
When your team is understaffed, underpaid, burnt out, and you are one of the idiots who "CARE", then whether you are told or not, you will end up putting extra hours in, since the hours in the week/day are just simply not enough anymore to complete the task.
Well ... just my though .... looking at my colleague looking into a css file, making a 3-keystroke edit every 15 minutes for the last 2 hours. In the meantime I wrote lots of lines of code and had time to good-off to slashdot. I am probably going to stay longer, even though I came an hour earlier..... I am not told to do that, I am doing it because it is the right thing to do.
No, of course I'm not paid in USD.. but the figures I quoted were just google "euro to dollar" rough translations I rounded off to a nice number to make it easier on the people reading it.
Also, don't forget I'm 28.. I'm out of university only for three years.
Well, honestly.. it is a system of trust.
If I start having a big epiphany at home and start working on it, I'm going to add that time to my sheet.. also, if I find myself goofing of for hours at work I'm substracting that from my sheet. And in the end, it all is more or less an educated guess, as to how you see your commitment (time-wise) to what you did.. there's no objective way to measure it, so you fiddle around with it until it "feels right" from your pov as well as that of your employer.
For example, as much as bonuses go, I always only asked for them if I had to physically go to the office, but not when I just "chose" to work from home on a bank holiday just because I had an epiphany..
Also, I know that in places like Silicon Valley etc (as a lot of people said in this thread in response to mine) you can get (alot) more.. but I guess that is the exception rather than the norm, while the environment I work in (at least if you can trust the annual statistics) is more the norm than the exception for IT guys in Germany.
Maybe being mariied to an asshole like you is the reason she is angry? By the way, you sound like a great father!
"Our employees are working the weekends; why aren't your employees?"
Because we actually see our employees as people, not as mindless machines.
I'm sorry, but the "people choose this kind of work!" bullshit just doesn't fly. I don't care if people are "willing" (false choice, they're not really wanting to do it), that doesn't make it right, nor mean that it should happen.
You're assuming that there's any kind of consequences for these CEOs.
Apparently saying that one shouldn't live to work, and sacrifice themselves on the altar of capitalism for their company, er, excuse me, Job Creating Overlord, is "lazy" and "entitled".
Sounds like that company is managed by completely incompetent buffoons, and anyone with any sense would get the fuck out of there before your brother gets hit by a bus or something and the company goes to shit.
No, Tort Reform is not to stop accountability for mistakes
Yes, it is.
It is to stop people from suing when an operation goes wrong even though the doctor did everything correctly and the patient was made well aware of the risk.
And how do you know this happened unless there is a fact finding operation, like in a court of law? Are we supposed to take the doctor's word for it?
But if you were made aware of the risks, and you accepted the risk, and your body just didn't respond well to the procedure, then that is not something you get a big payday for, it just sucks to be you.
Again, how do you know it was the operation, and not something the doctor did?
And that "sucks to be you" attitude is why no one takes libertarians seriously.
For how long, though? Eventually you WILL burn out.
Tell me, though: If you can work those 70+ hour weeks, or really, anything over 40, why shouldn't you be getting paid for it? Why should we have to work those overtime hours for free?
Ok, but why shouldn't you be getting paid for those extra couple of hours a day?
And that doesn't happen here in the US? How many of us are posting here during work hours?
PLEASE bring back the 40-hour work-week. I am sick and tired of having to work three part-time jobs because I cannot get full-time work any other way. It is disgusting how employers do this, I spend too much just travelling from job to job to job to home (where I often only have six hours to unwind/eat/sleep/shower/eat), both in money and time.
The last full-time job I had, I was told during the interview that I would be laid off before I completed six months and rehired at a later time, that this was standard practice... And this was a CITY job, guess they like to weasel out of benefits as much as private employers.
Meanwhile, the employees have slowly had the attitude of uncaring beaten into them. Your new purchase not working? Don't blame the manufacturer, blame the stock-persons who bounced it around the store before shelving it because he just didn't care any more. Milk go sour too soon? Shame that it sat in the aisle for two hours before going into the cooler because the employee didn't have any interest in keeping his job - because there's no reason for him to - and spent the time smoking out back.
When employers cared about their employees, (most of the) employees cared about their employers - and the customers of the business.
As for you lightweights crying about getting overtime, stop your crying! It may be a surprise to the average American, but you don't need to spend that overtime as fast - or faster - than you make it. A 60-hour week (20 hours at time and a half) gives you an effective 30 more hours of PAY each week. Keep it up and you can retire at least two decades sooner, without the financial hit. How many of you whiners have credit-card debt? You apparently aren't working enough. I would LOVE to be told during the interview, "We'll need you to work overtime each and every week." I could stop driving 100,000 miles/year and start eating better - AND I'd still have less time in the combined "working and driving to/from my job(s)" category. It'd be like a permanent vacation that I get to take a few hours per day, permanently - and I'd be getting paid (better).
Bawl about something important.
As for overtime here in the U.S. it might suck for employers but it works GREAT for my paycheck. I love the extra money overtime gives me (although it's actually straight time it still is nice to have the extra cash).
The problem is, the vast majority of people here, those on salary, do NOT get paid for their overtime. Meaning that they're working for free.
Adjust cost of living from Silicon Valley to where he is. The main reason why salaries are so high in Silicon Valley is because it costs so much to live there. Either you pay completely out the ass for housing, or you're commuting for 2+ hours a day.
Where are you at, though? I would imagine your cost of living is far higher than his is. And as you said, that number doesn't cover your healthcare, nor your retirement.
Wow, that's the most retarded thing I've ever read. And not a bit of it pertains to why people should be worked to death.
Free swab tests upon membership approval!
Membership approval? Somehow you're giving the impression that she was not, in any way 'default deny'...
Bitter humor is the best kind.
Preach it, brother!
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
While the club does require membership approval, she approved every member who came across her*, so it's something of a cosmic wash.
*bwahaha
Well, if you want a rundown .. (Anonymous coward here, just didn't have my login creds at work..):
I live in Germany, Stuttgart, in the City center, and I have roughly the following col: (all monthly quotes, converted from Euro to $)
3 Room, 700sqft -> $950 (including heating, fees, etc)
Power -> $90
50Mbit Cable -> $40
Car Insurance -> $100
Gas (at $8/gal..) -> $250
Insurance (non-medi) -> $60
Food -> $250 (including eating at our cafeteria at work)
Of course I have a lot of other positions to take care of, but this is just to give you an overview on my cost of living on the salary stated above..
Oh, and for your added benefit, some information on how we are taxed in Germany, example me (not married , no kids):
Income: 5516 USD
Work Tax: 1223 USD
Solidarity Tax (to rebuild Eastern Germany): 60 USD
Church Tax: 89 USD
Healthcare: 415 USD
Retirement: 540 USD
Unemployment Insurance: 83 USD
Pay after taxes (all above are mandatory): 3106 USD
Have you tried golf? You can swear all you want, and young, pretty women drive around the courses offering you beer. It's a win-win, and a lot better than being at work.
Eighteen holes in one day and I still have time for golf!
-Tiger Woods
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
So you know, yes it was already roughly converted into dollars :) If you scroll down a bit, I added a bit more information down in the thread as well..
While the club does require membership approval, she approved every member who came across her*, so it's something of a cosmic wash.
Heh. As a fellow bitter-humorist, I approve heartily!
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
If you really think a CEO acts without consequences, you simply don't understand corporations.
It may be possible for somebody who somehow was able to raise capital and owns 100% of a corporation to be a total ass and be lazy. Then again, such CEO simply don't exist in the real world so your point is irrelevant.
Yes, there are consequences for CEOs who don't perform. What you may see when a CEO or major corporate leader is goofing off is just a public view of that person. Some CEOs are lousy in terms of public relations and what their employees perceive of them, but if you really don't think there are consequences to their actions, you are completely mistaken. If anything, the level of responsibility and the things demanded of a CEO are by far and away much greater than what is expected of ordinary employees. That is one of the reasons they get the big bucks, because their liability is also huge if they are goofing off.
Yes, there are consequences for CEOs who don't perform.
No, there aren't. A CEO who doesn't perform gets to resign with a golden parachute, getting millions of dollars in severance pay. Then they simply lay low for a few months, and then take another CEO job at another company.
So, you've just told us that the parts of corporate finances that aren't creatively adjusted are instead randomly inaccurate through data entry error.
Hey! I'm management!
I believe that the simpler solution is to have year-ends computed quarterly. By that I mean, you opt for Dec31, March31, June30 or September 30, and stick to it as your annual filing date. The surge to file and the errors that crop up due to the 31Dec cutoff would be substantially reduced.
My own company in Quebec Canada files anally for 30 June. With adjustment for government taxation rule changes incorporated. It does mean that I can actually talk to our accountants without them breaking out in a stress based sweat attack.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
And it makes you wonder why businesses trend towards it, if the workplace results are so obvious.
We've encountered the trends: Less staff. More workload per employee. It's literally detrimental to the business, yet they do it anyway. So, let's suppose there's another motivating factor at work here. What are some of the other results of this approach?
Raging unemployment. For every job posted, businesses have their pick of the litter of potential applicants. Salaries can decrease, because job applicants are desperate to get some job, any job, pleasethankyouthankyou. And once they're in, they can be overloaded with the tasks of more than one employee ("duties as assigned", it says in the contract) without the employees feeling like they can do anything about it without risking their rent-paying job. The hidden suburban phobia has always been to become homeless, and this has been successfully used to goad them en masse as desired. We may be encountering a new iteration of that here.
I'm probably wrong about this. It's probably all just one huge, systematic coincidence which - via pure dumb luck - has left employers at the top of the heap and employees doing more and more for less and less. But I write online, and my article describing how to assertively tell your employer to stop burdening you with an inordinate workload keeps getting more feedback than all but one of the other ninety or so articles I've written. It's always the same, horror stories about one employee in a company that's been downsized one or more times, and is now given the workload of two or three. It seems to be the standard pattern, and without assertive employees who know their rights being the norm, it will presumably continue if not increase.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
Young lawyers, on the other hand, are screwed.
In the U.S. at least, I'd say turnabout is fair play.
But India? That's awesome! Perhaps it won't be long before we'll have an influx of Indian attorneys on the freelancer sites, plying their trade for reasonable amounts. When I consider the long-term trends of lawyers or attorneys who are available online and whose services are affordable to the average person, I get a little more optimistic that the citizenry will become more able to take on corporate and government corruption effectively. Societally, that's a very good thing.
Of course, it would be a lot better for them if the education wasn't cost-intensive because it had to come from an overpriced university. There's not a lot of justification (that I'm aware of) for why those curricula couldn't come from affordable online learning courses. Perhaps we're beginning to see the market notice a need for that.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
I'm sick of working 37.5 hours a week.