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."
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
Yes and no, but mostly irrelevant in this context. I'd say in the Scandinavian countries in general there's very low tolerance for huge wage differences, that one person is so much more worth than another person. For example here in Norway probably the best paid CEO is Helge Lund, who leads an oil company with $90 billion USD in revenue and 30,000 employees - he's paid a little over $3 million USD - in a country where the average full time job pays around $80k so about 40 times that. The prime minister is paid about $240k or three times average wage.
However, I have no impression that people try to out-do each other that way at work. Working yourself into the ground isn't well regarded, it's seen as destructive and a sign of bad management. So yes, if I was upper middle class or beyond, I'd probably want to move to the US because there's more "I want to be like you" envy than "I despise you" envy, not to mention the tax rates are much better. But I think you would find that the normal person is quite happy, and despite the economic hangups far more socially liberal than most of the US. Freedom is highly regarded, but not showing off superiority.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm a 'project engineer' in a company which produce control systems for oil/gas rigs and plants.
Overtime has a legal maximum which is quite strict here in Norway:
Translation of the legalese:
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10 hours in a span of 7 days.
25 hours in a span of 4 consecutive weeks.
200 hours in a span of 52 weeks.
Total work time must not exceed 13 hours in a span of 24 hours. Total work time must also not exceed 48 hours in a span of 7 days.
The limit of 48 hours can be averaged over a period of 8 weeks. This means that during some weeks more hours can occur but this must be offset by fewer hours in another week.
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Very few workers are exempt from these rules. A programmer or IT person is most certainly not exempt!
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