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."
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.
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.
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.
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
1 is untrue. The 80 hour employee is going to cost you much more. Paying for negative productivity is very expensive in the long run.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's just not correct. The employer is not paying for negative productivity. The employee is welcome to burn himself out and the employer can just hire a new one. Employees are easy to get these days. Even ones with hard to get qualifications. There's more population than there is demand for labor. Expect this trend to continue and wealth to continue to concentrate in the hands of the capital holders.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
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.
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.
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.
You've not looked at all of the local,state and federal laws pertaining to insurance and employment and how much of a hassle it is to fire the incompetent.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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......
"playing with lasers"
"eventually got burnt out"
This stuff writes itself.
Where the hell are you looking? Because I want to work there.
P.S.: Nice signature.
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.
It depends highly on what state you are in, since a lot of overtime law and exempt classification law is state law. And it is enforced by state agencies.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure none of that is relevant to the point I was making. If anything, they make my point stronger.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
The employer doesn't think they are paying for negative productivity. What they are actually getting is a different story.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
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.
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.
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.
The employer isn't getting 80 hours of work, that's certain. But from the employer's point of view, they do not care. They are not paying hourly, so for them the marginal benefit reduction in hour 80 versus hour 40 is not that big a deal, because it is still all positive for them.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
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.
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.
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.
Moving your Tier 1 staff to "exempt" is not the answer and would violate Labor Laws in most states if the main reason you were doing it was to avoid paying them overtime. The thing you need to change is the "2 weeks prior approval for overtime" which doesn't work in an IT setting if 24/7 uptime is required.
My hourly Tier 1 staff are compensated for being on call at an hourly rate that is quite low. When they respond to a call, they are paid 1.5X their normal rate for actual hours worked. That might only amount to 3 hours in a typical week of being on call as most calls are handled by phone or remotely in less than ten minutes. We are a 24/7 work environment.
Staff who work more than a 40 hour week should be fairly compensated for overtime. Doing so, places an incentive on management to keep overtime hours to a minimum by investing in training, technology, or adding staff.
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.
do you dig holes in the ground or pick potatoes for a living ? only there this might work ...
Employee churn is expensive in training and lost productivity costs; it happens all the time, but it's stupid, the shareholder does not gain by it; the manager might get one bonus for showing "determination and initiative" and finishing one project in time, but gets fried with the next project ...
Labour hours were lowered from 12h/day to 8h/day not because of the labour unions or the SocDems, but because 12h/day does not work with tasks that need skilled labour and expensive machinery.
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.
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
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
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"
Ha! Well said, sir. You and I should drink many beers together.
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.
This assumes said worker is hourly. If not then the employer would benefit from 1 employee working 80 hours vs 2 @ 40 hours. 1 employee on the health plan, benefits and other percs, taken into consideration.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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!
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.
Or someone just happens to work in a state where, by law, they can be fired for no reason. Yay, Minnesota!
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
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.
Nope, they'll keep unemployment high as a way to convince the next guy to give the rich "employers" big tax bonuses and to push for more deregulation.
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
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.
The margin on 80 vs 40 is typically negative, not positive.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
Not if the 80 hour employee produces less, or even negative work due to exhaustion. Which happens, almost all the time.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Speak for yourself. You must be in a piss-poor qualification job. For several times, people that were working with me left for other jobs and it costed me an arm and a leg to replace them. A stable, qualified, trained team is an invaluable thing. Bosses who think otherwise are as greedy as they are stupid. Unless the job is flipping burgers, of course. And even in those shit jobs replacing a hard-working, responsible employee is very hard.
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.
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!
I work for a "Right to Work" company. I manage 36 employees. Even though we are RTW, I must have clear documented evidence of why I want to let someone go before HR will even think about acting. The potential lawsuit is just too costly. It is true that I can let someone go without cause, but that does not stop the potential lawsuit. Companies will settle before they litigate and the settlement is generally $35k. So, the first thing they ask me, "do you have clear documentation of all offenses and corrective actions?" And after that, "do you have supporting evidence from other employees?"
We show geeks how to get their dream girl at EyesOfOdessa.com
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.
You are right, according to the statistics non-western immigrants are not contributing as much as they should. However, the sustainability problem is with the immigration and integration policy, not with social democracy or the welfare system as such.
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.
Work consistent 80 hour weeks and you are a wrecking ball. Everything you touch has to be redone. That's bad if you are an assembly line worker. If you are an engineer it's much worse. If it goes a while before it gets redone it will cost much more.
Productivity goes negative. I've seen it many times.
Some people start with negative productivity. I've never seen one of them overworked to the point they become productive though.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Republicans don't want to be in charge when FDRs kited check comes due.
Look how Bush took the blame for Clinton's .com bubble popping.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
An 80 hour a week average lawyer might not do any more actual work than a 40 hour average but they generate double the income to the firm.
Bottles.
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.
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.
If the corporation crumples like a paper bag every time he takes a sick day, he's not doing his job right.
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
Do you /really/ think this is true? Worker productivity in technical jobs is piss poor when you first hire, however good the individual is. Trained and experienced staff are an asset well worth developing, and if you just think you can burn through staff I personally think you'll end up paying more for less.
jh
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?
It should be pointed out that the Germans are also strongly Socialist. Much more so that in the US. The differences between Greece and Germany are many: Greece has a much smaller population, many fewer natural resources, quite a bit more corruption in government, and their finances were poorly managed for decades; but the government safety net is the same in both countries. Honestly it's probably better in Germany now, with all the cuts the Greeks have had to make. It's certainly true that the Greeks are looking for bailouts mostly from Germany, and that the way they were running their government was unsustainable; but if you're pointing at the Germans as a model of how it "should" be done I want my socialized medicine, awesome state sponsored public transportation, employee-centric employment laws, 5 weeks of vacation... well you get the idea. I'd be pretty happy if the US swung far enough to the left to look anything like Germany.
Before you start accusing me of wanting other people to do my work for me, I should point out that I'm a skilled, well paid, degreed worker. I'd probably lose money paying taxes like the Germans do, it's true. I can live with that. Taxes are the price we pay to live in civilization. (That said, I'd be pissed if my government managed the tax money I put in as poorly as the Greek government did)
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I'm pretty sure none of that is relevant to the point I was making.
Sure it is., since hiring more workers is a hassle.
If anything, they make my point stronger.
How so?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
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.
Service jobs most likely, you should note that even if that isn't the case, the 20- hours are going to be paid by the hour, not salary jobs.
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.
The more you pay for an employee with negative productivity, the worse the situation, the better it gets to pay more for two employees instead.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
As the evidence shows - bosses care not one fig for profitability - its not their company. What they really care about is lording over the workers.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
I'm am not an authority on this, but I have to imagine this has a lot to do with what job you're doing and who's doing it.
Just working for all the folks I've worked for, I imagine you'd have a hard time selling the idea to most of them. They'd probably expect more like 60hrs worth of useful work from an employee that puts in 80 hours at the office. That's a nasty curve, but it's fine by them if that employee doesn't get paid overtime. It's still 60 hrs of work on a 40 hr salary, as far as they're concerned.
I'm not saying it's a good idea... as at the very least you're looking at disgruntled employees there, having to hire replacements, lower quality work, etc. I just don't think it'd be easy to sell most employers on this "negative work" argument, and that they'd be better off hiring more employees if they can avoid it.
Every employer knows that's horribly costly.
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.
The way to deal with that is take _all_ the shitheads work when they complain.
e.g. Li complains that I am working less hours then him, even though I get much more done. Project manager asks me to take on more tasks. I go right at Li's todo list and, very publicly, clear it. Now Li is nakedly slacking for 50 hours a week. He thinks 'this isn't working out like I expected' and backs off.
There is no substitute for embarrassment. When you resolve an issue, that has been open for a month, in a day it will be noticed. The shitheads realize that fucking with you will have their incompetence brought to light.
Best case is shithead gets fired and you have hope of a cluefull cow orker being hired.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Dying early from stress related metabolic conditions, for one.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Indeed. But as you say, it's not the bosses money, ergo he is not the employer.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
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.
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"
There are some bosses with a rather different world-view. I had a friend who told me about the time when he worked at a Scandinavian company. Soon after he started, he stayed in the office after everyone else had left. Did the same thing for a few days. He didn't really have anything left to do, I guess he just stayed late because it was what people did in his previous job.
;).
;) ).
Then one of the bosses came up to him and asked whether anything was wrong, did he need extra training to do the job? Did the project need more people? Was the project going ok? Was the job a good fit for him? etc.
So after that he stopped messing around and went home on time
I gather the view is if people are having to work longer than standard working hours for extended periods then something is wrong. I can agree with that. If most people need to work longer hours than farmers in the bad old days (before the agricultural revolution) then isn't something wrong somewhere? That's not progress is it?
Why should we work towards a world where most work long hours so that a few can live a life of excess and leisure? I can understand having to work long hours in times of war or great disaster. But looking at the world situation, this really is not the case at least in the West- there is plenty of food and wealth around (just not that distributed that evenly
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
That said, I'd be pissed if my government managed the tax money I put in as poorly as the Greek government did
Then you should be pissed. At least the Greeks get health care for their money. And the US is more in debt than Greece is.
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.
It really doesn't. I live in Massachusetts. Programmers aren't exempt here.
That doesn't stop every single software company in the state from treating programmers as exempt and giving programmers job-offer letters claiming exempt status under Federal law.
I've reported it to the Attorney General's office, but I don't think they're doing anything about it.
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?
The only way you can deny that some/many burnout cases are doing negative work is to be willfully blind to it. They typically are negative all week, not just after 40 hours. Last weeks overtime is still in play.
Which makes it a hard nut to crack, providing evidence can get you fired as the easiest way to resolve the conflict is to fire the one 'with the bad attitude'.
You are better off elsewhere.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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.
That's engineering logic. HR & management have a different logic and follow a different set of rules. See my comments regarding government regulations and insurance rules.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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."
Huh? You say it doesn't matter what state you are in, and then tell me that because you are in Mass and can't get the laws enforced that it doesn't matter what state you are in? Hellooooo.... that is not logical.... it's barely even illogical.
I think what you just told me is that it matters greatly what state you are in, both in terms of the letter of the law and the enforcement of the law.
I bet code reviews are fun for you.....
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
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.
So, there is a giant conspiracy where almost all businesses in the US got together and agreed to sacrifice profits for a few years by reducing productivity -- all to make "Obama look bad".? This is an interesting theory -- it's not "all about money" for capitalists, it's "all about making Obama look bad". Personally, I'm going with the capitalists being "all about money" as that fits human nature better (most people, esp. capitalists, will not stick to principles for more than a few seconds if they actually have to sacrifice something for it beyond the time spent pontificating anonymously).
You may want to get your tin foil hat adjusted - I think it's too tight and may be cutting off circulation to one of your cores.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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.
This is why capitalism is ultimately doomed, just as communism and fascism and all the other isms failed. The simple fact is that thanks to technology the people here right now, much less those just being born? Well about 40% of those are simply not needed, their labor is no longer required thanks to automation and technology. We are playing IQ musical chairs when the average IQ is barely 100 and more and more simply won't get a seat.
In the old days one who couldn't pass college could work in a factory and feed themselves and their families but not anymore, those jobs are gone to Asia where the corps can pollute to their evil heart's content. and soon even college won't help, I was talking to the dean of our local college and he figures about 35% simply won't find a job in their field once they graduate, no matter what field they choose. there is simply more labor than is required and thanks to H1-Bs the market is even more skewed thanks to stuffing the channel with even more workers. Hell I'd argue about 40% of the low end jobs in the USA are being subsidized by the American taxpayer as "make work" for example if you go to work at Walmart one of the first training videos you will be shown is how to apply for food stamps! Now how many think that if Walmart was forced to pay a living wage they wouldn't automate many of those jobs, nothing about stocking or scanning products that couldn't be done by machine. Same thing with fast food, its all a limited choice set anyway and that kind of assembly line work, using pre measured ingrediants in a line, hell you'd probably cut down on waste and screwups by just making the entire thing automated. you'd just slap the money or CC in the machine, push a couple of buttons and the food would pop out of a slot.
So we simply have to face the facts that capitalism is coming to an end and look ahead to a replacement, otherwise that end could be quite violent. Much of what we saw during the Arab Springs could easily happen here as we have "jobless recoveries" which is just a code word for "The rich are living like Gods while everyone else suffers" which of course breeds hatred and contempt. We simply have to accept the very basis of the entire system, trading labor for capital, simply no longer works. What do you do with those millions upon millions who simply don't have the IQ required to become doctors and lawyers? hell 25% of lawyers graduating can't find jobs as we have more lawyers than jobs now. In the end we simply have to face the fact that we are quickly approaching half a billion people in the USA and with just current technology we could get by just fine on 100 million, maybe less. What do you do with the other 400 million? without consumers our service economy collapses, do you pay them to just buy shit and watch TV? Do you make up "make work" jobs where they do some pointless task simply so they can get a check? Even in IT we are seeing the coming of smart gear that can take care of itself and call a parts monkey when something breaks, construction they are already testing a road building machine that uses GPS, no real humans needed there, and houses can be prefabricated.
So what do we do with all the people that simply can't trade their labor for capital when their labor isn't needed? we need to think of something or its gonna get nasty. The minorities are already looking at 25%+ unemployment and the whites won't be far behind, there are simply too many people and not enough work. What do you do? put them in camps? False flag an attack that can wipe out large numbers of them? Just leave them in the street to starve or create huge crime zones? gotta do something as time is running out folks, the tech just keeps getting smart while the average person stays the same or even gets dumber.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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;
adjusted per capita income has actually dropped since 1973.. And that's before you factor in the 2x increase in productivity in those 39 years ...
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
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!
Wrong on two counts.
1. The author is a she.
2. There are plenty of cases cited where companies cut work hours and the increase in productivity more than made up for the shorter hours.
Did you even read the article, or just skim it here and there?
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
" But looking at the world situation, this really is not the case at least in the West- there is plenty of food and wealth around (just not that distributed that evenly ;) )."
There is. We are still in recovery from the worst recession since The Great Depression. Demand is very weak for the products, but the demands from Wall Street for high productivity with half the workers is very high.
The wealth is vanishing and going to Asia and the top 2% as CEOs salary has gone up 300% for the decade. They want their leisure time and toys too and the workers are in the way by costing too much money in this deflationary situation (why The Fed is printing money to stop it).
It will be awhile before its recovered and when it is people will be scarred from the experience and still work hard just like in the 1950s after leaving the depression.
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
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."
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.
So what do we do with all the people that simply can't trade their labor for capital when their labor isn't needed?
We aren't really at the point where extra labor is not needed - that labor only goes unused because people who could enjoy its fruits are not able to pay for it, because they are themselves paid too low.
Simply put, imagine that for all the people that do have jobs, their wages would triple tomorrow. How much would that change their consumption? How many more goods would they use? And how much extra labor would be required by the system to provide all those extras, leading to more jobs?
The problem is that most added value produced by labor ends up not in the laborer's pockets, but in the coffers of the owners of capital used to perform that labor. Stuffing their coffers doesn't lead to more jobs being created - it does not meaningfully increase their own personal consumption. And there's no point in them re-investing it into business when there's no demand to be covered by said business - you need an paying audience to target for new business, and their pockets are not infinitely deep.
Some capitalists have actually understood this - e.g. Ford, who specifically pointed out that him paying his workers more makes the overall market for his products bigger, which in turn makes it meaningful to invest more to expand business to cover that enlarged market. With a similar arrangement in place today, and with the right proportion of how created value is split between workers and capitalists, we could keep the existing capitalist system growing and benefiting everyone for a good many years now.
The only problem is that this requires rational long-term thinking to overcome basic greed. Which, unfortunately, is a rare occasion indeed.
"At-will" means that employees can be fired without any reason. However, it is still illegal to fire employees for certain reasons, even in at-will states. For example, if you fire someone for being female, or black, or Muslim, or Republican, it would be illegal. Consequently, an employee who was dismissed "at will" can still sue his employer and argue that his dismissal was really for one of the aforementioned reasons, and hence illegal. The company would then have to defend itself and provide evidence supporting the lack of discrimination.
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 wish that I had mod points. I agree completely. There are ideas on what to do post-labor at http://marshallbrain.com/ if anyone is interested.
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.
"So we simply have to face the facts that capitalism is coming to an end and look ahead to a replacement" Yea, lets government run everything, and everybody can live with free money from government. This is not a problem with capitalism, its a problem with government. Can't get jobs back till we get rid of the guy blocking jobs, Obama. We are heading toward being like Europe, where many people never have to work a day in their life (and have the USA to pay for it). Only problem is, we got no one else to give us free money.
If people hate working over 40 hours, maybe you should quit and get a new job. Personally, I love working over 40
I disagree with this assessment entirely and completely. In order to have good employees on a micro level, it is necessary for them to be happy and sane. But on a macro level, I can see the argument. A lot of others, people who are right bastards, the sort of C-level people in companies, implement that argument successfully.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
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.
Check out People's Capitalism. Written in 1976 by a NASA engineer who foresaw that automation would wipe out many jobs. For some reason, the links on the page are no longer working but the PDF link in the bottom left corner of the page is still active. The tl;dr version is that he proposed rather than use the Federal Reserve to print money for the banks, we should invest money in research, license the fruits of that research to private industry, and use the proceeds as dividends for the citizenry. Well worth the read. It's an idea whose time has come. See also Buckminster Fuller's idea for a basic solar income or read the wikipedia article on Economic Democracy. Oh, and spread the word. This needs to happen. It's crazy that we have have a class of workers who are overworked alongside a class of people who can't find work. http://www.peoplescapitalism.org/
harmonious design
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.
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.
Tell me friend, do you blame Bush too? Because they are just too sides to the same coin ya know, in fact Obama has really not done much of anything but copy Bush. More wars, more spending, hell those are ALL pages out of Dubya's playbook. What is sad to me is that you simply can't see the truth, but let me leave you with some words of wisdom uttered by the late great Bill Hicks "I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart....hey wait a minute, there's one guy controlling BOTH puppets!". As Jessie Ventura put it in "The Obama deception" which BTW if you haven't seen it you should, as well as the one before it on Bush, "What you have in politics now is just like pro wrestling, they make a bunch of noise to distract you , make believe like they hate each other, and then when the cameras aren't rolling they go have lunch together. Its all just a scam".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
[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.
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!
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.
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.
The thing I don't think you are getting is that the employer is also factoring in the training period for a new employee, when they are least productive. When you set that scale as your norm, then a burnout empoyee at 60 hours a week is still working as expected. The fact that they could be producing more at 40 hours a week than they do at 60 doesn't matter, they are meeting the expected ROI.
When I was a worker (and I mean that literally, as a carpenter, job superintendent and contractor) I and my crews were quite frustrating for my various employers. We could finish our days allotment of work in 3-5 hours. Then, because we didn't have the material to continue to work, we goofed off for the rest of the day. One company finally tried to get us material on our schedule and we were out of work in under 2 months (for what was scheduled as a 4 month job).
Rule 1: No overtime. We worked 40 hours a week, period.
Rule 2: No layoffs. Everybody comes to work every day and works 8 hours, even if it is just cleaning the jobsite.
Rule 3: Safety begins and ends in your head and your heart: Watch out for your buddy and trust them to watch out for you (25 years without a jobsite injury AND without hardhats and steel-toed boots)
Rule 4: quality is your job
That was all that was needed, we never ran out of work and I had men who followed me from company to company just to stay with me. They still email me and I've been out of that industry since 1996.
Personally, I believe that the destruction of the American work ethic came about because of the rise of the MBA. The change that this signalled, from labor as an asset to labor as an expense, destroyed the American work environment. Or, as Utah Phillips once said, "When they tell you that you are America's greatest asset, run for the hills! Have you seen what we do to our 'greatest assets?' Have you seen a strip mined mountain, a clearcut forest or a burning river? Those were America's greatest assets!"
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
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".
Nah, training period just means a time of typically zero productivity. Paying more for zero productivity is still better than paying less for negative productivity.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
"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?
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.
It costs more to have two employees who work 40 hours each than one who works 80 hours.
Only because the capitalist asshats have somehow made it acceptable that they don't have to pay employees for the overtime they work.
So recognizing that there are problems with Capitalism means that we have to go straight to the other extreme? Pull your head out of your ass.
Personally, I love working over 40
No, you don't. You feel you have to in order to get ahead or even just keep your job.
Can't get jobs back till we get rid of the guy blocking jobs, Obama.
Job growth under Obama has been far higher than under the last few years of Bush, when the recession started. Next time, try using facts.
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.
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
How do you misunderstand this? The letter and spirit of the law does not matter. Companies do not follow the law, they follow the Code of Not Getting Sued. Those are completely different at this stage.
I'm sick of working 37.5 hours a week.