Should people over 40 work a three-day week? | Hacker News Reader

Should people over 40 work a three-day week?

theguardian.com

44 pointsmetafunctor38 comments

Did you guys click on the paper itself? This is the scientific equivalent of clickbait.

https://www.melbourneinstitute.com/downloads/working_paper_s...

As I read it, they didn't even measure working hours directly because "we have another issue in examining the effects of labor hours on cognitive functioning, that is, labor hours are censored (that is, retirees report zero working hours). Rather than directly using variables which correlate with labor hours, but do not correlate with cognitive functioning, we use these variables for creating the fitted values for squared of working hours and working hours as instruments."

And they run a regression to infer working hours from the region they live in, parent being alive, number of children and so forth.

Let me just get to the main point: I think they're just picking up a decline in cognition from lack of sleep. If someone is stressed out with all these obligations, then longer work hours will cut into their sleep.

Also, I don't see how they figure out which way that causality runs: could those who have good cognitive function afford to work fewer hours than those who don't?

FWIW, I cut back to 30 hours a week for a couple of years in my late 40s. The effect on my stress level was phenomenal. The issue wasn't so much the direct hours worked, but the flexibility that I had to lengthen a weekend or take a random morning/afternoon off without feeling like I was cheating anyone. It was also nice not to be on the critical path for every damn thing, which I think is a continual struggle for most people experienced enough to be in a leadership role among many more junior developers.

There was a downside, though. Between working less than full time and working from home, I sometimes felt pretty disconnected, marginalized, etc. Mostly I was OK with that, welcomed it even, but I eventually came back to full time because I didn't feel like I could drive the things I needed to from that kind of position.

Overall, I highly recommend it. Just be aware that there are downsides. Like working from home, there's also a greater need for self-motivation, self-discipline, and self-reliance than if you're working in a more traditional arrangement.

And many employers will read this as "Should you ever hire anyone over forty?"

What's happened in the US at least since the recession is that almost all job gains have gone to those over age 40. The real agenda of this article is to discourage hiring workers over 40 in favor of younger workers. As to why employers favor older workers, it's because they are more experienced and also willing to keep working because they don't have enough savings to retire. This is an attempt to force employers to train younger workers even though already-trained older workers are willing to work the same jobs. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing depends mostly on your age and politics.

exactly... that's how the age discrimination will start again

will start again

I believe the word you're looking for is "continue".

Or maybe, not every field experiences ageism from the same end to the same degree.

Not even in our very ageist software industry is this consistent, if you take a look at things like mobile or web development when compared to lower level or legacy stuff.

Yes, but so should the under-40s.

(If this ends up as a threshold, it will become yet another factor encouraging the middle classes to delay having children...)

The article's title says a 3-day week, but the actual study more specifically said a 30-hour week.

Or, put it another way, The Guardian can't even summarize it's own articles properly, because there was no recommendation as to how those 30 hours should be split up.

Personally, I'd prefer 5 6-hour days to 3 10-hour days.

I work from home, so am able to set my own schedule, and tend to do something more like 10-20 blocks of 1-3 hours each, over the course of a week. They are not evenly spread out... I work when I am energetic and alert enough to be the most productive, balanced with the responsiveness required to meet the needs of the business.

Sounds like heaven to me.

Are there times you have to be available, or are you able to be entirely async?

Mostly async. There are some tasks that end up getting schedule at specific times -- conference calls, code deployments (sometimes), etc. But The vast majority of time is flexible. It really is a great setup for coding.

I would much prefer 3 10 hour days, and I would be be able to accomplish more in that time than over 5.

Perhaps they should, but I don't think they could from an employers point of view.

I'm over 40 and would love to work a 30 hour week. But there is a cost for hiring each employee and so it's better to have fewer employees working longer. The cost includes interviewing and recruitment costs, payroll systems, management time, IT systems (email, systems access, hardware and licenses).

If we could slash all these costs and make it easier and cheaper to hire people, the 30 hour week might work. It might also make it easier for companies to fire people though, so less good for the 'youth'.

It's not necessarily better to have fewer employees working longer. When I cut back to part time, I thought it ended up being a pretty good deal for everyone.

* For them, a lot of my value is in what I know rather than what I do. Let's say it's half and half. So they were getting somewhat less of that first half (direct hands-on work) but darn near all of the rest (ability to solve certain problems or make certain connections instantly instead of spending half a day).

* For me, a significant part of my job's value is not salary but other benefits, plus the ability to tap into the collective resources of a team to get things done.

Thus, even though the deal was nominally 75% of the hours for 75% of the salary, each side was really getting way more than 75% of the value from that relationship (compared to when I was full time). In the end, neither of us were so easily or cheaply replaced. Employees aren't as fungible as many seem to think.

What would happen if it really cost zero to hire a new employee? Or if hiring cost less than zero?

Let's postulate an annual corporate tax deduction of $16015 for each employee working 30 or more hours per week. This would be compensated by increasing corporate tax rates until all changes are revenue-neutral.

This probably means that every last person able to work could get a job warming chairs at $7.25/hr for 30 hr/wk. What unforeseen consequences could that have on the labor market?

These costs are banal compared to what your usual medium to large enterprise is paying in bonuses,benefits and other.

I am coming from Europe and always admired capitalist systems but I think the americans and others are probably stressing it too much.

I have experienced large US corporations firing people that had 2-3 years till retirement, people that spent 30years with company and have been replaced with cheap offshore resources.

I think companies could keep these employees but incrementally decreasing their salaries and working hours. They could still earn more (overtime) but I would dynamically adjust the salaries.

I mean anyway...95% people are just slacking at their jobs

I vouched for this comment in spite of the idiotic assertion at the end, because I wanted to raise a question on this point specifically:

> I have experienced large US corporations firing people that had 2-3 years till retirement, people that spent 30years with company and have been replaced with cheap offshore resources.

Is there any capitalist argument that a company should hold on to someone who has become redundant because they have only a small period of time until retirement? My gut reaction as a capitalist to someone being outsourced at age 63 with 2 years to retirement is "so what" but of course when I think about it from the human perspective it seems horrible. They either need to find another job (very hard at that age regardless of the sector, but especially in tech) or cut their standard of living beyond what they expected for the rest of their lives.

At some level, maintaining a reputation for humane treatment of workers might help attract young talent.

In some sense loyalty begets loyalty.

Do you seriously believe young workers think about the old ones, or about themselves becoming old workers? If loyalty begets loyalty (to which I agree), I would expect it to appeal to those who understand what loyalty is all about. Young generation was told they will have 12 jobs over 40 years of career, and looks like they have internalised this.

Heck yes! I'm targeting financial independence by my mid-40s. I don't expect to stop working entirely at that point, but I do expect to cut back. 3-days-per-week sounds entirely reasonable to me.

I'm not trying to disagree with the article here, but I have worked very short weeks before... and for me I found that 4 days off makes it really hard to be productive. You're away for so long that you don't even feel like you are a part of the company. Sometimes I would nearly forget to go to work, it was so much time off. I would say 4 days (maybe with less hours) is a much better schedule.

Perhaps a longer period would work better here. Maybe 6 days a fortnight (say 3/1/3/7?) or even 12 days in a month (say 4/2/4/2/4/12?) so you feel more continuity during work, but also get regular periods that feel like proper holidays.

Don't tell the kids (it keeps them feeling productive and important) but by simply ignoring all the bullshit...

We already do.

I suppose it could work if the employee gets time as their raise rather than a salary bump. Otherwise the business is increasing cashflow while getting less time out of the employee.

The cost benefit for the employer and employee is non-linear, so I think we need a better way to look at employment than either the hourly or salaried methods. Something that incentivizes 30 hour work weeks (assuming 30 hours is somehow an optimal compromise for both employer and employee).

Employers wouldn't go for a 30 hour week and there is no modern equivalent to the power of unions and popular opinion that drove reductions from workers doing 7 days of work a week down to the 40 hour week. Even a 40 hour week is a fiction for many knowledge workers.

Many people are not even halfway to retirement at 40. I guess that companies won't let them go part-time because of the increased cost per hour and employees won't be happy because of the reduced pension.

Everybody (in industrialized nations) should have 3 day work week.

I would honestly like to agree, but I don't think 3 days works unless you keep the 8 hour days. 10 hours is a lot of time out of one day. Once you sleep, commute, make meals, shower, and other such things, there is very little time. In addition, folks start to really slow down near the end of the day, especially on the 3rd day.

I believe it to be much better to work 4 days at 7.5 hours a day to reach the 30 hours. This gives some continuity in a workweek and much better productive time.

I actually support five 6-hour days even more. They are trying this in Sweden. With nurses, they find stress levels go down, productivity goes up, more self-reported happiness, and decreased absenteeism.

3 days isn't enough time for all the meetings. But 5 days of 6 hrs might work. 28 hours of meetings and 2 hours of coding.

I think you hit the nail on the head. 30 productive hours is a 60 hour workweek once you add in all the useless meetings. On a 18 month SAP implementation I was doing 70 hous a week for 18 months including 3AM calls with India 4-5 days a week. Totally fried me. It is interesting though, now that I'm working independently and change my standard rate for meetings, the number of meetings has gone way down.

Whatever happened to those productivity gains we got from the 50s and 60s? The ones that were supposed to make it so we could work two to three days a week?

Red Queen Syndrome[1], those productivity gains also created increased demands on the workforce.

1. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/redqueen.html

I would imagine it's something similar to what happens when you build a faster and more capable CPU: Someone makes an OS whith shiny features that eat all the gains.

I'm 39 and I've still got student loans to pay off - I can't afford not to work full time. So no, unless the pay is enough.

Honestly curious, how? Did you stay on Income Based Repayment forever? Get multiple Doctorates while deferring payments? Refinanced multiple times? Most US loans have 10-15 year payment plans so something unusual happened in your case.

I went back to school recently to pursue a programming degree, after being laid off. I wasn't the oldest person there, either, so my situation doesn't seem to be that uncommon.

yes, but not in their retarded jobs obviously

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