What happened when Swedes tried six-hour days?
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I work an 8:30-5:30 job and this ensures that everything I need to do outside of work during normal business hours builds up to consume my weekend. I know several people who work for business with half-day Fridays and that's when they get all of their outside-of-work things done ensuring that their weekends are actually free for doing the things that they want to do.
If you have kids this is an even bigger deal. If you don't, you're free for whatever every evening. If you have kids, your after work time is committed until they get to sleep every night. Having that work-day time when your kids are in school becomes HUUUUUUUGE.
I also know people who work for CVS doing 12 hour shifts with a limit of 80 hours over the course of two weeks. This leads to a lot of full days off every 2 week period...and they love it.
It's less about the "X hour workday" and more about the "X hours of free time during regular working hours"
As you might imagine his was terrible and required you to Often use PTO just to go to the bank or the municipal office for some registration work. Also it just makes you feel less than human when you're controlled so thoroughly.
Instead, they went with a 9/80 schedule and it worked out great for management and the workforce.
“A "9/80 schedule" means that on 4 days per week you work 9 hours, and on the 5th you either work 8 hours or you have a day off. So for example, you may work 9-hour days Monday through Thursday, and on Fridays, you either work an 8-hour day or take the day off. 9/80 means that you work 80 hours over 9 days, instead of the traditional 10.”
https://workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/glossary/n/nineeighty-work-...
Sounds great to me
Another fun day care problem is some bill by week and make the employees watch the clock like hawks to make sure no one is getting more than their fair share, while others bill by the hour and don't care if you're late, in fact they enjoy the extra money. Both sides sometimes insist the other side doesn't exist and their way is the only correct way to run a day care. Obviously 9/80 or 4/40 or anything more exotic than 9-5 M-F is going to need some care in selecting the correct day care billing model
(Note strange, yet honestly serious possible startup topic: brokering parents with day cares WRT weird schedule constraints and location constraints)
I think it's partly that a lot of 8-hour-day jobs bleed towards 9 hours, but (explicit) 9 hour days are less likely to bleed up to 10. But even at stated hours, it's got a lot of advantages. Free weekdays are incredibly useful, and the ability to schedule around 3 day weekends (or 4 day weekends on holidays) is a huge hit with people who want to take any kind of short trips.
Half days off is a brilliant idea, because it makes it easy to know when to schedule kids appointments withe doctor etc.
I thought one generally doesn't include lunch in the day length. So an 8 hour 'day' with an hour lunch is 8-5, 8 hours working + 1 hour off-time.
When they say "6 hours" in this article, they're excluding lunch.
Interestingly, while lunch isn't counted towards the 8h, the workday normally does allow for coffee breaks ("fika") on paid time totaling 15-60minutes depending on what business.
That's up there with "You can't work remotely but we expect you to VPN in after hours to fix any issues".
Break-fix work needing to be done on-call/24x7 while requiring in-office presence for design and new feature development (a fundamentally different type of work, typically requiring a higher level of collaboration) seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I live in a northern climate and when it snows can either spend 1 hour stuck in traffic or just work from home (and possibly come in after traffic has cleared).
My previous employer was adamant about being in the building from 0830 to 1700 even if it was a blizzard. My current employer lets the employees manage whether they need to come in or not (any day not just during bad weather). I'm sure you can guess which one has happier and more productive employees!
The key there is (almost) no one will be in the office because it's a synchronized event. OTOH, if everyone worked from home 2x/week at random, it would be chaos trying to plan whiteboard design sessions.
If you have any kind of agreement on "unpaid OT" you typically have 1 more (so 6 or 7).
Being on call would mean I'd want ar least another one or two.
So in reality the standard work day is 8-12 plus 13-17 so 8h work in 9h total.
This is a habit I've carried over from Switzerland and I couldn't defend it more forcefully. Full-hour+ lunches, preferably offline.
My kids' school only switched to a schedule where the kids eat at school two years ago, and I have a job in another city. But it was something quite a few parents managed to do until then.
(I'm in a city in the Netherlands)
I saw that system in some old fashioned societies (e.g Switzerland) and while it seemed good for the kids, it seemed to mean a lot of women staid home to feed kids rather than work (if they couldn't afford a nanny that is).
I think school lunches are pretty essential for getting a high workforce participation for both men and women.
In any case, lunch time is kind of a sanctuary here - deskside lunches are seen as very poor - even if people stay at work they'll go to an affordable restaurant together. I can say that this has lots of advantages, an actual real break from work really does recharge your batteries. Swiss workers are usually measures among the most productive per hour worked, and IMO a full lunch break is necessary to achieve that.
Edit: Btw women in workforce participation is 62% compared to 56% in the US, 54% in Germany and 60% in Sweden.
Spending two hours or more on lunch would be great, but I also want to eat no later than 6 (kids go to bed 7!) so it's very hard to squeeze in with two full time jobs of 8h.
I think the system is a nice idea in theory when you have great neighbors or walking distance to work - but the probability that this is the case for a whole school class is slim. I think it feels a bit like a remnant of a housewife society and something that adds pressure for parents to stop working - which isn't a bad idea per se but it tends to add more pressure on women to do so.
Now the class eats with the teacher in half an hour and there is no option to eat at hone anymore. School finishes half an hour earlier so the commuting parents still have to pay for child care.
One of the problems was that there aren't many good people available for the job of child care for one hour at lunch time, people leave when they find something better.
Of course as a salaried employee I have quite a lot of freedom to set my own hours so I sometimes work an extra half hour so that I can go home early on Friday or have some hours I can use to get things done without having to use a holiday day.
I'm fortunate in that if I need to take time to deal with that or work from home I can, but I'd assume most can't do that easily.
The other thing I can't help but fixate on is that this consumption of all free time seems to nicely reduce the risk of employees starting their own business or even look for another job. Much harder to do those when you're exhausted or dealing with family.
It worked out pretty well, but there were some obvious flaws like someone dropping the ball a few times here and there and the rules got changed where you had to have "availability" on your day off, just in case someone had a question, or something broke that you checked in.
Sometimes a lot of "house chore"-y stuff requires going to places that are closed after you get home. Unless you have flexible-ish work start time (which many tech companies do), you're doing that on the weekend or waking up earlier.
Banks, most contractor/consulting stuff like dealing with a CPA or lawyer, anything medical, even just shopping at specialty stores. I remember my parents changed banks when they both returned to work because only one local bank stayed open past 5.
Having a block of "standard work time" for asynchronous tasks (e.g. writing code, building a car) makes sense, but having it collide with the schedule of e.g. buying insurance is really weird to me.
I think that, at least for jobs that require significant context-building spinup time at the beginning of a work period before you can start producing useful work, this is a great idea.
However, I think the 6-hour day plan has some real merit too. I think it just depends on the job. For an engineering or programming job, I think the 11-hour day makes a lot of sense. But for some job like nursing (as in the article), or customer-service jobs where you're running around the whole shift, I think the 6-hour day (5 days a week) makes a lot of sense so workers don't get too worn out.
11 hour days sound delightful for a lot of jobs - lots of productive time at work, with enough time off to relax and travel. They also sound hellish for some work (11 hours of manual labor is wretched) and impractical for some (11 hours waiting tables misses prime hours).
So I think that conditional is important, but it sounds like a great thing to offer where possible. I can certainly see taking it as an occasional or even permanent schedule.
9/80 sounds like a good tradeoff. I had never heard of it before this thread. That's why I love HN. It's better than /r/todayilearned/
As a contractor I never try and line something up straight after my current one finishes.
It works out about 1-3 months off a year, which gives a nice amount of time to recharge.
For permies, it should either be a 3 days weekend, or at the very least a bank holiday every month.
If the company still paid good money, then it just means that they were a really profitable enterprise.
It's like if a company like Google which currently pays top dollar, decides to pay average market salary, but loads the compensation offer with perks and time off, then I bet people would be saying that Google is a profitable company because it gives employees all these perks, whereas Google gives all these benefits because it's a hugely profitable company.
Some people would rather get paid more (especially if they are young) then work comfortably, maybe it's too hard for you to believe but America is full of people like that.
This assumes that productivity is constant per hour worked, which is far from the truth for many professions. For most professions you the productivity delta not only decreases with too many hours, it even eventually becomes negative. There's no reason to suspect that eight is the optimal number of hours for every profession; it's just a historical quirk left over from the days of predominantly manual factory labor.
It isn't, but productivity also isn't an inverse function of number of hours worked.
At best, productivity is a function of the incentives which drives you, to a limit, after which it comes down for the number of hours worked.
Take for example there are many people who had high paying corporate job, but once they quit it and started working on their own startup, despite the long hours they worked, their productivity went up.
Similarly, other people work for money, because that's what drives them.
The main point is that there is no one size fits all solution. But nearly all these studies about workplace hours studies fail to see that.
Even in white collar that's not true. For creative problem solving it mostly holds but it doesn't hold very well in situations where the immediate product that isn't cutting edge and/or isn't mostly aesthetic (basically the artsy people and the R&D people). For everything else there's a pretty direct relationship between time and productivity.
People aren't machines.
They found production was maximized with an 8 hour day, interspersed with occasional longer days.
6 hour days would be a huge boon to my personal life, but I couldn't afford to be paid 25% less. even if I was 10% more productive (probably generous), i still couldnt afford to be paid 17.5% less
One possible downside is that not everything you work on makes it to the market and you have to be proactive in keeping your skills and knowledge up-to-date and to remain employable for your next job.
Here's the thing, though. We don't even get a choice. I tried for YEARS to engineer a long-term part-time career in the software industry, and I couldn't get it to happen. I'm perfectly happy to trade more free time for less money, but there are just no takers out there. The industry isn't interested.
What I wanted is 20-25 hours per week indefinitely (and with job security).
"Appeasing the owner" with promises of higher productivity might be the best strategy for passing these changes.
Furthermore, there's basically no historical basis for increased workers rights/benefits coming from business owners.
When given a choice between more money and more free time everyone around me chooses money and prestige.
>It's typically not an accepted proposition to offer to work 4 days for proportionally less pay
I currently have a 40 hour work where I can set my own hours and earn "flex time" (future PTO) for any hours over 40.
I am paid well now, but I could certainly earn more by switching to company that would expect me to work more than 40 hours.
The people complaining about working extra are absolutely choosing more time and more money.
It's a company wide thing, so that helps.
Partly I think that's an efficiency thing - if you're critical path on a task, having you available when everyone else is becomes worth a large multiple of your salary. Partly I suspect it's just about not opening the floodgates, where people either resent you or take the same deal.
I wonder what the real cut would be, though? For work like software where adding shifts can't be done cleanly, you risk all kinds of major benefit, payroll-tax, and hardware/facilities costs. Still, there have to be programmers willing to take a 50% pay cut for a 33% hour cut.
(There's an essay somewhere for programmers about how to ask a manager for this, which is full of notes on how they'll be confused and try to reject it without considering it.)
You can certainly choose to work for a 40h company instead of a 60h company but the latter type of company doesn't seem to have any problems recruiting.
Given that's the distribution, you can't say people won't don't want to elect for <40 for less pay, it's not a really a choice in the current environment.
Oh god. America is even worse than I thought.
Look around you and count how many people are working overtime on their own, sacrificing their life for free food, a fuzzball table, the expectations of 0.1% equity down the road, the hope of giving a good impression to their manager, the expectations of a raise later for hard work, or the pressure to work night and week-end unpaid on-call.
When not thinking about it, people choose neither money not free time :D
I suppose I can understand the conspiracy theory of "they want you to only have work friends", but I really don't understand "they're replacing a good raise with a $100 ping-pong table". It's just not a sane model of what's happening, keeping employees in the building is not inherently profitable.
1) Keeping tech employees in the building is profitable.
2) In tech companies in particular, you don't have to be at work behind a computer to be productive.
Once you both understand that these things are true and correct, you can begin to understand the business of the SV and why these perks come to be.
While people are in the office, they are with co-worker, thinking about work, talking about work, progressing on their work. And the magic thing is you don't have to pay them for it, because they ain't working officially.
A bad thing happen in production late? Fine, they're already there and they won't even think that fixing it is doing actual work because they are already there. That foosball table was way cheaper than paying overtime.
How about serving breakfast at 9 am and dinner at 19? Then people who wants both will stay. Most likely, people who are a bit close to one or the other might extend their schedule slightly just to grab it. But no way they think of it as extra work.
Early retirement is just something I don't see happening for a salaried worker in Sweden. Comparatively low salaries (for developers), high real estate prices and high taxes makes that pretty impossible. But now I have the choice of either taking a day off or pay 61% of my salary for that day to the government.
If you're in the right places, you'll definitely see people who value free time over money and prestige.
I had to stop because of how lonely and isolating it was and how I couldn't maintain any relationships with my girlfriends and the 99% of my peers that were back home working 60h a week.
What universe do you live in? In my universe, this is simply not true. No tech company is going to allow you to work, say, 30 hours a week for 75% of your salary, plus full health benefits. And taking a months-long sabbatical means you don't keep your job, and you have a hard time getting a new one because of a resume gap, which employers absolutely hate.
Previously I've worked every 4th week off.
These days I do contracts which provides some nice gaps if you don't try and line something up before the current one finished.
It's been possible to take a year off - I was using that to work on my own projects, so that went on my c.v.
I did it myself for years modulo the health insurance part (we have universal healthcare in my country).
That is the most exceptional thing about the trial: that it happened at all in a climate where collective bargaining is declining and the decline of the concept of a stable job.
Well, sounds like Swedish unions need to show what they're for and get more forward-thinking.
So the argument commonly takes the form of, "Well you're actually paying for something when an employee doesn't seem to be doing anything."
To the workaholics out there I say stop working extra for free. Those additional hours are unsolicited gifts to an employer who would fire you if it was possible. Stop giving your labor away, seriously.
And obviously people should realise that the lack of hour restriction on salaried work can be used against them. Stick, on average, to your contracted hours; crunch time may occasionally be necessary but it should be compensated and never normalised.
Do you get paid to work 40 hours, but only work 20? Or do you get paid for only 20 hours of work?
If it's latter, then the problem is that not many salaried jobs can offer such an arrangement without major caveats. Even if you have a formal agreement with your employer for 20 hours of work, the deadlines and expectations from customers and "business" in general will not care if you are only signed up for 20 hours, when the project needs to be delivered by Monday.
Getting better at estimates go a long way. The "20 minute" task at the end of the work day that ends up taking 2 hours ... either stop doing that or start being honest that 20 minutes meant 2 hours.
Also know what "corporate time" means. Usually the monday deadlines are dependent on a bunch of other things that are rarely if ever done on that monday. Almost universally things are days if not weeks later than scheduled. Have something to go for the monday, but anticipate the reality based on the client relations ...
Also position yourself from a business perspective. The company is doing X to make a profit. You are there to help fix a problem in achieving X. Orient all your goals only to that - not in fixing any adjacent problems - your customers ultimately don't care, your boss ultimately doesn't care, and if you did that, you just worked for free.
There's something called the pace of business. I'm sure there's been slow times when business is moving fine and not much is changing.
Instead of finding work, say to the boss, "I'm not going to waste your money in something that doesn't need to be done. everything is fine, here's the semi vacation I'm doing." It may come at a pay cut, but it should work in your favor and improve your trust and relationship with your superiors because you're taking responsibility for not just the work but the amount of it.
From a business owner you're essentially saying "I achieved the tasks, things are stable. Now pay me less and I'll go do other things" Sounds like a better deal then "now I shall fill up the time with tasks I claim are important that you don't understand but must pay for." From a non tech perspective, this makes you sound like a bozo who doesn't understand business.
Knowing how to negotiate and manage your own labor, especially with respect to business risk and your added value, and if you're expensive is important. Really, it's one of the primary ways you get to be expensive in the first place.
I'm still confused. Are you formally getting paid less than a comparable full-time (40 hours) worker, or are you getting paid with the assumption that you work 40 hours a week? You said you get "full-time pay" earlier, but now it seems you're saying you actually have a special reduced pay arrangement of sorts.
Don't end negotiations during the interview. Open it up again when things change.
Engineers aren't great at business and often hand wave it off as if it's unpleasant and impure. That's nonsense. If you're an employee, the business comes first.
If you get good and are known to be good, you can ask for any kind of work arrangement.
So when the productivity gains that were promised in the 50s came in the 80s there was no labor movement to force a shorter work week, so instead there were layoffs and bigger profits on top.
We never got the promised 20 hour work week of the 50s because collectively we forgot and abandoned the multi-generational labor struggle which got us the 40 hour one. These things aren't going to just get handed out.
We are also forced to spend more in many cases; taxes are higher, EPA vehicle regs are stricter, etc. I am effectively forced to give away ~40% of my work time to federal and state governments (not including taxes on the employer side, like payroll taxes), and I don't make much as a student.
Land is a competitive good, land near commercial hubs is scarce and eventually goes to the highest earners in relative terms. If you want to cut working hours for everyone, the government has to mandate it - otherwise people will always be willing to work a smidgen more than you for the better house. The government here is part of the solution, not the problem. (Unless you are talking about municipal zoning and NIMBYism which is certainly part of the problem.)
If people add more value I have no problem with them having a bigger house / more stuff.
I have a problem with being forced to work for my landlord.
we are slaves to our uncontrolled passions that marketers have ruthlessly and easily exploited having us believe we need something we cannot afford. we allow ourselves to be convinced that our life would not be as fulfilling without the latest fad/gadget/etc.
If people paid in cash for what they want, put off such purchases for three or more days, and bought a home one income could support, there would less "slave to wages" than people think
I think GGP's point was that those are becoming hard-to-impossible to find in many places, especially places with decent-paying jobs.
I don't agree with him that this was a deliberate conspiracy by employers to keep workers oppressed; I think it has far more to do with an out-of-control financial sector and governments addicted to over-loose monetary policy. But blaming people's "uncontrolled passions" for wanting a stable home, one they might actually be able to pay off one day, is a bit silly.
(Disclaimer: this is a view from London, which while it might not be quite the absolute worst for housing is pretty damn close to it. YMMV.)
Now if the question is whether they try to maximize profits, once again, this is not a secret or a back room conspiracy, this is how it works.
As an employee, enter into every negotiation knowing this.
I'm not sure you who you're arguing with. What I said was
> I don't agree with him that this was a deliberate conspiracy
and branchless' GGP comment I was disagreeing with wasn't about "extracting profit from the labor of its workforce" in general, it was about "The whole point behind high land prices is to prevent most people achieving financial independence."
If we get more productive and wages rise we have more disposable income so rents / renting money from the bank (mortgage) rises.
If we cut back on consumption we have more disposable income so rent rises.
Productivity gains are captured by land prices.
But people cannot do this because we live in a world of very efficient economic rent extraction through land prices. When productivity rises land prices rise, handing over all gains to the banks. Our generation are, thanks to tech, far more efficient than the 1960s. Yet now both parents must work for the same (or worse) house.
Computing power brought us many things, it also brought banks, the ability to track vast amounts of electronic debt. At a time when we came off the gold standard allowing unconstrained fiat issuance.
I'd like to see the shoe on the other foot - employees who are not under constant financial pressure due to high rents demanding that employers pass on most of their surplus value.
edit: cannot reply to your comment as faux hacker news "you're submitting to fast about usury"
here it is:
The main cost of "housing" in urban areas is the land. Construction has improved massively since 1960s as has materials construction, yet here we are with housing at record of income multiples.
That isn't true. Houses built in the 1960s that have only had basic maintenance done to them are available and they are a lot cheaper than newer houses. It turns out most people don't want to live with a house that looks like the 1960s. People like bigger kitchens and houses when we can afford them. Once the house gets a little bigger we like to see things like brick on the front (I'm not sure if this is styles changing or a longer term pattern of people deciding the houses of 1990 are big enough and now we want pretty not more space).
The result is perfectly nice houses in old neighborhoods are available for cheap if you are willing to live in them.
Despite the above I recommend you not buy those old houses: they are not energy efficient and so either heating/cooling will eat your paycheck or you will spend a lot fo money in upgrades you won't get back.
The trade off is a very healthy job market, phenomenal weather, a great liberal culture and great food.
I do.
>Despite the above I recommend you not buy those old houses: they are not energy efficient and so either heating/cooling will eat your paycheck or you will spend a lot fo money in upgrades you won't get back.
Ah, and there's the problem: not freezing in the winter.
In large part people live in city's because they want to live in cities. I pay close to 1/3 of my take home pay in rent because I like where I live.
Right now 20-25% of the US workforce teleworkers some of the time. And up to 50% of US jobs could be worked remotely a significant portion of the time. Further, as people move out of the most in demand city's service jobs will follow.
Quoted with emphasis placed. Can, could, sure I agree 100%. The ability to do this lies with the consent of the employer, not the employee. A lot of people don't have the luxury of cherry-picking their income source, and are beholden to the rules of their employer. I realize that notion isn't really considered here: "we can all get jobs anywhere, we're smart devs!", but in reality is isn't true for large swaths of people.
That said, my office has flexible hours and a liberal WFH policy which is a huge deal to me.
This isn't quite right. Most 'office' jobs could be performed remotely is true. You can't say they can be worked remotely because most companies don't want to deal with remote workers.
I'm a dev, my company doesn't like WFH. Many don't. That is the real world. And that is dev which is perfect for WFH.
Even the wording "a significant portion of the time". Gotta live near.
My boss lived 230 miles from the office at my last job. He showed up 1-2 days a week for meetings and that's it.
This is my 2nd such job.
If it's something you want, I encourage you to shop around.
A huge swath of people simply don't like to do remote work for very long which has a lot more to do with current trends than you might think. Anyway, while there are basic requirements as it's hard to do construction remotely for example there are far more opportunity's than you might think for people with even just a high school diploma, they just don't necessarily pay as well.
If your 'situation' doesn't allow the benefits/compensation that you want, you can either change your situation or change your expectations.
For me the american dream was all about financial autonomy. The USA had to have actual slaves because they had no land enclosure. Why work as a wage slave when you can walk up the road and work empty land? Land gives labour the choice. Land enclosure is required for wage slaves.
How do you eliminate bias in a trial like this? I mean, a lot of people want to move to a 6-hour day, so they'll be working hard to prove they're productive in that format. That doesn't mean it'll be sustainable though once it becomes the new normal.
Being sick is not a binary. We've all had days wher we feel like shit but figure we don't feel quite ill enough to stay at home, and so end up taking a couple of painkillers and favourite source of caffeine and end up working.
Presumably the shorter the work day, the more likely you would be to consider it ok to push through it if you feel ill, especially if you have vested interest in demonstrating that a new arrangement like a 6 hour day "works".
I'm not saying they did, but there are many ways they could plausibly sustain something like that for quite a while. The question is whether it is sustainable on a long term basis, or if it would change if/when a 6 hour day is no longer an experiment.
If the net effect is that you still show up to work anyway, does it really matter?
To be clear: I'm not stating a belief in terms of whether or not people do this or not, but it is a tricky confounding factor to exclude, because everyone involved in an experiment like that will have vested interests in the outcome that might significantly affect how they act.
It's not like you can double-blind a study like this. Ultimately it will likely take long-term studies from places that actually implement it on an ongoing basis over much longer time frames to get a true picture of the effects.
That said, as I said, I'm all for working fewer hours. I just don't think figuring out what the cost/benefit tradeoff is will be remotely this simple.
Everyone here called in sick at least once when they weren't actually sick.
Maybe I am not thinking about this right, but if I feel like I can more effectively plan alternative activities that fit into 2 hours than I can an additional activity that would fit into 30 minutes. What I am saying, is there is no reason to believe that the benefits are linear.
Think of it in another way, if I have to work one hour from 12 to 1, it removes any alternative activity that requires the whole day. I am just saying, that assuming it is a linear benefit is too big a jump for me.
The main difference being we cut out "fika" - this was easily 60 minutes per day at our old work place - and dropped all private web lurking from the work days. We just decided we didn't need all that downtime from doing work during days, we'd rather spend it at home.
Clients are pleased with the work, I get to both drop and pickup up my kids everyday. In Sweden, if you've got web dev skills, this is very doable.
I believe in it on a bigger scale for worker happiness sake and really hope we'll get there soon.
From the first google result: "Fika is a common practice at workplaces in Sweden and Finland where it constitutes at least one break during a normal workday. Often, two fikor are taken in a day at around 9:00 in the morning and 3:00 in the afternoon. The work fika is an important social event where employees can gather and socialize to discuss private and professional matters. It is not uncommon for management to join employees and to some extent it can even be considered impolite not to join one's colleagues at fika. The practice is not limited to any specific sector of the labor market and is considered normal practice even in government administration."
My company is a bit weird in the Swedish work culture since we don't really go for breaks at 9.00 am and 3 pm. But we get to go home at 3-4 pm because of it.
I realize that this is privileged and that the fika fills an important need for a break during more physical or mentally demanding work.
"It's a process and it takes time and when you don't have all that [much] time it kind of feels like skipping homework at school, things are always building up."
That's a perspective I hadn't considered. Maybe the 6 hour work day makes more sense for service-based work like nursing, fast food, etc.
For us techies it could actually be a nuisance (depending on how the individual works).
What I would prefer is to work as long as I need to and when I come to a logical breaking point, I go home. Some days that may be 4 hours, other days that may be 12. Some things I can't easily break down into chunks that easily fit into 8 hours and not have me lose my place by going to sleep. Some days I get into a flow and I don't even realize I'm hungry until it's dark again and I suddenly realize everyone's gone to bed and left me on my own. Other days I struggle to figure out what I'm doing and the more I fight it, the harder the struggle becomes. It's not because of a lack of discipline or lack of want to work, it's just that I struggle to connect dots that when I'm on form just connect themselves.
On days when I'm on form, I'm unstoppable, a machine that just churns out working, tested, simple, elegant solutions to problems. When I'm not on form, I can't figure out how chew gum without gagging. This seems to hinge on how much sleep I've had, which directly impedes the amount of time I have in a day... finding the balance between enough sleep and enough time to get work done to a high degree of quality is a constant struggle
So I don't think changing the length of the work day for me even enters in to my psyche. It's always either far too long or nowhere near long enough... it would be the same if the work day was 2 hours long or 22 hours long.
That's what it's like for me, I can't speak for everyone else.
Unfortunately programming is treated like assembly line work where every hour (and every worker) is equal. I don't think this reflects reality well.
Nowadays instead of coding full out until I go home and crash on the couch I try to spend the last hour of the work day documenting what I've done, what need to be done tomorrow and even what I'm doing this evening. That way I've probably had some decent time off, I know what to do the next day and can more easily get started. Even if I'm not motivated I can do something simple for a couple of hours, at which point I usually get motivated again.
Coding marathons feels good when you do them, but they also builds up debt. Both in the structure of the project and in motivation. It's quite natural that it's hard to get started if you don't have an obvious starting point and you anticipate that you have to do a full 8 to 10 hours and be completely spent at the end.
One could argue that the person can make a better use of the two extra days spent working but not productive on items related to specific work items. So it may not increase productivity to the employer but it increases productivity to the employee.
I kid around. Of course, we're all human and we're never all on form on the same day and shit happens and unexpected problems need to be solved right now and the only guy on form has no idea of the problem domain and the only guy who does understand it is 20 hours into a 22 hour day and has bloodshot eyes. This is life, reality. Sadly it doesn't understand ideal. It's all about compromise for the greatest good we can achieve today to meet our goals tomorrow.
C'est la vie.
The only issue with this approach is that what you perceive a logical breaking point and what your boss perceives as a logical breaking point will be very different. "Before you go, can you just fix ..."
Even 8 hour days can result in this behaviour becoming 10+ hour days.
The (engineering) company operated based on billable hours, so they loved it, initially. Eventually, though, you stop fitting in to the organization when you're a part-timer.
Many workers have jobs where human presence is a key part of the job function. Being a cashier, or a nurse, or driving -- it isn't as though these things happen unless you are physically there. The quantum of human presence is "one human" :-) so even if there are no customers, the driving is boring, or the patients are asleep, it still requires you to be there on the job.
If you're being kicked out of the building in six hours, that could be stressful.
But if six hours from now you have the option of leaving with no one looking askance, that's nice. (Until everyone tries to prove they're more hard-core than the next guy.)
It seems like the tech sector _was_ starting to realize that people can get more done in five hours of "flow" than eight hours of forced confinement to a desk.
With proper handover procedures it would be an interesting experiment to actually implement a hard maximum in my opinion.
I doubt very many people can regularly engage in 6+ hours of deep work, day after day after day. I think a more common pattern is 3-4 hours of deep work, then a similar amount of time processing email, playing code janitor, going to meetings, and screwing around on the web.
In the private sector that informally participated, apparently no staff adjustments were made (or at least not mentioned).
I'm not sure it depends on the sector.
There's always more work to do! No surprise! This is why we automate so that the amount becomes smaller and that's why we cut things we don't need.
* Employees are happier, more productive and less stressed
* The cost of staff increased due to sustained wages for less worm* if you have a job that requires X work be done. The more productive, happier employees still get X work done. If I'm happier and suddenly don't spend 2-3 hours of work time on reddit or hn, I can actually get MORE work done in less time. I imagine a lot of HN style jobs fit into this category. I know I can write more code when I'm well rested and thinking clearly.
* if you have a job that requires Y hours be worked. You have to hire more staff to cover the extra hours. For example, hospital care (like the lady described in the article). If you need a hospital staffed 24/7, you now need 4 people to staff a single day instead of 3.
That's the equation in its simplest first-order form. There are lots of factors you can put in the equation, of which you mentioned a few:
- reduced employer cost for recruiting if people are happier in their jobs
- reduced employer cost for sick leave/temps if employees are healthier
- increased efficiency because employees are more efficient/make fewer mistakes
- reduced healthcare costs for society if everyone is healthier
- increased employer cost of training and education if more people need to do the same task
- ... the list goes on and on.
In a society with publicly funded healthcare, the cost of sick workers is triple: first the employee is replaced by a temporary, often more expensive nurse to fill in. Second, society pays the insurance/sick leave for the person home sick. Third, the sick person now causes more work for the same public organizations (healthcare). The costs of people in working age being ill is one of Swedens largest econommic problems at the moment. In a small scale experiment the large scale effect of a healther population can't be seen in the direct economic outcome but it can be estimated.
There are jobs which require 8 hours of being present, doing something or not, and by reducing that time you simply have to hire more people.
From TFA:
"So I don't think people should start with the question of whether or not to have reduced hours. First, it should be: what can we do to make the working environment better? And maybe different things can be better for different groups. It could be to do with working hours and working times, but it could be a lot of other things as well."
Well, yeah, but a comprehensive study just showed that reducing working hours gives a tremendous improvement to the quality of life and number of jobs in an area. So why shouldn't we look at it?
From what I've heard and seen it's a total nightmare across the globe in almost every use-case. Just having a way for doctors and nurses to put all information in one clear place while also combining with the infrastructure to enforce certain information (e.g. when medication is retrieved from storage, for who is it, and was it pre-approved) to help prevent things as double-dosing (or forgetting to dose).
Doesn't sound easy tbh, but if you want a challenge here it is.
The cost of this is virtually nothing compare to other expenses in hospitals.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/11718631/Aspirin-loo-...
Staff costs are far and away the most expensive running costs for hospitals.
Moving from a 2 * 12 hour shift pattern to a 3 * 8 hour shift pattern has significant cost implications, and some safety implications.
It's an architecture firm (buildings, not software) and I'm one of the few that works only 40 hrs/wk and gets to walk out on time every day and never work on the weekends. So many people came back from the holidays sick, mainly I think because their bodies were so fried from the prior year that it finally caught up. Now, they're back on that cycle.
As IT support, I get to hear it all. The father of two that told me he needs to keep a laptop checked out so he can answer questions sent at 1 am. People that were given laptops so they could work remotely, but instead just work nights and weekends. A new mother, already back into the swing of working 10-11 hr/days and maybe a little more at home when the kid's asleep. Constant work on weekends.
And that's all for salary. For free work. For what? Great for the clients and the business owners but it makes no sense to me. Seems like a product of poor planning, client management, and the powers that be never saying no.
I've done the client services work in a previous life, the 80-100 hr weeks. Luckily, I was paid for each and every one worked, sometimes making the more in double time than my base 40 week. Burn out and depression easily followed and made some hard choices (and took some pay cuts) to transition to something a little more doable and a bit more balanced.
They live that chaos because they're taught in school or inculcated in their first jobs that that's how things are. Is it because my generation (I'm early thirties) is struggle to pay off debts (school ones, in the tens of thousands for some) while also trying to do all the things our parents did? Have a house (median price in LA - $610k) or raise a family (one kid - $250k before 18)?
It just strikes me as insane sometimes that this how we set ourselves up.
Maybe it's purely anecdotal based on past near decade in a major city. I'm from a rural place and life can be a bit easier, at least if you have family and friends near.
Sorry for going off on a rant but I was so saddened when looking around a room that day (open office, of course) to see how terrible people looked and it made me think "Why can't we do better?"
The setup was to during 23 months test if six-hour days resulted in any meaningful improvement on the (rather high) amount of sick leave the employees used.
The conclusion was that the amount of sick leave only went down with 0.6%.
I'm a contractor so it's relatively simple for me to do this, I'm in a lucky position in that I can afford to not work 8 hours, but personally I can really see a huge benefit.
I'm now a contractor in the very real sense. I use my own computer, I work generally when I want to (I set the total hours at the beginning of any month and choose what hours to work when within that framework).
In terms of pay, becoming a contractor means my pay went up and I can work 4 hours a day and do as well as I was full time, though I do try to work more like 4.5 - 5 hours a day (gotta pay that mortgage down).
What this means is that I generally only work when I'm motivated and "feeling it", the rest of the time I relax, learn, program, climb etc. It may seem like I'm expensive at > 2x what I was on when full time, but I think I'm giving way more for the time I put in, eg. no % of an 8 hour day spent being tired or "slacking". For instance I stopped the clock to read HN :) I'm also way happier than I was before.
Yes... 1933: http://www.alternet.org/labor/when-america-came-close-establ...
It's possible that if this is tried in larger scale that e.g. employees will be offered either 90% pay for 80% work, or that a deal with unions is to freeze wage increases for N years in exchange for ever shortening work hours.
> Maybe I'm severely overpaid as a developer, but I would take a 25% pay cut for 25% less work.
As a swede and parent I'm entitled to that while I have kids < 8yo. Really good set up I think.
If you really want a study, try finding workers in a factory who work 6 hours and then compare their productivity to workers in a different factor who work 8 hours.
Avg. hours per worker went down - but otherwise costs remains the same.
The state has to pay for 'x hours of work' to fill the demand, so why on earth did they think there would be any savings?
'Joe, you get every Friday off'
'Sue, you get to work every Friday'.
???
This might be better in a situation wherein people can simply 'get more done' in 'less time' and opt to spend less time at work.
This seems the more obvious choice for worker happiness. Also would give more time back to both emplyee/emplyor as for the former you dont have 5 days commute and the latter for things like nursing there is less handover times and similar prep.
Also I imagine if a bloc of countries did this en masse it would limit any detriment. That said I'd prefer 10hr days, which often is the case anyway, if I could get a 4 day week!
Some want to make it more flexible...
That sounds like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect to me.
* i'm a software developer in central europe. * i suffer from delayed sleep cycle (i.e. i'm a night owl). * i picked up weightlifting (as the main hobby) to compensate for all the sitting and the club has fixed workout times in the evening (i.e. no 24/7 gym access). the harder i work out, the more sleep i need.
i used to work a 42 hour work week (from 7:30am - getting up at ~6:30am to ~6pm) at a small web dev company in the countryside for 2 years. close to the end i was practically burnt out, close to tears every evening and broke out in celebration when they told me i was fired. even after 2 years my sleep cylce hasn't normalized - i've been constantly sleep deprived.
afterwards i got another software dev job at a company in the capital where i first worked 25 hours and now work 30 hours a week with flexible time - roughly 6 hours a day monday to friday, no core time (except for scheduled meetings).
i get paid more for those 30 hours than for the 42 hours in the first job, but have less money at the end of the month because i used to live with my parents at the first company.
there are a lot of differences (more competent superiors etc), but personal observation regarding work culture and time:
* i'm usually well rested: due to flexible time i rarely set an alarm and wake up on my own depending on when i went to bed and how much i worked out (or boozed) the previous day. this means sometimes i'm in the office at 3pm. sometimes 7am. doesn't really matter as long as i don't have any meetings (which are very rare; currently once a week at 2pm). if i want to stay home for the day i send my teammates a message.
* stress level is extremely low because i can always take time off without much bureaucracy if i have to attend personal matters.
* due to only working 6 hours a day i can easily accumulate overtime which isn't paid but goes into an 1:1 overtime pool. this enables the next point:
* i rarely sit idle. if there isn't any work to do, i'll go home. period. if there's a lot of work to do (and i'm in the zone), i'll happily stay longer. it evens out and i never idly wait for the clock, passing time. i usually work more during the winter and less during the summer, when customers are on vacation.
* if i'm feeling unwell but not sick (or not sick enough for sick leave) i work from home and take frequent naps. if i'm sick it's rarely for long because coming to work sick is heavily discouraged and i just stay in bed. i go back to work as soon as i feel healthy and ready even when my doctor approved more sick leave.
* if my concentration is slipping and i don't get any work done, i call it a day. if i'm super productive and in the zone i stay because i want to.
* because of all those things i love working there. i think my employer is fair, understands efficiency and treats us employees well and i wouldn't want to cheat the company because "do as you'd be done by". i wouldn't call in sick if i had a hangover (or are otherwise unfit to work due to my own fault). if i work from home i don't do the dishes on company time. i'm honest - and so is my employer (as far as i can tell - i never caught them trying to cheat me). loyality is high; in case i suspect a colleague of cheating i'm actually on my employers side and tell them to quit their bullshit because of self interest (i don't want to lose those perks).
* i don't think i could deliver the same bang for the buck with an 8 hour work day because i wouldn't be able to accumulate the overtime i'd need to take time off if i'm not at my best. but if i wanted more - or even less - that'd be possible.
* i still earn enough to get by comfortably.
* i don't have kids yet but many of my colleages do and they love working part time because it makes things so much easier and enables them to spend more time with their offspring, even though they earn less. but this way their spouses can work more and earn more, so it evens out - and they can share responsibilities easier.
TL;DR: in my opinion 30h/week is the best bang for the buck for both me and my employer because i only work when i'm productive, so the company doesn't have to pay for my idle time and i can minimize stress and frustration. i understand this is partially possible due to the nature of software projects (deliver on time, but it doesn't matter much when you do the work).
edit: also, i can do 6 hours without the mandatory 30 minute break, if i'm in a hurry.
edit 2: i can't offload work to teammates. if i take time off, work just accumulates. no cheating!