Hacker News Reader

Comment by splintercell | Hacker News Reader

You can't have more money, AND fewer hours/more vacation.

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.

View on HN

> You can't have more money, AND fewer hours/more vacation.

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.

>This assumes that productivity is constant per hour worked, which is far from the truth for many professions.

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.

It's true for most (if not all) white collar professions, not just the creative/artistic ones. You can't stare at Excel spreadsheets for ten hours straight and be as productive in the tenth hour as you were in the first. Or say that you're doing case research -- you're certainly more bored and easily driven to distraction after you've already been reading for many hours in a day.

People aren't machines.

> This assumes that productivity is constant per hour worked, which is far from the truth for many professions.

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.

It's not a quirk. There were studies done during WW2 that aimed to maximize production. They found that increasing work beyond 8 hours increased productivity for a few weeks, then it fell off below what was produced in 8 hours.

They found production was maximized with an 8 hour day, interspersed with occasional longer days.

would I be more productive with 6 hour days? probably. would I get more done? absolutely not (at least for me).

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

So, I ask you kindly, where is the tradeoff? 7 hours/day? And what if most decided that that was the norm, and maybe and as competitive forces corrected your wage would rise to match current (or oppositely prices fall to meet less free income)?

People in the software industry find it hard to comprehend the fact that many old-school companies actually don't require all their employees working at 150% thrust to remain super-profitable. Slow product life-cycles, manufacturing prowess, regulated markets, etc. mean that in many companies, you can have a fruitful career and not burn yourself out with 80 hour weeks. This is usually more true with non-software/non-service companies where white-collar labor isn't the most critical asset. In the same companies, employees in manufacturing, sales, etc. have it significantly harder than developers, R&D, etc.

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.

> You can't have more money, AND fewer hours/more vacation.

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.

Did you try freelancing?

Freelancing is good if you want to work 40+ hours per week for a limited duration, and then perhaps take some time off before the next job.

What I wanted is 20-25 hours per week indefinitely (and with job security).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com