We should kill the 40-hour work week | Hacker News Reader

We should kill the 40-hour work week

crew.co

253 pointsjjoachim3270 comments

We should absolutely kill the 40 hour week and replace it with a 30 hour week.

> the 40-hour work week doesn’t work anymore

Doesn’t work for who? What does “works” mean anyway? Maximizes efficiency for our employers? Why is that the question? What works for you? Why not ask what works to maximize your happiness and flourishing? What works for me is fewer working hours in the week (doesn’t matter what time of day it was that I logged them) and more time to do whatever I want, whether that's coding, walking a dog, reading or doing absolutely nothing. We went from 80 hour to 40 hour weeks 100 years ago, why is 40 to 30 such a stretch today?

> During the Industrial Revolution, factories needed to be running around the clock so employees during this era frequently worked between 10-16 hour days. In the 1920s however, Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, decided to try something different: His workers would only work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

That is completely ahistorical! The 8 hour day was carved out from the 16 hour day and paid for in blood by a militant labor movement over several decades, not granted magnanimously by Henry Ford. You don’t have to consult obscure labor history to find that out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

> kill the 40 hour week and replace it with a 30 hour week.

Or less. If you're over 40, cognitive function declines if you work more than 25 hours a week (and declines more the more you exceed). Up to 25 hours a week, cognitive function increases with more work.

Not that increasing cognitive function is the be-all and end-all, but (a) it's certainly something to consider whether you're degrading your brain and (b) 25 hours probably also works well for other reasons and for other ends.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2737742

But is it not also true that cognitive function declines if you work more than 25 hours a week for those _under_ 40 also? In fact, isn't it true that cognitive function declines after only 10 minutes of focussing on a single problem!

My main wonder: Why did they limit the study to persons over 40 only?

Oh, well, I can always take solace in

"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" John P. A. Ioannidis Published: August 30, 2005

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...

and

"We have an epidemic of deeply flawed meta-analyses"

by the same author:

http://retractionwatch.com/2016/09/13/we-have-an-epidemic-of...

and the original paper "he Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses" at:

https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/mass-production-r...

> Why did they limit the study to persons over 40 only?

1st sentence of introduction of the fine paper:

"Many countries have already increased their retirement ages by delaying the age at which people are eligible to start receiving pension payments."

in france there were the 35h weeks by law. result... everyone mocked the country and employers gave everyone a manager title which has no 35h restriction.

good luck

That experiment started in February 2000, a time where telework and work from home and other policies were much less common. Automation in the past 17 years have invalidated a lot of 'work' people do as well.

The idea that 40-50 is some magic number is the more ridicouls claim imo. If anything, progress, technology, and automation should naturally drive down hours needed per week. No one at my job does nearly the same amount of work we did 10-15 years ago. Our Fridays are all 'work from home' which is code for 'maybe check your email or finish up something.'

Our work world is only changing. Rolling with the changes makes sense to me and 35 hour or 4 day work-weeks seem like the a rational change. We should be benefiting from automation, not punished by it by pretending to be busy or working at much slower paces in fear of layoffs.

Also French experiemnt only lasted until 2004, when reforms were put in to raise the maximum amount of work allowable per month. I think its disingenuous to say that it 'failed.' It had a short 4 year run almost two decades ago. The world of 2017 is very different from the world of 2000-2004.

> We should be benefiting from automation, not punished by it

That's such a great point. It's a signal that something is wrong if automating tedious work away creates more misery instead of less.

Getting paid to do a job = 'misery' now, apparently. Maybe we should all go back to working in the fields from sunrise to sunset and avoid all this 'tedious work' for regular pay, benefits, vacation time, lunch breaks and closing bells.

If automation was creating 40-hour/week jobs with benefits, I think people would be pretty happy with it. Instead it's polarizing the labor market into underemployed service workers and overemployed professionals.

Children working in factories losing fingers every month got paid too. I think the idea that we've now, in 2017, reached perfection in employment is ridiculous.

I also think "go do farmwork if your job sucks" is dismissive and below the standards of HN discussions. There's always something worse, that doesn't mean we shouldn't ever complain.

I agree. I have a job I love (after numerous jobs which sucked), but I'd still vote for less working hours/days so I could actually, you know, LIVE: spend time with family and friends, enjoy nature, have hobbies, etc. The way I see it half the week should be for work, and half for life. So we should all work Monday through Wednesday, and half a day on Thursday.

>Getting paid to do a job = 'misery' now, apparently

It has always been a misery, even back to biblical times. In fact, having to work for his living was the original punishment for Adam.

Ancient Greeks and Romans, as another example, considered work beneath the dignity of free citizens. Not even Christianism was pro-work for the better part of 2 millennia. Older societies valued the fruits of work, but not work itself as much. Work only became a virtue in modern times because of the protestant-derived work ethic and the Horatio Alger types.

>* Maybe we should all go back to working in the fields from sunrise to sunset and avoid all this 'tedious work' for regular pay, benefits, vacation time, lunch breaks and closing bells.*

You'd be surprised. People work more in tedious cubicles than they did in medieval times (where scholars calculate something like 150+ days of the year devoted to festivities and holidays). Much less stressed, too, especially for those farmers free from feudal lords asking for most of their produce. The life of a farmer in France (and I know of several) is so much better (in vacation time, lunch breaks and closing bells -- and sometimes in pay too) than the average office drone that it's not even funny.

But that's a strawman, anyway, as nobody suggested we get back to the farms.

Aren't suicide rates among modern farmers among the higher. Long working hours and low wages because of the demanding market.

Peasants don't get emails after sunset and their vacation time were entire seasons off between harvest and seeding.

Sounds great to be a peasant. Wonder why so many peasants try so hard not to be one.[1]

[1]https://www.ft.com/content/44096ed2-eeb0-11e4-a5cd-00144feab...

From the very article you've linked to:

“Rapidly rising migrant wages in cities and shortages of low-skilled labor suggest that fewer people than before — and fewer than warranted on economic grounds — choose to leave the countryside to move to the city.”

And, from the same article:

"Becoming a migrant was a matter of necessity for her and her husband as they attempted to save their family from a crushing debt. She is now materially wealthier than she could ever be from working her family’s tiny plot of land. But the things she has lost, including her marriage and the chance to watch her two daughters (now aged 14 and 21) grow into young women, make it hard to convince herself she made the right choice. For her and her family, the things they held most precious have been destroyed in the process of trying to save them".

It's easy to be lured by BS promises of wealth and consumerism and life in the "big city" and many did. But even the article you've posted argues that the trend is reversing...

No one here is making a "back to nature" argument.

Up until the great depression this was taken for granted.

There was even a "share the work" movement, something we could probably do with now.

Is that 35h with lunch, or without lunch? Different countries measure it differently.

e.g. I believe my contract says I have a 35h work week, but that doesn't include an hour a day for a lunch break. But I believe the US measurement does include the lunchbreak, which makes my 35h work week the same as the US 40h work week.

State law is what determines when and how breaks are to be taken. In most states, there is no law that requires an employer to give their employee breaks, let alone pay for them. In my experience, I've had mostly unpaid break times while an hourly employee.

So it's common to earn 8 hours pay working 8-5, with two 15 minute "cigarette" breaks and a 30 minute lunch break.

Typically a 35 hour workweek is 7 hour days with up to an hour of unpaid lunch.

Don't rely on laws to fix this. Simply don't sign employment contracts that don't work for you. I think a lot of the HN crowd can afford that.

This will guarantee that a change won't happen. I think a whole lot more of the HN crowd and the greater crowd won't demand less hour when "everyone else" is doing "normal" hours, even if they might "afford" it. I think you underestimate the power of wanting to be normal.

If enough special snowflake people would demand 6 hour work week that might become the new normal. But in my experience these demanding flake people seem to on the contrary be very confident that they can do 60 hr work weeks and be 10x productive so the demand is rather astronomical pay rather than fewer hours. Which is why currently the "normal" working hours instead seem to be increasing.

But if you believe in free will. This is correct answer, because everybody get to choose to work 60 hrs and no laws should interfere with that. No matter how much research says that this is not a sustainable way of life.

> We should absolutely kill the 40 hour week and replace it with a 30 hour week.

How about this: we should absolutely become more flexible and let people find the workweek that works for themselves.

If you can get as much shit done in 20 hours as the average employee can in 40 hours, I will assign you twice the work.

No, I won't pay you twice as much. (But as a top performer, you can expect a 5% YoY pay raise, and a 15%, instead of a 12% bonus.)

This has always been a thing that bothers me. The incentive structure is for me to be more productive than my peers rather than as productive as I can be.

LOL. Well put. This is totally the bullshit way things work in the US. You can work as hard as you can and still only make the same salary. Hell, most places I've worked have what amounts to a cost of living adjustment (the so called "performance review") of 2-5%, and, if you're lucky, a 3-5% bonus which is tied to company performance and paid annually. The inventive is always to find the smallest amount of work necessary to keep the job. That said, smart employers (like my current employer) focus on desired output. They don't care how much time it takes to get there, just so long as you do by the agreed upon date. So if you can achieve the objective that they're willing to pay you $X/year for in 20 hours a week, everybody's happy. Essentially they're paying on a freeform production basis. "We imagine that in a year you'll be able to get X done, and getting X done is with $Y to us." So far I find it immensely freeing and motivating. If I can work smarter then I can essentially work less, while still upholding my end of the bargain.

As a society we just need to stop focusing on hours and start focusing on output. But in a babysitter culture where we indoctrinate kids with the 8-hour school day and production process, this change is slow to occur. Just imagine if, in highschool, we said "here's the list of things you need to know to graduate. We provide resources on the premises--teachers, mentors, technology, books, etc--for achieving this, and it can take as long or short as you are capable and motivated. Go!" Yes, some would take forever, but I suspect many would blow through it so they could focus on doing whatever they really valued. But this will never happen because what parents really value out of highschool is the daycare aspect. While the parents are at work they can rest easy deluding themselves that their kids are 1) relatively safe, and 2) "learning" something. Safe, perhaps, but learning? Not enough, and super inefficiently. I've been in both public school and home school, and I've seen what I could do when properly incentivized. In home school I was efficiency in motion because I wanted to finish so I could go play. In public school I barely applied myself because what point was there. I'd be there for 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday, no matter what I did so...

But daycare, ahem, highschool isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

"...absolutely become more flexible ..."

There's something not quite right about this phrase.

To add to this, human labor doesn't begin with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to it, people produced the bulk of their own food, clothing, furniture and tools. Most manufacturing was done in homes or small, rural shops, using hand tools or simple machines. Serfs may have been tied to the land, but they worked for themselves on their own schedule, not a micromanaging lord who demanded set working hours. Before mechanization and factories, textiles were made mainly in people’s homes (giving rise to the term cottage industry), with merchants often providing the raw materials and basic equipment, and then picking up the finished product. Workers set their own schedules under this system.

The Industrial Revolution's effect on the working class is somewhat similar to what Chinese peasants who are forced to move out of their ancestral villages experience. Sure, the economist will tell you that real wages increased and the working classes began to have a more varied diet, as if that in total defines the overall happiness of a person. But despite the rise in income, many feel worse off..going from working outside and in a small, yet tight-knit community to being forced to live in polluted cities in cramped apartments where even though there are more people, there is more loneliness and alienation.

I'm fortunate and I work remotely. Due to not having to deal with all the distractions and wastes of time that are part of the modern office, I'm able to be roughly 1.8x more productive (stats from github & RescueTime). I do the same amount of work in 20-25 hours/wk that I did in 40+hrs/wk (not even including commute times). My morale, motivation, and creativity has increased greatly. I don't have to take a vacation day to deal with doctor's appointments, picking up clothes from the cleaners, going to the DMV, or whatever else you can only do from 8-5 M-F. In short, the company I work for is getting the same, if not more productivity out of me (my code is definitely of a higher quality and I'm never burned out enough to take shortcuts.) without any cost. I don't have to commute, pay, spend less on gas, eat healthier and cheaper because I have access to my kitchen, etc. It's a win for both sides without costing either party anything beyond the risk it took on allowing a remote culture.

So much of work in the modern office is pure optics. So many times after lunch I would be well served by taking a nap for an hour or two instead of wasting 2-3 hours staring blankly at a screen while I'm doing the microsleep, head bob dance.

Do you feel this dynamic holds true for all developers? What about non-developers?

I'm a data scientist and this certainly is true for me, too. I think it applies to any knowledge worker.

Of course my sentiments don't hold for the entirety of the labor market. As I said, i'm fortunate that I'm a knowledge worker whose physical presence is normally not necessary for me to complete my duties. I'll address your two questions separately.

> Do you feel this dynamic holds true for all developers?

I believe that software engineering is one of the professions that can stand to benefit the most from allowing remote work. It depends on your personality type, transparency/maturity, and, most importantly, communication skills. I currently lead a team of 3 junior developers and we have few if any issues working remotely. For those guys, it's most important for them to speak up when they are having issues, not when there is a deadline. Maybe I'm lucky that they have no problem admitting defeat. When they do have a problem, I've instructed them to prepare their questions as if they are asking Stack Overflow, though not nearly as exhaustive. I've found that this forces them to think critically and exercise their problem solving skills. Often times allows them to find the answer themselves instead of coming to me and disturbing my flow state, gesticulating and waving their hands because they don't even know how to phrase the problem. We all go into the office about 2x a month and those days are usually spent on the more troublesome issues and general shooting of the shit, Overwatch sessions, etc.

Before I started coding professionally, I hadn't worked in a team environment before nor had I been exposed to professional software development, release cycles, etc. I think we live in a different time now where more of those resources are available via the internet, but it wouldn't be ideal for a complete noob.

> What about non-developers?

It depends on the nature and responsibiliteis of the job. It certainly wouldn't work for some of my past gigs, such as being the Systems and Inventory Manager of a chemical storeroom. A lot of that job entailed babysitting my team and repeating over and over don't handle frickin chemicals without wearing PPE's , handle peroxide formers with care, go in the fucking eye wash if you got something on your face, etc. For some, it depends on your personality type. I know a lot of startups want the company to feel like a family. But, if I had a family, I'd opt to spend more time with my real family than the family I am paid to be around.

However, that's not me. I'm an extroverted introvert. I'd rather spend 40 hrs/wk with my girlfriend, dog, and friends (sometimes meet up at co-working spots, each other's place lunch, etc.) than in an office. I like Slack as I have just as much verbal communication and its async/doesn't require immediate response. When I get stuck with a problem, I can take a break and shoot some hoops, lift weights, go for a run, or vape some pot and sometimes I work for 12 hours straight without speaking to a soul....and I don't have to worry how my behavior is being judged.

It vastly cuts down on meetings. In my experience, people tend to prolong meetings often times just so they have said something to look like they are contributing and haven't remained silent. My pet peeve were impromptu brainstorming meetings. Brainstorming without any preparation is such a waste of time.

In some places 8 hour workday was achieved by union organized strikes, in other places by law decree and in other places by non-unionized workers and employers as an agreement.

The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements ...

> The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements

I think that's actually also ahistorical. There are some scholars who believe that before industrial revolution, commoners only worked on average 6 hours per day.

You are right, but that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Most preindustrial work was agricultural, and therefore heavily tied to the seasonal cycles of the year. While your comment is factually correct, it conveys the wrong image to the listener. The first thing modern people with white collar lifestyles will think when they hear "average 6 hrs per day" is some sort of utopia where they go to their jobs one hour later and leave one hour earlier.

The experience of those preindustrial laborers would have been closer to being employed in a sweatshop, working 70+hrs per week for 5 months; then being unemployed for the rest of the year. During those lean times, they would split their time between small DIY home improvement projects, unpaid civic duty activities, maybe working small one-off jigs for wealthier neighbours, drinking cheap ale, and in general worring about running out of food before the sweatshops open up again next year.

I am not saying life was easy, but rather, there was no intrinsic reason to bump lifestyle into 70+ hrs sweatshop year round.

My take from "economic transformation" in Czechoslovakia is - if someone promises you to "tighten your belt" now because you will be much better off tomorrow, run! It's bait and switch and the other part is not coming. The same applies to "austerity" in Europe today.

>The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements ...

Social factors can drive technological innovation, which then makes it possible to more peaceably accommodate the social movements' demands.

While I love my flexible, remote schedule... and I loved alternative schedules when I was in my 20s and had no children. The standard 40 hour week offers a stable schedule to the large population that does have children, and needs to both work a full time job to collect a paycheck while also knowing they can be home almost every hour their child is out of school.

I'm not arguing against flexible scheduling -- I live that life, and I will proclaim its benefits as much as anyone. But to really engage in a meaningful discussion about it, we need to realize that different people have different needs. And for much of the working population, the primary need is about providing for their family, not self-fulfillment in their own work.

> And for much of the working population, the primary need is about providing for their family, not self-fulfillment in their own work.

That's another problem, not entirely related to the 40h work week.

Eh... it works the other way, too. School is (maybe accidentally) also designed so that people can be productive while their children are too young to be responsible for themselves. Many of the main benefits of universal pre-K, for instance, overlap a lot with universal day care.

The standard work week (whether 30 hours or 40 hours) is about having a common cadence that everyone can plan things around. The counterexample to this is the plight of workers who have to juggle multiple part time jobs and the availability expectations of multiple bosses, their kids schools, and so on.

but with flexible scheduling, people can still choose to voluntarily follow the current 40-hour week schedule. So what you are saying is not actually an argument.

I think the problem arrises when we "kill the 40-hour work week" _fully_: there's no consensus on working hours so it creates the problem he's describing; "the world is ruled by morning people" and all that.

If it's true that so many people depend on the 40 hour workweek being the norm, then no amount of added flexibility will fully kill it.

The argument should be for a 4 hour standard working day. This gives the freedom to flex another 4 hours whenever is most convenient.

This is a good suggestion in many ways, but could be quite inefficient as long as we have the commute culture we have. I.e., you commute for an hour each way and work an 8 hour day? Your commute is 20% of your work day. If you work a 4 hour day, and still commute two hours a day, your commute is 33% of your day. Yikes. So this is a good solution for remote workers, but bad for everyone else.

That's a great compromise solution!

I was raised on a single income and so was the majority of my peers in urrr, the 80s!

This baffles me the most.

See the Two Income Trap (TL;DR: there is limited housing in good school districts and there are limited places at good universities, so when it became possible to compete for these with two incomes, it gradually became the case that you had to have two incomes to compete for them, as prices were driven up) and the recent post on here about the bizarre cost disease affecting the West, and especially the US, making basically everything but imported cheap plastic/electronic crap cost more in real terms than it did the year before, every year, for the last few decades, including construction, infrastructure, health, and schooling.

There may also be something to do with globalization turning out to be not so much "rising tide lifts all boats" as "rising tide lifts the average elevation of all boats"; the latter is very different for someone working for a living in an already-affluent, globalizing state than the former.

Actually, Warren's data and the Two Income Trap shows nothing of the sort.

The Two Income Trap shows that income rose 75%. Mortgage expenses rose 70% (for a 66% bigger house [1]), two cars cost 55% more than 1 car, health insurance cost 60% more, etc. In fact, the main expense that rose faster than income was taxes (140%) - everything else rose more slowly.

http://www.volokh.com/posts/1185883980.shtml http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_04_27-2008_05_03.sht... https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118705537958296783

It's not really your fault that you made this mistake, however. Warren chose a really strange way to report tax increases - she reports them as a percentage of before and after income - a 9% increase from 24% of family income to 33%. I place the blame for this confusion on her strange data presentation choices - nearly everyone who read her book gets confused by this, not just you.

But all her other increases are in inflation-adjusted dollar percentages. If she reported taxes this way, they'd be up 140% from $9,288 to $22,374.

If she reported housing expenses the way she reported taxes, they would be down 3%. Health care would be down 9%.

She sure made such a strange choice in how she presented the data. I wonder why she did that?

[1] https://www.nar.realtor/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?Op...

Indeed. A big chunk of the "cost disease" can be explained by this in my opinion. The unaccountable administrative state - largely peopled by the "knowledge worker" class - has effectively pirated a big chunk of the income of the country and redirected it to its class friends via direct government employment, government licensing, government regulation and government spending. Nearly all western governments demonstrate symptoms of this disease.

As someone who'd been a skeptic of "lawsuits are killing us!" arguments, I actually thought the most convincing explanation of the many that were offered up after that SSC post is that uncertainty bred by too little (or too inconsistently enforced) regulation that leaves too much of enforcing good behavior up to litigation is the biggest driver of the problem.

It neatly explains why the US suffers from it far worse than other OECD states, I'd say—uncertain, relatively weak regulatory environment, easy lawsuits. The uncertainty encourages, at both the personal and institutional levels, extreme risk avoidance (CYA, if not actually risk reduction) throughout private industry and government, adding a percentage to costs at every stage of any project while also slowing things down (so, more costs there too) and killing innumerable potentially-cost-saving innovations in process before they can even be attempted.

The problem with that theory is that it's wrong on the facts. The federal government has consistently been about 19% of GDP since the 1950s. Your wages are no more eaten up by bureaucracy than was your grandfather's.

See epi.org. Wage income has been flat for the median earner since 1979, despite 128% productivity growth. Nearly all benefits to increased productivity went to the top 10%; 80% of that went to the top 0.1%. Return on capital is doing nicely. Return on labor, not so much.

For the 2/3 of the workforce with no college degree, real wages since 1979 fell 28%. Before you start feeling smug about getting on the right side of that divide, remember they vote, too. Ergo: President Trump, the man who promised to restore their jobs (and wages).

How to let everyone participate in a prosperity so unevenly distributed is the central problem of our time. The solution will not be found in flexible work hours. It will require a lot of work, starting with understanding that the capitalists will not give up their winnings easily.

Except your facts don't conflict with the idea that government expansion in the private sector is causing costs to rise.

It's may be true that the total share federal government spending as a share of GDP hasn't changed. I think it's more important to look at the ways government policy has picked winners in the private sector. In other words I regard government intrusion in the market as a cause of inequality you bemoan, not an effect.

Another point: did you read yummyfajita's ancestor post? He writes (quoting Elizabeth Warren): "The Two Income Trap shows that income rose 75%. Mortgage expenses rose 70% (for a 66% bigger house [1]), two cars cost 55% more than 1 car, health insurance cost 60% more, etc. In fact, the main expense that rose faster than income was taxes (140%) - everything else rose more slowly."

[1]https://www.nar.realtor/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?Op...

If you want to see money going to waste, look into any sufficiently large private company. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about government inspectors that inspect inspectors that inspect tools, the private sector is just as full of pointless, or even actively harmful paper-pushers.

Which we all get to pay for, through higher costs. This is also the core of the 'pointless jobs' thesis.

>the private sector is just as full of pointless, or even actively harmful paper-pushers.

1- Maybe. To what degree are these paper-pushers an artifact of government requirements? It's hard to tell the difference between a 'pointless' private paper-pusher and a private paper-pusher who is there because of some perceived liability to the government or hostile lawyers.

2- Even if so. At least private companies can ultimately be punished in the marketplace. Government typically insulates itself throughly from oversight, both economic and from the ballot-box.

1. Most of it is unhelpful middle management and non-productive people providing themselves with job security. There are a million and one incentives for this kind of behaviour in the private sector. Nobody ever got fired for failing to point out that their job is pointless.

2. Government can be punished at the ballot box, I don't have a choice in where my grocer sources its produce from, whether or not property developers in the area will choose to build small, affordable homes or McMansions, or which ISP will take my money, but not provide stable internet (Because all we have here is Comcast.)

I mean, technically I suppose I could overpay crazy amounts of money to get my food, my housing, and my connectivity sourced from somewhere else, but at that point, the ~25% of my income that goes into taxes will seem like a drop in the bucket.

I agree with the general gist of this, but I think you're down playing how much stuff people can buy now.

Furthermore, if everyone's getting paid more, isn't it natural that person intensive activities like construction, infrastructure, health, and schooling will cost more?

But stuff, stuff is ridiculously cheap at the moment.

Perhaps you yanks didn't see it so much as you were already rich in the 80s/90s, but compared to my childhood in the UK, all the children I know get mountains of presents. Literally so many they get bored opening them.

I can get cheap salad any time of year. Cheap fruit, milk, bread, etc. I can buy mounds of rice, pasta, etc. for literally pence.

TVs in every room, not just one per household. People have espresso coffee makers in their kitchens! Everyone has at least one computer, if not one per child, and another in their pocket. Everyone's got at least one console or some such device. Everyone can afford Sky or Virgin or whatever cable channel.

You're massively overvaluing toys and other consumer goods, and you're massively undervaluing real estate.

Having nice TVs doesn't make your quality of life that much better now than back in the 80s.

Living in a terrible neighborhood with crime because you can't afford to live in a decent neighborhood on a single income makes your quality of life much worse than back in the 80s when a single income could afford a nice house.

By almost every metric, crime has gone down in the last 30 years.

On average, sure. In specific places, no. These days, if you can't afford more than a crappy apartment, you're going to be living in a place with drug dealers and occasional murders. And with the high rents, having a single income (and worse, having to support a family on that) means that the crappy apartments now cost what, 30+ years ago, a decent but modest home in a decent neighborhood cost.

So maybe living in downtown areas isn't nearly as dangerous as it was back in the 70s-80s (when NYC's Times Square was full of prostitutes and muggings were common), but affording a place that doesn't have you surrounded by drug dealers and ex-cons is more out-of-reach and costly (and those once-seedy downtown areas are now completely unaffordable if you don't make $150k+).

True, though that seems unexplainable. Vox had a good piece on it a while back, concluding that it's probably the sum of a lot of small factors.

Perhaps it's worth asking why preventing crime is so much harder today than in the past. That might lead to uncomfortable conclusions, however.

Apart from the crime prevention, what does the terrible neighborhood lack that the nice neighborhoods in 1970 had?

Perhaps it's worth asking why preventing crime is so much harder today than in the past

It's not tho is it? In the United States at least crime is much lower than it was since like the 50's.

Good school. Employment opportunities. Cleanness.

> Furthermore, if everyone's getting paid more, isn't it natural that person intensive activities like construction, infrastructure, health, and schooling will cost more?

Yes, more. Not disproportionately more (except for certain things with natural limits like land and education at high-name-recognition universities). Not wildly disproportionately more.

The blog post[1] I mentioned (prominently linked on HN when it came out) covered the phenomenon pretty thoroughly, without offering much in the way of explanations, though ruling some out.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

Yup, I've had peers argue that their kid should be in school for more of the year because it's a nuisance and expensive to put him in activities during the summer months. Never mind if it even makes sense to have a kid in school more, or if it might be better for the kid to spend some time exploring the neighbourhood, spending time with his friends &c.

I completely understand that not everyone has the ability to have one parent stay at home, but I think it should be the ideal.

Thanks to stranger danger, freerange kids aren't allowed to explore the neighborhood anymore. What was perfectly acceptable behaviour in the 80s is now considered parental negligence.

My spouse and I specifically opted for the single-earner model and haven't regretted it. We had some tough years, but now our household income from my earnings is at the 83rd percentile nationwide. In our experience what studies have shown (there's more proportional wealth in single-earner households than dual-earner) has proven true. So if you want to maximize, choose one of you to work, and the other to do everything else.

I too was raised on a single income in the (late) 80's and 90's but I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.

40 hour work weeks, for both parents, are discussed.

I am just describing the world only 30 years ago. A double income is almost a requirement now.

On based on the "required" standing of living. 2 cars, $150 cable package, $200 cell phone package, 4000 square foot homes.

Single income COULD work for the vast majority of Americans, but then they need to be happy with less stuff.

There are no 50s-sized cheap houses within walking distance of employment centers in good school districts in my city. Out where the good schools are, they only build McMansions. This is the typical case for cities in the US. I live in a big-ass house in the 'burbs because a big-ass house in the 'burbs is cheaper than a smaller one still capable of (more or less) comfortably housing 2 adults + 3 kids in the city, plus private school for those three kids. It's not because I love McMansions and owning cars and being far from everything.

As for entertainment spending (Netflix, cell phones, et c), it's nothing next to (especially) housing and (even cooked at home) food. Cutting all of that wouldn't get us down to a secure, responsible income level with only one parent working.

You can send your kids to an average or even below-average school, be able to spend more time at home, and more than make up the difference. Education driven by the parents is always going to be better than education driven by a public school board anyway.

Which is better, having your son be the salutatorian of the average school district in a suburb nobody's ever heard of, or having him be 75/350 in an amazing school district in a suburb nobody's ever heard of?

School district quality matters of course but I think it's overblown when everybody thinks they need to live in the best school district within a 50-mile commute from the job they ended up with more or less randomly.

The other problem is utility bills. These anti-big-house people complain how people don't need giant houses, but they completely ignore how horribly inefficient older houses are. It probably costs a lot less to heat and cool your McMansion than it would a 50-year-old house that's half the size.

I really wish it were easy to find nice, well-built, efficient, modestly sized houses in neighborhoods where you don't have ex-cons living next to you, vicious dogs running loose, etc. That just doesn't seem to be the case.

My house was built in 1920 and I spend more on my car payment that I do on all my utilities combined. Even if you buy a house that costs a lot of heat or cool, it's at most a weekend project per room to rip down drywall or plaster, put in new/better/any insulation, and re-drywall.

You can't do that if you don't own the house. A lot of us are renters because we have no intention of staying in the same place for 10 years.

That depends. In a lot of places, if you expose any wiring (aka, rip out drywall) you need to get a building permit and inspection for the work you're doing.

That seems suspect. How much does it cost to heat and cool a McMansion in dollars? I live in a 2000 square foot 75 year old house and my utilities are very reasonable.

When I lived at my grandmother's house (rented from her), the utility bill was almost as much as rent through the winter (I think the highest I saw was about $500 one month). The house is from like 1890 or whatever and they did add insulation and all but the heater was on a lot.

How many square feet was the house? I don't know if that's compatible to heating a McMansion though.

I just did the math with my past bills and, amortized, I spend about $200 total on utilities a month. That's water, electricity, and oil. I have no special upgrades to my house. It gets fairly cold here. I have the aforementioned 2000 square foot (which I consider big) 75 year old house. I keep the heat on 68 when we are home. It gets hot in the summer and we use window air units.

I just looked up the realty listing and it says it's 2100 sq ft. In the summer the bill was < 100. We get a lot of snow up here and I am betting that even though they added insulation the roof leaked ridiculous amounts of heat. I don't live there anymore luckily.

In climates with seasons you really have to do a yearly amortization to get a true idea of utility costs. A lot of oil and propane companies around here actually let you sign up for a plan that lets you pay them your amortized costs year-round. A few friends of mine love those plans, I prefer to pay the upfront cost to fill the tank and not bother.

My grandma's house had exactly the same problem, the roof was rotted and actually had a hole in it, you could see the outside from the inside. She didn't have the wherewithal to get it fixed though, unfortunately. She would just put down buckets to catch the water when it rained.

All houses need regular roof maintenance!

Absolutely wrong.

No, you don't need $150 cable packages and $200 cellular packages. I don't have those myself. My cellphone bill with Ting is about $30/month for myself, and I got my 3-year-old phone on Ebay used.

And no, you don't need a 4000sf home. But most people do want a decent home in a decent, low-crime neighborhood. The problem is that it's very hard to afford that on a single income, even after you cut out extravangances like $150 cable packages.

The fundamental problem is that the rent is too damn high.

Where do you live? You should move.

I have:

- 2 paid for cars, one has 200k miles on it and is sitting dead in the driveway.

- a 1200 square foot house outside of town, not in a nice area. It's the cheapest house I could find and the only one I could afford.

- Internet.

- Cell phone.

- No cable, no Netflix, very little dining out (always somewhere cheap) and no other debts other than mortgage.

I have a decent income for the area I'm in, and still barely get by on a single income. I really don't understand how other people are making it. I'm either much worse off than I think or most people are just doing so much better.

We had a car and a small house, but my father returned from the office every day ... to have lunch with us!

As far as I remember, all my class mates went home for lunch ( we actually had dinner ).

Consider that the costs of those vehicles, communications devices, and shelter have increased much faster than wages have. But no, what you choose to take from that reality is "they need to be happy with less stuff"

Well houses have been getting bigger at the same time families have been getting smaller. The living space per person has almost doubled since the 70s.

https://www.aei.org/publication/todays-new-homes-are-1000-sq...

Why do you even need a motorized wheelchair, if you have 2 working legs? It doesn't matter how much something costs if you don't buy it.

Place with good school, college debt and healthcare are way more expensive. Cable and cellphone packages are pretty much irrelevant.

Which, I'll point out, would be a vast improvement for our environmental impact...

$2000/month for day care or camps or lessons or whatever...

$2000/month for health insurance for family.

$2000+/month in rent or mortgage

$1000/month in groceries

And we are up to $100,000 a year in just the bare one expenses to exist.

Maybe add some retirement savings, a vacation for a week or two, maybe some college savings, and we are into $200,000+ territory.

I honestly can't tell if you are being serous or not. $2,000/month entertainment is included in "bare one expenses to exist?" No. That's pretty extravagant.

Sure, you are probably going to need 2 incomes if that's the kind of lifestyle you want but don't kid yourself its some sort of bare minimum.

Growing up my family of five (three kids, two parents) somehow managed to live in a two bedroom apartment with one car and played in public parks and other public facilities for entertainment. We wore hand-me-downs and had little in terms of "stuff," we didn't have any room to store it anyways.

I am much happier I grew up without excess toys/objects/items as most of our play was centered around imagination. Children are really good at entertaining themselves if left to their own devices. It also made me appreciate what I did have.

Basically, I didn't grew up even remotely in squalor or anything like that. It would have been nice to have my own bedroom but it wasn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

---

My family now has two incomes/jobs but only one car, we share a car ride to work, one drops the other off in the morning and picks them up in the evening. it's kinda annoying at times. I want to get a second car but every time I run the numbers in my head I can't justify the huge added expense just to alleviate a little bit of annoyance/inconvenience.

So anyways, you can do with a lot less if you actually wanted to. "This is how much I spend" isn't the same thing as "this is how much I am required to spend."

$2000/month in camps/lessons/kids activities/afterschool care (far from entertainment).

I'm going to disagree with you hear. The list provided is absolutely non-essential. I mean, are you kidding me? To believe otherwise absolutely astonishes me. We think of it as an extravagance if we pay $50/month for our daughter to take a dance class. $200/month maybe, if all the kids are in a single class of some sort, but $2000?! Not happening, even if we could afford it.

camps = entertainment

lessons = entertainment

kids activities = entertainment

None of those are some sort of bare bones living expenses. They are nice to haves if you can afford it.

afterschool care = not required if one parent stays home or works a different shift.

Daycare is not entertainment. Daycare is what stops Social Services from taking away your kids. (Which wouldn't happen in the 70s, between multi-generational families, and less moral panic about unattended twelve-year-olds.)

Uh, daycare wasn't on the list. After school care was. Different animal.

And yes, I'm going to be normative here and suggest as a society we do an awful lot of offloading our kids into the care of others. And if we're doing that, why the hell did we have them in the first place?

The alternative is kids home alone. Not even legal in many us areas.

Since when was the alternative to piano lessons and dance class leaving your kids unsupervised?

If you need bare bones supervision for your school age children you can get that at the Boys and Girls club and similar programs. Their summer program was around $1 a day per kid when I went.

Totally agree. Besides, in many states kids are allowed to supervise younger kids starting somewhere between 9 and 12. I.e., if your oldest is 9 in Utah, you can indeed legally leave them home alone with their siblings.

I think these are really inflated. I've got 5 kids, my wife doesn't work, and our expenses in the categories above are:

$150/month for day care or camps or lessons or whatever...

$500/month for health insurance for family [my portion, the company has a plan]

$1500 month in rent or mortgage

$1000/month in groceries

That's just under $38,000 per year. I make more now, but we lived very comfortably when I made $80,000 per year (before tax).

Yes, completely overpriced relative to average costs across us - however these are real for major metro areas (ny, dc, sf, Boston etc).

Unless you make $250k+/year there, it's not worth being in these areas.

The median family income for those metro areas is nowhere near $100k. I spot checked Boston and its $53,657.

Yep. I've got one word of advice: move!

In a single worker house, no daycare - so strike that.

$2000 for health insurance in the US? Not from a professional job. Normal employee copays for a famils are in the $200-$400 per month range.

$2000 rent? No way. Move. You can live for $1000 or less in many areas of the world with great jobs.

$1000 groceries? No way, try more like $500.

here is the spending report of a family of 3. It is about $25,000.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/01/16/exposed-the-mmm-fa...

That should be the baseline for where you think. Not some crazy fantasy land with a $2000 mortgage and $2000 daycare (despite 1 parent being stay at home)

MMM's posts are all from the perspective of someone who: 1) has a paid off house, 2) has a lot of money in the bank, can get a job with benefits easily on short-ish notice and has no-one with chronic illnesses in his household (= incredibly low health insurance costs). He also gains all kinds of savings by not being dependent on a 9-5, like having enormous choice in housing location, lower transportation expenses, and so on. This is the end state of someone who's made it, and spending at that level's not realistic for a family that's still working, because their spending is necessarily much higher due to having fewer options to reduce costs.

I like the general attitude of that blog, but after going on a reading binge of it a couple years ago I came away with the impression that it's subtly misleading and kinda scummy. Stuff like "how I thrive with no job (by already having a ton of money, and actually having 3 part-time jobs, one of which is getting you to click affiliate links on this very blog)", or "Why are you paying so much for health insurance, really guys, it's cheap (if you're in an exactly perfect life situation, what, are you not?)" Clickbaity humblebragging and condescending wankery mixed with good advice about frugality (some of which is actually useful to people who don't already have a ton of money in the bank), in service of making him money via one of his not-jobs.

> Normal employee copays for a famils are in the $200-$400 per month range.

No. Maybe for one person, not a family. Yes, there are companies that deliver great benefits on health care (I'm at one) but they're exceptional. $2000 seems high, but $200-400 is low by at least half.

I agree. MMM is completely unhelpful for someone who is not already in a great position.

If you have great income and you want to retire early by saving on some big expenses, MMM probably has some good advice for you.

If you are relatively poor and you're trying to figure out how to pay off your student loans, fix your beater that you need to get to the office, and afford health insurance, while having essentially zero money left over, MMM's advice is essentially worthless. It's like telling a homeless guy with no jacket, "Why are you cold? Just put a jacket on."

Or find a company which pays the entire premium for the entire family. They do exist. I work for one and it's awesome.

>Normal employee copays for a famils are in the $200-$400 per month range.

Completely wrong. Mine is about $850 for two people, no kids.

Total cost on the open market for that kind of plan is 1k - 1.2k, so your work basically has no health benefit? I have never had that experience...

Yeah, my health insurance costs about $800/month before the employer portion, for two people, no preexisting conditions, no children.

The guy telling others how to live their life has no experience contrary to their own, and thus no empathy? Fancy that.

I stopped taking you seriously when you said "move".

LOL and I just said the same thing.

I am a 3rd year dev living on 70k income. Wife works >20 hrs part time. 2 kids. I live in the US between the Rocky and the Appalachian mountains where the cost of living is reasonable. Things are tight, but solid. $800/mo rent (4 bedroom house, .7 acres) $800/mo debt, 2 car payments $200/mo gas $500/mo savings $600/mo groceries $500/mo utilities, phone, internet, streaming $250/mo car, life insurance

Not even at 50k a year for essential expenses. It's doable. At 100k I'd have pretty much no financial worries, and at 200k, I'd have better problems to worry about. :)

Stop with the standard of living shaming. You're not convincing anyone and you're ignoring the fact that even if you adjust/account for that the issues being discussed here are the same. In other words you're just doing moral finger-wagging, not making a substantive argument.

The substantive argument is that people spend a lot of money on things they don't need, then complain that they don't have the money to cut their hours and earn less money (if that's even an option).

You're the one not making any substantive arguments by just calling it "shaming"

Some people do, and a lot of other people are genuinely having a rough go.

That's crazy. Almost every couple I know is single income, in order to better provide for the kids. It's not a requirement.

That's how we roll, too. I don't know how dual-earners do it. When the hell do you pick up the house, clean, pay bills, spend time with each other? Seems like it'd be an incredibly hectic way to live life.

That was true in the USA from the 1950s through the 1980s. Since then the middle-class has been more than decimated. Paul Krugman's book "Conscience of a Liberal" tells how/why this happened:

https://www.amazon.com/Conscience-Liberal-Paul-Krugman/dp/03...

I'm conservative in general, but I agreed with Bernie Sanders on (at least) 3 issues and have a 4th bone to pick with USA politics:

1) Privacy is paramount; the government should stay out of our lives as much as possible. "Terrorism" is no excuse for a government to monitor its citizens.

2) Taxes must be severely increased on the wealthy. "Death taxes" must be restored and income taxes raised on the wealthy. To do otherwise creates a situation where wealth accumulates to individuals w/o bound.

3) corporations must not be allowed the rights of persons. Campaign finance reform must occur and the power of special interests must be cut.

Until we restore heavy estate taxes ("death taxes"), income taxes, and reduce the political power of corporations as well, the USA will continue its long slide toward an economy like Mexico's, where there are only the poor and the rich, and no middle class.

Finally (something Sanders would likely avoid):

4) as part of (3), non-profit corporations and all foundations, public or private, (churches, foundations, organizations, etc.) should be both taxed and audited. Today they're little more than an end-run around taxation. They are too powerful politically. They're controlled by their founders and their families. They are economically inefficient - releasing their resources (by breakup, taxation, etc.) would boost the economy greatly.

During the Middle Ages the British and French took possession of the (then) Roman Catholic Church's lands, possessions and clergy. After all, the Church _was_ meddling in the political, and not the spiritual, realm. I think its time for the USA to do the same:

"Dechristianization of France during the French Revolution":

https://www.google.com/url?url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

"English Reformation - Wikipedia":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Reformation#Actions_by...

The exact

I think we need to define what flexible actually means.

There are schools around here which start at 9 or 10 or finish at 3. Good luck picking up your kids or preparing your kids when you NEED to be at work at 9 AM sharp or can't leave your workplace until 5 or 6 PM.

Hasn't this been the average experience for as long as dual income parenting had been typical? A "traditional" 8am-3pm school schedule still conflicts with a "traditional" 9am-5pm work schedule - you might prepare them in the morning but you won't be there when school gets out. This is why the "latch key generation" was considered a thing.

If we all worked 4-6 hours per day then we could flex morning/evening according to our family needs.

It is also yet another negative hit to a family's cash flow if "latch key" isn't feasible/desirable and the only alternative is to pay for after school options (depending on if there is a cost for those).

It's bullshit to me that employers aren't more amenable to employees doing what they need to do for their families: get in "late" or "leave early" to pickup/dropoff kids, etc. It just seems like, uh, what? I've got to go pickup my kids. Period. Full stop. They're little human beings who rely on us, and need us in their lives. And some job, some company, has the gall to suggest we arrange for someone else to pickup our kids and watch them while we're meaningfully engaged in what? Answering the phone? Meetings? Responding to email? WTF

So your argument is: because schools take our kids off our hands 40 hours a week during specific times, that is when parents need to work? That's kind of an ass-backwards way of looking at it. I have kids and I completely disagree. It would be far more efficient if you could individually construct the optimum schedule for you, your spouse, and your kids... Taking into account education, hobbies, work needs, etc. You'll end up with rythmns all your own, which will be internally consistent, even if they're very different from others'.

School hours are another conversation we should have. How was that determined?

> Give yourself one day with no work

If killing the 40-hour work week means I'm now working six days a week instead of five, then long live the 40-hour work week.

Some people (myself included) need two days per week off work, except in special circumstances. We also need to be able to clock out of work and not feel bad about doing so just because we still have work. The worst thing about university to me was the feeling of always having more work to do. I understand avoiding the "I'm just working until the clock hand turns a little further" state, but often the cumulative effects of the proposed alternative are worse.

I agree. This seems optimized for workaholics; people who work as their primary goal in life. If work is not the first priority in your life, being replaced by kids, gaming, hiking (or you simply don't enjoy your day job; not everybody does), then you need a bit more structure around maximums every day, with time off to live your life. 5x8 works well for creating culturally acceptable maximums.

There's a difference; if you own your own business or are freelancing, any extra work you do is for your benefit. If you're in someone else's company, completely different story.

> any extra work you do is for your benefit.

Well, technically, yes. It's all still part of the process of getting paid, or drumming up business, and thus still (IMO) required work.

What about a 40 hour week working just 4 days?

As much as this seems great on its face, I find for myself that I can't consistently work 10 hours in a day without my productivity dropping off. Sometimes, when I'm making good progress, I'll go 10 to 12 hours, but that's not the norm.

When I was in the SF startup scene, I was very fortunate to work in a company where everyone trusted everyone to work with whatever schedule allowed them to maximize productivity. It turned out that 8x5 worked pretty well for me (sometimes with an hour or two nap in the middle, though I don't do that anymore). In the beginning, I worked more hours per week, but that just resulted in me needing to fall back on the lack of vacation policy to take frequent 1-2 week vacations (adding up to maybe 6 weeks per year). When I normalized my regular schedule to 8x5, I stopped needing to do that (although I still place great value on vacation time).

Many of my coworkers had rather different schedules, including one who seemed to be able to work very long hours about 6.5 days a week without much apparent drop-off in productivity.

What about not working so much? You can get a programming job that pays you $200k/year for 40 hours, plenty of which you spend blocked anyway, but for whatever reason no one will pay you $100k/year for 20 hours.

Productivity is nonlinear in hours worked.

First 20 hours: read a bunch of math papers about some obscure part of stochastic programming.

Second 20 hours: figure out how to apply it to problems useful for the company.

The first 20 hours are worth $0, not $100k. If I spend an additional 10 hours/week improving my skills, that effect is multiplicative rather than additive.

Claudia Goldin has a great paper on this effect, focused on using this phenomenon to explain gender gaps in pay. (Specifically, the fields with the lowest gender gaps are the most linear fields, e.g. Pharmacists.)

http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.ph...

Suppose two of your weeks go like this:

Week 1: First 20 hours: read a bunch of math papers about some arcane aspect of stochastic programming. Second 20 hours: figure out how to apply it to problems useful to the company.

Week 2: First 20 hours: read a bunch of math papers about some arcane aspect of partial differential equations. Second 20 hours: figure out how to apply it to problems useful to the company.

If you are only working 40 hours rather than 80 in those two weeks and you choose to do the first half of each week then, sure, your net value to the company will be $0. So don't do that. Pick one of those two 40-hour chunks and do it in two weeks instead of one.

And, boom, your value to the company has scaled linearly.

Now, no doubt your work on stochastic programming and PDEs has prepared you for some other future work of still greater value. So there's nonlinearity on longer timescales. But we can get an estimate of just how much nonlinearity there is there by looking at how your salary increases over time. Maybe you're worth 20% more each year than the year before. (That would be bigger pay rises than most people get after the first few years of working.) In that case, the first half of a given year is worth about 47.7% of what the whole year would be worth instead of 50%.

So, if your work's value is nonlinear enough to justify giving you a 20% pay increase every year, then it's nonlinear enough to justify paying you about 5% less pro rata. (Plus, of course, giving you only about half as much pay increase per year.)

That assumes that the growth in your value to your employer comes only from this nonlinearity in your work. If some of it is because of other things that you're learning in other ways, then the reductions should be less.

Sure, but that assumes I can break everything down as granularly as a pharmacist breaks down their work. But in reality I can't. First of all, if I do it like you describe, the company's velocity is halved. Timeliness matters.

Second, by working more slowly and parallelizing across many more low productivity people, you lose the ability to make connections and reuse relevant expertise.

For instance, consider two lawyers each of whom are running half of a major case. When the opposing attorney presents claim A, the two lawyers may not realize that evidence X (in lawyer A's half) and evidence Y( in lawyer B's half) put together refute A.

Like it or not, there is value to having a single person who can keep the whole thing in his head.

> if I do it like you describe, the company's velocity is halved.

Well, sure, half as much work means getting half as much done. That's why the pay is also half as much.

I don't disagree with any of the things you say here; there are some ways in which working part-time is less efficient than working full-time. I just think you overstated the case before.

Do you still want full health insurance benefits, a full laptop, and a full vacation policy?

I think the breakeven for a 200k full time employee would be maybe 80-85k for a 20h a week. Which is still enough to get by in many places.

Why do employers not want this? I can think of a few reason. Knowledge transfer is hard. Adding workers to a project always makes it slow down by a fair bit (as in less than linear scaling). So a project that has 1 40h person right now. How many 20h employees would it take to replace him? 3? 4? 5? Perhaps 5 20h employees could do a programming project to the level of 1 dedicated 40h employee. Which then means the actual "equal" pay for your 20h employee is more like 35k per year, not the 85k mentioned above.

Why in the world would it take 5 people to do the same thing as 1 when they're working half the time? First, you're assuming that it's not possible to do 50% of the work in 50% of the time. If you look at the people on HN working full-time (e.g. not founding a start-up or doing their own thing but working a regular W2 gig), they could probably complete 60-70% of the work they do in 40 hours in 20, especially if they got to choose what 20 hours they're working, and especially if they're paid break-even like you said, somewhere in the 80k range. Which, before we start hearing from the SF people about they pay $25k/mo for a studio, is many tens of thousands above the average US household income and nearly three times the average US individual income.

And for the project, if you've got two people doing that, let's say 60% of the velocity of their 40-hour selves, you're essentially getting the work product of 1.2 people for the price of 1, from 2 separate people. All while having happier, more loyal employees to boot.

I'd absolutely work 20 hours a week if I could get paid 40-45% of my current salary and if I didn't think it'd kill my career prospects at my current company. Even places that would entertain the idea of part-time engineers, I don't think they'd be promoting any of them to manager or director.

I think you missed something.

There is a HUGE communication overhead in writing code with multiple developers. HUGE. If you have Bob writing a program all by himself, he writes at speed X. Now you add Jim. Jim is just as smart as Bob. But he doesn't know the way the object model works. He doesn't know about the glitch where sending null to some method causes a really weird stacktrace that is hard to debug. He doesn't know that the reason Bob did something else was to cover a real but rare network event. So Jim makes mistakes. Jim and Bob have to discuss decisions. Jim and Bob need to have meetings, and design reviews, and repeat mistakes. So I bet the total code delivered by Bob + Jim is something in the range of .9X to 1.1X. NOWHERE near 2x like linear scaling would deliver. You can argue something like the total code quality improves with more eyes, fine. But Bob is held back a lot and able to write a lot less code because of the newly added teammate.

This is why some of the most influential pieces of software ever written were done by 1 man teams. A decent 1 man can be much much more efficient than a 2 man team.

So back to your example. Bob goes halftime, and you are right - his productivity drops from X to .6X (not a full 50% loss, because his brain is more rested). But adding in Jim, you don't get .6X + .6X.. you get more like .5x-.7X total productivity. Adding a third Billy, and you end up with maybe .8X the original Bob speed. Remember you now have 4 people. So you need 4 way meetings. Each person picks different parts of the codebase to specialize in. People now write code that will conflict with other people, maybe not even knowing it for months. Maybe a forth programmer Jen can get your total productivity back to the original X of just Bob. So you know took 4 half time employees to replace 1 full time employee.

All of this is why I think a team of 2 is almost always a mistake. A team of 1 can go pretty far, and when it hits a wall - it may be time for a team of 3 or 4. Team of 2 has all the downsides of a team (communication overhead, etc), with not enough bodies to rocket the project.

You can't really call someone out on assumptions when your rebuttal contains "probably".

You're probably right.

Part time work, in my experience, is never paid out on a linear scale. The exception is when you're working for yourself as a consultant. However, with consulting, for every billable hour, there's typically another unbillable hour of work which still needs to be done.

This is another odd byproduct of labor law in the US. The same regulations which protect workers from a lot of abusive employer behavior also have the effect of putting a floor on the numbers of hours employers require. So until regulation is reworked to protect workers irregardless of the number of hours worked this behavior will continue. It also has to do with tax incentives. Anyway, I'm totally with you. I'd voluntarily and enthusiastically take a job paying half of what I make if they expected half as much output or hours worked.

> You can get a programming job that pays you $200k/year for 40 hours

I'm going to assume this is including any stock options and other benefits? Because IIRC the software engineering profession caps out at around $200k... and that's only for the best of the best in places like SV. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'd love to be honestly haha.

BigCo pay for a senior software developer in the Bay Area:

  $160-200k base salary
  $10-50k cash bonus
  $20-200k annual RSU vesting (heavily dependent on the company, how many years
  you've been earning stock awards, and whether you're
  considered a high performer)

So, you do have to be good enough to be considered a senior developer, but I'd say if you get hired as a junior developer and work hard for many years, you top out at more like $400k/year total comp.

There's a reason people continue to work at BigCos, and stay in the Bay Area despite the (modestly, by these income scales) higher cost of living.

Some healthcare professionals do that. 4x10h or some similar flavor. But again the same problem hold if you have children. Assuming a very short 30m commute and lunch on the go, you are still gone 11h a day. More realistically, that's 12h/day. Smaller children that wake up at 7 will be in bed around 7:30, so the only time you're with them is during feeding/bath and that's it.

You can make up for it the remainder 3 days of the week, but if your 4 work days are contiguous, that's a long time to be essentially absent as a parent.

Or 28 hours... 24 hours between Monday and Wednesday, 4 on Thursday. Conceptually it's half the week. I hate explaining (or trying to explain) to our five year old daughter why Daddy goes to work most days of the week. Clearly the implication is that work is higher priority than family, and everything else in life. Yes, an income is high priority, but to the exclusion of so much? Seems idiotic to me.

Working four tens is the best, if you can swing it. Even better if you can get a schedule where you alternate Fridays and Mondays so that you get four-day weekends half the time.

Especially if you commute any significant distance. Skipping one commute a week is a big win.

You haven't explained why having a lot of work is bad.

You haven't explained why having a lot of work is good.

>You haven't explained why having a lot of work is good.

Because it means there is an opportunity to make progress. However, if you overwork yourself, stress yourself, or are simply incapable of putting in the work necessary to make that progress happen, then you would have squandered that opportunity.

Work doesn't always imply progress. Ask anybody who stacks shelves or waits tables for a living, or someone who works two or three jobs.

Thanks for the comment, but we were discussing work in a specific context. Instead of being so uncharitable, you could have asked what is being discussed.

That's a reason why work itself might be good. That's not a reason why a lot of work, to the point where you are doing more work than anything else in your life, is good.

Yeah, that is one way to look at it, and I honestly wasn't thinking of that. I was intending it to mean "a lot of courses" as the context was that of an university, but it could also mean "a large project" along the same thought axis.

Large corporations need hordes of people doing boring work in a reliable and predictable, easily manageable manner. Society needs what large corporations produce. People need the wages these corporations pay. The 40hr work week is going nowhere.

There are a lot of pointless jobs too. Related: http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d...

Do pointless jobs pay pointless money?

100% this, most people don't realize a lot of these corps are the "Jobs Programs". They take huge tax breaks to provide these 40/hr week unproductive boring jobs, or no one else will. In Canada we call them Banks and Telcos.

And Bombardier.

corporations need to process work that can manifest in a specific manner, and in non specific manners too.

to use an example of a fictional manufacturing company, i'd like to commission a piece of software that can do almost anything- from processing an order from any business, that can come in digital format, scanned, printed, or spoken over the phone, to generating an purchase orders and sales orders to our suppliers and distributors who may have an online interface or who may still use fax or phone and may communicate in english or not english.

that is quite a difficult piece of software to build so most companies don't actually build that at all. instead they rely on hordes of people who are configurable in any imaginable way to solve problems that appear in unimaginable forms.

Large corps are simply small corps that transitioned from innovators to job-generators.

The are a bit like the socialism in capitalism. Most of the jobs are redundant and could be done more efficiently by a bunch of small corps instead of one big.

It's funny that I'm experiencing that exact transition at the company where I work, and it's not even that big yet.

When I first started I was getting paid a pretty paltry amount, but there were only 20 or so employees and each of us basically did whatever was required to succeed.

Now we're up to almost 100 employees and I still work here, making over double my starting salary, but I do so much less work. I've carved out my little niche in the project pipeline and outside of that I read HN or Reddit. I feel a little guilty but I'm still getting the work done that's asked of me and receiving praise and raises from management, so...

> Large corporations need hordes of people doing boring work in a reliable and predictable, easily manageable manner.

That's what machines are for. We need to embrace automation.

> Society needs what large corporations produce

Nope. Large corporations spend loads of money and manpower to make people think they need what they produce.

> People need the wages these corporations pay.

Not if they resist the manipulation to buy all the useless stuff. Not if automation makes everything cheaper.

> The 40hr work week is going nowhere.

Oh, but it is going. The sooner we realize this, the easier the transition will be.

In France, we have 35 hours work week. It works fine enough. I cant imagine moving to 40 hours.

An hour a day either direction doesn't make much difference at all; what makes a bigger difference is what time you come or go. I'm very lucky in my current gig that I can come and go as I please provided I get those 40 hours and as a team we cover the business day.

I'd much rather work 40 hours or even more, working 6-2 or similar, than work 30 hours a week and have to deal with rush hour traffic.

> An hour a day either direction doesn't make much difference at all;

But it can make a big difference. I don't think I can stay productive for 8 hours straight on the average day. So the last 1-2 hours are a miserable grind, effectively wasted time. Add to that, I don't live to work, I work to live. I'd be very happy if I had quite a bit of energy left when I get home so I can live my life too.

I think the real problem is the just lack of flexibility. If 40 works for you, why shouldn't you be allowed to work 40. At the same time, that doesn't mean everybody should be working 40. Same for any other number of hours. Same for any the time...

The problem is twofold (at least) - 1) most people this is relevant to are not paid hourly; 2) most people this is relevant to do not have clearly defined metrics measuring their work product (e.g. number of widgets produced, widgets produced per unit of time, etc).

Combine those two and you have a scenario where 40 is the minimum, doing less is seen very negatively, and there's no real way to prove you're producing more or at a higher quality working 30 hours than the guy next to you working 55.

Then maybe they should be paid hourly.

I'd be happy to work 30 hours even if that meant I got less done than the other guy working 55 hours. For this, I'd happily trade some salary.

Landlords need us to work all the time so they don't have to.

We should move to a 4 day week.

Do you pay your landlord less if you are home more? Is shelter worth less if people have jobs with alternative schedules?

Someone doesn't know how prices are set!

Buy a house and you won't have a landlord. I'm not sure why living in someone else's home is something you shouldn't have to pay market rate for.

Market rate is set by wages less other essentials. As is buying rate. Credit issuance against land consumes all surplus value. Hence why not work 4 days en mass.

Good article but in essence, it only works for freelancers, especially the 20 something kind who programs or designs and interacts with his customer through skype.

Modern society has conventions that makes it work well. Like the expectation that the delivery guy will work from 9-to-5, instead of trying to deliver at 2am or in a Sunday morning, because that's optimal for his circadian rhytm. Same for the bank or the library or Starbucks open during the day. This convention lets us help plan our day. Without these you will have to plan for contingencies. These can be acute when you have a chronic disease, disabled or have babies/children. You just wish that everyone works 9 to 5 just so you can go through the day.

> Good article but in essence, it only works for freelancers, especially the 20 something kind who programs or designs and interacts with his customer through skype.

That's exactly my thoughts. I provide analysis & design work for government - even the fact that I'm an early riser is an issue, as leaving the office that 1-2 hours before the government mandated 4:30 end time causes them to be partially without the instant support and feedback they expect.

In its history of the 40-hour week, the article omits the substantial contribution of organized labor to fighting for shorter hours:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

Keeping this history in mind might allow us to determine other reasons and means for improving on the workweek than pure business interest.

In my opinion, no consideration should be given to 'business interest' over the interests of the workers. The idea that the workers ought to just settle for compromises is rubbish.

Well life is about compromise, so there's that. A 100% pro-worker, anti-employer solution would not work, just like a 100% pro-employer, anti-worker rights solution wouldn't either.

Crediting the 40 hour week to Henry Ford's business acumen is a common mistake.

The call for eight hour workdays was over a century old by the time Henry Ford implemented it. It was a major point of discussion for Karl Marx. Forty years before Henry Ford's supposedly brilliant insight, in the Bay View Labor Riot of 1886, the Wisconsin state militia opened fire on labor activists protesting for an eight hour workday, killing seven.

None of this is new. This is a battle labor has been fighting for two centuries now.

You guys are all totally missing the point.

The whole concept of an X hour work week is stupid for most of us on HN in knowledge intensive industries.

It makes sense if the work you're doing is a direct function of time - think receptionists, cashiers, phone customer service, assembly line workers.

If the work is knowledge intensive, then your output is generally not a mere function of hours worked. In software engineering, productivity can vary enormously when you're "in-the-zone" vs. feeling tired and sluggish. I'm not talking about a mere 15% difference in peak productivity vs. least productive, I'm talking multiples (short example I wrote http://www.jbernier.com/how-to-work-efficiently-and-stop-was...).

Judging an employee by "hours of ass in chair in office staring at computer screen" in a knowledge intensive field is an extremely inaccurate and lazy metric, used by non-technical managers who can't think of better ways to gauge the output of their employees.

Judging an employee by "hours of ass in chair in office staring at computer screen is the most common startup metric. I dislike it as much as you, but that won't change anything on it.

Just because it's common doesn't mean it's going to remain. The status quo is already changing with the rise of companies offering flexible hours and remote work.

Everyone here seems to be thinking in hours, like they actually equate to produced product. I don't think that's really the case. It's more like working 8 hours a day so you can find that productive 2 hours in the middle somewhere where things get done.

As a manager, I don't care at all if my employees work 40 hours or 4 hours. I care about what they get done regardless of the time it takes or when they do it (to some degree). This requires _active_ management in their day-to-day with the domain knowledge to call bullshit when things aren't getting done.

This management style doesn't scale to large teams, but I find it very effective.

You sound like an excellent manager to work for. And you're right, it requires that people be adults and actively work together, make agreements, manage expectations and all that.

Having a bit of experience and knowing what "result oriented with flexible schedule" actually stands for, I think I'll keep my 40 hour week. Thanks.

As long as the USA is still a nation that takes pride in the sort of values shown in this infuriating Cadillac advertisement (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WKgSCPqY4M), working long (unproductive) hours isn't going away any time soon.

this!

Besides all the scheduling trouble that would cause, what will you replace it with?

The 40 hour work week is an achievement, and if it is to be killed I would propose replacing it with the 32 hour workweek or a 24 hour one. Definitely not with a lack of structure.

I've worked for some companies long ago that did not adhere to the 40 hour workweek. Let's just say I would have been much happier if they had and that's not because they decided to go for 32 hours or 40 hours whenever I wanted to work them if you thought that was the case.

We should kill work, period. This is not the way it always was, and it's not the way it always will be. This is a brief moment in evolution, a learning experience. If some didn't insist on having plenty more than others, there would be enough for everyone without anyone working for anyone; and once you have everything provided, helping out is the natural thing to do.

Sounds a bit like communism, but without anyone having any job. So yes, this should probably work out just fine.

Where is your trust in basic human values? The behavior you see around you is an effect of pressure from a completely artificial and destructive environment, regardless of what it's called. Using communism as some kind of crucifix for killing every suggestion of change is not working any more; change is coming, like it or not.

I think my environment is pretty good, optimistic and nice. People don't kill other people around here. We have a social support system.

When times get though, and this environment is gone, bad stuff happens.

Culture is only a small thin layer, that is gone the moment real problems arise. Just take a look at history, and you event don't have to go too far back. Look what's happening in the middle east right now.

"On days where I put in less than 8 or 10 hours of work, I feel a bit guilty"

You need workaholism consulting. Repeat after me: more hours do not mean higher throughput.

No, we shouldn't. Most people are totally fine with it, me included. Why change something that works? There are always people not satisfied with the current system, but for the majority of our society, the 40 hours a week model is fine. And if it isn't, there are plenty of other options - maybe you have to look harder for them, but it's definitly possible to work on different schedules, too.

it "works" is a very subjective and low threshold of efficiency. It works in that people struggle to deal with it. The average american has to commute 5 days a week through horrendous traffic (which saturates the traffic grid), because of people who insist that we need to obey the 40-hour week because "it works".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias

> The current baseline (or status quo) is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss.

We absolutely should get rid of the idea that a "full time" job has benefits and stuff. Compensation should stay about the same, it just shouldn't come in the form of benefits.

Just to be clear. The reason this happens is because insurers like groups that don't have terrible self selection biases towards sick people. Buying insurance as an individual means the insurance company is worried you are a soon to be expense.

>Buying insurance as an individual means the insurance company is worried you are a soon to be expense.

Really worth noting that this is a non-issue in many (most?) countries with healthcare systems that function differently from that in the US.

There are also tax advantages.

And it makes overtime cheaper by moving some of the base compensation out of the hourly wage.

Just because it "works" doesn't mean it can't be improved.

My proposal: 3 days work week. 3 days works the father, 3 days the mother, one day free for the whole family. Import taxes for all goods that come from countries that don't implement this.

As for the article, yes, it's true. But you need to have a "results based environment". This further needs that your manager can do your work. This means it will not work in most companies.

Import taxes are paid for by the consumers in your country, whose cost of living will go up and make them less competitive against consumers in other countries who don't have that burden. This is a surefire way to shift economic power away from your country and towards countries that are willing to import goods from places that have lower manufacturing costs. And it doesn't hurt the manufacturers at all, because they'll just sell to friendly markets someplace else.

Taxing imports doesn't "level the playing field" for your industries vs foreign industries. It just winds up hurting your citizens and economy. You can level the playing field by reducing your industry's labor costs by removing expensive regulations, but that means giving up environmental protections, worker protections, livable wages, etc. So that's not acceptable. I believe the only way to keep your industries competitive, while also providing the protections that your society deems valuable, is for the government to subsidize those protections instead of making the industries figure out how to pay for them. Ultimately your citizens and industries still wind up paying for it through taxes, but the cost burden is spread out and ideally the protections can be provided more efficiently by having a single organization managing them instead of every little company doing it independently.

The world switched from 6 days work week to 5 days and from 12 hours work day to 8. For sure it can be done again. Maybe it will come with the help of automation (not enough work for everybody) or as social pressure: people in other countries will want the same lifestyle. Work in progress...

The world, or western Europe, US, etc? What are workdays and work weeks like in the places where the bulk of consumer goods are manufactured today? There's still a lot of concern about child labor in those countries; I think they're a long way from even 40 hour workweeks.

> Import taxes for all goods that come from countries that don't implement this

Wow. "Let's have a trade war with people who work a lot harder than we do!"

They work a lot harder. But do they produce more? I'm not even sure these taxes are required after all...

Why should parents get special privilege? Because I don't have kids, I should work a full week?

There is life outside work, for sure. The problem is that we are not used to it because after work, even if there is some time left in the day, you have no energy left. Of course there will be a lot of details to be sorted, like what you said; I don't claim to have it all figured out.

If you don't have a family to support, you could get by on the 3 days alone.

I'm single - now what?

Date :)

this penalizes individual workers (and even entire countries) who wish to work more.

You can work more for your own thing...

> So the 8-hour work day, 5-day workweek wasn’t chosen as the way to work for scientific reasons; instead, it was partly driven by the goal of increasing consumption.

Money doesn't really work like that, unless you A. Saddle employees with debt or B. Boost short-term revenue so the company looks more attractive to investors.

Or is the idea that Ford would set an example so that the entire industry would start doing this, which benefits him more?

Keep in mind Ford also hired investigators to check up on his employees' morality:

> To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married.

You could argue that Ford wanted model Protestants as employees because they increased productivity, but it's a more elaborate argument that just picking a quote or two. He may have done it for religious reasons.

We've had the concept of 'flexi-time' for decades, where people can start and finish work at different times, so they can work at the time of day that best suits them.

The easy way to implement this is to place enormous taxes on benefits.

Companies aren't going to cut hours much when it drives up the effective cost of benefit packages.

or better yet, just have include benefits in total income when calculating taxes.

or better yet, fix the system where affordable health care is tied to corporate employment

Well a primary reason why health care has been tied to corporate employment in the US is because benefits are not taxed. Tax benefits at the marginal tax rate, and you'll discover that health care won't be quite as tied to employment.

Site's down for me. Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RzYQ6Q...

I am more against open office plans than 40 hours weeks.

I also think people should be allowed to take naps rather than coffee breaks.

Man I hate pretentious privileged startup people who try to apply their incredibly rare circumstances to the entire society.

Most people I know would kill to work only 40 hours. Only one had so much free time that he quit to freelance, and he was an IT worker. Now he's constantly busy.

Really? In my experience the people who work in startups are the ones overworked and working 60-80 hours a week.

Where as those of us at profitable established companies can check in, do our 8 hours of work and then go home and usually not think about work.

There is a frequent pattern which concerns me of primarily justifying the desire for reduced work hours in terms of the alleged increase in productivity this will bring about (by allowing recharging, preventing burnout, etc.).

I worry that this already concedes too much. This allows for just as much stressful dominance of work over the rest of life, and shame over any deviation from this script, as maximizes productivity.

Even if my shorter-work-hours productivity doesn't match my longer-work-hours productivity, I'd still prefer shorter-work-hours, with no guilt over having those preferences. My goal in life is not to optimize everything I do for maximum benefit of my employer; I have my own priorities and trade-offs to worry about.

40 hr /week is anyway going to die due to massive lack of jobs. Governments/businesses will get forced to either layoff people or reduce hours. Till now layoffs seems cleaner solution to tackle less work/more productivity scenario. In first world tech sector where where 6 figure dollar salaries are common, less work even with lesser pay may be manageable scenario. For the poorer and heavily populated 3rd world productivity gains will increasingly cause massive rupture in social stability.

Just today I read in India increasing automation is causing either major layoffs or no new jobs in sectors as diverse as mining, banking, IT, manufacturing etc.

* The article makes some great observations about energy levels. I think you can definitely run a company more productively if employees had more leeway about picking their own hours as long as the job gets done. Anecdotally, I'd get far more work done if I set aside just around 9-midnight every night for coding from home rather than waking up early and slogging to an office.

* The article presents some opinions without really justifying them. According to who exactly does the 40-hour work week not work anymore? It works great for some folks, it works badly for others. Personally, I'd rather see more people working less, and I think more jobs should be more flexible about things like remote working and letting people pick their hours when possible.

* This article also erroneously gets some history wrong. People like to cite some of Ford's management innovations as some magnanimous gesture on his part to give employees enough cash to buy more products. The reality is that he was initially having a problem keeping employees because assembly-line work is so monotonous and doesn't leave much room for human contact and many employees would quit or inconsistently show up to work after a while. He was trying to make working conditions as good as possible to reduce employee turnover/absenteeism, greatly reducing his recruiting/training expenses in the long run and making things run smoother on a daily basis. It was in his self-interest to do this because once you got a great Ford job you wouldn't quit or just not show up to go to a baseball game or whatever people did back in those days. I believe some people erroneously got this part of history wrong because there's a narrative out there that the free market is some kind of predatory exploitative thing that needs to be completely controlled or it will work to destroy people. To me, that's incorrect because employers also need to compete for employees' labor. Going forward, innovative and smart companies will increasingly offer things like remote working, picking your own hours, limited work week, etc to compete for the most talented employees. Some companies might want butts in seats at 9AM and will compete by offering cash. That's fine too, let people have a choice.

Kill the "work week" concept too while we're at it. Are we seriously going to continue the fallacy that humans only work on specific religiously appointed days?

Just start moving to results only work environments.

The only effect that will have is that you'll be working 7 days per week. That religious influence is - for once - actually a positive one. Quite a few bits of our social contracts have their root in ancient history and religion played a larger part back then then it does today (for most people, anyway).

That does not make them bad per-se, they should be looked at independent of their roots.

Just like 'thou shalt not kill' isn't a bad idea just because it happens to be in the bible.

Removing well-defined restrictions on work usually results in an explicit or implicit negotiation for working conditions, which usually results in less favorable conditions for the party with the weaker negotiating position (workers).

Bucky Fuller determined that, by some time in the 1970's, we could provide a high standard of living for everyone on Earth while only working a few hours a week. IIRC, he postulated that most people would have to work for about two years and then they could retire. All we have to do is apply the technology we already have in a sensible manner to meet our needs.

In other words, all our problems now are psychological, not physical.

He probably didn't consider that there are always scarce resources where the one who has the most money gets it.

Simply said, the one who can buy the biggest diamond also gets the prettiest girl, and that's what life is all about, no? ;).

(Okay, but, uh, we can manufacture diamond now, you know that right? ;-)

Sweden tested a 30 hour work-week and found it to be too costly. For some professions it just isn't realistic (e.g. supply chain/logistics industry).

For the professions where it is more realistic, maybe give them the option of finishing up the week at 30 hours but don't set a hard cut-off. I've found that the more work-hour freedom people are given, the better quality work ends up getting done.

I was lucky enough to work for a "technical" non-profit for a few years. We worked 7 hours a day instead of a full 8. It was absolutely amazing. It was the perfect amount of time I felt. I noticed I slacked off less to get everything done in a day.

Honestly, if we worked that extra hour each day, it would of have been spent surfing the internet. Spending more time making coffee, chatting, lunch etc.

The best part of a 9-5/40-hour work week are the hours where everybody else is gone. That's when you get the real work done.

Ha! So true. The workday starts around 3pm.

Mine ends M-F between 8:30am and 5:30pm. All the rest of the week is considered a work day.

Or starts at 7am and effectively ends around 10am

There's a book called "The Power of When" which I hear talks about how every person is different, and how depending on what type you are your day should be structured differently. Could be an interesting read when deciding if the 40 hour work week is appropriate or not.

This is just awful. Only one night a week where you don't work? "Try removing work completely for a day". I do it for two days: the weekend.

This article is basically arguing that you should spend all your time working, without being bold enough to come out and say it.

Why do I feel all alone in loving the 40 hour week :) realistically this is 35 hours a week after the commute. And I like my 2 days off where I can ignore work issues completely.

And personally for me working in an office is more attractive than flexible remote work.

Because the amount of productive work hours most people get per week is realistically closer to 20-30. The rest of the time they are being paid for their presence. If the day's work is done at 11am, I hope you enjoy twiddling your thumbs until 5pm hoping something comes up for you to do. There's only so much of tomorrow's work that you can finish ahead of schedule (esp. if most of it is waiting on clients to get back to you at a later date).

Every individual in my department could work a 20 hour week and just as much work would be done. I know this because of the 1 hour smoke breaks that happen every-other-hour. They're already working 4 hour days, why not just make it official? I'm sure the employees would love having an additional 4 hours of personal time each day.

What job do you work where you get paid to commute and it counts towards your 8 hour day? This is definitely not the norm.

If you're working alone or completely asynchronously sure, that makes sense. But how do you account for collaborative work that needs to be done in a group?

Met a former Solyndra employee. He said they used to have 12-hour days, but the tradeoff is that they had four days weekends. Sounds amazing for the employee.

Informative piece on circadian rhythm -- not sure how it justifies getting rid of the 40-hour work week.

What should we do about the 70 hour work week? Somewhat sarcastic, but mostly serious.

I, as an independent coder, enjoy my 90 hour work week.

And I am in my 50s.

This article is mostly about scheduling, but a bigger issues is actually amount of actual work. (Ignoring cases where amount of perceived work is important like in Japan)

A “reasonable” amount of work basically always comes down to what someone is willing to sacrifice. A cushy work week is basically always subsidized by other people. It’s often very indirect, like a factory in China. When this information is forcefully shoved in a person’s face, their moral compass gives them no other choice but to protest against the Foxconns of the world.

Unions formally define what is reasonable, but there is also a cultural form of unionization. In the U.S. H1B’s implicitly acknowledge this possibility. They look to join teams that have this cultural unionization. If half of the non-H1B’s go home at 5, management cannot force overtime from everyone else without it being egregious. This disappears when the team is mostly H1B’s or even if the manager him/herself went through this process. (Startups, rather than look for H1B’s, look for “culture fit”)

Cultural homogenization allows a shared definition of reasonable-ness without needing formal structures. With a non-homongenous culture, the “lazier” cultures lose out to the more “hardworking” cultures. The “lazier” cultures would like a rule that says “You must eat out at least one a week, and enjoy a movie, and NOT let your money compound for your children.” Otherwise, the culture that is more willing to work hard effectively undermines the desire to live comfortably of other cultures. In the Bay Area, western culture simply cannot compete with Chinese culture when it comes to housing bids. It’s 1 couple vs an entire family of savers.

There should obviously be a law to prevent Olympic athletes from taking a super-drug that will allow them to win a gold medal and then drop dead afterwards. But should there be one to prevent parents from overworking for their children?

IMO, when the amount of wealth in the world reaches the point where everyone can live comfortably if it were evenly divided, a casual lifestyle will naturally emerge. Prior to that though, there will always be people more willing to work hard. In order for a cushy lifestyle to be sustained, there must be an explicit border or wall (physical or otherwise) that divides people into homogenous cultures. People in each group must be willing to work around the same.

In the U.S. sweatshop and factory conditions are protested against, but in those same countries, they are prestigious jobs that can lift a family out of an agrarian lifestyle into technical or knowledge work. The willingness to fight over pennies subsidizes the casual picking of dollars. With China moving towards picking up dollars, there is no longer a large enough penniy-picking population to sustain it. (Which is why China internally subdivides into a 1st world portion and a 3rd world subsidizing population).

With globalization comes cultural mixing. A large portion of Trump voters realize this threat to their lifestyle (and many have probably already been affected and have trouble making ends meet) and think that re-establizing cultural zones will fix the issue (with a literal wall…) but it won’t. Solutions to questions about how to work and live comfortably without solving the global wealth distribution problem basically are all forms of indirect subsidization, making it zero sum. (Aside, religion can actually be used as a force to sub-divide a population into a culture that desires less, allow them to subsidize a smaller population that want to live more comfortably)

No one's genetically a 'night owl'. Stop drinking caffeine.

Sleep issues run in my family. My uncle sleep walks. My father worked nights for decades by choice. I've experienced weird altered mental states while sleeping, and always had problems sleeping. My kid is experiencing some of the same stuff.

Caffeine definitely exacerbated my problem. But quitting caffeine alone was not enough. Avoiding screens (and using f.lux), making my bed a 'sacred space' where only sex and sleep happen (although I still read fiction in it because it helps me nod off), using a red light, and a few other things have also been necessary and even then I sometimes have trouble sleeping.

My kid is experiencing much the same problems and she is not allowed to have caffeine. I'm trying to teach her good sleep hygiene, but the things she's describing and the things I see are very very similar to the things I went through as a teen and sometimes still struggle with.

It may or may not be a coincidence that we trace a significant portion of our ancestry back to places of high latitude. In fact, now I'm kind of curious to ask some of my distance cousins if they've had any of the same issues.

You have a point. I thought I was a night owl, until I figured out that if you wake up everyday (weekends too) at the exact same time, your body adjusts and naturally wakes up at 7am (for example) feeling well-rested, and you start getting drowsy at around 10pm.

However, I gave up and reverted back to my night-owl ways because it's just not fun going to bed early. Not enough time after working out. And working out in the morning only makes my mornings 3 times more hectic and I hate that.

> You have a point. I thought I was a night owl, until I figured out that if you wake up everyday (weekends too) at the exact same time, your body adjusts and naturally wakes up at 7am (for example) feeling well-rested, and you start getting drowsy at around 10pm.

So it worked for you. Maybe it doesn't work for everyone else.

If you didn't use an absolute and instead said something like 'The large majority of people who think they're night owls just drink too much caffeine,' you'd probably be right and not downvoted so much.

For me, I switched from being a night owl to a morning person when I kicked my caffeine habit of 1-2 cups per day.

I switched when I stopped drinking caffeine after 1pm and, even more importantly, started working out daily in the morning.

Took a week to get used to waking up early, but now it's nice to collapse in bed around 11pm dead tired instead of just wishing I was tired.

>If you didn't use an absolute and instead said something like

Do you apply such stringent requirements to every single comment you make? Because otherwise it is incredibly hypocritical in the "do as I say not as I do" sense.

I have never been a consumer of any sort of caffeine (don't like hot drinks or fizzy drinks) and I have always struggled to get to bed or to sleep before, say, 2am. I don't know whether it's genetic, though I'm not aware of any reason why it shouldn't be, but night-owl-ism is definitely not caused exclusively by caffeine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder#M... seems to suggest that in extreme cases at least some of this is, in fact, genetic: it runs in families and there's a specific gene it's thought to be related to.

I have one cup of tea in the morning, drink water the rest of the time, and still struggle to get to sleep before 1am.

Edit: own stupidity.

> I have one cup of tea in the morning, drink water the rest of the time, and still struggle to get to sleep before 1pm.

Try waiting until about 2pm or 3pm when your lunch has properly settled. Then find a comfy chair and change into your slippers. You should have no problems nodding off. ;)

Well there's your problem, 1pm is way too early to go to sleep.

Hard to believe it when you are young but I was a 'night owl" that wakes up early now. 'night owl' for me now means just that the person doesn't know how the body works and/or doesn't take care of themselves.

Well yeah, people tend to wake up earlier as they get older, its just part of aging.

Or yeah, aging. Unfortunately I can't go back in time to test it :)

Oh man, people work 12 hours a day (like me) and you complain about a 40-hour week??

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