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Comment by darkmighty | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand here: Why can't we just work less?

I know it's not trivial, but it can't be impossible either. I doubt he would starve if he got a part-time dev job (are those easy to find? I have no idea). I agree wholeheartedly with all that he said. I think a life of work-home-work without breathing is almost meaningless unless you can have possibly unreasonable amounts of fun and freedom in the job (few if any industries allow/demand this kind of work). Indeed if a job allows for fun and freedom markets will usually exploit this advantage to try and push you to work even more (if you let them of course).

I'm still a student but I'll certainly look for a job that's either totally fulfilling (rare) or allows as much freedom as possible while maintaining a reasonable lifestyle and quality of life.

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It is the government's explicit policy to continually raise the price of housing (etc) so that most everybody is forced into working "full time" to keep up the "growth".

The elephant in the room is that all of those housekeeping tasks used to generally be done during the week by a second householder. So what happened?! Rather than double income households actually resulting in getting ahead, economic feedback simply made it the new normal!

Similar destruction of economic progress happened when Walmart (et al) gutted local business - a lot of high-margin employers went away, yet prices weren't allowed to go down. So rather than local economies' costs at least going down along with their pay, they only got the downside.

Taking into account women entering the workforce plus general technological progress, "full time employment" these days should be under 15 hours per week!

> It is the government's explicit policy to continually raise the price of housing (etc) so that most everybody is forced into working "full time" to keep up the "growth".

I downvoted you because of this extraordinary claim. If you're going to make a claim like this you need to provide evidence. Not only that but the government doesn't even have direct control of property values and indirect control is at the local level.

It can seem quite extraordinary when stated plainly.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/economy_14400.htm

The main goal of inflationary monetary policy is the shameless "maximum employment". Since the cost of manufactured goods will not go down (technological progress and fundamental economic optimization), in order for CPE to continue to rise then some other component must go up. The closest consumers get to new money creation is taking out loans for housing, therefore the price of housing goes up.

Landlords and realtors raise the price of housing, not government.

The biggest reason is because bosses don’t want us to. They want to make as much money as possible, and that’s about it really. The good news is we have made progress, through mass action, people have won the right to weekends, fewer hours and other rights. The final battle is one to win control of the workplace itself, a self-managed and owned workplace.

In tech in SV, so many stupid things happen because people work too much. Self-organizing is a challenge as well though.

So let’s legislate a four day work week. The productivity gains to justify it already exist, they’ve existed for decades.

I wonder if that would have to happen globally. We are still competing with companies in other countries. Chinese startups subscribe to the 996 schedule (9am-9pm, 6 days/week). I'm not sure if 954 allows us to compete.

More hours does not mean more output. Productivity decreases significantly when you work those kinds of hours regularly.

Competition has little to do with working hours. If anything you have to look at hourly rate and company revenue divided employee-hour

Why not? We're currently competing with 955.

I don't think we've really gotten to the phase (at least in software) where we are directly competing outside of China. I think we are starting to compete in markets like India. I'd be surprised if in a few years we won't be fighting over US market share. The recent Reddit investment by Tencent might be a harbinger of things to come.

Edit: I very much hope I'm wrong. I do see a danger of a future where a small percentage of people work long hours and everyone else is unemployed.

I'm pretty astonishing about that movement happening in the West(or USA only?). Because, by contrast, in China, 996 is the current trend in tech companies.

> Because, by contrast, in China, 996 is the current trend in tech companies.

Only very poorly run ones with crappy per-hour productivity.

I convinced my boss to let me work less days per week. 4 to be precise. It was a very very rare exception open just for me and because I was a well regarded dev 2+ years in the team. Since then, I had interviews with companies and recruiters and there simply isn't any offers for reduced week loads. Companies have fixed costs in hiring you, I guess, and want to suck you dry ASAP.

There aren't any offers, sure, but you can still negotiate for this and get it—it's harder than doing it at your current job, but it's still possible. And once you've done it at one job it's easier to say "and I did this successfully at last job and it worked out fine" and that reduces their worry somewhat.

Still means a longer job search, but it's definitely possible.

Key trick: ask for shorter workweek only _after_ you have the job offer. That way they don't just filter you out in advance, and they're already in a mental state of wanting you.

I've negotiated for shorter workweek at three jobs so far, and did it this way at last two. And people who have read my book on negotiating a 3-day weekend (https://codewithoutrules.com/3dayweekend/) or that I've interviewed about their independent experience doing this (https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer...) have done it as well.

Pretty much. People have been talking of 6 hour work days and 4 day work week for awhile now. It makes sense. It is mostly a matter of, lack of, influence.

The final battle is the only battle worth striving for. Become financially independent and make bosses a thing of your past. You would not believe how motivating it is to work for yourself.

Even when self employed I don't really want to. I know 5 days/week is unproductive, but it's difficult to scale down to 4. That's cutting down "potential" salary by 20% and with all the fixed costs out there, the potential income loss is much, much higher.

But the reality is that being constantly tired is unproductive and having 50% more time off is huge.

Just employ yourself at 25% more than your current rate?

Or do as I'm striving to do and work 5 days a week for less and less of the year. I aim for 35 weeks, basically 2/3 on, 1/3 off. And then I find when I consult for 2 or 4 more weeks it's like a bonus.

It also allows you to work a little harder on Fridays when there's a tanigble endpoint.

Just go work at Mondragon.

The first step to working less is being in a comfortable enough financial position that you can push your boundaries without worrying that if it backfires you'll be out of work and behind on your bills.

Once you have the money to cushion the blow, you can start pushing back on demands for your time with a lot more confidence. A thing I've personally found is that my employer just wants results and things done on time and when needed. They don't particularly care how much time I'm physically in the office working.

Definitely not impossible, one of my co-workers switched to only working 3 days a week last year. He lives a fairly frugal lifestyle and enjoys more time for other things, so it works well for him... But it wasn't easy for him to get either, they originally told him he'd only be able to continue like that on a temporary 4 month contract... But we work in a larger bureaucractic company, and after a couple months it was clear that we wouldn't get approval to automatically replace him any time soon if he left completely, so it made more sense to keep him permanently even at 3 days a week, rather than have no one new. It helped that he was one of the better performers on the team, so even at 3 days a week he's very productive, he's just taken less of a role on many of the side tasks that he used to do.

Hiring is actually a tremendous burden for most small/mid sized business with all of the compliance and regulatory stuff. Its far cheaper to hire one person for 40 hours/week than 2 people for 20, even if their pay is half.

This. It’s interesting to read all the other reasons people think that we don’t have a shorter workweek but the above is the simplest reason. It’s also easier to manage 1 person working 40 hours than 2 people working 20 hours. It’s also less effort to interview and hire 1 vs 2 people. As the business owner you might even prefer hiring a 60 hour employee over 1.5 40 hour employees by the same reasoning, but we in the U.S. and western world have reached an equilibrium in the supply/demand at something around 40 hours.

Saying employers don't want it is kind of stating the obvious. Of cause the employer tries to extract as much value as possible, while most discussion in this thread seems centered around improving quality of live of employees. So looking at only one side of the labor market doesn't really help. The more interesting question is employees make deals without it.

Is it actually true to say there is an market equilibrium at 40 hours? I'm no expert, but 40h seems heavily reinforced by regulation (FLSA comes up on search). Without government intervention, I'd not see much stopping a race to the bottom, at least for a significant part of the job market.

I wonder if less wealth inequality would give more leverage to the average citizen, enough so that this additional bargaining power would make a significant difference on the job market. Influences like that might explain the systems trends over longer time periods...

You need to account for all the people who leave a job and would have stayed for a 30-hours week. High turn rate companies see that all the time.

> Why can't we just work less?

You can. Anyone that says you can't hasn't tried hard enough.

Ask your boss. Tell them you want a better work-life balance, tell them it's really important to you and that it's something you will prioritize. Work 4 days a week and get 4/5th of the pay. Step down to 3 days a week later.

If your boss won't come at it, find one that will. Your time is so much more important than more money.

There are a lot of industries where if you aren't at work before and after the boss is and aren't there 50+ hours and promptly answering calls and emails all weekends, you will not ever be promoted. A lot of my friends in finance are going through an existential crisis due to the weight that this mandatory brown nosing has on their well being, despite the decent pay. A lot of them feel trapped in their job, that they can't transition to a better industry with a better culture without basically resetting the last five years of their careers with no guarantees of making it back through the rat race, or that it will be culturally any different at all.

You're right that you may not get promoted. If your time is more valuable to you than money, why does it matter?

> hasn’t tried hard enough

Its worth noting that “tried hard” isn’t a good description of the things necessary. You need to creatively manoever into a position to do so and you need to know how to do that.

I do this, I work 4 1/2 days a week (more accurately, I take a day off every fortnight).

It’s really nice. That’s an errand day, or sometimes hang out with friends day, and sometimes just a sleep in lazy day.

Does 10% less pay (more like 8% less after taxes) affect me? No, not really.

I’ve worked both 3 and 4 day weeks (at 8 hours a day), and it was always really great, but it made me feel I was missing so many things in the workplace, I’m now not particularly bothered by working 5 days.

But if you want to do a lot of things beside work, 3 days is best.

It’s also a bit dependent on life situation. When I left university I was perfectly good with 3/5ths salary, but now with a family to support that would be hard.

I felt the same about 3 days and then asked to work 4 days again, which by boss was happy to grant me. But for me 4 days is the sweet spot.

Graeber's book on Bullshit Jobs gives an answer: we work more , and for longer hours, as a (fallacious) proof that our jobs are useful after all. Being busy, in a hurry, and tired is a form of validation.

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