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Comment by warp_factor | Hacker News Reader

My theory is that 90% of people don't do more than 20 hours worth of work per week anyways. We just all got used to be very inefficient at what we do.

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That was one of the central theses of David Graeber's famous "bullshit jobs" essay, which is now a book (haven't read yet.) Keynes et al. predicted declining work hours. Graeber says not only do most people barely work during their 40 hours, many entire jobs or entire departments are basically... well, bullshit.

Sounds like just the sort of thing that 'lean startups' push back against.

I though Startups where all about working people to death

I always assumed startups were about sticking

    CREATE TABLE widgets (
      id SERIAL,
      name VARCHAR NOT NULL
    );
    CREATE INDEX widgets_idx_id ON widgets (id);

into migrations/42-add_widgets.sql, tapping Melissa[0] on the shoulder and asking her to review it, then SSHing into staging and executing it, all in the space of about twenty minutes with zero paperwork other than a PR.

[0] Melissa is not real

Melissa is real to me dammit

I think they demand the focused work at similar hours, which is very mentally drowning for very many people.

How?

I'm afraid I don't know specifics, but the lean startups 'movement' emphasises efficiency.

This has been a longstanding theory of mine. The brain is lazy and doesn't like to think - people sometimes miss manual labor because you don't have to spend too much time thinking since at some point it becomes rote.

Every once in a while I pine for jobs I had before I was an engineer because the stakes were low and I never had to give work a single thought while I was off the clock. Ultimately I think I'm happier as an engineer (at least at my current job) but I still miss it sometimes.

I miss my old restaurant jobs- not because the stakes were low, but because the requirements were all well-defined. I knew when I was doing a good job because everything was running smoothly, and then I got to go home and screw around. Being tired didn't make work that much worse because it was easy to get into a flow state.

Compare that to current job- must maintain several projects, all of which are constantly changing scope, while leveraging soft skills and playing office politics, while worrying about career development...

Unless you're carrying a pager, as an engineer you don't really need to think about work when you're off the clock. Culturally this tends to happen a lot, but it's not mandatory.

When you've been pouring your mind deep into a difficult technical problem, it can be extremely difficult to just "turn it off" when the clock hits 5.

And whenever I get shanghaied into working into the evening, I'm unable to sleep till the early morning.

Which also makes 'keeping up with evolving tech in your off hours' so frustrating, it's no longer fun.

I don't mean that I _have_ to think about it, it's more that any problems that existed at the end of the day will exist the next day. There's no reset because there's no second shift coming in after me. That causes me to think about the problem, at least subconsciously, until I can fix it.

When I worked in food service, any problem that came up that wasn't solved when my shift ended, would likely still be fixed by the time I worked next.

I have had both Engineering jobs that would force me to be always on and other engineering jobs in which I would completely disconnect as soon as I leave at 5PM.

The ones in which you fully disconnect are so good for your private life. You leave the office and don't even think about opening the work laptop anymore, that's something special.

I wish we could concentrate our effort at work and be allowed to work less hours for the same pay and output but companies pay for your availability not for your output so never gonna happen.

you are exactly right. Fortunately in Tech that seems to change somewhat with homeworking and other "remote" style of working.

Right. But the tough part is most of the workers have internalized that low level of cadence and focus. For that archetypical person, if you cut their work week from 40 hours to 20 hours, their actual output would probably fall to the equivalent of 10 hours.

I you're right that it would fall. But I think that would be temporary until they got used to the 20 hr week.

I have recently gone down to work 60%.

Yet my output isn't very different from what I used to produce, so your theory seems to match my experience.

How did you manage this? I currently work 80%, but I don't see a super-viable pathway to go down to 60%. You work three days a week or what? (Mostly four days a week in my case, with some additional days taken as holiday).

I work 5 hours per day, with 4 hours on Fridays. We did it so I can work on a side-project (writing a book) and so our boy don't have too long days at kindergarten.

We do live in a small village where our cost of living is quite low. I also work remotely and keep a fairly good salary comparatively, so it all works out well.

But everyone that I talk to is "slammed". It's interesting how the perception of working more hours is so powerful.

Regardless of how much you get done, you're still at work for those hours. It's not like people who work inefficiently have more free time.

You're right, but capitalism will simply use this to pay people 50% and starve them.

I guess you never heard of the time Boris Yelsin though a grocery store was myth because he had never seen so much food in one place.

If so, we are just collectively wasting everybody's time.

Yes I believe we are all partially wasting our time. Unfortunately it is one of the pillars of our societies and it would be extremely or almost impossible to change. People expect to be busy at work 5 days a week for 8 hours.

Pretty easy to change, I think.

For everyone on salary, just say: "our new office culture is a 2.5 day week."

For everyone on hourly wages, just double their wages and they'll adjust their own schedules.

The trick is to do so simultaneously across the world to discourage scabs.

> For everyone on salary, just say: "our new office culture is a 2.5 day week."

That'd work for many, but many others would seek another job the same.

> For everyone on hourly wages, just double their wages and they'll adjust their own schedules.

That definitely doesn't work. Where has introducing or raising minimum wage caused workers to seek fewer hours, for real but less extreme example?

> Where has introducing or raising minimum wage caused workers to seek fewer hours

I guess we haven't yet saturated the demand for wages.

Well, yeah. Most white-collar jobs are adult daycares (including my own + many others in software).

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