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Comment by hairytrog | Hacker News Reader

Sure, many spend 8 hours at the office. But do they do 8 hours of work? Probably not. There are diminishing returns on time spent working, and it probably starts around the third hour.

https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/978019087...

Many industries would probably suffer negligible losses (and maybe gains) by transitioning to 20 hour work weeks.

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I don't disagree with you. The average eight hour office worker probably only does do four hours of work a day. But I think the problem is that that nearly everyone has internalized that cadence.

If every office worker had their schedule cut to a 20 hours a week, I strongly suspect that only 10 hours of work would actually get done. It's just too much of the low efficiency is culturally ingrained on every level from the cultural to the organizational. It would probably take a generation for things to change.

I beg to differ. Everywhere I've worked, people have despised the waiting built into the processes they have to conform to. Many roles are constructed so that they're actually two roles: one is pure productivity, with clear goals and deadlines. The other is some sort of service role where you're at the beck and call of clients who could waltz in whenever, defined less by your productivity than by your availability (which is always meant to keep you in an workplace for 6+ hours). Switching between roles is aggravating; effectiveness at one kills the other, to some degree. Most would rather just do one at a time, and be paid for either the time sacrificed or the work completed, at a dignified rate.

But that would cut into C-suite bonuses and dividends.

> But that would cut into C-suite bonuses and dividends.

I beg to differ. I think, the mixture of work items as you describe is solely motivated on fear that employees may produce less if not under 8hours control in open plan office. The fear however may not have anything to do with the reality.

This would make it easier to spot more productive people

This article isn't about office workers. It's about workers. Laborers are doing 8+ hour days, too, and they would not be equally productive in half the time. There's a reason it tends to pay by the hour.

Let's compare apples to apples. Office jobs didn't exist in the medieval period, but labor jobs still exist today.

I humbly disagree. Even in medieval times there were clerics, scribes, book-keepers, and so on.

Those people probably made up less than 1% of the population.

The small number is irrelevant. The OP said office jobs did not exist in medieval times. This is quite clearly an incorrect statement. I am perfectly happy to debate whether pointing this out is relevant to the point being made, but I stand by my assertion.

But those were the people that could actually read and write. Most people were illiterate. Only those privileged with status and wealth could have access to reading materials (and they would be the only people that would even desire them), and they were only men.

Cut the shifts in half and people work less individually while more people overall have job opportunities. As a benefit, working shorter shifts would result in more rested workers who would theoretically be more productive or at least have less chance of mistakes.

Those workers may also be more likely to stay in work to finish a piece of work off, rather than leave as soon as the bell rings.

This would either halve incomes or double labor costs. Any improvements in individual productivity would be offset by the new logistical nightmare (especially for knowledge workers) of coordinating with twice as many team members to accomplish the same amount of work. This seems like a recipe for skyrocketing costs.

With coders, that's clearly not the case right? Coding requires immersion. Same person working on same thing 60 hours per week will make a lot more progress per hour than if he worked 20 hours.

In the freelance world, this is name of the game: recruiters want people to work as much per week as possible for this reason, freelancers want to work as little as possible (that improves their skills quicker by working on many things at same time, plus provides job security of having 3-4 clients at same time so they are unlikely to all fire at same time).

I think that'd definitely wrong.

Some kinds of coding do benefit from lack of interruption, so that's can be an argument for very focused work. But one way coding is different than, say, factory work or service work, is that our errors accumulate. It takes just seconds to put a bug in, but hours or days to take it out again. So anybody working long enough to get tired will very quickly hit diminishing returns. There's a nice presentation on this from a while back: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...

I also have come to be suspicious of the "hyperfocus for many hours to get large amounts of state into my head" approach to coding. Code I have to be extremely clever to write usually ends up being a giant pain in the ass to maintain. These days I think it's better to use things like unit tests, pair programming, and very frequent releases to get things done.

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