Spanish schedules are downright weird (2016)
english.elpais.com
english.elpais.com
I'd argue that it's most of the other countries' schedules that are way too early. They're mostly based on 19'th century farming schedules which most people don't follow anymore.
Singapore is interesting because afternoons are pretty hot, so people take advantage of evenings more.
Interesting that Singapore is also a bit off from its natural time zone.
How much is time wrong around the world?
http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t...
or, if you just want to see the map:
http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV...
Reminds me when I moved from the UK to Germany (and later Switzerland) and was blown away, in the German office I worked in, how they worked less hours (most people strictly 8am to 4pm) and were at least a factor of 5 times more productive than anything I'd experienced in the UK.
The typical "average working day" I witnessed in a number of UK companies in London (I was an IT freelancer back in the mid-to-late 90's) went like...
- Arrive 9am-ish (depending on the Tube)
- Drink coffee, talk about football, what was on TV last night and whatever funny thing happened at the pub last night and basically almost no work until...
- 12 noon... time to get something done for an hour before lunch
- Lunch for 1 - 1.5 hours... some people already drinking their first beer
- Get back from lunch, pretend to work while being half asleep from a large lunch
- 4pm something's on fire... big crisis! Gotta be fixed NOW
- 8-9pm... fire now extinguished. Leave to the pub with colleagues
That's slanted toward an IT department but from what was basically 12 hours of being at work in some work, there was probably only 4-5 hours of productivity.
The key difference I witnessed in Germany was people went to work to work, not to socialise, and were actually getting more done in less time. There was also a bias towards being pro-active over being re-active, which meant less fire-fighting, which in turn meant time could be better managed.
He disliked the strict 8 hours/day(or more during crunch time) butt-in-chair concentrated German work ethic that left him(and me) mentally spent and tired by the end of the day and moved to the UK where, despite the usual putting out fires before a release was due, he gets paid more and can come at work close to 10AM and leave before 4PM while not doing much work most of the time leaving him plenty of energy for fun in the evening and saying he'll never go back to working in Germany.
Can't say I don't envy him. I mean, is life about being as productive as you can for someone else or for enjoying it yourself? Maybe the Brits have it right.
If the office is mostly middle aged people with families or it's a bigger company you see more early starts early finishes 9am - 5:30pm of for some people with kids 8am - 4:30pm.
In an office of mostly younger people you see the 9:30am til 7pm+ marathons when actual work needs to get done. Because so much time is spent recovering from lunch, recovering from the hangover, waiting for coffee the long hours become necessary.
A 10am start is quite uncommon, everywhere I've worked (5 different places so far) no one would look at you funny as long as you're in _before_ 10am and put in your hours but after 10am is a stretch.
I also personally dislike the alcohol and coffee culture because overall it just makes you tired. It was fun in the beginning but when the real work starts to kick it is exhausting. I quit both for a month and felt a lot better for it.
It might have something to do with short schedules of Austrian businesses which meant that if you go with 9:00-5:30 work schedule by the time you finished work the shops would be almost closed so you learn to optimize for early in the office, early out the office.
I had no idea this was common for programmers. Is there any evidence to back up your claim, other than our two points of anecdata?
It was quite difficult to figure out when you’d see him in work next.
This is how it would look if you gave Spain a time zone where solar noon would be around 12 (winter time) just like Berlin and Spanish people would keep their rhythm relative to actual daylight: https://i.imgur.com/u01l47S.png (I've shifted Spain up by a bit more than one hour).
You go to a restaurant at 9:30pm and you're one of the early birds.
Those "weird" Spanish Schedules are my schedules.
I rarely have breakfast before 9:30, I rarely have lunch before 14:00 and dinner before 20:30.
Except for breakfast (I am not a morning person, never been) I learned my schedules from my family, a normal working class family, with regular schedules, same as many other families around us.
I guess we are weird too.
I'm saying it without any kind of judgement.
She does like her breakfast though, and apparently I'm the odd one out for this eating schedule.
No snacks, no tea, no coffee. Only water to quench thrist.
Having said that most of my work is technical in nature and I am a partime machinist. Basically, after completing my development work at 5pm - I work in my machine shop for an hour or two everyday.
- Lunch is often 2 hours for "white collar" workers - Plenty of people start at around 9~9:30AM and finish work at 7:30PM~8PM
Also regarding dinner it starts at 8 for many.
Repeatedly calling all the people in a country as lazy and unproductive is not an innocent move. Is parroting the racist slogans what other people said since decades whereas choosing to be blind to the easily verifiable facts. Therefore can be traced easily to drink from the same racist fountains, even if is of a soft, non-conscious type.
Dehumanization is a necessary previous step for racism.
From there is easily escalated to "they don't deserve it" and "they must be punished for it" and to "he tried to resist and I don't care if this hispanic scum can breathe (because in my mind is just a parasite)". Can you see the pattern?
Lots of people in Spain are as white as the whitest people that you can find in USA. I guarantee that you couldn't guess in photos by their look, who will be classified as "hispanic" and who will be classified as "white/caucasian" in the frontier.
I would consider a nap in the middle of the day far from laziness, but an enabler of great productivity. I'm (edit: covetous) of siestas.
Anyone who questions whether it’s still topical in Spain need only read the news where people fret about losing the siesta or complain that their work doesn’t allow it, or enshrine it into law, or proudly announce that the ‘stereotype’ is gone and Spaniards are now like the rest of Europe.
Fake news. I never had seen that in my life.
> or complain that their work doesn’t allow it,
Again, fake news. My advice would be to stop reading tabloids.
> or enshrine it into law,
Maybe I am living in a parallel reality. Can you point here to a single current spanish law specifically about "the right to take a nap" in Spain?
> or proudly announce that the ‘stereotype’ is gone and spaniards are now like the rest of Europe
Nobody is doing this. This cliché was gone 100 years ago.
Talking about how spaniards "love their siestas" is exactly the same as making jokes about blacks, fried chicken and watermelons. Is stupid, tags you as ignorant, is slightly racist, and frankly, after a while it becames pretty annoying.
[1] And by the way, Spaniards aren't, never will be, and don't want to be, like "the rest of Europe". We speak the second language in the world with more native speakers after Chinese, and we have historical, cultural and blood links with three continents: North and South America, Africa, the old Europe, and the Mediterranean World that the rest of Europe don't have (Italy or Portugal are the closest in this sense), and sometimes it seems that it can't understand or respect.
https://elpais.com/ccaa/2015/07/21/valencia/1437504076_40327...
more of a recommendation or advisory than a guarantee.
Obviously this struck a nerve, and I'm sorry about that. I always considered the siesta a positive aspect of the culture. Whether you would use it to nap, to spend time with family, or to exercise, I think it would show a good sense of balance with the demands of workplace culture. Then again, I'm pretty stoked about fried chicken and watermelon, and yet I know how much stereotypes can be used as a synecdoche to dehumanize people. So, please accept my apology.