Hacker News Reader

Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

That's very similar in most government jobs in Europe, I believe. I don't know about the US, but I expect it's similar there as well.

I'm afraid that it works out great for you because others are working more. Individually, that's a good decision for you, but it's not a model you can make society run on, at least not at the same level of output we're currently providing. If everybody had the same circumstances you have, we couldn't afford everything we can afford now, unless there's some explosion in productivity, which is hard to believe for the majority of jobs where it's not about "coming up with the right idea".

View on HN

I don't think this is true. In my experience a lot of work time is just wasted time. Often nothing is accomplished. A lot of extra hours for meetings are not productive at all. A lot of extra hours looking into that bug ("so we can fix it today") is not productive at all..

I think you have the impression that working longer means being more productive. I don't believe that. I am often more productive if I have a shorter work day.

Also your argument doesn't make too much sense to me because OP already says that he is paid less. So it's not like he gets the same for less work. He gets less for less work.

> I don't think this is true. In my experience a lot of work time is just wasted time. Often nothing is accomplished. A lot of extra hours for meetings are not productive at all. A lot of extra hours looking into that bug ("so we can fix it today") is not productive at all..

And this is not true in public sector ? :D

Probably also there.. does this contradict anything I said?

That just means that doing more hours won't help more.. where ever you are (there are always exceptions).

I would say equal amount of time is being wasted even if you work less hours but public sector tolerates less being done. For example your morning windup routine is the same, your lunch takes the same time, you need to go to bathroom, pointless meetings are still there - I don't really see what would improve about my productivity if I worked less hours - what would I be able to eliminate in order to shorten my time at work ?

Even if time is "wasted" with breaks at work this time is between events - not at the end of the day - and I usually don't have the ability to compress it.

And also the economics of working more hours once you become a critical contributor are very different from a person staying in late for appearances - adding a person to take over the load has multiple costs - hiring risk, training and on-boarding time, extra sync and communication slowing things down.

I see. I don't have experience with the public sector myself but what I meant is this:

If I have only a 4 hour workday, people(bosses) think twice about wasting my time with useless meetings. Also it gives me energy to start into a day with only 4 or 5 hours ahead instead of 8h+.

Of course having a shorter workday doesn't make it 100% productive. But my personal experience is that it is MORE productive. Sadly most of my days are 8h+.

I also want to add that a tired, worn out developer might even cost productivity by introducing flawed code into the codebase. Did you ever do a serious code review while being tired? I don't see how that works. Then others have to deal with all this stuff afterwards.

My old neighbour taught me a valuable lesson back when I was a teenager fixing his computer problems: you don't get paid for the time you spend on something, but for the time you save the other person.

For me fixing his computer was easy work, not worth getting paid for at all for the time it cost me. But he insisted paying me because I was saving him evenings of work if he had to fix it himself.

This does not apply to every sector though and you will need to spend a lot of time (eg: my entire childhood "playing" with computers) to be of actual value to someone else.

So instead of having all this time wasted being "your" time wasted, try to maximize the value per hour you can bring to the right person so you can use the rest of the time to do the things you love (which might as well be chasing after that bug).

But he said specifically that he earns 10-20% less than his friends (and probably a lot less than the one who founded his company), so in fact he can afford less than them. It's just that he is content with that much.

On the other hand, many private companies don't contemplate (on don't look favorably upon) employees who work part time or anything below the standard 40 hoours/week, so if you do work in the private sector you don't have much of a choice. If everyone was magically allowed to reduce his/her working hours and salary by the same percentage I wonder what would be the outcome.

> But he said specifically that he earns 10-20% less than his friends (and probably a lot less than the one who founded his company), so in fact he can afford less than them.

If he has a defined benefit pension and they don’t he’s probably going to come out ahead if he lives long enough. Given he’s in government and they’re not that’s a reasonable assumption.

He earns 10-20% less but they work significantly more than 10-20% more. If they worked (and had worked) the same hours per year, they'd make significantly less money than he does.

That's expected, the state pays it's employees very well for a multitude of reasons, but primarily: to buy their loyalty, to make them less susceptible to bribes, and to encourage stability. It also has no reason not to, there's no competition.

I don't know the Danish situation, but e.g. a teacher in Germany will have a pension that is higher than the salary of 70-80% of the population.

Teachers in Germany also have 19.5 (now 18.5) years of education. There are few jobs that require more (e.g. doctors).

So, how much percent in pension payments for teachers would the German taxpayer save if the state required, say, one year less teacher education?

The question does not make sense to me. It‘s a market. You require a masters degree and an additional tough 1.5 years of training? Better pay me well, through salary or benefits. Let‘s not kid ourselves: most of us (highly qualified) white collars in the private sector enjoy some additional retirement scheme and can reach much higher salaries.

Why shouldn't a teacher have a high pension? I can't think of a job that's more important to the long-term viability of a country than that of a teacher.

A high pension is one thing. A pension that's higher than the salary of most of the population is quite another.

I'm not arguing that teacher shouldn't be paid well, I'm saying that the state is paying it's officials very well. Not because of the jobs they do, but because of who employs them. Teachers in Germany that are not employed by the state get significantly less.

Having worked in software industry for too long, I've come to conclude that the majority of the workforce today is spent on experimentation (i.e. "let's try project X" in corporate and "a new startup to try X"). There is so much money available in the hands of the rich (angel investment, venture capital) to fund these experiments.

Most of these fail but they keep us working.

Mais naturalement, in R&D the R part is exactly that. It's really hard to do.

>unless there's some explosion in productivity...

Or if the historical increase in productivity would have benefited the workers instead of the capitalists. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/producti...

If you look down that thread there's a first valid argument against this : breaking down the "productivity increase" by industry shows the huge growth comes from software, also if you look at how they track productivity in manufacturing it's also misleading - if you account for stuff like outsourcing the only sector that's seeing huge real growth is computer related.

And software/computer economics are a story of their own.

Productivity growth is largely overstated.

That's the US though, and this is Denmark. European countries, and especially the Nordic countries are set up very differently with regards to income equality.

But generally, it's a hard thing to determine that exactly. How much is that 10% gain in life expectancy worth? How comparable is the life of 1970 with that in 2020? Inflation is a difficult thing to tackle.

But sure, changing wealth distribution is an option as well. Unless that happens though, somebody else has to work more to cover what another person works less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com