"We could pass income laws with a 35-hour cap on all positions."
This is kinda what I'm working on:
I recently launched https://4dayweek.io/ - Software Jobs with a better work / life balance.
This is kinda what I'm working on:
I recently launched https://4dayweek.io/ - Software Jobs with a better work / life balance.
As an aside, this is why there’s such a culture of overwork in fields where many workers are extremely passionate about their work, like scientific research, art, and yes, software engineering. When a sizable fraction of researchers are in the lab 80 hours a week because they actually love their science that much, it precludes anyone else from treating the job like a standard 9-5, since the work level expectation is set by those who legitimately enjoy spending long hours on their passion project, and thus don’t consider those 80 hours as “work” at all.
It’s a common illusion that people are putting in those kinds of hours for decades, but the reality is people end up goofing off or burning out.
I’m emphatically not saying that expectations will implicitly rise to 80 hour workweeks across the board. For many businesses, there would not be any implicit pressure at all to go beyond the hypothetical legally mandated 35 hours. But for some companies in certain lines of work, there will most certainly be implicit pressure to go above and beyond 35 hours, simply because there are sufficient people passionate enough about their jobs that they will put in more than 35 hours and remain productive.
Breaks are obvious on an assembly line, less so in other jobs. Zoning out while physically in a meeting isn’t getting stuff done.
I'm not particularly concerned about enforcing this for entrepreneurs and the people who thrive on work. There are definitely people who are wired this way and who make the world a better place being who they are. The bigger issue is enforcing it so that one can't make others work more than 35 hours.
I would think a 35 hour work week in the West would allow and encourage an increase in entrepreneurial projects.
Therein lies the difficulty. Sure, you could make it illegal to explicitly say “yeah I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday, and if you could come in on Sunday too that’d be great.”
But if there’s a culture at a software company of being a hacker on the weekends (whether on side projects or on company projects), even if you’re never explicitly asked to work on something after-hours, the “perpetual hacker” culture will implicitly cause people who aren’t gung ho hackers to fall behind. The worker who, for fun, learned a new algorithm/framework over a weekend that happens to greatly improve some aspect of the company codebase will advance over the worker who didn’t.
And sure, there might be companies that explicitly try to avoid hiring the perpetual hackers and only hire people who are not particularly passionate about technology in their spare time. Those companies will be eaten by the ones that only hire hackers.
Making labor scarce so that workers are paid a larger share of the profits they are involved in creating, like they have in the recent past, is the point.
Sometimes, one’s personal projects align with projects relevant to one’s work. Many projects at my work have been so interesting that I continue to think about and work on them in my spare time. Furthermore, the closer one’s personal projects are to their work projects, the more successful they will be at their job. This is what creates an implicit culture of overwork: if Hacker Helen’s personal projects align with her work, causing her to get promoted faster than Hacker Harry, he may also start devoting more of his personal project time to work-related things, in order to maintain job parity with Helen. This will percolate across employees, to the point that Non-hacker Nick, who never touches a computer outside of work, will be seen as underperforming.
Or: your employer does not value your time enough to grant on the job training time (aka what Google's 20% used to be).
This is exactly why a hard, legally mandated and enforced working hours cap is needed - to prevent people from self-exploiting themselves and their employer reaping the gains while those with a social life or a family get left behind.
> When a sizable fraction of researchers are in the lab 80 hours a week because they actually love their science that much
Or they are in the lab for such long times because they are understaffed as hell, underfinanced, and under constant pressure to pump out "research" of any quality to chase tiny grants? And most of them only put up with this bullshit because they are afraid of their 1-year (or shorter!) contracts not being extended, leaving them unemployed?
No one except a very few select top researchers actually wants that life style that is incompatible with any form of social life.
And for what it's worth: people died by the thousands literally fighting to their death a hundred years ago to force employers and the government to introduce worker protections. The way how tech and academia treats that sacrifice is frankly disgusting.
"Working hours" is a surprisingly nebulous concept. Let's say I'm a mechanic, and cars are my favorite thing in the world. The first thing I do after getting home from the shop is opening the hood of my personal project car, and tinkering with the engine for a few hours.
While my project car work doesn't strictly fall under "working hours," the skills I acquire in my home garage directly improve the quality of my work back at the shop. As a result, I will be a better mechanic than my colleagues who never touch a wrench outside of the shop, and I will thus get promoted faster than they do. Management notices this, and biases their hiring towards people who live, eat, and breathe cars because they make much better employees. Now, all mechanics at the shop are working 50+ hours a week on cars, even if by your hypothetical law they can only spend 35 of those hours at the shop.
Now let's make the definition of "working hours" even more nebulous. Suppose that a customer's car at the shop has a particularly interesting problem I couldn't solve during working hours. The problem is so interesting that I can't stop thinking about it when I get home. By law, I can't continue to work on the customer's car after hours, so instead I decide to reproduce the issue on my personal car, figure it out, and the next morning fix the customer's car as a result of my tinkering at home.
Replace "mechanic" with "software engineer," "customer's car" with "company codebase," and "personal car" with "personal computer," and you can further blur the line between working hours and personal hours.
The only law that could possibly prevent any of the above is making it illegal for people to work on anything even tangentially related to their day job during their spare time. This would not only be unenforceable, but patently unfair and ridiculous.
>>When a sizable fraction of researchers are in the lab 80 hours a week because they actually love their science that much
>Or they are in the lab for such long times because they are understaffed as hell, underfinanced, and under constant pressure to pump out "research" of any quality to chase tiny grants?
>No one except a very few select top researchers actually wants that life style that is incompatible with any form of social life.
That's exactly my point. As soon as you have even a few people in a workplace whose sole passion is the work, you're going to get a culture of overwork. Even if a scientist is legally mandated to only spend 35 hours a week in the lab, nothing’s stopping them from spending another 20 hours at home each week reading publications or working on other research-related tasks that can be done outside the lab (and for some scientists [e.g. computational scientists], that’s 100% of their tasks). I don't see any solution to this, other than strongly discouraging people who just want a 9-5 from working in fields that tend to attract people passionate about work. Just as not everyone is cut out for the grueling training schedule of a professional athlete (who submit themselves to such a regime because their sport is their passion), perhaps not everyone is cut out for the grueling work schedule of other professions.
I feel like the hard part will be policing this going forward, no? "You said only 35 hours" "Yeah, but we have a deadline and it just moved closer"
I'm convinced that the marginal hours between 35 and 40 are much less productive than the marginal hours between 25 and 30, and the marginal hours between 50 and 55 may actually be negative.
It has in fact been proven to be negative:
https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo...
https://lifehacker.com/working-over-40-hours-a-week-makes-yo...
Also, having personally struggled with overwork and burnout, I can say 60 and 80 weeks can be productive.. Until they aren't.
You can't force people not to work, so you'll have some people who will choose to and some who won't, hence the people who do will have an obvious advantage.
That being said, progressing isn't everyone's life goal and I hope projects like this help create a market that 4-day weeks are the norm. The CTO at my last role was seriously considering this.
https://data.oecd.org/chart/6oFS
a zoom into percentiles, by country/region, is also revealing intercultural differences:
https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_1_Usual_working_hours_b...