Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
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In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren't contending with pointless meetings and busy work though. They can't do 40 hours of work in 32 hours by removing some of the hours they're not really working. What they do doesn't compress like that.
Consequently looking at this from the context of tech workers is far less interesting. The Japanese government isn't saying "Let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work!" In tech removing the pointless nonsense isn't actually reducing the amount of real work people do. Instead, Japan is saying "Our country is wealthy enough and advanced enough that our people can actually do less work." That's fascinating.
If you see this as "removing the wasteful time spent on things that aren't useful like meetinga" then you've missed the point. It is that, but it's much, much more than that too.
Examples from my own employment experience:
- front desk clerk at a hotel
- fuel pump operator
Both of these are pretty dull work that doesn’t exhaust you at all at the 40 hour work week. Most of the time is spent idle and the time spent working doesn’t require much going on upstairs.
Front desk work could be done away with mostly by electronic systems (most of the time when I "check in" it's just picking up a ready made room card as I checked in online). You could even centralise the "talking to a human" part in a call center operating a number of hotels, who delegate to staff on the premises (house keeping, maintenance, room service, etc). Of course luxury hotels will still have humans.
Fuel pump operator hasn't been a job in most Western countries for decades, as you just pump fuel yourself (and often even pay at the pump). Is "EV charger operator" a job?
A neural network trained to classify spray-painting kids?
Obviously that's not an absolute statement, especially considering that armed robbery is a thing. But in general humans are better crime deterrents than security cameras or robots.
In a lot of cases, that's the sole reason for employing security guards, since the only thing they're actually allowed to do when they encounter crimes in progress is ring the police.
It seems to me that the question to be answered is: how can we afford to not have full employment?
Full employment means lots of good things: a population that's richer per-capita and spends more, less expenses on welfare, less poverty, less crime, less billionaires, etc.
Where are you from? I thought fuel stations in most Western countries were fully automated already. In Sweden there are loads with no people at all but even the ones with a store you just pay at the pump. You only go inside if you need to buy something else.
Very strange example to use and kind of invalidates your whole point.
[0] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/74549/why-cant-you-pump-...
No need to get out of your car and deal with a dirty pump. You can also get out to go in the store while they fill your tank, or some smaller places you can buy stuff right from the attendant. Gas doesn't cost any extra because of it either. We used to have some of the cheapest gas in the country before a recent tax hike. Basically a free service, no tipping either.
One downside is that if it is busy you might have to wait, but the guys are usually pretty quick.
The cost can come from the margin for the gas station, not the consumer
Nope. See Oregon and NJ, unless you don’t these American states to be part of these “Western countries”.
In general, don’t respond to examples of jobs that actually exist now with a hypothetical world where they don’t exist to state something about the current world.
> Nope. See Oregon and NJ, unless you don’t these American states to be part of these “Western countries”.
Two states out of fifty. Maybe, in general, don’t respond to examples of jobs that hardly exist any more with a tiny and dwindling part of the world where they’re still just barely hanging on and pretend that has any relevance to the world economy.
(As for the US as a “Western country”... Well, sure, at least geographically.)
Its not clear if the change back to "normal" week was entirely rational - there were other suggestions to make the cited target of 80M NOK/year savings.
It's amazing because they do finish a lot faster than in western countries, but you can definitely remove 20% of the people in street-level construction and would see little difference. An example: they hire 2 people on every sidewalk just to tell people to continue walking the way they are walking and make sure they don't fall into a pit while looking at their phones[1].
From what I've learned, this specific job is normally filled by people who have already retired but don't have enough to live, so they are paid peanuts (I believe they might also be paid a bit extra by gvmt to go back to work, but I'm not sure I understood this point properly). They have started to be replaced by "robots" though [2].
Edit: in general everything in Japan seems overstaffed compared to the western counterparts, not just road construction. I believe this is how they can maintain very low levels of unemployment here, but I don't yet know how the incentives work to make it possible.
[1] The guys with the blue shirt, notice one on each side https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HBJ2K1/japanese-people-in-construc...
[2] https://japangasm.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/rwintro-swing0...
Of course, with Japan being the land of just-in-time, one could argue that spare capacity is bad -- but that's an oversimplification. Necessary spare capacity is good. What's bad is not being able to address the reasons the spare capacity is needed. Maybe when it comes to humans doing road work there's no way around the need for spare capacity?
That's why I believe these market forces push to at-capacity, because if someone has spare capacity or a lot of profit another company is going to come in at a lower margin and win the market. Yes this leads to breaking at some situations that happen once every 20 years, but otherwise you die from competition so that's what we are stuck with.
Mid and long term cost actually turned out a lot higher than if they had chosen the better slightly more expensive bids.
Some Italian construction company underbid, and slightly later went bankrupt after finishing some of the work. They just about missed the contract milestones for payment too, and got nothing out of it. Then, the contract went to someone else who bid, with expected costs adjusted. Think there was an 8-ish month delay.
1. Submit a low bid for EXACTLY what's written in the RFP
2. Submit contract delay notifications with contract amendment offers, explaining that the original bid was incorrect and therefore if the amendment is not accepted the project can't continue.
3. rinse and repeat
No. 2 is basically legal speak to make sure you get paid(or win a lawsuit in the event that you don't) even though you can't continue construction.
It's basically saying, you made a mistake in your original RFP, therefore nobody could have continued the construction anyway and therefore you have to accept my amendment.
Good bidders will actually tell you that your RFP was wrong. As an example in the construction project I was in the main architect requested custom spliced decades outdated Fiber wiring, when I finally got a hold of the wiring company and asked them why didn't just do MTP, they mentioned that a) they mentioned to the architect that the request wiring makes no sense and b) they were not allowed to talk to us(the engineering department) directly. Same happened with the fire protection rules from anything like stair handles to the garage.
That's also why I don't think the Airport delays in Berlin were engineering mistakes but rather gross mismanagement.
Also, while in this whole project there is a lot of physical work that you can't optimize away, a lot of the physical work delays and do-overs were also due to gross mismanagement, which is something the toplevel comment completely ignores in his assessment of the 4 day workweek.
But yes any description of economics is necessarily a simplification. For example market segments where people intentionally pay more for the exclusivity that comes with being charged more.
Why do I phrase it this way? Because the only market mechanism is a sale, you either buy or you don't. Low price is visible before a sale, so a new sale is reward for the low price offered. Quality and timeliness are only apparent after a sale, so can only be punished retroactively by not buying again.
The punishment signal is also far weaker than the reward signal, lots of goods are not bought too often and problems get forgotten by customers, alternatives may have their own problems, etc. And prices can be compared objectively for standardized goods, and at least easily for other goods. Quality and timeliness are often in the eye of the beholder, subject to variation. Comparisons in those areas are also systematically prevented by most vendors.
That's not always true. When a rail network gets privatized, the argument is that the market will make sure it's a good service still. But they are usually paid by the government, not the patrons. The commuters vote becomes negligible, and the rail network has every incentive to optimize for a minimum viable network that meets their government set targets while the service gets worse and worse in all other metrics. Seats are shittier, service is less clean, graffiti stacks up, railstock gets rickety etc.
Construction isn't like that. Companies aren't cranking out a million buildings a day, so they can't remove every ounce of unnecessary materials; they don't control the environment, making delays a fact of life; they don't control all of the companies and people involved; etc. There's just so much unknown when it comes to construction. Like software, it can be difficult to figure out how much padding to put into estimates. It's a good bit easier when it comes to things like roads, but companies still need to contend with unexpected delays a lot.
You would. But the guy doing the hiring is just giving the job to his drinking buddy, sure that the favor will come back in some way or the other.
There’s also the social factor to consider. These extra people could be superfluous, but if they’re not there everyone walking past will condemn that construction site as being unsafe.
They don't even have to be deceptive about it. Just in time is obviously about not having undue spare capacity, not about not having any spare capacity at all. But Toyota knows this nuance is going to be lost on buzzword-loving PHBs and greedy management consultant firms. You see the same thing happening with corporate Agile.
Edit: found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1JlYZQG3lI&t=804s
At 13 min. 24 seconds:
> Just in time is such a simple principle, but the pursuit of the elimination of waste is now the central mission of any major manufacturer.
> However, most did it wrong. Manufacturers globally saw the headline “elimination of inventory leads to massive efficiency gains” and jumped on that without actually determining what made it work for Toyota.
> They ignored that Japan's small physical size made for short domestic supply chains, less vulnerable to things going wrong.
> They ignored the company's production leveling: finding the average daily demand and producing that regardless of short-term changes and demands.
> They ignored the fact that eliminating excess inventory is different from eliminating all inventory.
> They ignored the principle of growing strong teams of cross-functional workers predicated on respecting people.
> They ignored the culture of stopping and fixing problems to get things right the first time.
> They ignored huge swaths of the Toyota Way and created a system that’s less effective and less resilient but can impress shareholders through short-term savings.
> How Toyota has effectively implemented this system fills books but many are just reading the covers.
> Even Toyota though is not perfect.
> In 2011 japan was rocked by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake the fourth strongest ever recorded anywhere. Not only did this cause immense destruction to life and property but it also led Toyota to recognize a flaw in its own system.
> As japan recovered some supply chains were quick to as well. For example, securing plastic resin for door panel production is not difficult: there are plenty of manufacturers globally creating easily substitutable alternatives.
> That’s not the case with, say, semiconductors: the hugely expensive facilities that create these chips require years to construct and after the 2011 earthquake it took many months to mend them back to operating status.
> This surfaced a truth that had never been fully considered: not all supply chains are made equal. Plastic resin can handle supply chain disruption, semiconductors cannot. Therefore Toyota made changes: all along, their mission was not to eliminate inventory full stop; it was to eliminate excess inventory.
> Supply chain disruption is inevitable. It's inevitable in the same way that Titanic's flawed design would eventually encounter an iceberg, or the structural economic vulnerabilities of 2008 would eventually collide with a market panic. Therefore semiconductor inventory is not excess because inevitably, due to the inevitability of disruption, excess semiconductor inventory will eventually become necessary.
> Recognizing this, Toyota in recent years has started to build up a stockpile of two to six months worth of chips and that's why the company is the only major vehicle manufacturer that is unfazed by the semiconductor shortage.
> Toyota followed its own principles. It did not stray from them, and it did not reinvent them. It’s no surprise that Toyota excels at implementing its own system, but it is a surprise that the entire manufacturing world has so wholeheartedly embraced flawed implementation of the system.
> Just IN tiime, is such a SIMple principlee, but the purSUIT of the ELIMination of waste...
Tab closed, thanks for the transcript.
That's what manufacturers had done ever since Ford tried to scale up his initial (very Toyota-esque) operation, and scaled it incorrectly but managed to inspire hordes of other manufacturers to repeat his mistakes.
The novelty of Toyota et al. was not that they asked the what if question, but that they answered it unconventionally: they worked on making the supply chains more reliable instead of adding buffers.
That's what makes this next move counter-intuitive to so many people: when Toyota encountered a supply chain that couldn't be made more reliable, they chose the previously-conventional response, apparently in defiance of their whole thing. Except it wasn't.
You're right in that it is simple, but in trying to show that you're making it too simple.
Just stockpiling is not really an answer as much as it's trying to just do the least amount of problem solving and thinking.
I have no idea of whether this is true at all, but I really like the story anyway.
----
What I do know is true is that modern day Toyota doesn't mind sharing the solutions they have come up with to various problems, because they think the real value is in the people and processes to (a) identify the problems in the first place, and (b) come up with solutions suited to those specific problems.
Blindly applying Toyota's solutions to Toyota's problems to your organisation, just hoping that you have the same problems as Toyota and that their solutions will work also for you is a recipe for confusion, and not what matters. (Yet virtually every "development methodology" is a specific solution to a specific problem blindly applied to an organisation.)
The competitor probably could have purchased a sewing machine and replicated the engineering drawings themselves. Teardowns of competitor products is common today, and I'm sure it was back then as well.
I think Toyota's "helpful" attitude comes from the Western paranoia in the 70-90s that Japan was going to completely dominate worldwide manufacturing. After all, their rise was fast: in the mid 60s, Japanese manufactures were practically begging to sell rudimentary formed metal components in the USA, but by the early 80s, they were a leader in the high-tech manufacturing. That rise caught many people off guard and I've heard it said that the "lost decade" in Japan was the result of American trade policy specifically designed to curtail Japan's growth in manufacturing.
Viewed in that light, it makes sense that Japanese companies would appear "helpful" to American ones. Why else would Toyota co-build a plant with GM in order to teach GM their Kaizen philosophy for manufacturing?
Also about making spare capacity undue. The lazy solution to unreliable delivery is inventory. The efficient solution is working with the supplier to make delivery more reliable.
Naively it looks like it's cheapest to get close to 100% utilisation by removing all slack from the system.
If you do that though you can't deal with shocks to the system and it costs you much more in the medium term. In the long term your company dies.
This is very well illustrated by John Sterman's Beer game[1]. That's aimed at supply chains in general but works well in any system you can make brittle via cost over optimisation.
This happens a lot because initially over optimisation makes accountants and managers look good to share holders. By the time the chickens have come home to roost they've moved on to another job.
1. https://www.isixsigma.com/training/training-materials-aids/t...
There's lots of examples of that, people doing things that you would see brutally optimized out of western city and those cities I feel are worse off for that optimization.
One way to look at it is that with their wealth they've decided to employ more people and do more good, versus pocketing the profit and calling it efficiency.
The famous railway networks in Japan are actually privatized rail companies which was very surprising to me. When the rail companies privatized in my country they immediately became worse, as they were suddenly serving a very different purpose. Staff were let go, the trains are cleaned less often, services were cut. That kind of thing.
How would liability play out for the construction company in a Japanese court? It's already a low margin competitive industry so passing risk management costs onto customers (the cost of the people monitoring the holes) is likely more practical than risking all profits evaporating and years of litigation, especially if insurance has anything to say about it.
In Australia we certainly don't have those people, construction companies just use a few signs, some cones and barricades and that's all that is required to be compliant. If someone falls in the hole they shouldn't have walked past the cones!
Not the case in Victoria. Pretty normal to see a couple of workers standing near the site entrance making sure pedestrians don't get run over by a truck. Or standing in front of a closed footpath, directing pedestrians to cross the road.
There's pretty strict rules around keeping the public out of construction sites and excavations. Putting a couple of cones around a hole is definitely not all that's required.
There's absolutely a limit where adding another person only adds marginal safety. For instance, children who don't know they should not jump to jump a barrier and then go into a pothole should not be allowed alone on the streets. We are not talking about a random hole in the street, these things are already heavily warded in Japan with barriers and signs AND on top of it there's also workers AND on top of it the mentioned security guards. My argument is, many or all of these security guards are not needed.
Here is the thing: there are adults who know all this and they fell into a potholes by accident, or momentary negligence
The privitization is split into different companies, the best having had a 30 year contract to revitilise their line, and they've done wonders with it, while one of the worst was (pre covid) run to the exact orders of the government
It references other patents (prior and subsequent).
You mean vs allowing those people to spend their time on something that might instead be more productive for society?
If that person is going to spend an hour doing something, is that truly the greatest contribution they can make? Maybe it is! Then again, maybe not.
The minute we got off the plane in Tokyo we were met by a greeter pointing people to the escalator. Not that you could miss it, that was the only exit.
In the city you could see people guarding potholes. Bus stations (not particularly busy) would have a couple men at each station that would help arrange the passenger luggage: something usually helped by the driver in the West.
Once we took a night stroll in the city, meeting a roadwork on a deserted street. There were 3 men along the fenced dig basically showing us to walk around it.
Can't see any of that sustainable if you pay people full wages.
Those jobs hardly add any value to society (let alone economy). If you just hand out money instead, some people might find something more useful to do, or at least be better off for themselves. See also David Graeber's essay "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs".
https://d-pt.ppstatic.pl/k/r/1/6c/83/5b7d5e3b2b9de_p.jpg?153...
Anyhow my point is it has little to do with system redundancy.
It's not important that all jobs are high value, it is important that we as a society have a way to create and recognize purpose for individuals to support their mental and personal wellbeing. While welfare / UBI may ensure they have basic needs met to sustain life, it does nothing to support their mental and personal wellbeing, which is why these systems often results in the creation of delinquent behaviors that are mostly absent in a system like that in Japan.
It may be the the same economically, but socially it is much better to have someone doing an "unnecessary" job that is recognize as valued by society vs simply collecting a check.
You say they're standing there in place of a traffic cone, Japanese society instead says that they're there to provide a friendly face ensuring safety of passersby around the dangers of construction work. A traffic cone cannot assist someone who has trouble walking to traverse rough ground because of the work being done. A traffic cone doesn't smile or acknowledge your presence.
That sociocultural element is what has value, and as long as it has value, the job is valuable.
We provide a jobs program for white-collar folks through our excessively-large and exceptionally expensive healthcare system. We pay for whole categories of jobs that don't need to exist and are only adding costs. A double-digit percentage of our healthcare costs are a white-collar jobs program paying people to do nothing useful whatsoever, and we spend a lot on healthcare so even 10% makes it a fairly big program.
I spent some time in Belgium a few years ago and was amazed to see that the two people on road projects who turn the "slow/stop" signs to control traffic on single-lanes were replaced with robots. So the EU has managed to figure out how to go under skeleton at least.
Meanwhile, when I was in Japan, there were indeed lots of seemingly "useless" people doing "useless" jobs on similar sized projects.
And it's also probably not for wanting just 1 staff -- it's probably because no one want to work at those place.
Maybe the 20% extra people is the reason they always finish a lot faster.
To circumvent strict donation laws, the idea is that these people will be "lended" as administrative staff and door-knockers during elections, in exchange of juicy contracts.
And let's be real, that linked in [2] does not point to a job that requires automation, a blinking panel is enough. Often I have seen the sad spectacle of one mannequin handling a signal on the end and a human on the other end. It is totally a bullshit job.
If you look around there's plenty of such a "pointless" jobs. The same with people steering the traffic at the parking lot entrances/exits at any bigger entertainment or shopping center. Sometimes with almost no pedestrians around and yet those people are standing there in sun or rain alike. Or people who's only job is to smile and open doors for you, less common, but happens as well.
To be honest, though, as a "consumer" of such jobs (pedestrian in this case) I do feel they took an extra mile to make it as safe and comfortable for me as possible. And I do feel better about it.
It may look pointless at the surface, but I think those jobs are extremely important for society at large.
That's really going to depend on the business. Plenty of businesses-- specifically ones with a lot of customer-facing staff-- would not be able to sustain labor cost increases up to 20%.
To take an easy example where I already know the #'s in the US, labor costs at a fast-food restaurant are around 25% of costs. Net profit margins range from 5% up to around 20%, but that top end is for McDonalds, the rest are on that lower end.
Increasing labor costs by 20% means a 5% increase in absolute operating costs. Sure, McDonalds may still run at 15%, but other places that increase for many others would erase profitability.
Even with a McDonalds, those franchises don't go for less than $1million each, often a lot more, and 20% profit on them seems to be about $150,000/year. So an owner is already looking at 7+ years to recoup their investment, and that's before accounting for any additional capex costs McDonalds may require when they roll out mandatory renovations.
Certainly there are many more businesses than fast food, so the above equation won't hold for every thing. But any low margin business with moderate customer-facing labor costs won't be able to manage this without raising prices, and then we're just shifting the money around to different piles. In fact as a result of those increased prices, the lower paid workers, while they may be able to work less hours and may work for a business that didn't cut their pay, they're still paying the price for that decision in their overall increase in cost of living.
The reductive "race to the bottom" can go both directions
If you're getting into the everyone-deserves-a-living-wage side of things, that's a different conversation, one I tend to agree with, but is much more complex than the current discussion about whether current business could manage this if they operate with low margins and moderate customer-facing labor costs.
The amount of low-effort populistic comments on HN starts to be worrying.
I'm sure the economics of paying for work on plantations also did not add up.
I think these are useful conversations to have, but this is not a problem that submits to easy one-size-fits-all solutions. I'm all for a living wage, but simply raising minimum wages without doing anything else is a short term solution that will bring things back to roughly where they are now over a period of time as prices for people with newly increased hourly pay rise to the point where it is, once again, no longer a living wage. Sure, go ahead and do that anyway, but only if you have other plans in the works to stop that cycle.
As a side not, emotional appeals to slavery do not help promote a reasonable conversation either. Having to work two jobs to make ends meet is a far cry from slavery. We don't need to look far in the world to find people living in conditions that are actually identical to or not far different from actual slavery. A person in the US working a low paying job 60 hours a week that can barely pay there rent or afford unexpected expenses is nowhere close to those conditions, especially when "barely getting by" in the US still mostly includes the bare bones amenities of living in a modern western country that are significantly better than conditions in many developing nations. Comparisons of this sort simply inflame tensions instead of conversation.
Demand is probably slightly elastic, but not that much (there are plenty of restaurants in France, despite very high cost of employment)
As for demand, it is always elastic. A lot of people eat fast food, and a lot of those people are going to be in a position where they're just barely fitting it into they're budget. Raise prices, and they're gone. That's not even getting to the actual elastic part where people actually have the money to decide either way if they're willing to pay at one price but not another-- that bottom group is simply gone.
Also you shouldn't focus just on the one example I chose. I happened to choose a discretionary spending activity because I knew fast food #'s off the top of my head, but the same thing applies to every single business with low margins and moderate labor costs. Even if you were right and every single one of them could raise prices without losing customers, that would also mean that the exact people we're trying to pay a living wage then have significant increases in their cost of living as everything around them raises prices.
[1] France may also not be the best example to compare to the US. Despite staggeringly astronomical wealth inequality in the US, it still has a lower poverty rate than France. Canada would probably be a better example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentag...
And the French definition of poverty is equally useless, it’s just a percentage of the median income
Surely you appreciate how that’s a problem?
Then there's the fact that raising prices will still lose fast food places customers: For every person not buying it because it doesn't fit their budget, there's someone who just barely fits it into their budget that will stop buying it when prices rise.
This isn't theoretical: Companies analyze the price elasticity of their customers and understand roughly how raising prices X% will lose them Y% customers, and the amount of revenue Y customers represent, and whether that is higher or lower than the revenue generated by X. I don't work in the food industry or retail, but I have run that analysis myself in my own field.
I'm all for a living wage, but simply paying low paid workers more & raising prices to cover it is by no means a complete solution. Raising minimum wages is a bandaid solution. (And I'm not saying we shouldn't do that-- only that it's short term, and we need more comprehensive answers)
Maybe, but if you've worked in Japan, or even just living here, you know about the long, pointless meetings, desk warming and busy work. Thus, it's highly possible the government is saying "let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work". Things are that top-down here that often companies won't do anything unless the government has said something (and it's likely that it was the big companies that control the politicians that told them to say it).
There are plenty of examples of this kind of thing, one is when the government had to do the same to force companies to let/get employees to use their holiday entitlements. Western principles such as truth, innocence and self-reliance aren't foundational here - the moment you accept that you understand so much more about the culture, in much the same way you won't understand Buddhism if you use a mental model constructed out of your understanding of Christianity.
Then what is?
... nor in the West, to be fair. Lies and cheats are commonplace in any Western workplace.
I think you are over-generalizing. Self-reliance is big in Japan too, even while egoism is not - it's drilled into people basically from birth, with things like students cleaning their own schools. Innocence is always politely expected until openly questioned, at which point it turns almost automatically into guilt; but it doesn't mean it's not "foundational" - in fact, it's much more entrenched, it's just that the act of questioning it carries so much more weight on all sides (an unfair accusation, if determined, would be extremely shameful) that nobody wants to go there until absolutely necessary.
They just play the game with a slightly different set of practical rules.
I've worked a factory job and have seen it there, I work in white collar now and it's the same.
If you say 40 hours you'll only get around 30 because workers have to bounce between working and getting down a little or else they burn out.
Indeed, but going to 4 day weeks will require employers to hire more people then to fulfill the same work.
It's absurd that even with all the gains in productivity we're still stuck since decades at the 5x8=40 week. Time to redistribute the producitvity profits towards the workers.
While someone working a reduced schedule in an office where other people are working a full schedule may be able to set a schedule that misses some of the things they consider nonproductive (and may actually be more productive/hour for doing so), I don’t think that actually is likely to scale to the whole office switching schedules. If the people in authority that think that the meetings you feel are nonproductive are essential are still in the same positions of authority, they’ll still have the same meetings at least the same share of working hours, though there is a substantial risk that some of them will instead take the same number of hours per calendar week, regardless of the reduction in working hours.
> The government included the promotion of an optional four-day workweek in its annual economic policy guideline finalized Friday
But even if it wasn’t optional, the idea of mandatory labor laws is hardly groundbreaking anyway. The US has many regulations regarding working hours.
It depends.
In China, the tech companies are testing AI telephone support. My banks uses it, JD.com uses it, China UNICOM use it. If you dial to those companies, an AI will take the call and guide you through the process, no human interaction needed. Not only that, some AI will even call you to schedule appointments etc.
Another example is the supermarkets. Almost all supermarket in our city has deployed self-checkout stations, and some of them even laid off almost all but 1 or 2 of their checkout workers.
I assume this trend will eventually expand to other labor types, so the workload of those workers will be lighten as result. (But of course, we can keep the load the same, but laid off unnecessary people instead, which is more likely if the government don't intervene)
And really, people need to be wary with automation. What people don't realize is that relying on it utterly paralyzes you when it goes down, because its a higher order fault than most staff need to handle.
If the AI telephone support breaks during an update, you've just sidelined your entire operation. If you only have a few checkout employees, and your POS service needs to connect to the internet, and it goes down, you have virtually no one to reply to it.
By reducing headcount you really run the risk of what were tolerant faults becoming critical. My own job has been running on a skeleton crew, and thank god one of us hasn't become sick or left yet. Eventually relying on automation and minimum staffing may bite you hard. A lot of retail stores would be up the creek if the store manager up and quit or was sick for multiple weeks.
For example, a road worker can now focus on fixing the part of the road which is more likely to be damaged, while the rest of the road is serviced by machines automatically. 4 hours later, the worker finished fixing the critical/difficult part of the road, then he/she go home to enjoy their life, the machine takes the rest of the routine to finish it off.
But of course, more likely, we will go down the "Bad route". Workers will be fired, just like those in the supermarkets. And if machine fails, people will be re-routed to a "backup" -- a human or another machine, to be queued up for a even slower handling process. Few hours later, the machine is fixed, and the event is marked as one-time incident -- stability still above 99%, everything stay the same, except more workers will be fired due to redundant stability.
1: “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”
Retail and factory work already has low wages and high turnover, forcing them to try and make up a 20% loss in staffing hours is probably not going to happen over just cutting operating hours and shifting to models designed to work with less staff; retail stores for example may just be open 20% less or be constantly understaffed and understocked.
Or eventually a lot of them just close and the bigger ones absorb the surplus workers to keep full hours.
If the majority of the economy follows a linear production curve in hours worked, then this opens many jobs. Not a bad deal for a mature economy like JP, but will be interesting to see what un-forseen dynamics emerge.
Companies that shuffle things up to prioritize productivity over simply showing up will be set to succeed over the next generation.
Minor nitpick: Is an hour long lunch really that bad?
Get out of the building, take the bicycle to a park to eat, take a small nap and read a book, come back to the office fresh and mind reset.
This was my routine before I switched to WFH. Official hours where 9h to 12h, then 14h to 18h. 35h workweek, 2h lunch break, (France).
(Just highlighting that different people have different preferences. :))
Also, for some of us it's normal to go to a restaurant or to the pub for lunch. It's been years since I've eaten a packed lunch.
As a “productive” software engineer, in the sense that I have gotten positive feedback in my career and never had a problem “getting enough done” to satisfy my superiors, it took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I cannot productively apply myself to work for 40 hours a week. When I have to be in the office for that long, I end up slacking off for hours and hours (like reading HN). I thought for a long time that maybe I was just flying under the radar and I would eventually “get caught” but at this point I’ve made peace with the fact that my productivity comes in bursts and as long as my employer is happy with my output I don’t sweat it too much.
I was visiting a Western company that was renting a small space in the same building. Their routine was to never get caught up in the great migration (in either direction).
Consider it was a place where one guy hoarded 15 years of WSJ in his office.
When staff are excellent professionals in the field, they get to do all sort of weird things.
Where I work now local laws require taking at least 1 hours of breaktime per day so I can technically not do that.
My biggest issue is, that in an office environment I can't use it as effectively as I would like to. At home I tend to spend 20-30 minutes taking a short nap and it really pays off as it boosts my productivity for the afternoon. At the office, I don't have that opportunity :-/
I once told a freelance client (hourly) that I solved most of the tough problems while I thought about things in the shower. On that project, very little of my time was spent coding. Client then said I ought to pad my hours by 5 per week. He “got it.”
If simply “coding” is what constitutes “really working,” that seems problematic.
Basically, the rules of the game mean a salaried, remote employee can easily work half time at full pay - gg
This would be a huge mis-optimization IMO. Good luck attracting "top" workers and retaining them with this model. It's just "butts in seats" taken to an extreme.
If you’re not working, you shouldn’t be paid. Fair is fair.
Perhaps instead of paying per hour a company should offer pay per week, and it’s up to the developer to decide how many hours they will end up actually working that week and if the offered pay is worth it.
You are being a little broad with this statement. One can easily put in 60+ hours for weeks on end and be incredibly productive while doing it. Its all circumstantial. If you have no family, are the sole founder in the company, and really enjoy what you are doing, why the fuck would you stop at a 40 hour work week?
Not all of us loathe the thing we do for the majority of our waking hours.
Even in your example, being productive for 60+ hours is possible, but for how long? There might be extreme (extreme!) outliers, but I think it's fair to say that at some point you will increase your productivity by putting in less hours.
It's the kind of question where I wouldn't really believe your answer, unless you've actually tried to experiment yourself where is the cutoff (for your specific situation) between hours / productivity.
Not because I think you would answer in bad faith, but because it's a really complex question. What if working less hours over multiple years would let you pursue some hobby, turn you more sociable and thus a better leader/CEO?
Or maybe it would make you just very slightly better at decision making. You would have less time to manage your company, maybe relying more on others, but in exchange you would have more energy for the really crucial decisions. Or enough energy for extending that 2-weeks international crowdfunding effort into a 3-weeks.
It is a very unhealthy industry. I am not sure if it can be sustained in it’s current form, but I don’t ever see the hours being reduced either. 4 day work weeks would just mean 12+ hour days and you would have to hope your clients aren’t open on Fridays or whatever day you decided to make your company day off. Staggering days wouldn’t work that well as most agencies have little to no redundancy by design.
Again, this leads to burnout and employees that are sufficiently burned out either quit or are fired for no longer being able to meet the productivity requirement and/or making mistakes. The agency does not care because the supply of recent college graduates in marketing and communications is never ending (it is one of the most popular majors at almost any college/university).
Interestingly, slower work to a point is better for the agency since they bill the client per hour. That reverses when the quality of work suffers or the employee is no longer able to get everything done that was promised to the client. The agency gets more value out of a single employee when they work longer hours. Bonuses are common in the agency world, but they are typically meager compared to the extra hours worked. Burning out their junior employees is then to the advantage of an agency that bills by the hour.
However, most people do not run their own business. Most people are low-level code monkeys in large firms where individual efforts aren't business critical. When your project gets cancelled for the 3rd time and you still get a raise, it finally clicks that your work doesn't really matter. This takes a psychological toll. As a result, most people I know in FAANG who are 28+ years old will sheepishly admit that they do very little actual work (30 hours max per week). That's the whole point of hiring people straight out of college: you get ~5 years out of them before they realize what the game is. The ones who are happy with the "truth" become managers, and the ones who aren't opt to keep their head down and coast, or just quit from "burnout".
The only exception I'd personally make is to found a startup with people I enjoy on a problem that I'm personally motivated by. This is basically a band for capitalistic nerds. Even then, you still have to allow VCs to suck out your soul.
Did not realise believing in a mission is akin to joining a suicide cult.
Work doesn’t have to suck. It doesn’t have to be everyone’s calling. But it is for some of us, and sixty+ hours a week can be time well spent. My time at start-ups has been time around colleagues I love, work I enjoy and a mission I believe in. (I was also decently compensated while there and exorbitantly so on the upside.)
There are countless public servants, non-profit employees, artists and public-company workers putting in those hours and more finding reward in their work. No need to deem everyone who doesn’t fit your lifestyle an idiot.
Me? I'd rather do what I can to make Art. So it's nice that I can get a software company to subsidize it thoroughly.
I'm just glad I can get paid effectively for being Skilled instead of laboring with my Skill. Availability is the best ability after all.
It's a suckers game: the default behavior needs to be "when the founders get greedy and kick me out...what will I do then? How will I feel about that time?"
If the work is for financing a life outside it, yes. But if the work is rewarding in itself, then said failure is—while highly disappointing—balanced by the relationships, stories and skills gained therefrom.
This is absolutely a risk tolerance and personality matrix thing. I just want to push back against this recently-popular philosophy which idealises the Western European work ethic and lifestyle. It is one among many local optima.
Employees are too likely to be screwed over, even if the company is successful
I will agree with you - it's probably batshit insane for a working stiff without a good chance of a $2mm+ payout to be working 60+ hours/week for years on end.
Amdahl's Law
yeah in this case, if its really your dream, go right ahead.
most workers aren't the founders of the company.
Do you have an objective measure of that? I've worked with plenty of people who thought they were being productive for 60+ hours/week, but none of their productivity actually stacked up. Founder/CTO types were the worst, they'd bypass process and cause outages but because of their position everyone had to coddle their ego and pretend that they were doing good work and the trouble wasn't their fault.
You asked about objective measures, but I’m not sure how programming can really be quantified. All I can say is my “hyper-mode” has caused projects to reach deadlines that others on the team thought were unlikely.
So that's... maybe 20% of the workforce?
> are the sole founder in the company
And with this we narrow it down to maybe 1% or less of the workforce.
He can be broad because your conditions don't apply to the overwhelming majority of workers. Statistically, your conditions cover an insignificant group.
Hyperbole is to be expected.
You sound like you're having a bad day outside of HN, as this has been just a regular and might I say, civil, chat, otherwise.
A temporary break from HN (or social media in general), might not be a bad idea :-)
Anecdotally speaking, all my mates who work in private construction office jobs regularly do quite a bit of unpaid overtime. It's very much a combined cultural and managerial issue, clocking off at the correct hours gets you the stink-eye, and the volume of work assigned necessitates overtime.
https://www.industrialrelations.nsw.gov.au/employers/nsw-emp...
I tend to disagree, but don't argue either way for four or five day weeks, but because it seems success and productivity are only loosely coupled.
Company financial success, and / or long term viability, I believe, is largely random. Large, already successful companies will, largely, continue to be so, small to medium enterprises will survive the next five years at about the same rate they historically have. Small business will continue to fail all over the place.
People will continue to be super intelligent, flawed and incompetent, easily distracted, lack focus, and easily corrupted by power and vice.
And start ups, to anyone who's been paying attention, is almost entirely a branch of gambling for a specific type of whale.
I predict that on the whole the next decade will be largely like the last ten years, and there's approximately nothing to be gained from chasing tiny productivity gains.
Good riddance if people with a working brain were given any power, we'd all be at 2-3 hours of work per day with robots doing the rest by now.
Have lost quite a lot of weight too … and it’s only been a couple of months. Go for it! Can’t recommend it enough.
For intellectual work like we what we do, the brain doesn't just stop "working". I tend to be able to come up with good solution while driving/working out/taking a walk/drinking tea...
Only at low levels that I see time-at-keyboard important. Now it's all ambiguous/large scale problems that spending time at the keyboard is a very small portion of my time. It's more productive to keep the problems in mind, then let my mind wandering and arrive at the solutions later. After you design/test/run the solutions in your mind, it only takes a small amount of time to write it out (design doc or code).
This was when I was in Google
Since everyone is contract, we’re seeing an average of about 26 hours per week. It’s by far the most productive team I’ve ever been on or have built. We ship new features weekly. It’s truly an incredible pace, but doesn’t feel hectic like you might think.
I think the contract only + no meetings + no HR (no culture bullshit, no “get to know people” social events, no bullshit) company setup is going to be the future. If you give people the opportunity to work on things they like working on, and don’t make work about anything other than work, you get amazing results.
Some, not all, but certainly some people use work as their only form of social life and interaction. Which leads to a lot of time not working. I’m not saying this is inherently bad. It’s just not the type of company we’re building. Filtering for contract work has taken care of this so far. Will continue to evaluate as we scale up.
Sick/vacation days are harder because we pay for whatever I get an invoice for. Since we don’t track what people do on a day by day basis (I often don’t even know if someone is working that day until I reach out to them or slack, or vice versa), there’s nothing stopping them for billing me for extra hours. And to be honest I really wouldn’t care. I just care about output and quality of that output.
If you don't know if they're working, don't fucking slack them. How about you check their calendar or send an email.
Slack is not for asynchronous communication.
It's amazing how high and mighty people can be and then they ping people for non-emergencies while they're on vacation.
Depends on the organisation.
Where I'm currently working, we use Discord. Discord is similar to Slack.
It is explicitly for asynchronous communication. We are supposed to not expect immediate replies to questions and comments on Discord, especially as other teammates are in different timezones. Sometimes there's real time chat, but it depends who is on at the time.
I posted some comments yesterday. There was one reply within a few hours, and two more this morning.
Email is pretty much deprecated. Nobody uses it, except to set up calendar entries for meetings, and formal things like HR and invoices.
I just fly home from the US. And … I still have to work instead of just spending time with my parents that I haven’t seen in years.
I earn more than 200k. ( not west coast ) it’s a decent salary right? Why can’t I have vacation, too? I asked and putted and asked again…
All that will accomplish one thing: one day in the next 2 years I will wake up, look at my bank account. And quit. To have actual free time.
I told that to my boss in those term, we have a decent relationship. But … he gave me some HR bullshit.
It’s worth more than the proportional time I would take off. It’s very valuable to me. Like 5k / week would be a good price tag. I have no debt and more stuff than I need. Now let’s me enjoy life while I still can ( and keep working on that job that I actually enjoy )
I’m not sure to understand about the net positive. The response I got was that taking time off without pay would 1) set a bad « example » or something of that sort and 2) make it hard to plan for resource availability.
Does that answer your question?
I think that everyone is a bit wary of setting difficult precedents in employment situations, as well as the possibility of creating rifts between people with different ‘deals’. That said, I think we should all place a higher priority on coming up with mutually beneficial arrangements.
It’s crazy how they don’t realize it’s just alienate workers.
As I stated it’s easily worth 5k for me. ( 7 days, 5 days would be $3500 )
That négociation did not go well. I got 2 extra day off and was told to stop making noise.
Oh. well.
It's a pretty infuriating setup. From the employers perspective, the amount of money you lose by having someone not work is so obscene, so quickly, that you have to fight your monkey brain pretty hard to not be a total asshole about it.
Even in this well paying industry, you could give everyone obscene raises, before time off makes any financial sense for the average employer. I don't think enough employees realise this.
I heard this argument in North America but not here in Australia. I mean, small businesses might require critical people at critical times, but generally in larger orgs this shouldn’t be too hard.
This is the weird and intuitively wrong stuff that happens, when employers make more through their employees work than their employees do, even after factoring in their salary.
There is something that make me think something is fishy in that approach : why are more and more places switch to unlimited PTO if it’s that costly to give folks time off?
I had unlimited PTO a couple of times, it can sucks ( pressure NOT to take any PTO for the company sake ) Or he just fine.
"Why do people get more time off now than ever before in human history (which they do)?"
There are now more forces than ever, that work against unlimited exploitation of human labor. For example, human beings in most countries have enforceable rights and they want time off, and the market that has to compete for those people. Humans are shitty machines. If you piss them off, they do shitty work. If you treat them poorly they leave. (In reality, "treating them poorly" translates to "treating them slightly less good then someone else") Since having someone quit working for you is pretty fucking expensive (assuming, of course, that they are actually being productive), you better make sure they do want to continue working for you and so you make it worth their while.
Another important example would be worker protection laws, that simply dictate certain amenities.
"Why is everyone doing unlimited PTO, specifically?"
Less clear on that one. Part of it is certainly it being a trend. If other people do it and employees want it, then you might have to go along, again, to not get pushed out of the market.
But since it clearly does not ever actually mean "unlimited PTO" (you'd be out of a job pretty quickly if you tried), an interesting followup question might be what the fuck it actually means and who benefits? Maybe employees are a little confused about how much time off to take and take less than before? Or maybe they feel pressured to underbid each other? Maybe it's also just that the flexibility it adds to the job leads to more loyal employers, which is pretty nifty in a market starved for workers.
That's how it works in Europe. It's common that a boss will ask an employee to work less, because the amount of time they work is not even legal sometimes, or to force people to go on vacation for weeks to use their vacation days. It's also more fair and don't put pressure for other employees that value their life outside work.
Its always interesting to see how other people live.
So, gig economy. Or, at best, hourly wage at Amazon warehouse, but for developers. I heard those warehouses are super extra no-bullshit efficient.
I mentioned benefits in another post, so I wouldn’t say it’s gig economy.
What other environment could give a developer $100+/hr, ability to make their own schedule, and essentially all legal protections to work on side projects, work for other companies, etc. at the same time?
Is it for everyone? No. But we’ve had more quality devs interested than we can employ at this point, so I’d say it’s attractive to a good portion of the market.
But if this "hourly wage for hourly work and nothing else" becomes a norm, that's what we'll eventually get, I'm afraid.
Your success in this direction to turn software development into some kind of cattle feedlot is only a mirage. Let me make it clear in economic terms: you're up a few chips at the casino, for now, because the market allows you to be. In the long run it's not sustainable, and won't yield any major feats of engineering with any level of competence.
At what point did I say or lead anyone to believe that we 1.) expect developers to be autodidacts? Because we don’t have meetings? Seems an odd way to measure engineering culture and 2.) this had anything to do with cutting cost? Our hourly wages are high enough to where the cost savings is negligible compared to fully loaded salaries. I’d be happy to share the numbers over email.
Your idea of the master-apprentice relationship seems overtly romantic. I never said we don’t train staff, or haven’t brought on younger engineers. I literally onboarded an intern last week. They’ll likely make more working less than any intern at any FAANG is making this summer.
> Your success in this direction to turn software development into some kind of cattle feedlot is only a mirage.
I have to straight up disagree on the premise that it’s a mirage. Nevertheless, this is certainly an experiment, and one where we’ll adapt as needed.
I feel as if you’re focusing too much on the contractor concept. Would you be as opposed to this model if say I hired FTEs at 20 hours per week? So essentially half salary. How is this any different (note my previous comments about benefits).
CleverControl employee monitoring pitch: "This software offers powerful features: keylogging, screen recording, live viewing, remote settings, clipboard control, Skype monitoring, and more. The software records time that was spent on this or that activity and shows you stats in graphs. Besides, the app captures screenshots at all important events like right-clicking and window change, and it can record activity near the device with the help of a webcam and microphone. Moreover, CleverControl records employees’ active and inactive time, letting you detect lazybones and reward hard work."
"Another unconventional tactic is work-to-rule (also known as an Italian strike, in Italian: Sciopero bianco), in which workers perform their tasks exactly as they are required to but no better."
I treat it as a total, humiliating devaluation of creative engineering work (and thus their identity!) to that of unskilled factory workers.
Unions would be helpful for both, in my view.
This is how it works already in many companies, also infamous 996
There are (sad, imo) people whose entire lives revolve around work. Their friends are there, and they enjoy social outings with their work colleagues.
To me, social outings are just an unnecessary risk. I do not talk to my coworkers like I talk to my friends, I do not want my coworkers knowing too much about my personal life, and especially when booze is involved it's too easy to find yourself on the receiving end of something awkward, or witness to something awkward.
Meetings are simple: if it's important enough to take an hour of my day it's important enough to count as seat time. When my productivity drops and my manager asks why I tell them that meetings are taking up too much time. It's their job to make sure I have what I need to do my best work. If they tell me to work later I start looking for other jobs. It's so easy to get a senior developer job now, and there's really no long term benefit staying anywhere, that I'm not exactly sorry for leaving in this case.
I have literally zero interest in "culture". I wouldn't even work for a company if I didnt need the money to live. I don't understand how you've derived the dichotomy that you can either have mindless time sink "culture" bullshit OR an amazon warehouse slaveshop.
Call me a pessimist. I think people obsessed with "work culture" are sad. You shouldn't hate the 8 hours of work you do, but you also shouldn't center your entire life on it. Afterall, it could be taken away from you with a penstroke the next time the CEO needs to make room in the budget for their salary.
That line started off well, but ended off terrible. I really don't want to be working in a place where I'm treated like a replaceable machine. You do you, man.
This seems like a leap. Where did I insinuate that anyone is a cog in a machine? Just because I said work should be about work? Why does it have to be about anything else? If you need your job to provide a social aspect to your life that’s completely fine. It’s just not a part of the business I’m building. It’s why I think having options is great. Everyone works differently.
I interview fairly often with potential employers, sometimes just for the experience and insights. Never once did I consider taking a job for other reasons than the type of work and its pay (commuting time and factors not directly in control of the company aside).
I'm not even the type of person who hates team events and the like, at least at the companies I have been working at these usually were a lot of fun. It's just nothing that keeps me from moving on from or motivates me to take some job.
But in the US you see the opposite happening at a lot of large companies. I think what you described would be the future of a company with a homogeneous type of worker. However, we are humans we are not machines ignoring that we are humans can be detrimental. Not to mention worker equality is becoming important to be a stable work environment. It’s important to forget you have other roles and industries that simply cannot function the way you described (doctors, nurses, flight attendants, pilots, plumbers, etc.)
Also, I want I’m not saying the current technology corporate environment doesn’t need optimizing. It certainly does but it seems that we are moving towards that and trying to focus on what matter in HR as well.
Is this true only in the US? What percentage of companies is this true for? How many jobs will tolerate this reality?
The invert is true though: a task will evolve to take the time alloted to it, I see that regularly with "unconstrained" project running amok. Those with fixed time are way more efficient and finish with a minimum of overtime.
Obviously people hated it. But it is happening and no wonder China tech is catching up fast / winning in some areas already.
I’d bet the factors are much more political in nature than productivity on the individual level.
The only people winning in China are the people at the top of the communist party.
Be grateful for your privilege. Most employees aren't tech.
The workers at companies that schlep things around are working a real, non-stop 8 hours. This is why Amazon warehouse jobs are so shitty.
Teachers are pretty much non-stop as well. This is why so many of them have medical issues with their bladders.
The vast majority of workers are in positions that really do put in 40 hours of hard work a week--and they don't get paid anywhere near as much as tech.
Are one hour lunches not the norm? I've always worked 0900-1730, with an hour long lunch.
Now, many people, especially women* and young people are finding that it’s possible to run a small business for 3-4 days a week and make more money than an entry or even mid-level full time office job.
So, I think Japan finally enforcing rules against abusive behavior at the workplace and pushing for a 4-day week, if it really happens, is a reflection of where society is at right now.
*Women have a low wage ceiling because they are expected to quit and have children at any time.
Many of these Japanese firms are many hundreds of years old, and will probably stick around for some hundred more years.
Being able to run a small business for 5-10 years is very possible, but there's no guarantee you'll be able to do that for 20-30-40 years.
We often hear about the success stories, when it comes to small businesses and startups, but there are unfortunately those that will fail after N years, even if they had some pretty good years.
There are horror stories floating around on the internet that explain how many stay in office, often later than their boss, just to look like they are working hard.
And I have experienced it first hand. Went to Mitsubishi factory in Takasago on a company visit. I asked the employees there, why do you stay late, and they answered, everyone has to stay late.
I genuinely believe that an alternative to the 4-day week, is to allow employees to switch off their work emails and phone calls on Friday evening. No use in having a 4 day week, when your mind-share is extended to a 6 day week.
The horror story there is in how late that takes them to in many cases. A friend spent a year in Japan. Leaving by 8 was apparently a good day.
Anecdotally, I managed to accumulate almost 300 hours of vacation time and now switched over to 3-day weeks at a big tech company for a while and even though I really enjoy my work, I feel much better this way and roughly at the same productivity, but a lot happier.
> Especially in industries that require deep thinking, the output doesn't necessarily scale with # of hours a worker puts in, not every hour is the same. I think 10 hours of highly productive work is much better than 40 hours of busy work.
I absolutely agree with this, but I'm skeptical of a model that allows someone to come to work for only 10 hours and have those hours be the productive time. Especially for deep thinking work. My experience is that to push forward in work that requires creativity and deep thought, one needs to be immersed in it, while at the same time not pressured to come up with something on the spot. The immersion (often) requires a full time commitment to the work, even if some of that time is actually spent chatting with colleagues or wasting time on HN or whatever. Providing the needed freedom from pressure, but still enough pressure to get results, is a question of management, either personal or from good manager.
My last employer refused to even accept 4 days a week for 80%. Manager brought up how much the company had invested in training me as a grad (which, to be fair, they did), and that cutting my hours would have meant that investment had gone to waste.
I now work for them 0 days a week. Funny how that works.
I'm assuming this is a problem in a lot of organisations; the people who rise to the top are the ones who lean more towards work on the work-life balance scale.
He doesn't seem to have attained a high level of proficiency in the craft of people management and employee retention, though :)
My advice is to also enjoy the time you know you have: now. Even if it postpones the “later” for a bit.
Its not about the number of days per week, it's also about the frequency of the thinking you put into it. If you do a 4 days break between two work days, I'd be very surprised if you remember anything in detail of your previous work period.
My overall output was reasonably similar to that of a 5 day week because I came at work with a waay better attitude. It also made it easier to plan 2 days of work instead of 5. I also spent a chunk of my Wednesday thinking about work and how to tackle the next two days.
That meant I could without guilt take the weekend entirely off and not even think about work at all.
Just want to point out that Ideally you shouldn't feel the need to think about work on either of your free days. Wednesday or weekend.
Might as well do something about nomikai[1] while they are at it.
It would definitely be a convenient loophole for companies to continue shitty practices, so I think I just lucked out with the places I worked at.
Japanese labour regulations are very strict, in particular around hours worked. Basically all employees (yes, including engineers) need to clock in and out, the concept of a "salaried worker" doesn't really exist, although normally engineers are paid for a certain number of hours regardless if they are actually worked. Primarily it is to make sure that overtime is paid and not excessive, but I believe there are also some related to the definition of what a "full time" job is.
So, it sounds to me like the government is considering relaxing those definitions on minimum hours worked to make it easier for firms to adopt 4 day work week if they so choose.
裁量労働制 certainly meets the spirit of "salaried worker" if not the letter ("need" to clock in for at least 1 minute to be counted as working for the day).
I have a 15 minute standup every day, an hour long 1 on 1 once every two weeks, and the occasional meeting where I am genuinely needed and maybe 3 hours talking to another developer.
I would love to convert my job into a purely objectives driven thing with the only requirement being that I am online/in the office for those specific 5 or so hours a week.
I will take the risk that what I think takes a week of work runs over (forcing me to work on weekends) in exchange for that kind of flexibility.
Sure, people could just work flexibly to accommodate the necessary meetings, but I'm my experience, that just leads to people being on call for 10-12 hours a day with no regular schedule.
In every company I have been part of, workers who didn't need dedicated work times simply didn't keep them. It is only becomes an issue if it doesn't work.
Then I got in touch with the officials and lawyers. Labor law IS already strong in Japan, but it is the employees who do not demand it and the employers who do not follow it. The officials are running many campaigns to advertise equality and proper working hours. Just nobody cares.
Long story short - I got my salary paid ouf for a couple of months and could stay in Japan. Best time of my life and this is the way you should experience Japan: live there, DO NOT work, have enough money to support a certain lifestyle.
Now I am back to Germany and I am happy that I have a decently paid, low stress 40 hours work week, 100% home office, many perks, I am practially unfireable, 32 holidays per year and a worker friendly corporate culture.
I am not entirely sure if this will help though. Birth Rate in Japan, ( or in any nation ) is a complex issues. Both cultural and economics. Why would anyone want a baby when they can barely afford themselves decent standard of living? ( Standard being different from person to person )
Rent and food even in Tokyo is much cheaper than even medium sized cities in the states.
People might not be able to afford a luxurious lifestyle in Japan, and economists standard of living models may tell you otherwise, but the standard of living for a typical person in Japan is high
Once it becomes a norm, people want more.
There are macro and microeconomic reasons , but not being able to afford to raise a child is not one of them. Most of the reasons are social.
Most of these “leaders”, especially in “startups”, have very short term goals - exit, acquisition, insane funding and valuations etc.
It’s not that they don’t think about employees burning out or lack of their well-being. They count on it. They know exactly what’s happening and they know that that 2<x> year old burning out (literally falling ill mentally and physically) after 7 month of hell, but wrote y number of functioning APIs, was a great success!
And that’s just software.
I don't mean to suggest this is a universal trend, but I remember being surprised to see that Tora no Ana, a comic book shop with tech company aspirations, advertised "super engineer" positions that let you work four days a week. But it turned out this was a position with higher qualifications than a normal engineer that just gave you the option of working four ten hour days instead of five eight hour ones.
https://www.toranoana.jp/recruit/super-engineer/
While the suggested four day work week here sounds like a real four days and not longer hours, I do think that managing company expectations will be difficult.
I went to 36 hours when I started my new job, but went back to 40 this year because I can manage with working from home, and because of the pandemic there were no pay raises last year - while cost of living is spiraling upwards because of rapidly increasing housing prices.
The idea shouldn't be how this benefits their career and contributes to the economy, but how the individual can live a more balanced and healthy life.
"...improve the balance between work and life...family care".
A three day weekend would give the salaryman/person some time with family.
Other countries are making policy changes as well. China is also planning to remove all caps on births to combat what they see as problematic demographics.
Of course - why would a company want their employees to learn new skills on the side that could potentially lead to greater personal fulfillment -.-
Obviously being facetious but the Japanese work ethic expectations are terrifying
Even in Europe we have countries with a high rate of unemployment among young people.
But why do we have to "compensate for the lost workday"? Let's just say that at this point in history we appreciate work-life balance more than before and we'll switch to 4-day weeks with the same paycheck.
Employers are greedy and evil. Their focus is profit maximization. Not employee well being.
Given the chance, do you really think employers will even give vacation days to employees? No way. They will want you to work 24/7 if the govt. is ok with it.
You seem to imply that for any entrepreneurship, you need to have no worker protections at all. But that is simply false.
You seem to have no understanding that powerful states is a VERY recent invention in History.
There is no government possible without incomes that support it. You got this exactly the other way around.
Has it? Levels of life of the whole world are on the rise for the past 20 years at least - if you want to make that argument the current data does not support that at all.
For fun, the US is at 127%. Equity, debt, fiat, just rows in a database. If it doesn’t work out, what’s the worst that happens? We go back to few more hours a week? But if it does work, it’s time work evolves further.
Do you really think that at large scales the need to watch spending just dissolves? Why do you think nations have budgets? Do you think it’s all a fun game?
If what you’re suggesting doesn’t work, people don’t just go back to work longer hours.
Some people die, some people lose their homes. Incredible.
But hey, just rows in a database. Tell that to families scraping by.
We’ve forgiven $3 billion in student loan debt in the US, for various legitimate reasons, without consequence for example. Yes, the US has more power to do this because it’s a reserve currency, and no you can’t do it forever, but there is room to experiment when you’re a nation state.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2021/06/16/biden-h...
A lot of people are talking about cutting back on days everywhere.
But now, more than ever, is when we need to be working harder to get back to where we were before.
(Of course, my attitude to these things is shaped by being a business owner -- not an employee. So take with that point of view)
Exactly. Which is why of all governments the Japanese one is pushing the 4 day week is really surprising. Here the mentality is really to work for the show, even if resulting in no increase of production whatsoever.
The worker gets nothing except less life and more stress. The owner sucks up all the benefit.
Money is a powerful drug and society needs to tame the habit. Otherwise, you will end up with conditions equal to slavery for the workers and royalty for the capital owners.
All this will lead to is revolutions and bloodshed.
Its ok to sacrifice rapid growth, in cycles, to steady but slower growth that has none.
The worker thinks 'without my work, the owner would have nothing!'
The owner thinks 'without my business, the worker would have nothing.'
The truth is, both are right, to different degrees depending on the circumstances. A good owner should make workers feel they have a stake, whether by salary or ownership. A good worker should make the owner believe they are making a good decision by paying them.
I have no answer to the debate in the title, I just find this little sub-argument fascinating.
This is a time where you need minds on deck. The "knowledge worker" as some places call it. You stretch them too thin and you get less for you money and time.
Is a 4 day week better? I don't know. But I know it's not the same context as it was too years ago.
There's always more stuff to be done and it needs to be done faster to keep up.
However I can't just expect everyone to keep "working harder" without sacrificing the household itself.
Just letting things lapse, optimizing for speed through technology, and lowering expectations (un)surprisingly end up with a healthy household.
Business can be run the same way.
Where we were before was broken, and the pandemic helped reveal that. Poor work/life balance, income inequality, industries built on JIT processes which fail spectacularly when the unexpected happens (see lumber, shipping containers, semiconductors, etc), an unfortunate wake-up call that even with entire industries shut down and almost no flights and cars on the road we only reduced emissions by 13% so we're going to need to make incredible sacrifices and green-tech investments if we even want to hope at our promised 50% reduction by 2030.
We shouldn't hope to get to where we were before. We should try to be better, and perhaps learn to live with less, because on a global scale we're not going to have a choice before too long whether we do it consciously or have it forced on us.
> Where we were before was broken,
Not for the people with dominant power over society, including over the media organizations that write the narratives fed to the masses.
And that's the answer to your question.
First of all, your focus on this boogeyman of work/life balance assumes that all but a small percent of the global population even has enough autonomy in their employment to enjoy any balance whatsoever. Most everyone in the world is at sustenance levels of labor, "work/life balance" is the work of being alive. Secondly, JIT everything worked for the past 100 years, failed during an unprecedented in history event (we've had pandemics, but we've never "shut down" society) and will probably recover to do well until the next once-in-a-century event. Solving the global emissions crises isn't going to occur via the wealthiest working remotely or "learning to live with less". Population growth is far and away the biggest contributor to global climate change. Not your commute to the office, but growing enough food, building enough homes and providing for nearly 10 billion people and counting. Again, most of these people don't have anywhere near the luxury of bemoaning a poor work/life balance.
It is so telling that the answer you see to solve the woes of modern society -- which as you are commenting on HN, you and me and the rest of us are beneficiaries of -- is to work less and remotely. What sacrifice you make for the good of the world!
I am sorry I just am beyond over the sanctimony and self-importance of everyone. Now that _you_ have _yours_ and can relax in relative comfort, lets call it a day and cut off the engine that rose you and yours out of poverty for those poor schmucks still dreaming of the comfort of a 40-hour work week.
I'm fully aware not everyone is in this position to request or push for work/life balance. I've worked a decent amount of shitty jobs in my day, in fast food, retail, shipping/receiving, warehouse work. I've gone through periods where I was so physically exhausted after work I didn't do much more than go home and pass out and wake up and go back to work again. It sucks. And I don't know what they can do exactly, I'm too far removed from that now.
I believe I did say that shutting down and working remotely brought our emissions down only 13%, not "solving the global emissions crisis". I said it was a painful wake-up call that even with all that happened last year, it wasn't anywhere near enough. So we need to try to do as much of that as possible and a lot, lot more if we are to get anywhere close.
I don't know what that might be. I was listening to Bill Gates' 'How to Avoid a Climate Catastrophe' and he thinks there's several technologies that can possibly get our emissions to zero in the next decade or two. But after listening to that book I'm more dubious than he is. It sounded like even with his optimism he just inadvertently kept making a case for how fucking hard it is, how every piece of the solution has downsides and problems to overcome to work at scale, and how there's no way we're going to change enough hearts and minds or provide enough incentives to do enough to get us to 50% reduction in the next decade, or all the way down to zero by 2050.
I don't think just staying home means we solved it, not by a long shot. We (and I mean corporations in this too, they're the bigger culprits than individuals) need to be doing all the things and a whole lot more, if possible, and even then I don't see it being enough totally avert catastrophe. I'm just hoping instead of like, 4-8 degrees warming (and likely human extinction or near extinction), maybe we'll somehow bring it down to only 2-3 degrees of warming. And that will still lead to terrible things.
And it'll be hard to give up creature comforts. I'm failing pretty hard at this more than I'd like to myself right now. I'm trying to get better, though, but even if I do, it's going to make such a tiny, unnoticeable difference by itself.
We can expect things to get fucking bad regardless, I think, I'm just hoping we can make things slightly less bad instead of everyone just shrugging our shoulders and accelerating and steering directly into the iceberg.
We are already dealing with famine and disease in many places of the world. Independent of whether or not this is climate caused, we can't solve it without expending large resources and using the industrial might that we've built.
The conundrum is that the place with massive population growth aren't really the places with the resources to implement green energy solutions. Coal is easier, coal is cheaper. Yes, the developed world's love of meat is a major source of deforestation, but so is the need to grow the food to feed 10 billion people.
Retarding population growth is _the_ single biggest thing we can do as a species to reduce climate damage. This is one of the reasons I am not planning to have kids, when I die the relative population to my existence drops by one. Even if my kid rode their bike their whole life, lived in a climate friendly passive heating/cooling house and ate locally sourced food, their existence would produce more climate gasses than my ICE could ever dream of producing.
Retarding economic growth is, a better candidate, if you limit it to “retarding growth”; you’d need substantial and rapid population reduction (not just “retarding growth”) to offset the expected effects of near term economic development outside of the West.
Obviously, the biggest thing we could do to end anthropogenic clomate change is species-scale mass suicide. No anthropos, no anthropogenic climate change.
OTOH, most people who want to address that problem don’t actually think that doing the most we can on that unconditionally overrides all other concerns.
It is all a balancing act and I am not convinced any balance we find won't result in massive suffering and loss of life somewhere.
I get so upset about people who think green energy is the answer when they don't realize it's not feasible if you want your current lifestyle. People altogether need to stop driving so much, spending so much, and living more modestly. I guarantee you without even switching to green energy we'd see a higher drop in non-renewable usage.
Yeah I believe I said that when I said we need to make large sacrifices, I just didn't specify what those sacrifices were exactly.
I don't think green tech is the end-all be-all. I honestly think we're kind of fucked either way (if anything I was holding back, I've been reading some pretty bleak shit about how impossible this task will be and how bad things can get, but this is Hacker News and most people here don't seem to be receptive to that). Clean tech is just part of reducing the degree of how fucked we are, at least slightly.
And I also think nuclear energy needs to be part of that solution to bring down emissions as well, at least for now. I haven't been against nuclear power for a long time, and was disappointed how people shunned it again after Fukushima.
Green energy is not the end of the solution but it is part of it. It's also quite a big part of it.
Technology increases leverage allowing exponential outputs given the right inputs.
Overworking employees ceases to be a viable strategy for high tech industries.
the question is whether working more really leads to working harder and more output. From what I see most people just go through the motion after a certain amount of work per week. They look busy and feel busy but I am not sure the output is there. I personally I am most productive if I work around 32 hours per week with some spurts of much more work in between.
Are you sure that is because of employees slogging in factories?
Productive people outside of work will develop and nurture their passions. That is a net positive effect on the economy. This leads to new innovations, companies and benefit to the economy.