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Comment by devmor | Hacker News Reader

> So during those 40 hours, let's say a person delivers 100 work units. If we were to say, from now on you only have to work 32 hours, some people will still deliver 100 work units, but many will deliver an approximation to 80 work units. Many people will automatically adjust. People have a "pace of work" that is like breathing.

Perhaps in manual labor, but I don't think this applies to white collar work. The limiting factor in output for this line of work seems to be intellectual exhaustion/burnout, not pacing.

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Exactly. Setting aside the "metabolic drag" of working in a company (time spent attending mandatory trainings, recurring stand-ups/all-hands, etc), I think everyone working in software has more productivity in their 1st hour than in their 39th. The question is where does the N * f(N) first derivative turn negative. I think it's lower than 32 hours/week for software development myself.

I would agree with that figure.

Personally I assign development to more of a "creative" role than a lot of people tend to. Your productivity can often depend on your inspiration, moreso the more senior/architectural your role is.

I've certainly had moments where I accomplished more at one 3am moment of clarity than an entire week before - and I think most experienced developers can say the same.

White collar work in the modern era is also very unrestricted. I can slack off during most of the day if I want (and nothing urgent comes up) and my manager will neither check nor care. Because of 24/7 systems, I can completely bunk fridays while pretending to work from home and just staying online from the phone. It is totally irrelevant to my job. I hate fridays and usually work Sunday to Thursday in reality. Many people I know have this level of flexibility in many fields.

My “work hours” in my pay slip say 75.8 for every 2 weeks. I work maybe 50 hours in a busy week. It is irrelevant to my organization. So we are already there in terms of intellectual white collar work.

I feel that we are employed above of all to be available when it matters rather than to do a certain amount of work for the hours you are paid for. Compare it to a workshop with some tools, you buy a hammer not because you use it for 8 hours a day, but because when you need it, you can't do without it. If you go a day without needing to use the hammer, it doesn't mean that having the hammer in your shed is a waste of money.

If the company cared only about getting certain amount of work done in the time they paid for, they would hire an external. And continuing the analogy, it's usually more expensive in the long run to rent a tool even if you use it only a couple of times a month, as well as having to get used to unfamiliar equipment, having no records of how well the rental tool performed earlier.

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