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Comment by darthrupert | Hacker News Reader

It would be useful (although more difficult) to know how many effective hours people put in every week.

I have a real big difficulty believing that most white-collar people can get over 20 effective hours a week, irregardless of their number of office hours. I also suspect that there's no correlation between office hours and effective hours.

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Ditto. Sweden defines a working week as 40 hour. However, 1 hour of wellness and two daily coffee breaks (15 minutes) are usually included in working time. So "butt-in-chair" time is 36.5 hours per week.

Ha, come to Austria where your break times are not included in your working time, so if your contract is 38,5h per week, then that's your expected butt-in-chair time as that doesn't include any breaks.

The mandatory 30min lunch break and other coffee breaks are not included in that, but as extra in your own non-billable time, while the clock is not running, so you could easily be spending 40+h/week in the office if your company insists on keeping track of your time, which some do and also don't offer WFH so they can nickel and dime you on your butt-in-chair time which they can't if you're at home.

Another Austrian work quirk that always gets me: 14 salaries.

Yeah, you're not actually getting paid 2 extra salaries, it's just your yearly salary divided by 14 instead of 12. The only extra si you pay less tax on those 2 extra salaries so you get more money in your pocket before summer and Christmas.

I guess when the 13 and 14 was added it was essentially a pay increase in some negotiation? And stuck around? However, if the company has more money in some point of the year, it makes sense for them to pay more wage at that time.

Also applies in Germany. Infact, every contract I have(had) includes a special clauses “40 hours per week, not including any lunch or break hours…”. However, I see my colleagues spending 2-3h each day on coffee/lunch break and doing actual work for ~3-4h and then going home. Only people I’ve seen religiously maintaining that 40h/week are consultants/contractors/HR.

Honest question: as a person in-between academia and industry (sorry, I stalked you a little bit), what are your views on the percentage of actual, hands-on work happening in those 36.5 hours? I have a theory that in Sweden you must divide your work into 80/20: 80% self-advertising (bragging in meetings, etc.) and 20% actual work. Anything more and you’re wasting your time and losing the race.

I'm at the seniority in my career where I still find stalking flattering. :)))

I think in every job you need to (a) do good work, (b) make that work visible. So at least some amount of self-advertisement is good both for the individual and the organization. You would wonder how much time I spend on "stalking" engineers and making their amazing work more visible towards our customers -- giving proper credit during our biweekly demos, of course.

Unfortunately, above a certain threshold (say about 20% of your time), self-advertisement is toxic. As far as I could notice, this happens in environments where people feel unsafe. This can happen both in industry and academia. However, you might be right that self-advertisement is more present in academia, given the tendance to assess individuals over teams and given the overall "squeeze". :)

Would you agree?

I never worked in the industry, so unfortunately I don’t have a basis for comparison. But in our case (academia in Sweden) I’d say it is certainly not because of lack of safety. If anything, one of my assumptions is that it’s actually the opposite. Since we’re not being judged by merit (at least not in any significance way for better or worse), and there is no easy way to get paid more for extra time or better outcomes, people will inflate their mediocre results to find a way to work less with the same pay.

Interesting hypothesis. I think your hypothesis has some merits. The way salary increases work in Swedish academia is that the union negotiates an average increase over the whole university -- say 2.5%. Then the department head will give some below the average and some above the average.

So it's up to you to be "the loudest in the department" to get an above-average increase.

Not saying how things should be, just saying how things are.

>I have a theory that in Sweden you must divide your work into 80/20: 80% self-advertising (bragging in meetings, etc.) and 20% actual work

Doesn't that depend more on company, size and industry than on country?

In big and inefficient companies everyone dedicates most of their time to visibility to the upper echelons, instead of actual work, as that's what gets you promoted. You loose a lot if you're the one actually doing the work, but none of the bigshots above you knows about it. You might even get laid off lol, I've seen it.

In small companies your productivity is more easily seen by those in charge of your paycheck so you can dedicate most of your time to that as you know that will be rewarded

Could be. Actually I could argue that Sweden is just one big inefficient company. :) But I’ve worked in a couple of other countries and Sweden is by far the worst in this aspect. Competition and merits mean very little here because jobs are extremely safe (once you get one), salaries differ very little, and even when you’re not working you get so many benefits many people don’t even care too much. So, what happens is that the system optimises not for those who actually get things done, because that doesn’t matter too much, but for those who know how to build an interesting, believable façade.

Let me exemplify with a common interaction from my daily work. Suppose I’m working on a project proposal. Before I do anything, I need to have a meeting with 5 different people from various administrative positions in order to make sure they “allow” me to write my proposal (i.e. if it aligns with the institution’s goals, if it meets all the hundreds of rules that are in place at any given time, if there are other people that “should” be involved, etc.) After that 1h meeting, they’ll all say “ok, great! We’ve done our job. No go and invest the 50h needed to write the proposal, and don’t forget to include our names in it because we’ve helped you so much. This is your part of the job!” So I go and write the goddamned thing and put everyone’s names in it. Then the project gets accepted, these 5 people are posting this thing everywhere, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. as if they actually had anything to do with its content. They get promoted, invited for committees, and the whole shebang.

Now don’t get me wrong, I also get recognition, but my salary is almost the same as theirs. Sometimes smaller. And because it’s so obvious they got a lot of rewards with very little work, it just makes more and more people seek administrative jobs and less seek jobs where you actually get shit done. I understand; why would you care? If I was born here I sure as hell wouldn’t.

Edit: I realize maybe “very little” work is misleading. Maybe they are doing the same thing many times a day. But it’s for absolutely sure much “easier” work than actually getting the research done. It’s the kind of work that you can completely turn off at the end of the day or weekend, for example.

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