Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

I think the fundamental problem you've identified is the workday is too long. 40 hours a week is a lot, and most people work more than just 40 hours, sometimes much more.

Why have society's productivity gains not gone into reducing the time we spend working? Why do we seem to have ever-less free time?

Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours. Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?

View on HN

Shitty workplaces will be shitty workplaces. You can have traditional offices where work-hours are respected, and you can have traditional offices where everyone is "forced" into doing crunches and staying until midnight.

I think one thing people always misunderstand it: WFH doesn't need to mean separating work and home is impossible. Separate room that you can close if you have a house. Or going to a co-working space. Or in my case: Renting a 2-people office with a colleague.

Well, my anecdata is that this got much worse at my company after COVID made work-from-home a thing. There used to be no expectation that you would work after leaving the office; people would stay late sometimes (not that late), but once you left for the day, that was pretty much it. Some of my coworkers literally didn't own a computer at home.

Some of it was on the workers' end (including me). It just becomes so easy when you're in the same physical space at all times.

That falls 100% into "shitty workplaces being shitty workplaces".

"My workplace used WFH as an excuse to get more labor out of us outside work hours" is not evidence that WFH is inherently going to lead to that. It's just evidence that your workplace is shitty. It is one anecdote, not actual data that can be used to describe trends.

I also think that it's important as a remote worker to set boundaries and communicate them. It's really hard to know when you are working from the other side of the monitor. So, you have to be like: "Okay, it's 4:30pm, I'll take a look at this in the morning" and then leave like you normally would.

This. I'm fortunate to work in a place where working hours are respected and when you're off, you're off. Before COVID hit, I got into the habit of showing up to work and leaving a good hour and a half earlier than everybody else, so I could avoid being compressed in the metro. No one actually cared, and pretty much everyone got the memo that I'm not available after 5 PM, so no one expected any reply from me after that hour.

When COVID hit, and we all switched to WFH, this continued. At one point, we were only working part-time, but were free to work as we liked. Some did a few full days and took the others off, others worked every day, but fewer hours. This worked fine, too, because there was flexibility on both ends. Need to set up a meeting at a time when Jim isn't usually working? See if you can move it earlier / later. Not possible? Jim'll see if he can work later / earlier and adjust some other day.

I think the lesson is that what counts is both sides trying to work together. Of course, if either party tries to abuse the situation, like slacking off day in day out, or always setting up meetings outside regular hours, this falls through because the good will is lost. I work operations, so I sometimes had to drive to a datacenter at five in the morning to replace a switch or whatever. But I also sometimes could clock out at 3 PM to attend to some personal matter because it allowed me to not have to waste time waiting in line or some such, without having to take the afternoon off.

My anecdata is that it got a lot better. I probably worked like ten hours a week less on average during the whole 2020-2022 pandemic period. I even have weird nostalgia for the two months that we didn't have daycare at the beginning, which I remember thinking was really awful at the time, but when I look back now I remember spending a lot of large chunks of afternoons playing with my daughter when I would have previously been at my office. I was certainly a less effective employee though!

I disagree. I really like my work and I really like my family. The problem with commuting is that it introduces a gap of mediocre-to-awful time use in between those two things that I really like. Working fewer hours wouldn't solve that. I'd just be doing less of one of the things I like to do, replacing it with either a meh activity (if I can take public transport or there is no traffic on the drive) or a super frustrating activity of driving in traffic.

We haven't kept on lowering the weekly hours because despite the unstoppable productivity gains, people want more stuff.

Want to work 6h per week? Live on the strict minimum.

Want everyone to work less. Not happening.

Regaining time spent commuting is a pure gain of time without conceding on throughput.

An argument could be made that if all workers who can converted to remote but also went part time, all kids would truely have parents and environment deadlocks we face would be more half solved.

But here we are still debating which of hybrid, on-site or remote is best for some company cultures, whether the model benefits employers or employees most and how can we make populations and businesses swallow a carbon tax

> Want everyone to work less. Not happening.

It could. How did we settle on 40 hours?

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-wo...

```

The first demand of organized labor was 10 hours - the 10-hour movement. And they made a concerted effort and were successful, to a certain extent, to obtain the 10-hour day.

By the late 19th century, Hunnicutt says, the workweek begins to shrink to something closer to 60 hours a week for more and more people.

But it took the Great Depression to make 40 hours the norm. Government saw a shorter workweek as a way to fight the massive unemployment crisis by spreading the remaining labor out over more people. That led to a series of laws that eventually enshrined 40 hours as America's workweek in 1940. And it seemed like that trend would keep going. The most respected economist of the era, John Maynard Keynes, famously predicted that improving technology and increasing efficiency would deliver a 15-hour workweek by 2030.

```

A California bill is out to redefine the work week as 32 hours.

Keynes was pretty good economist, not sure he took into account that industrialisation then got us into societies of consumption.

Once we solved the production problem it didn't take long to invent new ones.

If his prediction is right we would already be at the 20h week. Not sure why we would suddenly get into sprinting sprinting for the next 7 years to catch up with the productivity gains observed in the last 93y. Efficiencies have many folds increased.

All the California bill will do is guarantee access to lower paid jobs. Not necessarily bad since so many low paid jobs dare to get workers to do 40 + non paid extra time.

Ironically the workers who delivered the bill and those who will vote in its favour all work somewhere between 60 and 80h per week. And will continue to do so if the bill passes.

I’ve heard arguments that Keynes was right, if you average out your working life + retirement. Most people had little to no retirement in 1930.

Today, a lot of productive output goes towards supporting the elderly.

The point the parent comment was making is that some people want to work more. If you want everyone to work less, you would have to mandate it by law. That is, not just a mandate on what employers can require, but a mandate limiting what individuals can choose to do. That's a fine proposal if you're into that kind of social engineering, it's a reasonable point of view that I just don't share. But in the country I live in, it's a certainty that a mandate like that targeting how individuals can choose to use their time would never fly; you couldn't get it passed, but even if you did, the backlash would destroy it right away.

> A California bill is out to redefine the work week as 32 hours.

In France, the official workweek is 35 hours. It was brought in with the same argument: spread the work to more workers. Didn't exactly work out as expected.

Then companies will move out of California. Employment law here has become very adversarial to employers.

Gosh, I sure hope the door doesn’t hit their asses on the way out.

> We haven't kept on lowering the weekly hours because despite the unstoppable productivity gains, people want more stuff.

Which people?

It's the ones with all the money and power who actually control this. Don't try to blame this on regular working people.

>Which people?

People who are advertised to, and told that they aren't good enough unless they use <product>. Ads create negative utility by attempting to make people less satisfied with what they were already happy with.

Obviously "not all ads", some ads do useful work of informing the public about a useful product when word-of-mouth isn't working "fast enough". I'm adding this line specifically to pre-empt nitpicker replies.

I'm not seeking to blame the average earner over the super rich.

Most people are very much attached to consumption, it's been a bigger factor that kept the common 40h week than the employers very possible desire to keep workers hustling so much.

Which people? In term of numbers and total impact that would be regular people, more so than those possibly having more leverage on defining what a working week should look like.

In any case the control is over the regular people. If the latter change the other bunch will de facto have to revisit how much they consume, by rough as much.

You forget that rent goes up with income in an area. So does the price of many necessary goods.

I rather forgot to mention that and how it turns into a cycle, pushing out people with ordinary income out of those cities.

It's pretty much everyone who wants more stuff, when they can afford it. But the kind of stuff different people want varies a ton cultural and individually. But no, it's not that "regular working people" eschew possessions while the rich consume. "Minimalism" and "FIRE" and "#vanlife" type things are all distinctly wealthy phenomena. It's people who can bail out of that lifestyle into a life of bounty if they decide to. Working class people may have fewer possessions (though this isn't even necessarily true IME), but that doesn't mean they don't want more stuff. Every "regular working person" I know is trying to save up money for stuff they really want but can't yet afford. The only people I know who talk about consumerism and people having too much stuff are those who can already afford anything they want.

Eh. No I think it’s really the commute.

Commutes are long. They also need to happen at specific times. It’s easy to start your day +/- an hour or two when working remotely. It’s not really an option if you’re expected to be on site by a certain time and have home obligations prior to that.

Commutes are also a stress and danger. I used to commute ~1.5hours in and out of DC and had to stop after getting home one day and realizing I couldn't remember anything from the drive I just did.

Fwiw That’s fairly typical. It does not mean you were not paying attention to driving.

I can attest to that. Been working remote for many years and home office is draining so i head out daily, outside the peak hours, across a small part of the city only, a precious pleasure.

> Why have society's productivity gains not gone into reducing the time we spend working? Why do we seem to have ever-less free time?

There are per-employee overheads (training comes to mind, probably tax & conditions law too). That means the economically optimum equilibrium is still to concentrate knowledge into select employees and have them work hard. Imagine that to achieve a certain outcome we can do it with, say, either need X people working Y hours or 10X people working Y/10 hours. Of the two, X people is usually a much better choice for employers because it reduces the per-employee overheads.

People also seem to misjudge their own preferences. Many might say that they'd like shorter days, but when tested they usually prefer to work more and have more stuff. Employees would like to work less hours in principle, but if you offer them more hours + more pay they take that deal.

In short, in practice, employers and employees both seem to prefer it when people work long days. If employees get more productive, both side of the bargaining table tend to negotiate for hours to stay at about the limit of what workers are physically capable of.

>In short, in practice, employers and employees both seem to prefer it when people work long days. If employees get more productive, both side of the bargaining table tend to negotiate for hours to stay at about the limit of what workers are physically capable of.

If that were true our workday would be something like 6 hours.

>they usually prefer to work more and have more stuff

My paycheck is the same whether I work 40(45) hours per week or 90. I've actually reduced my productivity rather than increased it because there's no point in being more productive as an employee. All that will do is give me more work to do for the same wage.

The answer is that we (I speak as an American) hate lazy people and view anyone not working full time plus as lazy. That's it. There's no additional overhead that magically appeared as productivity went up. It's greed and presenteeism. Work hard so your boss notices you so you can get that sweet, sweet 1% raise and a promotion that entails 200% more work. Why?

I don’t know if you’ve only ever worked for clueless management (a real possibility), but good orgs care about output not butt-in-seat time. In a healthy org you will be promoted because you are delivering value more efficiently, not because you are grinding more and more hours. Obviously the latter makes your effort more visible to management, but it’s not the only way to stand out. You’d be surprised how few employees really understand how their work translates to business value; just bringing a mentality where one thinks a little bit more critically about what they are doing and how things could be done better with the same amount of effort will make one much more upwardly mobile.

> In a healthy org you will be promoted because you are delivering value more efficiently, not because you are grinding more and more hours.

Everywhere I've worked promotions are handed out by brown nosing. While, yes, you need to have a baseline of skill it's not nearly as much as one might expect. You can hit senior while being a junior if you sniff enough of your boss' farts.

>You’d be surprised how few employees really understand how their work translates to business value

That's really irrelevant in my experience. Sure some places may be different I haven't worked at every single employer. I've done the enterprise, mid-sized, mom and pop, and start up gauntlet both as a contractor and a full-time employee and it's not been much different regardless of the company.

>how things could be done better with the same amount of effort will make one much more upwardly mobile.

I don't care how much better something can be done. I care about a paycheck. I've pushed myself to near burnout for jobs before (plural) and you know what happened? Nothing but more work added to the pile.

So at the end of the day I do the bare minimum required to hit my metrics. The people that put in the hours are surprised when we get the same raise. In some cases, people that do less than me get promoted and then have to figure out why they took on so much more work and responsibility for barely an increase in salary. It's laughable.

Butt-in-seat time, as you put it, is the metric nearly everywhere actually cares about. Status go yellow? Where were you and why were you AFK?

So, sure, I guess you could say that I've only ever worked for clueless management but in my experience all management is clueless. I've never worked anywhere IT or not, nor have I ever known someone personally who has worked anywhere, that management could turn the lights on in the morning without help. That's just what management is. The people who can do the job are doing the job. The people that can't get promoted to management.

> My paycheck is the same whether I work 40(45) hours per week or 90. I've actually reduced my productivity rather than increased it because there's no point in being more productive as an employee. All that will do is give me more work to do for the same wage.

Broadly speaking, that isn't correct. In the short term, over maybe a few months, the logic works. But over the longer term money tends to move away from unproductive workers and towards more productive workers. People don't make hiring, firing and pay decisions every day but when they do relative productivity is a consideration. Thinking this way leaves you open to being outcompeted.

Try years. The hardest working people I've had as coworkers are the same ones getting shit raises and no promotions because they're "too valuable" to move out of the position they're in. Meanwhile I've left the company after a few years for massive pay increases and they get to figure out what they're going to do with their year after year pay decreases thanks to not getting raises above inflation.

Your experience may differ and that's fine. In my experience having worked at numerous businesses from startup to enterprise it's all the same. Hiring budgets are always bigger than retention budgets. 1% raise vs 10%+ salary increase. I know which one I am going to pick.

> There are per-employee overheads (training comes to mind, probably tax & conditions law too).

The more significant overhead is internal communication. Recently, after coming back from a week-long vacation, I spent an entire day catching up on unread chat messages and e-mails. [1]

In a group of N people where everyone needs to communicate with each other, you will have N(N-1)/2 lines of communication, i.e. communication overheads per person even scale quadratically instead of just linearly (like the things that you mention do). Having a hierarchical org structure alleviates this somewhat by centralizing the flow of communication, but this introduces a different set of inefficiencies which most people around here are intimately familiar with.

I used to work 70% part-time (i.e. 5.6 hours per day) for a while, accepting the trade-off of less money, but more free time. However, as I ascended through the ranks, I ended up going back to full-time because my current position as senior IC involves so much communication work (meetings, mails, workshops, etc.) that I would not be able to do any actual programming if I were still on 70%. And the programming part is what I like the most about the profession, and also where I feel like I produce the most value, so I'm not quitting that.

[1] I opted not to "Mark all as read" because I have learnt over the years that it's actually very valuable to be up-to-date on what people in adjacent teams are up to, even as an IC.

You may feel like we're working too much, but the statistics paint a different story: we continue to work far less than we have historically. I agree with your concerns about work-home separation, but related to your example we're less than a generation removed from when the expectation (outside of those downtown office jobs) was that you probably were working on Saturday.

I need to see these stats.

i think it's an interesting question. to me, i actually don't mind being available for a bigger portion of the day because it has come with a lowered total amount of time doing work. i generally enjoy my job so i am a fan of the blend -- I'll wake up, do an hour of work, go to the gym, come back and do another few hours, go run an errand and make lunch, some more work, then maybe meet up with friends and finish up some stuff before bed. i find this to be a win win, I'm available for my coworkers across maybe 12 hours instead of a strict 8 but in total i work less than when I was going into the office

The problem with the idea of “everyone working less” is that some people won’t work less. Even now, there are people who work more than 40 hours / week.

Someone who works 25% more than you will make 25% more wages and will afford a 25% more expensive apartment, etc.

So long as you’re comfortable living in a suburb with lower desirability, you’ll be fine. But you might get priced out of places where people work more…

In fact, it doesn’t take a law for you to decide to start working less. Plenty of people work part time… You just need to balance how much you work with the affordability of the lifestyle you want to live.

Just to be clear, I wasn't proposing a law.

Here's the thing. Right now, it's difficult to work 25% less for only a 25% pay cut, especially when you include other benefits. And that's because people who work less than 40 hours are considered more temporary and less dedicated—because the market of "part-time" job seekers usually is more temporary and less dedicated, as of today.

But I think that's cultural.

I'd like to encourage more people to re-evaluate how they're spending their time. If a certain mass of workers decided they'd prefer to work 30 hours, it would become easier for others to work 30 hours as well. Not entirely unlike how normalizing remote work allows more people to do it.

You're assuming less hours = less pay, which is unwarranted.

Someone who is at work for 40 hours is not necessarily "working more" than someone who is at work for 30 hours, it just means they are less efficient. If both workers produce the same output, they should be paid the same.

In many cases, it's easy to make a 40 hour job into a 5 hour job with proper planning and automation. But since workers are required to be at the office for 40 hours a week anyway, the work "expands" to fill the time with useless meetings and time-consuming manual processes.

I have 6 parrots. They require hours of care everyday. The fundamental problem is the workday is too long, and not that I made a choice to add 6 parrots to my life.

...I really do appreciate this take, even if I can't completely get behind it (kids aren't parrots). But couldn't you make the same argument about commuting?

...and as an employer I'm going to look for the person who doesn't elevate parrot care to the level that you have. We're both right.

But there is a reason that we have some amount of legal structure (and should have a lot more IMO) to avoid employment discrimination against people who have children, but not people who have lots of parrots: Unlike pet parrots, children are very important to society, and societies that fail to incentive having children end up with fewer children, and that's bad.

> and societies that fail to incentive having children end up with fewer children, and that's bad.

I mean, citation needed. I know that e.g. Japan is having issues with an aging population but they could probably fix that with more immigration if they wanted to. The US certainly could.

There is lots of data on this. Immigration is also good, we should have a lot more of that too IMO.

By preferring someone else, you are treading on my fundamental human right to have to care for the parrots I chose to have.

At minimum you should make up plausible-sounding fake reasons for why you prioritize parrotless applicants over me.

I'm a VP managing six projects. They require hours of care each day. The fundamental problem is that the workday is too short, and not that I made a choice to add six projects to my life.

I love this. At it’s core there’s an element of communism in people wanting the benefits that today accrue to the hardest workers, while being allowed to allocate their own time according to their needs.

Not communism, but socialism, and yes, obviously. That's what governments are for, to balance the needs and desires of society against the needs and desires of individuals. Every government, including those thought to be very capitalist like the US, is constantly striking and re-striking this balance.

This is how a person like Mitt Romney can be both a ruthless private equity capitalist and also an advocate for natalist policies. There is no capitalism vs. socialism binary. Both things are good for a society in different ways for different things at different times.

While that is true, in the 3 years I've been working from home I gladly trade a few hours on the occasional Saturday for 10 hours of commuting per week.

> I think the fundamental problem you've identified is the workday is too long. 40 hours a week is a lot, and most people work more than just 40 hours, sometimes much more.

Citation needed.

> Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours.

It this some plot from employers? "We are forcing you to the office for your own sake so we won't make you work from home on weekends"?

> Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?

Is this a serious question? Because I have other more interesting things to do on Saturday.

The folks with wealth have seen our productivity gains. We as labor have not. We seem to have less free time because we're working more. We have less free time. We should be down at least to 32 hours per workweek at 4 days. If we unionized we'd be able to negotiate such things. Unfortunately, our industry as a whole seems somehow illogical about that as it, we're all some 100x rockstar type. As it stands that we (IT/Software Engineers) are classified as salary exempt (in the US at least) is incredibly damaging. When you can be made to work 70-hour workweeks with no additional pay and with your job hostage, I'd say that's a perfect time to unionize.

But broadly speaking we in the US view down time as somehow the greatest sin imaginable. Take time off? Better be sick. Don't want to spend 3+ hours of your day in waste? How dare you, you entitled commie!

WFH is the best way to reclaim time that we presently have. I get to lose two hours commute and an hour lunch that wasn't really mine anyway. My work week isn't going to be reduced so the time I have around that is what I can reduce. Given that I see no other way to do that besides working from home. When we work from home we must be diligent to create boundaries. Don't install Slack on your personal phone. Don't put your email on your personal phone. At the end of your workday shut the work machine down and leave it until the start of your workday.

>so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?

I don't work on my personal time without additional compensation. If you want that task done on Saturday you can do it yourself. If you want me to do it then you can wait until Monday.

> WFH is the best way to reclaim time that we presently have.

Is it? WFH is great for many reasons but the normalization of WFH is also bringing a lot of pressure for more hours. Some (many?) companies are using those hours you are no longer commuting to do more meetings.

Nobody (at least in Silicon Valley) would do 8am meetings because commutes made that impractical. But if you're sitting at home already.. hey let's meet at 8am.

Everyone had to leave the office at 5 to 5:30 to go sit in traffic. But now you're home already, so let's run this meeting to 6:30 or 7pm. You're not commuting after all, let's be productive with the time.

So it's companies that are stealing more time from you. That has nothing to do with WFH. Don't accept those meetings.

Anyone can find an arrangement where they work less. You seem to imply everyone should be required to work less, so that you’re not competing with people that are willing to allocate more of their time to work.

You don't compete with people that are willing to allocate more of their time to work. You compete against who can get more work done in the same amount of time. If you work for free why would the employer give you more money? You've already signaled that you don't have self-worth. You get nothing, boss laughs at you, and you think you're indispensable because you worked 60 hour weeks for the last three years with barely anything to show for it besides more work.

We shouldn't be required to work less. We should get the benefit of our productivity. If you are more productive you get punished by getting more work thrown your way.

>Anyone can find an arrangement where they work less.

Sure, anyone can quit their job. I don't see how that's helpful.

You compete with both kinds of people.

Maybe you do. If I have to compete with them I am not interested in the job.

You misunderstand, you're competing with both kinds of people in your career all the time. There's no opting out. There's a global pool of talent and it's one big market.

But an important corollary is that you absolutely do not have to be at the tip top of that competition to live a good and successful life. It's a global competition, but there are a lot of slots to be filled out there.

The incentives in place for businesses seem to dictate an ever increasing production of profits. There's no target production quota, where any excess is reduced to give more profits to employees.

In case you are interested, here are two tips I found for remembering loose vs lose:

1) add an 'r' at the end and pronounce it in your head (looser, loser)

2) convert to past tense (loosed, lost)

Loose is visually more loose (wide). Lose in comparison loses an “o”.

loose goose works

not lose gose

Reply on news.ycombinator.com