Average worker now logs off at 4 p.m. on Fridays
axios.com
axios.com
Every Friday, he came in with a copy of the Wall Street Journal, wearing his usual expertly tailored suit, sat at his desk in the front of the room, and asked the class “What day is it?” The class would answer in unison, “Its Friday”. “And what happens on Friday?”, he’d ask, to which we would all dutifully chant: “Absolutely nothing.”
He’d open his paper and we had the rest of period to do whatever, so long as it didn’t result in him being interrupted.
White collar fucking off on Fridays is nothing new.
I.e., was it an educational win to have him as a teacher despite his Fridays policy?
Monday: recuperating after the weekend
Tuesday: preparing for work
Wednesday: work
Thursday: recuperating after work
Friday: preparing for the weekend
After the presentation, he asks the audience if they have any question. The most senior employer rises and asks, "So wait, you mean we're going to toil like horses EVERY WEDNESDAY NOW???!"
(As far as I can tell, this dates back to Soviet times at least, if not earlier.)
The study in question is from the 2017-2018 period which kind of breaks the premise of the whole article.
Also from the same study, to nobody's surprise:
> The study’s findings suggest that fatigue and stress can accumulate throughout the workweek, potentially leading to decreased productivity, particularly on Fridays
At the end of the week, I come back to a home that's been neglected and have to spend a chunk of the weekend getting things back in order before the next week starts. Working from home means I can do five minutes here, ten minutes there, and the place stays clean.
And because I've been doing it so long, I'm more productive and more relaxed at home. Working from home is a skill, and if the industry could just make up their minds and commit to it, more people would develop that skill and productivity would equalize or increase.
No deploys allowed also really reduces any urgency among devs.
My hours are more like 8-2 or 9-1. Sometimes I log off after lunch.
Remote work is awesome. No more dealing with impatient dick heads on the road. No more contributing to the destruction of the local environment via tail pipe emissions or tire wear particles. More importantly more time to spend with family, friends, or personal projects. Overall happiness is increased.
I’ll never understand the reasonings behind forced RTO. Is it a hidden financial gain for CEOs to fill the offices? Is it a false flag op to “appease” stock holders (“hey guys pandemic over, we are working to returning to normal. Pardon any poor quarterly results for the year”)?
Leaked Amazon doc shows reduced physical office footprint saved company billions.
All data is showing forced RTO policies are counter intuitive and counter productive.
> I'll never understand the reasonings behind forced RTO.
Uh, the first excerpt might help answer the question you pose in the second.
What’s the point of staying logged into a computer staring at nothing?
You know what’s also “fraudulent”? Wasting my time.
Time I will never get back. Time that you can never buy. Time that I will never spend with family/friends. I will never get back the hours lost to commuting to a stupid office.
Who’s “defrauding” who at this point?
No. It is factually true. You refuse to meet your contractual obligations towards your employer, but represent to him that you have met them. That absolutely is "fraud".
>You know what’s also “fraudulent”? Wasting my time.
No it isn't. It is not fraud to waste your time.
>Who’s “defrauding” who at this point?
You are defrauding your employer. Lying to your employer about the time you work is fraud. Your employer wasting your time does not under any circumstances count as fraud. In fact you signed a contract which explicitly allows your employer to tell you what to do with your time, including telling you to waste it e.g. by sitting in front of a PC waiting for someone to talk to you about something. If you don't like what he tells you to do you have options, but refusing to work and representing to him that you have worked is not an option you have, without commiting fraud.
There is no world in which you are not committing fraud. And there is no world in which your employer is defrauding you.
I wonder if you're referring to jobs outside of the U.S.?
Salaried software developers in the U.S. typically don't have actual contracts.
How are wages defined, if not by a contract?
As an exempt salaried employee you can simply check your email and (legally, backed by case law) call it a day of work. In an at-will state an employer can let you go for any reason. The contract is favorable to both parties at the same time
Again, you are very dramatic. Everything you have said hinges on the fact that “yOu hAvE tO be 100% aVaIlAbLe dUrInG 9 tO 5”. This is not the case.
If there are employers out there that do this. Their priorities are not on delivering a usable product but using other people to make themselves feel better (surrounding themselves with yes people, lol)
>If there are employers out there that do this. Their priorities are not on delivering a usable product but using other people to make themselves feel better (surrounding themselves with yes people, lol)
This isn't something an employer or employee decides. My contract is essentially a single page stating my salary, days of and saying that labor laws apply. There is no actual alternative I have.
If he self reports weekly hours or they are just assumed he is commiting fraud. If he correctly reports his worked hours his wages will obviously get cut to represent the hours worked and lead to swift termination as he is violating the contract he signed.
Why do you think he’s reporting hours and getting paid hourly? This is pretty uncommon in my experience, usually people work a salaried job where they’re paid in terms of an entire year. They don’t report their hours, that’s typically considered a toxic work environment in software development. For example at AWS we take turns being on-call every couple weeks and reporting hours would look absolutely ridiculous, it would be something like 80 hour work weeks.
It’s kind of like if you and your wife insisted that you report how many articles of clothing you’ve each folded or how many dishes you put away each day. When one of you ends up doing a bit more or less, it’s not “defrauding” the other
An hourly employee (several got fired at my last office for this, contractors who were not salaried) who shows up late in the morning and leaves early in the afternoon and claims an 8-hour day, yeah, that's defrauding. A salaried employee without a contractual requirement for 8-hours at their desk, then not fraud (maybe won't win them points with peers and supervisors, but not fraud).
Honestly if this person does all their work and does it well and just works really fast, that’s great. I’d keep them. Performance matters not hours.
If they’re fucking around and underperforming they’ll eventually get laid off. Don’t see how their work location matters that much either way. Someone who sucks at home probably sucks in an office too.
walk to my fav pub, and fuck around. Or even better take a walk around the city parks and enjoy the views in the middle of the day. Maybe even get more exercise in for the day or walk the dog.
And depending on your job you can go out to actual normal non-forced social spaces while working “from home”, some of the time.
I tend to go to a coffee shop most days for a few hours. Some days I'll go to a public library, or a co-working space.
As a young, single person, staying at home for 4-6 hours every day is soul sucking. I can see it being very appealing to anyone with a family, though.
Also invested significant money into wfh setup. Monitors, chair, standing desk. Much better at home than whatever shit office managers buy at the surplus store
[edit] in fact, at certain times they’ve had to shift workers around when new buildings have been completed to meet occupancy targets for whatever benefits they’re getting, before they have enough new hires or transfers to really use the space. Just shuffling people a few hundred meters away so the compliance forms have the right numbers. Total joke.
Team is well aware of the product and confident. Very very rare to have knowledge colocated within a specific member of the team.
All or most knowledge is well documented as well.
On the very rare instance I am actually needed to put out a fire. We have “on-call” rotations (pager duty).
1pm is when my meetings end (to the extent that I can control) and I can get to work on my real work for the day. This includes meeting with fellow independent and competent developers to ship features. Our software is also in high demand
on occasion i leave a little early but i also often get in early. I WFH 2 days a week.. it suits me fairly well.
What I'd really prefer though is to take my LSL one day a week.. have three day weekends every weekend. I feel that two days off followed by five on is feeling like I'm scraping the edges of the bottom of the barrel.
I think the awesomeness of remote work really depends on the company culture. If you're in a meeting heavy environment, it may be pure hell for anyone trying to do technical work. If someone schedules 3 meetings with a half hour or more in between, the whole day might be shot.
Especially with kids.
WFH helps a ton with that, though. Can make dinners during the week instead of prepping on the weekend as much (do most of your mise during a meeting or something), don’t lose time to a commute so there’s more time to get stuff done during the week, get a couple loads of laundry run when it’s time to stand up and stretch and look away from the screen for a few minutes anyway, et c. It saves the weekend for actual relaxation, or at least more of it for that.
This is my life, and I just accept it now. I've tried so hard to change. I've tried to balance it all. I don't/can't care anymore. My place is always a wreck and so be it. I only have two days to myself and I value other things in life more.
Even during weekends, I put aside hours replying to lower priority emails and completing other work commitments that may have piled up from the week before.
If anything, this WFH movement has led to more hours worked/higher productivity for me (and my immediate colleagues).
This is of course worse in Asian cities with super congested traffic. When you spend 2-3 hours/day commuting, it becomes very hard to maintain a regular workout schedule.
A commute time of perhaps 20 minutes one way is manageable. Anything beyond that simply eats into your quality of life, really.
the traffic will not delay you; only deep snow or civil disaster will stop you; you will save money on gas; you may not need a car at all; you will get fit; you will save 30-minutes of going to the gym; you will suffer less from stress; you will achieve at least 2 things every single day; you may also be in nature, go through a park, or along a beach - if you are lucky, or deliberately choose your dull jobs wisely, to get a premium commute.
The article also doesn't touch on total hours worked during the week, but that makes a big difference, too.
If hourly workers are logging off early on Friday, it could be because they've already put in enough hours earlier in the week that they'd be veering into overtime territory if they were to work late on Friday, and so it's their employer, rather than them, who is making the call.
But if it's salaried workers who are logging off early on Friday, it's likely because they recognize that working late on a Friday isn't actually going to accomplish much (especially if others are leaving early, too) and so it's not worth putting in the extra time.
Monday-Thursday, we would go for a run, often alone on our individual schedules, but sometimes in a group. The target was a pub a few miles away. We would sprint down the hill, touch the pub, and run back up to the site. It was a serious pursuit, there was a fiercely contested leader-board maintained in the office. New junior hires were challenged to beat the old-beards - many of which were ex-military, very proud, and very hard to beat.
Friday, we would would drive to a pub (occasionally the same hallowed turn, but often some other local hostelry), have a long lunch, drink a few beers (most of us did not have to drive home), and discuss old times, new technology, big projects, legendary deadlines that were beaten, and stories about sport or running. What was left of Friday afternoon was just tidying-up work and a some admin, combined with a little chit-chat about the venues and parties that would occupy the weekend.
I think it is high time the society looks into this as a way for it to be more productive as counterintuitive as it may sound.
Personally, I find it hard to be productive with a 4-day workweek.
I think we should push to lower the retirement age instead of shortening the workweek.
Fridays should be used for sync up meetings, planning for the following week, and retrospectives on the last however many weeks of work. Any of those meetings should be earlier in the day. The only communication out of any of that should be latency tolerant (questions won't be answered until Monday at the earliest).
This allows people to check out earlier on Fridays if they need/want. Forcing butts in seats until the quitting bell rings is a waste of everyone's time.
I know after going fully remote I started working earlier in the day.
I'm a night-owl kind of person, and I just can't make myself function any differently. Remote work greatly benefits me with a relaxed time schedule, since no matter when I log on/go to work, my brain doesn't start working until about 1:00pm/13:00.
4’s just when enough other people have left or logged off that you feel like you’ve got some herd protection doing the same.
- observation 1 :: it's nothing new we tend to work less, there are studies divided by cohort of age for instance stating newer generations do work less, engage less than older ones for instances (sorry I do not have a link at hand) and it's not new the sentiment "we work to live, not live to work", I generally add that before people know they can get more working more, for the entire life, i.e. people know they can slowly improve their lives working hard. With the declared WEF agenda "in 2030 you'll own nothing", with evident push toward smart-cities populated of evident de-facto slaves who are bound in an assembly line, earning to live, consuming all they earn in services they need, no heritage, no ownership, anything is decided outside the smart-city/forced labor camp and those inside are just obedient slaves those who think this will happen feel NO REASON to work since their work can't improve their condition for their life and get passed to newer generations;
- observation 2 :: despite a very obscene business-driven digital evolution against the civil society, tailored to reach the no-ownership, no-competence, no-future slaves model, a real Fordlandia, not Telosa, Arkadag, Prospera, Innopolis, tomorrow NY, SF, ... things start to be digital a little bit, meaning a gazillion of classic tasks that classically demand much work to be done now are quick or even automated, in other terms we need to work much less in various fields, and managers cray in tears that less enslaved workers start to care about their life as people not they work-life as life;
- observation 3 :: there is a dichotomy in our society between "those from the old generation" who reject the digital world, generally oppressed by those who rightly push digitization BUT for their own economical and political agendas against all the others and those who feel the potential power of the digital model but cry against the "old generation" who fighting it allow it's evolution in a way AGAINST the most instead of unite and pretend a good evolution for all, this create an immense amount of stress between two cohort and as a result fatigue, those from "the old generation" are tired of the modern life, those from the "digital" one are tired of a slow and bad evolution due to a small cohort of kleptocrats and a large cohort of luddites, and both cohorts can't fight their enemies, giving up instead "in the end we will all be dead" or "pulvis sumus et in pulverem reverteris";
To solve this issue the recipe for me is clear: we need to envisage a good future. We need to own our life, so we need deurbanization not in the USA model of suburbs but in the "Riviera model" of the EU, meaning spread homes AND workspace intermixed, with a string push to the home office, meaning homes where most people work and live in the same place, NOT just from remote, meaning a dentist have a home at II floor and it's cabinet at I floor, customers came from one side, personal life on the other, laundry have the working area in the basement, the residential area upstairs and so on, for eligible professions, while small buildings at short distance do the rest and only few districts exists, heading as much as possible to the dark factory model for the rest we can't do otherwise so far. This model is a nightmare for the 1% because service and enslavement industry plunge on it, no one buy the sharing economy, no one choose Uber or JustEat in this model and so on, people understand the value of ownership and do not want to came back, while terrifies the most because they fear the change and the responsibility of ownership, being slaves means having nothing to think, not feeling the pressure of the commandment and most aren't really adult enough to self-organize their lives. But that's is. This is the best model, potentially very easy to adapt to a changing world IMVHO.
Keeping up today trends we will end up in a broken dystopi than can't last longer.
I think you have something here. I'm not sure I agree with the "deurbanization" idea, and I'm not sure what this "Riviera" style would be, but I do note that some of what you're describing is also possible in urban environments, for example in Asian cities (or European cities a few generations back, the ancestral knowledge of which has been forgotten), where sole proprietors and family businesses operated in the way you describe. Moreover, it's possible in second and third tier American cities, where prices have not forced out ordinary people. Indeed, there are many semi-abandoned towns with good urban cores, ready to be revitalized, a la Strongtowns.
Individual ownership is entirely achievable in such places, but it does also hinge on a degree of coordination with others, because no one person can single-handedly bring a Main Street back to life and make it desirable again; a critical mass is required. It is this failure of individuals and small businesses to coordinate that makes them easy prey for the megacorps creating our dystopia.
Possibly a new mechanism for social organization in the vein of the joint stock corporation, HOA, traditional Chamber of Commerce, or even city government could solve the problem. Maybe that's what we need: Small-town mayors with the attitude of CEOs (let us not be led down the path of messiahs/fuhrers, however). Something requiring more active civic participation. (Perhaps the multiplication of university administrators can also be seen as symptomatic of students' abandonment of self-government. Is this because they are too diverse to form a democratic collective with a collective will? Or are the muscles just unexercised?) This requires more thought, or, better, more active experimentation.
I do see an objection to over-urbanization, which is that a too-large city becomes divorced from its agricultural surrounds, becomes food-insecure, dependent on outside sources of food -- at which point the giant agricorps enter. A more permaculture-type vision is appealing, but it doesn't seem compatible with cities over a certain size.
Smallish cities and largish towns, however, can be totally compatible with this style, and nearly all European cities fall into this category (they are all small).
Stepping back just a little, I do also think you're onto something with your emphasis on defining a future. That's why this kind of musing may have some thing value: Perhaps it helps in the imagining of such a future.
It must lead to action and experimentation, however, to really be valuable.
Some people are static, but most move, in the end an area or another looks like the same, following a relatively alive and kicking small scale real estate, moving means keeping change the local service/works mix, plans to avoid too much concrete in a natural landscape force such move avoiding concentration and the "spread" area is still dense enough to offer anything, but not to dense to stop evolution, so a shed of a supermarket today became a home tomorrow and an old home became a new shed for a blacksmith etc. A kind on unstable equilibrium that while it keep change at a higher zoom level it's pretty stable.
I speak about it because as a former young ex globetrotter that have seen many big cities and some years ago having choose a different life in French Alps I see this model as the most effective I've seen all other the world. Around me I have essentially al services, still being in nature, having at a short range a little Silicon Valley (Sophia Antipolis), not too far a local nuclear research center, various touristic amenities, a gazillion of small companies with most people living a relaxed and still productive life, with very wealthy an somewhat poor people living not more distant than in a big city and no too much different living condition to fracture the still moderately dense society.
Meanwhile on EU cities, well, they are simply too dense to been able to evolve. Most are old mess where any change is a nightmare, just digging the ground to repair a pipe it's a mess: nobody clearly knows whats under the ground to a point that's perfectly normal having here and there an HV electricity cable cut by a excavator hitting it (old lines have no warning signal above them), or a pipe cut while repairing the HV line and so on. Cities to spend big money just to change small areas even making here and there good results, but they are still unable to offer good quality of leaving and no path to really evolve. In the end despite all the advertisement about future cities the green new deal can't exists in them. The green new deal imply new different buildings and building them demand free space for the construction site, people relocation and so on. EU cities was designed to go by feet in work intensive jobs, now we have far less work intensive jobs and we need much more room for various stuff than the past, they are incompatible even more than large US zoned cities. It's not only a divorce from nature, all cities and most urban people do not know nature, try with some kids asking where milk came from and you'll find many saying "from the supermarket". It's the whole food industry than have to change. If you live in a spread area you go to a restaurant perhaps as frequent as in a big city but you also have food stock at home, so there is far less packing because being surrounded by nature means also being able to buy some locally made food, so it's normal for instance for me go buying olive oil at ~80km from my home in 10l can and bottle it at home, similarly for wine in demijohns, having less "quick service" it's normal to make some sausages at home so buying 30-60kg of pork, prepare and casing the meat at home, living it few days hanging in a fridge than freeze portioned the rest. This means less packing, bigger quantity, a different shopping model that perfectly match modern logistics and on-line retail, allowing still for efficient transport because once the online retail became glocal for real, so a neighborhood normally buy local product on line since they known them already local logistics and modern digital tools allow for a better efficiency than last-mile supermarkets. People move less for living while keep moving for pleasure, and economy keep turning at an efficient and not tied nor exaggerated peace.
Only aspect: the big&powerful loose to the small and medium, and they do dislike it... While many fear being "independent", knowing they are not accustomed to manage themselves, having no discipline without someone who command and put them in assembly line. This mix is IMVHO damn nasty.