Why the 9-to-5 Day Is So Tough on Creative Workers | Hacker News Reader

Why the 9-to-5 Day Is So Tough on Creative Workers

m.theatlantic.com

170 pointswellpast96 comments

It is completely unsurprising to me that this could be true. If you look at efficiency gains over the years relative to wages, people are working more and earning less. I think the statistic is something like we should be working like 15 hours a week to get the same productivity as was the norm in either 1950 or 1970.

I think a lot of people would love to work half the time to make something like 2/3 or 3/4 of what they are making now, especially considering what wages should be given productivity increases.

Let's face it, the reason the 40 hour workweek exists anymore is a habit, not because it's the correct amount of hours to work. Everyone expects a 40 hour work week because that's just what full time employment is supposed to be right?

One argument for the 40 hour work week is that we've simply built a complex global society around it. Almost every country in the world adheres to it more or less. We have set store hours at either 8 or 16 or 24 hours, again based on shifts of workers, and we have a complex economy that I'm sure our leaders would argue depends on it.

Not saying I agree with that argument, or that something better isn't possible, just stating a potential defense to the "tradition" of our 40 hour work week.

Any solution would take a ton of logistics and considerations in terms of wage parity during any transition period, less you want people starving because of bad policy. OR it would take one class of people, those who own the means of production, to create this policy on their own. I see no reason why they would.

In lots of poorer economies people are asked to work more than 8 hours.

In which countries are store hours are usually set at multiples of 8 hours? (I have never see that being usual. But then, I grew up in Europe.)

My Dad is a cab driver. He was, when he was young a Bus driver. He used to routinely put in over time 12-13+ hours scale and generally used to report to the Bus Depot around 3 AM in the morning.

I'm not sure if that counts as creative work, but its very stressful though.

Note, this is in India.

> One argument for the 40 hour work week is that we've simply built a complex global society around it.

Which I passionately hate. Banks around here strictly adhere to the 40-hour work week, which obviously results in banks only being open when, you know, everyone is at work. Consequently, if you need to interact with a human at the bank, the only option you have is to skip lunch break.

The solution to that where I live(Lebanon), is that banks have 40hr weeks but instead of 8x5 they are 7x5 + 1*5. That is, they work 8am=>3pm on weekdays and 8am=>1pm on Saturdays. It's definitely less than ideal but at least if you need to interact with an actual human at a bank and it's not extremely urgent, you just go there on Saturday.

Exactly; I need to take half a day off at work whenever I need to go to a bank. Or a barber. I don't understand why so many services have opening hours when most of the people are at work. Where do they get their clients from?

It works because then it gives people an excuse to leave work lol!

Banks don’t exist to serve personal customers, they exist for business (the overwhelming majority of their profit comes from business accounts). To that end, they have no reason to be open outside of normal business hours.

I'm curious to see what company is first to use shorter work weeks as a perk (if it hasn't happened already) with a lower salary. I personally would love to work 20 or 30 hours a week, and have more time for side projects, etc.

I think part of the problem is that an employee has a set of fixed costs (healthcare, hr, etc) that don't decrease as an employee works less hours.

I agree, but man would it be tough for a company to offer this.

As CEO you have shareholders, competitors, customers, blah blah blah all expecting growth or seeking to take your growth.

So to do this, either a) everyone works more efficiently, but how many will hold themselves accountable to this? b) you hire more people, but creates more organizational complexity c) you ask people to work more hours

Seems most companies would take C.

You do this by measuring productivity in terms of what each person actually achieves each day, not by how many hours they spend in the office.

I have done this for a development team by agreeing milestones and targets for my team with both the developers involved and the internal customers. The devs are then responsible for hitting their targets, and notifying everyone else if they slip or are unable to meet them. The customers are responsible for notifying everyone if the requirements or context changes. I was responsible for notifying everyone if the priorities changed.

It then became the dev's responsibility to determine how many and which hours they needed to work to achieve the goals set, with some simple rules (like a maximum of 8 hours coding per day and 6 days working in a row). We had some weekly meetings that the entire team needed to show up at, otherwise it was their call. They could work from home or from the office, although we generally preferred office because of the network effects. If they completed a task early, they got to go home if they wanted (some didn't).

We got some flak from other departments because it appeared to them that we were never around, but they got used to it. The fact that we were consistently hitting deadlines was a HUGE plus to the whole thing; they could see this worked. As a bonus, we had decent support cover for some of the evening and night shifts as there were devs who preferred working those hours.

TL;DR: Don't measure people on how long they sit behind their desks. Measure them on what they actually do. Then set targets based on what you expect someone to do in a week. Then send them home once they've hit target. To grow the company, set harder targets.

I would love to hear more about that... Were you working on a single product or multiple products, each with new customers, or something in between?

Who is the judge as to whether the target has been hit? Do you lay the rules in advance? That must be a lot of work just to define what needs to be done... When developing a new product the specifications are bound to change during development, how do you tackle that?

I am genuinely curious how you approached these difficulties and would love to hear more about it.

The internal customer was as involved in the development as they need or want to be (usually not much, actually, with a few exceptions), but the target was usually a specific feature or capability requested by an end-user customer, so it was pretty easy to determine when the target was met. There'd be the odd wrangle over what had actually been agreed but it wasn't a major problem.

Generally speaking we kept each milestone small, ideally each dev would be hitting 1 or 2 milestones each week, not necessarily on the same project. I measured schedule time in quarter-day blocks and had a weekly 'schedule' that showed who was working on what each week. This meant our smallest schedule block was 2 hours... if it was a 5-min job we either did it for free or charged the customer 2 hours, which really helped reduce the mass of tiny jobs into manageable requests.

For new products we iterated a lot and involved the customer in specifying the next steps. There was one project that needed a lot of architecture up front, and that got a bit tricky as we had to spend a lot of time building with nothing to show for it, but usually we were able to do it in small sprints (this was before "Agile" hit our corner of the world!). This is pretty much a solved problem now.

Marcus, thanks for the answer! It sounds like a useful tactic... We are trying to push for a similar system so it is good to know how others cope with it. Thanks again!

Yea, definitely agree way to go is managing by tasks not time.

But then do you find games emerge? For example, do devs sandbag their time estimates so they only get 2 tasks instead of 3 tasks?

And what happened when you needed 50 tasks done, but the time estimates from your team, combined with the cap of 48 hours per week, fell short of 50 tasks?

> For example, do devs sandbag their time estimates so they only get 2 tasks instead of 3 tasks?

There are mechanisms like planning poker that help to prevent this. They still aren't perfect.

> And what happened when you needed 50 tasks done, but the time estimates from your team, combined with the cap of 48 hours per week, fell short of 50 tasks?

Most methodologies should see this coming except in minor cases. You generally have better foresight over longer projects. This can allow for some correction. Sometimes you just asked too much. Consequences are context dependent.

The obvious (and wrong) counterpoint to this is that you're clearly sandbagging your estimates. If you can get X amount of work done and consistently only work 30 hours a week, we'll just up the amount of work for your milestone by 1.2x.

37signals. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/be-more-pro...

Carsonified also does this: http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/work-less

It's the law in the Netherlands. If you want to work 4 or 8 hours less, an employer can't stop you (unless your presence is critical). I work 36h, a lot of my colleagues work 32. Some female colleagues work 3 days. I work for a creative agency with clients like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé and more. I enjoy my afternoon with my kid. (Side-projects and studying during the evening).

Overall just seems like the Netherlands are progressive on so many topics - see them all the time in the news.

Now if you can just get rid of the cold, maybe I'd move there..;)

Can't help you with the cold (although it's not exactly Norway), but... "For self-employed Americans, there is the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, which is a piece of war-era diplomacy that makes it relatively simple for Americans to set up manufacturing companies in the Netherlands. Since apps are, by definition, products, we certainly qualify for that." http://mur.mu.rs/2011/05/26/appsterdam-immigration/

I found a random quote on the wikipedia Pilgrim Fathers page that I can't stop but thinking about on many things US: "They found the Dutch morals much too libertine. Their children were becoming more and more Dutch as the years passed by. The congregation came to believe that they faced eventual extinction if they remained there." You're going full circle intellectually :)

Now I understand what it means to "Go Dutch".

They've been the opposite on a number of other things - see http://jacquesmattheij.com/life-as-a-service for reference

Great read, thanks. Crazy indeed but funny as well: 'The only way it seems for me to get out of this is by dying or emigrating to a place where there are none of these problems. Off planet is not an option. I spent some time researching the emigration options. A lot of time actually. And I’ve found out that the place where I live is in spite of all of the above probably one of the best places on earth to be living at the moment. It’s shocking! Half the world or more of it would be more than happy just to trade with me, and they’d be absolutely right.'

Unfortunately capitalism gets in the way.

Suppose you're a factory owner with 4 workers working 40 hours per week. You invest in a new machine that lets everyone be twice as productive. If you don't have demand for the extra output, then do you cut everyone's hours in half or let two people go?

Think the far more common solution is to let two people go. So even though productivity went up, hours worked per week stayed constant.

And I think 40 hours per week is status quo. Suppose you get a job offer, and ask to work just 30 hours per week. There are a number of forces conspiring against you: 1) If you're salaried, the employer would see this as less efficient (even if you're actually more efficient) 2) If you're used to a particular way of living, 30 hours could entail pay cut 3) Others are willing to work 40 hours per week, and hence employer gets more "value" out of hiring someone else per week

I think best bet to achieve that reality is to be your own boss. Friend of mine works as a UI consultant and bills out at $200 per hour, works maybe 20-30 hours per week. It's a brilliant gig.

I don't think the factory owner example applies here (the article is talking about creative workers.

And I also think that a lot of stuff is negotiable - you just need to show your worth. It is all too easy to go the same path as all others did, just because we think this is somehow expected of us.

But then again, I work 9-5 too and hate it (just the working hours, not the job), so I guess I should fix that first before I lecture others... ;)

Totally agree that article is talking about creative workers. But the factory example is concrete and great for a basic discussion on the question of "why the hell are we working so much when productivity has increased".

And completely agree stuff is negotiable. But as mentioned, if not here then above, I think being your own boss has the highest possibility for that.

For example, the ONLY people working <40 hours at my job are all independent contractors. They come in, do exactly what is asked, and GTFO. My company doesn't want them to "take on this as well" because every hour costs a pretty penny :).

> You invest in a new machine that lets everyone be twice as productive. If you don't have demand for the extra output, then do you cut everyone's hours in half or let two people go?

You let two people go, and they go work at another factory that has higher demands for its products. Then that factory invests in a machine and the process repeats. The output of products increased with the same number of workers. This process is known as "The industrial revolution" and is generally considered a pretty neat thing, not "capitalism getting in the way".

> I think best bet to achieve that reality is to be your own boss.

You're absolutely right. I don't think it's coincidental that experiments with different styles of working (remote, flexible hours etc) is coming out of the businesses more associate with low-cost entrepreneurship (ie. the industries where the barrier to entry is a good brain and a laptop). Ironically, this is capitalism at its absolute best.

The answer to this problem is to offer discount to your employer when you want to work 30 hours.

> do you cut everyone's hours in half or let two people go?

I think the argument here is to take a third option - offer to double the 4's salaries and simultaneously cut their hours in half. You maintain the same workforce and productivity but, non-traditionally, allow your employees and not just your profit numbers to benefit from good business decisions.

And that has no tangible benefit to the company so it will never happen.

Just look up thread, the solution was shorter hours and less pay. Put everyone in the McDonalds position, full time job doesn't cover living expenses but damn if those corporate profits don't look good.

The benefit to the company is not immediately monetary, no. However, you're going to be buying this new machine from long-term improvement profits (and not leveraging it against future profit from staff reductions), so keeping the current payroll won't hurt your bottom line, either.

But you can be damn skippy that you'll retain those employees longer, reducing turn-over costs. You'll maintain redundant, deep institutional knowledge. You'll have the flexibility (unless they're unionized, and even then sometimes) that when there's a down period and you need to temporarily drop or freeze wages, you can often negotiate it.

But, I don't approach work from the pure-profit perspective and I treat my reports like valuable people instead of commodities. I fully plan to continue doing so when I eventually start businesses of my own.

What happens when your competitors buy the same machine, are not so generous with their workers, and undercut your prices so that you're no longer profitable?

>Suppose you're a factory owner with 4 workers working 40 hours per week.

Your analogy doesn't work because its premise doesn't apply here. This article regards knowledge/creative workers like programmers and engineers, not line workers like retail and factory workers.

In line work, the hourly threshold at which you see diminishing returns is much higher compared with knowledge/creative work. There's also generally less need to be physically present at work as a knowledge worker, while as a line worker it's inherent to the job.

> Unfortunately capitalism gets in the way.

> I think best bet to achieve that reality is to be your own boss.

In other words, the system (capitalism) is broken for the vast majority out there who are not their own bosses.

If something is broken, then it needs fixing, is the way I see it.

the reason the 40 hour week still exists is because (after much blood shed) we managed to make it difficult to expect a 50 hour work week or a 60 but I don't see any reason to think people wouldn't be sitting around writing essays about how maybe we should scale.down to 'just' 40 if we didn't have the existing labor laws in place.

The 40 hour week is also enshrined in law because our labor laws are codified around the ideal of factory jobs. If you want a job that has benefits then that's a "full time" job at ~40 hours a week, a 15 hour/week job is considered to be a completely different sort of beast by the government (something more akin to a temp summer job).

I think we may be overestimating how much of the average developer's job actually requires creativity.

Most programming jobs combine creativity with more mundane work. For example, tracking down bugs or answering e-mail questions from co-workers or customers generally doesn't require the amount of creativity that solving a previously unsolved problem does. Neither does figuring out how some open source API works (whoever designed it originally did the heavy lifting for us).

So if we reserve the hard stuff for our hours of peak creativity, we could optimize our creative output while still getting a lot of other useful stuff done in the remaining hours of an eight hour day. Even if my brain is completely fried, I can usually find something to do that pushes my work forward.

I think you may be overestimating what a "creative job" actually entails.

My girlfriend is an artist (teaches fine art 50% of the time, does commissioned work 50% of the time). I think a lot of people would agree that this falls within "creative work". And yet she also does a lot of tedious things, like applying several layers of varnish to a finished piece, repeating a certain pattern hundreds of times (eg. feathers on a bird), etc (and this doesn't include stuff like generating invoices with clients, scheduling times to talk with them, etc.).

What's the ultimate "creative job" to you?

I think that a developer's job (unless you're in something ~extremely~ repetitive) is highly creative- just that highly creative jobs still have a lot of tediousness. I was in research for a while, which I'd consider "creative", but I spent a lot of my time doing things like reviewing paper drafts for typos, figuring out why some code wouldn't compile, etc.

Even in the most creative job ever, 90% of your work will likely be "daily grind".

> What's the ultimate "creative job" to you?

I'd hazard "Creative Director." You know, the role the creator of a character or story setting (e.g. Stan Lee) gets put in when they consult on a movie tie-in. Basically involves talking to people and writing down what you talked about to make sure everyone has your vision in their head. ("Game Designer" is also a pretty isomorphic job, given the games industry.)

Then you're spending 90% of your time communicating. I'm sure Stan Lee spends far more time communicating his ideas to other people than he does developing them.

"Tracking down bugs" is a previously unsolved problem. It may not be difficult, but it also may require as much creativity as writing something new.

+1 this. And the same for answering customer support issues. There's no limit to how creative customers can be at breaking everything they touch. Prey tell the focus you need to even begin to imagine what is wrong when they vaguely describe some convoluted behavior.

+1 as well.

I'd say it can be just as difficult to track down and fix a bug than solve a novel problem. In fact, in many cases it can be harder and require more creativity in how to go about discovering the bug, if we assume that the bug fixer didn't write the code nor design the original solution.

I agree that some bugs require a great deal of creativity to track down (maybe even writing a new debugging tool), but in my experience, most bugs are caused by a minor oversight and can be found by straightforward techniques like examining logs, or examining program state in the debugger where a segfault occurs, or running a few experiments to do a "differential diagnosis" (it happens when I do A and B, but not when I do C, so the bug must be here). These are things that I can still do when I don't have the mental energy to synthesize new code designs.

Today, workers are putting in increasingly more hours(!)—so much so that the 40-hour week has become a relic of the past.

(!) - in the US/UK, I guess, and some other countries ...

I moved to Denmark recently, there are goods and bads, but the 37-hour work week is almost a religion. And there are 6 weeks holidays per year. Creativity and innovation should be safe in this country.

Well, reading this article makes me wonder where I'm. If a 40 work week is tough, what about people like me who are having a routine 40 hour work week job and trying to bootstrap a company/work on side projects by the evening and night.

I am sleep deprived regularly, often I just come to home totally tired after work and travel. Only to find I have to pick myself up and throw in another 5-6 hours. Add to this stress when things don't workout,an occasional bad day and occasions when I have to face failure after days of work. Plus I have a family to which I have to tend to. Often they feel I'm just not spending time with them.

I completely agree that currently I'm in some sort of tiring march. I'm tired already. I see wins rarely, but continue to put in record efforts. On the other hand, I see the only reason I'm doing this is because.

    a. To some extent I enjoy what I'm doing.
    b. I want the money.
    c. I see I'm literally getting addicted to it.
    d. If I don't put such efforts, I feel guilty
       that I might just be getting lazy, or
       under performing.
    e. There are good deal of people whom I would like to 
       prove wrong.

I've discussed this with my mentor, who is a veteran of 3 successful start up's and has had a great career so far. He tells the modern internet techie's narrative of stress and tiredness is just plain whining, complaining and asking for sympathy. Though he agrees its a little stressful and tiring. Smart people eventually realize achieving something big demands hard sacrifices.

I also see many other smart successful people putting ridiculous efforts day in and out to win. And its in every profession. Whether its sports, medicine, software, hardware etc.

I feel at the end of the day, its just like a rubber band. You can stretch until it breaks. Some people just practice it stretching enough number of times to keep the breaking point a little high. After some time you just get numb, and absorb failures, stress, big sacrifices and just keep moving forward. And then what happens doesn't really matter.

>>If a 40 work week is tough, what about people like me who are having a routine 40 hour work week job and trying to bootstrap a company/work on side projects by the evening and night.

You people are crazy!

Now sure, you may achieve something huge and it might all be worth it. But in the mean time you're missing what remains of your youth and neglecting your family.

You don't have to put that sort of time in to 'win' at life with software. You can make really good money and live a life inaccessible to 99.5% of the world's population by working 37 hours and being good at it. If you need to be part of the 0.5% then don't let me put you off trying, but I'd be giving serious thought to whether I really needed it or if my life would he better scaling it back and taking time with loved ones.

I am trying to change the world. So far, I've had some decent success. That will cost me part of my life, just as it has for everyone else who has changed the world in some meaningful way.

It is the price we pay. And I'm not getting any younger. (Early 30's.)

I wish you luck in your goals.

I don't want to change the world, I want to enjoy it, which is why I take on consultancy work and take prolonged vacations in between.

Life's too short whichever path you take :)

Which is crazier? A year or two of super-long hours to free yourself from the dayjob, or just working 40 hours a week for someone else until you're too old to do it anymore?

I'm in the same boat, doing a spare-time startup while holding a day job. And I"m not young - my kids are grown. But I'm paying for their college, so I can't just quit and do the startup full-time, not until I've got it generating at least a little cashflow.

The trick is to overwork but try to get on the shortest (leanest) path to revenue.

But keep in mind that not everyone is doing a startup to get rich. Getting rich is a nice side effect, but the heart of it for me, and for a lot of others, is personal freedom.

>> A year or two of super-long hours to free yourself from the dayjob, or just working 40 hours a week for someone else until you're too old to do it anymore?

False dichotomy, there are other life choices. I'm a freelancer and I maintain a good income and a healthy work/life balance.

I also don't believe it to be 'a year or two'.

>> I'm in the same boat, doing a spare-time startup while holding a day job. And I"m not young - my kids are grown.

Then you're in a different situation than the OP, IIRC.

>> Getting rich is a nice side effect, but the heart of it for me, and for a lot of others, is personal freedom.

This is why I like freelancing/contracting/consultancy. The money is good and the freedom is unparalleled.

I'm a contractor, but I don't feel free. Still stuck working in someone else's environment. I could push farther into freelancing I suppose, but it's not the same.

Part of my motivation is that I'd like to build the biggest thing I could possibly build. I'm not going to accomplish that in the straitjacket of someone else's big enterprise project.

>He tells the modern internet techie's narrative of stress and tiredness is just plain whining, complaining and asking for sympathy.

Pretty much. When I was starting up my company, I was putting in 50 hour weeks at my IT job that I hated and another 10-30 (depending on mood) developing the tech and business processes for my current startup.

We don't get to punch the clock and expect greatness.

But isn't this article saying the exact opposite of this? It may be counter-intuitive, but every serious study I've seen regarding the amount that people work consistently says that 40 hours (or less) is ideal, and exceeding that for an extended duration (where "extended" is a very small amount of time like a few weeks) leads to negative productivity.

It seems like there's often a lot of cognitive dissonance going on in these threads - when we're talking about managers or people other than us telling us to work > 40 hours a week, it's widely accepted as counterproductive, but when we do it ourselves, we ignore the data and revert back to platitudes about pushing yourself harder and not being complacent.

Those studies might have involved people doing one job for all those hours, while the grandparent worked two jobs. Depending on how different they were, the variety might have been enough to offset some of the fatigue of working up to 80 hours a week in total.

The GP post saiys he hated his 40-hour job, so we can assume he wasn't at his most productive there (it happens to me too).

> Plus I have a family to which I have to tend to. Often they feel I'm just not spending time with them.

Working 40 hours week plus 5-6 hours afterwards every day does not mix with having a family, or especially not if you got kids. Maybe if you got a 5 minute commute you can do some hours but not 5-6.

> I also see many other smart successful people putting ridiculous efforts day in and out to win. And its in every profession.

And then there are the really smart people who realise they are most effective by not over doing the hours, but maximise the hours they do put in. You still have to put a good amount of effort as few fat sportsmen are successful, but also they know not to over train (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtraining) and reduce risk of injury.

I also refer to another recent HN article (http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmer...) and its linked book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician's_Apology).

>>does not mix with having a family

Well that's the most stressful part.

Its stressful because you need to be surrounded around by people who can appreciate what you are doing and why you are doing it. Either way what is I see is, and this is the case with nearly every one. Everyone's family wants a rich dad/husband/brother/wife/sister/mom, but no one really has a clue of what it takes to get there- Until they've done it themselves.

I guess this is the reason why people marry in the same professions. To an extent it helps the spouse understand what the other person is going through.

Also from the blog post you linked to:

"I would submit that the appearance of hard work is often an indication of failure."

Sorry but the author totally lost it when he wrote that.

>> Everyone's family wants a rich dad/husband/brother/wife/sister/mom, but no one really has a clue of what it takes to get there- Until they've done it themselves.

Some would rather have one that is present.

Ouch.

>> Everyone's family wants a rich dad/husband/brother/wife/sister/mom, but no one really has a clue of what it takes to get there- Until they've done it themselves

are you really willing to bet everything on that very debatable claim? Money makes little difference after the basics are covered, and the basics are not what the soap operas would have you think.

Please, spend time with your children. Take the hit, spend the next 10-15 years in a dead-end job if you absolutely must, but come home after that and spend time with them.

Not judging, just urging you to rethink the position that your kids need your money more than they need you. Peace!

>> Everyone's family wants a rich dad/husband/brother/wife/sister/mom

Just to echo some of the other comments above, this is absolutely BS. How many kids, when they grow up, say "I wish dad worked overtime so we could be rich". Compare those kids to those who say "I wish my dad was around more, but he was always working".

To think your children will be disappointed when they're not rich...well, you're living in a self-inflated bubble. I hope you come out of it.

I wish my parents worked harder so we would be rich... would make my life a hell of a lot easier and more fun now.

Why would your employer want you to start a company or work on side projects? Think of this from the boss's perspective - they want you to dedicate all of your energy to their work, not something else that won't even make them money.

Perhaps they don't have your best interest at heart. But then again, that's your job.

> I've discussed this with my mentor, who is a veteran of 3 successful start up's and has had a great career so far. He tells the modern internet techie's narrative of stress and tiredness is just plain whining, complaining and asking for sympathy.

Or he could be self-filtering - after all, he made it and if others can't then they're wimps and not tough enough.

Men are especially good at this. By the path he's chosen I would guess he's an alpha male to begin with.

I totally feel your pain. I'm in the same boat, day-jobbing while trying to bootstrap a startup. What I hate are the weeks where life interferes and suddenly I've gotten almost nothing done for a week.

But keep your eye on the prize. Work toward liberating yourself from the day job. You may not work any less, but at least you'll be working entirely for yourself.

On a related note, I would even prefer working 4 days for 10 hours to make this quota if absolutely necessary, and though I am not particularly supportive of said work hours per week, I do obey the system. I understand that there may have some W/OHS related issues with this of course.

I wonder what sort of impacts these things would have on things of a grander scale, such as the economy, transport, employment rates, inflation etc. I refer to either lowering the hours & pay per employee per week (as discussed in other comments) or overlapping shifts such as half the employees work 38 hrs Mon>Thu and the other half working 38 hrs Tue>Fri (rough schedule of course).

Have there been any remotely similar studies on this?

Sure, it's called most any support/operations team in large IT shops. Since most IT places staff ops and helpdesk for coverage, they get more creative and flexible with shifts. Developers are seen as task-oriented so they get the business hours when the boss is in the office. A 4x10 shift is what keeps me in my current role, by and large (also because I work a "shift," I can completely cut off from work when I'm not at work because other people are paid to work the other hours). Our current shifts run 10 hours days, 10 hours swings, and 10 hours nights with each "side" of the week working four days. Each shift on the same side of the week overlaps with the preceding and following shift by two hours and all shifts overlap at some point on Wednesday.

And yet, the only way for me to bootstrap my own company is by working those 40 hours per week and working at home after the one-hour commute, and on weekend. Now it's no longer 40 hours as I have swapped job and work only 4 days per week instead of five.

And I would say that I even have to be more "creative" since bootstrapping a company involves a lot more different work than a regular day job.

But still I agree with the article; it's been a long time since I promised myself to offer a four-day flexible week to my future employees.

I wish I had a 9-to-5. In Sweden, business hours are 8-5. They still call it an 8 hour workday, since they exclude the lunch hour.

China is the same. The norm is 9-to-6.

not true for gongwuyuan

Same in the US, we just call it 9-5 anyway.

Move over to Finland. True 9-to-5 workday. 30min lunchbreak and 37.5h work week.

Are there any non-self employed developers/engineers here that are still being "forced" to work 9-to-5 or similar?

Because in my experience, for most software centric companies it's just a paper obligation which is ignored with mutual agreement as long as the job gets done.

In fact, I don't know of anybody still forced to work 9-to-5 without a contextual reason (opening hours, shifts etc).

There's a lot of social pressure to be in the office during the core hours. People will schedule meetings onto your calendar during those hours and expect you to be able to make it, etc.

> Are there any non-self employed developers/engineers here that are still being "forced" to work 9-to-5 or similar?

I used to work at such place. The "office hours" were 9-6 and people were expected to adhere to that. I was an architect on a project and engaged in highly creative work so I tried to make my hours slightly more flexible, because honestly, my output was very high and I didn't think it mattered whether I was there 9-6, 10-7 or whatever. Soon enough I got called into a meeting with the company president and an HR person and was sternly told that if I didn't start showing up at 9am straight that I would be let go. I tried to argue that the hours don't really matter for creative work and was told "Don't try to make this company into something it's not".

Some places are completely fucked up and beyond toxic. It also just so happens they're run by idiots.

There is no such thing as job gets done. There are always jobs waiting for you.

I think that might be the wrong way of asking that question. I don't know many people who are forced to work from 9 AM to 5 PM specifically, but I do know plenty of places where there's an expectation that you're putting in more than 40 hours a week regardless of how much work you're getting done, and a manager not seeing anyone in the development team's area at 6:30 is in and of itself a problem, regardless of whether the sprint is finished.

In fact, one place where I don't see this attitude at all is a place that does enforce a strict 9-6 schedule. It's more than 40 hours a week, but they're extremely rigid about it - no laptops go home, and working outside of those hours is more or less prohibited.

I was surprised about the article content about the brain taking up to 4 hours to ramp up in the morning. I usually work (mostly) from home and I find the three hours when I first wake up from about 6 to 9am are my most productive. I usually then take 2 or 3 hours off for hiking or other exercise, then start working again. Sometimes I also work for an hour after dinner.

I am working as a contractor on-site at Google right now, and it is challenging working non-stop without long breaks. I get into work by 6:30am and the first three hours is great (quiet, almost no one there, and also that is my best time of day). I find that short 15 minute walking around the block breaks don't really reset me back into work mode like a long hike does.

I only work when I feel I can be productive, and am currently averaging 6.5 hours per day. As a graduate student I am somewhat disconnected from the whole "show up at x, leave at f(x)" concept. I also tend to work on the weekend. Basically if something has to be done, I make time for it.

The disadvantage to this approach is that whenever I want to meet people, I have to modify my schedule. There is value in the idea that everyone involved in a project is at the office for a mandated period of time. It may not be best for everyone, but it sure is nice to be able to interact with people without the ordeal of establishing a common meeting time.

The original title, "Why the 9-to-5 Day Is So Tough on Creative Workers", might be more appropriate.

  A shorter workday works particularly well for knowledge
  workers—people in creative or professional jobs—who can
  work productively for about six hours a day, 
  compared to the eight hours manual laborers 
  can churn out, according to Salon.

Since when do we care about the well-being of manual workers - or professionals? The focus on management has been to (fail to ) extract as much labor as they can from their workers and paying them the least. This can be formalized through various management mumbo jumbo.

How do we re-educate managers to "risk" losing productivity by trying these alternative means?

The really funny thing, my wife works at a sort of creative job writing helicopter manuals, and all her coworkers call her crazy for only working 40 hours: they all actually get overtime pay!

I've been saying for a while now that the only problem with the 9-to-5 schedule is its adherents' insistence that it's the only valid lifestyle.

I run a consultancy so its easier but we pay hourly and provide benefits (payroll taxes, health, 401k). People can work whatever hours they want and from where ever they just keep the team updated and request a workload consistent with their expected hours. I have team members who work 50 hours a week and some who work 20 hours.

"Kellogg’s discovered, was that employees were happy to work less when they were paid 12.5% more per hour, meaning the company was able to offer more jobs"

I don't get it, how were they able to offer more jobs when they paid the same wage (6hrs/day with a 12.5% increase)?

Perhaps Kellogg's limiting factor was not their salary budget, but maximum occupancy on their assembly lines. Switching from eight hours to six means you can hire a whole additional shift of workers, assuming the machines run 24 hours a day.

If 6 hour workers are 112.5% as productive per hour as 8 hour workers, then this turns out to be a good deal for Kellogg's.

Oh, that makes sense!

Proves? Hasn't this been common knowledge for a long time? Why else would jobs that need workers that are creative, but not __too creative__ demand a 9-to-5 day?

As a creative, I easily could have told you this. ;)

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