Productivity and the Work Week (2000)
groups.csail.mit.edu
groups.csail.mit.edu
Honestly, it would be a _huge_ perk. I don't understand why a reasonable work-life balance is such a taboo. Money is useless. Give me my weekends back and the occasional day off and I'll happily take a 50% pay cut.
First world problems, I know... (Most of my family is semi-unemployed and barely scraping by. I really shouldn't be complaining...)
As a developer, this gives me flexibility to go to conferences, hackathons and networking events that definitely improves my skillset and ultimately makes me a better and more resourceful employer.
Even though I don't make nearly as much as my colleagues, I'm extremely grateful I can take time off when I need to. I've got way too many close friends tied tightly to an inflexible 9-5.
These people are professionals, and I treat them like professionals.
There might be more benefit for some developers to go a conference on circus skills or screenwriting or photography than on Ruby, but I can't justify that to the board without sounding a little crazy given we're a Ruby shop.
I'd rather if that's what interested them and helped them grow as individuals they just take some leave and go and do it. We'll "pay" in being flexible about time off where we can be.
I haven't had anyone try and justify me paying for clown college.
Regardless, our people are salaried, they get paid to take time off and go to conferences, and they can get paid for clown college too if that's how they choose to spend their time.
I would certainly hope so!
Supposedly, we have lots of nice perks like a 9/80 schedule (every other Friday off), etc. It's just difficult to take advantage of them.
The main problem is the culture of working through those Fridays off and many weekends. You may not be "required" to, but you're certainly expected to.
In development and production, you're typically involved in smaller business decisions at regular intervals. In exploration, you do work to support very large (100's of millions to billions) business decisions with longer timelines, but very inflexible deadlines.
Normally, you'd have a couple of months of crunch time before a bid round/prospect assessment/etc. You work 12-16 hour days for 60 days straight, and after that there's a period where no one cares if you head out early every day for a few weeks. During the crunch time, though, there's an expectation that you're "all in".
However, I'm more of an internal contractor (I prefer the term "mercenary interpreter"). I rotate between teams that are understaffed and help out during the "crunch time". The downside to that is that I rotate off of one understaffed team and on to another with no down time in-between. It wouldn't be as bad if I were actually on a particular team long-term. (The upside is that I get to see a lot of neat geology.)
Most of this is just me griping about my current role (I'm hoping to move to R&D soon). It's not quite this bad outside of the specific teams I've been on.
However, there's a strong culture of working crazy weekends and long hours that I really wish we could change. I've worked for three of the majors. There are differences, but this part of it is the same.
Overall, I just don't understand why salary is negotiable in a job, but time off isn't.
Salary is fungible, they can give you more or less of it and have it not appreciably affect company goals. Time off often is not.
I don't know your industry though so it would behoove you to make friends with someone else who consults for your company and figure out what arrangement they have. If the company has done it once they'll do it again.
Keep in mind that I do not work in oil and gas and my knowledge is very limited, but his schedule seems to be very relaxed, more so than almost anybody else I know. I don't think I've ever seen him work on his Fridays off, and actually he frequently comes back early on the Fridays that he doesn't have off too. He also doesn't seem to work 9 hour days for the rest of the week either even though technically that's part of the 9/80 schedule.
It would be more interesting to look at more socialist countries, where benefits are provided more by the government instead of the employer. For example, France has experimented implementing 35 hour work weeks by giving extra days off in the month to white collar workers.
No, that's part of how the employer-centric market got started; its now tied to employers for a number of other reasons, including cultural expectations, and the fact that employers as large purchasers can get better prices per covered individuals than individual purchasers, meaning that even without a tax advantage, an employer can provide greater value to employees by providing them a group plan than providing them money with which they can then by an individual plan.
Would you not agree that treating all citizens equally, and giving them the freedom to choose how and where they get their healthcare would be an improvement on the current system?
Because large companies have a hugely skewed amount of political power due to campaign finance and lobbying and while I don't think they (large corps) engineered the current system purposefully, I do believe they recognize that it is beneficial for them to maintain it as it helps to keep the wage slaves in line.
Would you not agree that treating all citizens equally, and giving them the freedom to choose how and where they get their healthcare would be an improvement on the current system?
Of course. Economists all over the spectrum agree that either individual insurance should be tax-deductible or employer-provided insurance should be taxed. But it will never happen, because politics. See http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-poli...
If you mean why not excluded premiums from taxation for all health insurance (with the same limits applied to the pre-tax status of employer-paid health insurance premiums), that's probably a good idea.
(Of course, a substantial number of individual purchasers get better tax treatment as individual purchasers through the ACA exchanges by way of the tax credit for premiums.)
> Would you not agree that treating all citizens equally, and giving them the freedom to choose how and where they get their healthcare would be an improvement on the current system?
I'd agree that not tax-favoring employer-paid premiums over individually-paid premiums would be an improvement over the current system. If you have problems with other distinctions that exist in the status quo, I'd prefer to discuss them specifically rather than generally.
Simplistically: people who are more likely to suffer an illness (e.g., people with pre-existing conditions) will buy more insurance, and people who think they'll be healthy (e.g., younger people) will buy less. This drives up the amount of payments per insured, which drives up price, which further drives healthy people not to insure.
That's why you want health insurance purchase to be independent of risk of illness, which is (at least somewhat) what the employer-provided insurance does.
This is probably also the main reason state-provided health insurance might be a good idea.
Banerjee's and Duflo's 'Poor Economics' gives you a more detailed and nuanced explanation pp. 147-151. Great reading throughout.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142863.The_Social_Transfo...
Tl;dr: adverse selection is one of many reasons we are where we are.
(a) positional goods (I can have a house on the best street if I just work 22 hours, not 11) and (b) the scanty resources now provided in fields where average productivity growth has been lower.
To use Baumol's example, the string quartet will still have to play 40 hours a week while everyone else works 11, as string quartets have not become more productive.
This has been plaguing the arts for many years, but it is mostly because art is not valued for the time that went into the production of that art.
If we both write an app and I take twice as long I don't get to charge twice as much. The only effect adding additional time has on the value is when it creates a better product (maybe the quartet is able to play more demanding pieces and becomes more well-known and prestigious).
Even in the arts when you're selling the application of your skills rather than the end result you charge for time spent. I knew an accompanist. She charged for all her practice and rehearsal time.
The author made an interesting point about choosing between the following:
- work 11 hours for 1950-level productivity
- work 23 hours for 1975-level productivity
- work 29 hours for 1990-level productivity
But the following option isn't discussed:
- work 40 hours for 2014 (or current) level productivity
The first 3 options representing increased productivity over the past means that we can "cash out" at any time, i.e. pick a defined level of wellness, and work at that pace. This means we can stop trying to push the boundary and enjoy the fruits of our labor.
Now, viewed this way, is it any surprise that we still work 40+ hours? We don't collectively agree that we should cash out. If we cash out, we won't be curing diseases; going to Mars; making the next Snapchat. Don't get me wrong, resources are definitely (in an idealized sense) misallocated; I don't think so many people should be engaging in digital marketing and social media business pursuits. But it is what it is, and we'll keep going.
Regarding working >40 hours/week, this is simply because as technology creates scale of productivity, the middle class finds it harder and harder to keep up with increasing costs of living and commodities. People think America got something wrong after that golden period of the 50s - 70s. Yeah, after that we decreased taxes on the wealthy (Mitt Romney paid 13% in 2011 or something), but the capacity for people to do useful stuff has just gone down due to technology and automation; unions disappeared; globalization happened.
tl;dr - productivity will continually increase, but we'll never get out of the rat race.