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Comment by seanstickle | Hacker News Reader

That's a reasonable concern, adeptus.

What's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload and telling you to get it done in 40 hours — or you're fired and they'll find someone else to do it?

I do not mean this at all flippantly. I've worked places (and I'm sure others have as well) where the amount of work assigned is undoable in the amount of time available. People burn out, people deliver poor quality, people quit.

A ROWE is not meant as a mechanism to protect employees from destructive bosses. And, for knowledge workers whose work cannot be mechanically reduced to hours, neither is a 40-hour week.

A ROWE is about removing waste in the work process so that people can focus on the work they're hired to do, not on outdated ritualistic traditions about work that no longer apply.

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> What's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload and telling you to get it done in 40 hours — or you're fired and they'll find someone else to do it?

The thing is, under such a system, you get fired and that's the end of it, and the employer suffers for it as well as you. They can't push people to spend more than their 40 hours - they have to find somebody else who's willing to put up with it for 40 hours a week, or explicitly require more.

In the ROWE system, employers can collectively gradually push their employees to work more and more. 10 years down the line, everyone could have 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do a week, and no recourse, because every employer has gradually done the same thing - after all, if they can get more work out of you, they will.

A lack of recourse would only be the case if, as you say, 'every employer has gradually done the same thing'.

In an ideal world, all employees are able to be mobile, and would gravitate quickly away from bad employers, incentivising employers to not be bad (basically), and/or removing those employers / organisations from the environment.

I respect we don't live in an ideal world, but equally we don't live in a 100% evil - but somewhere in between the two extremes. So in practice you would see the same things that happen now - employers that aren't evil are able to obtain and retain better employees, in part because they don't engage in the kinds of activities you're describing.

I agree, and actually in a lot of countries you couldn't just get fired. Your employer would have to prove you really are slacking off, which would be hard if they're giving you more than 40h worth of work per week.

They'll think they do, but they won't really. Research is showing clearly that 60 hours a week is not sustainable longer than a couple months. Afterwards, you get less efficient than if you only worked 40 hours. http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...

I'm sure you don't mean it this way, but you should know that culturally, using people's names when replying to them the way you're doing often comes across as condescending.

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