The 40 hour work week - Society is changing. Should our work schedules change too?

[Whoopsie Daisy]

I work at a place that does 4x10 hour shifts, giving everyone a long weekend so that they can do shit on a friday. If productivity starts to drop, as it always does in any environment, we remind them of the friday, not in a malicious way, but as a "come on, we don't want to return to this bullshit", and productivity spikes again.

What I hate about the mon-fri, is that by the time you get to work or leave work, everywhere is shut. Bank? Closed. Non-supermarket shops? Closed. Need to sort your dry-cleaning out? Sorry buddy, we shut the second you clock off.

As for salaried staff having to work longer than 40 hours, that shit can burn in hell. "you're salaried and your wage has been calculated on working a 40 hour week, but you're expected to do 47 hours". Nahh, I don't think so.

We also live in times where starting a family and having safe shelter has become an impossible dream for many. There comes a point where you can no longer adapt.

(not picking on you, just choosing your quote).

This line of reasoning is absolute bullshit. People have never been richer and I'm sick of hearing people complain about 'poverty', when they wouldn't know poverty if it slapped them in the face.

"Oh but houses are more expensive", then do what your parents did and buy a cheap shitty starter home somewhere. You don't need, want or deserve a £350,000 house fresh out of uni.

"Everything is expensive, I'm so poor unlike my parents". Your parents didn't have sky, hulu, gamepass, £50/month mobile phones, £400/month uber eats, the internet, an addiction to chinesium purchases and a whole host of NON-ESSENTIAL purchases.

People who complain that they are poor are almost always people with low impulse control. Cancel your subscriptions, buy a cheap pay-as-you-go burner phone, cancel the internet, cook your own food and do a fucking budget you whiney cunts.

MATI

 

[newuser131]

Why not? We're already there. We already have a huge section of society half-assing their work, doing 20 hours and getting paid for 40. Why not make it official and see where we can go from there?

its all about making profit on the margins. if corporate sees an opportunity to cut cost, like 10 high paid workers doing work that 5 workers can do. corporate will fire 5 of the 10 and either bring in low wagies or invest in automation to do the rest.

also any manager who proposes this to corporate will get fired on the spot. corporate will see the manager as someone who is not representing their interest. there is no union for middle management.

 

[PeachDream]

At my job, if I finish all my work early I'm expected to start working on other people's work. I was denied a raise this year because when finished with my work I'd instead stop working and wait for more to come in. After that I just stopped finishing my work early and haven't heard a complaint since.

During covid for like 3 years my job required supervisors/directors/managers to stay off site almosy entirely. All other workers were only expected to come on-site if they had work to do, and often got 2-3 days of WFH. You also got an extra like $50/day you came on site, even for an hour.


Then one day they got rid of that and banned all WFH for everyone.

 

[CEO of Pickles]

I think the 40 jour work week makes sense in the context of working in a support team.
You do have your own work that needs to be done, but sometimes you are just getting paid to be on standby and fix whatever errors popup.
It's tard wrangling, but the job posting does include "must wrangle tards during core business hours."

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

I work at a place that does 4x10 hour shifts, giving everyone a long weekend so that they can do shit on a friday. If productivity starts to drop, as it always does in any environment, we remind them of the friday, not in a malicious way, but as a "come on, we don't want to return to this bullshit", and productivity spikes again.

What I hate about the mon-fri, is that by the time you get to work or leave work, everywhere is shut. Bank? Closed. Non-supermarket shops? Closed. Need to sort your dry-cleaning out? Sorry buddy, we shut the second you clock off.

As for salaried staff having to work longer than 40 hours, that shit can burn in hell. "you're salaried and your wage has been calculated on working a 40 hour week, but you're expected to do 47 hours". Nahh, I don't think so.



(not picking on you, just choosing your quote).

This line of reasoning is absolute bullshit. People have never been richer and I'm sick of hearing people complain about 'poverty', when they wouldn't know poverty if it slapped them in the face.

"Oh but houses are more expensive", then do what your parents did and buy a cheap shitty starter home somewhere. You don't need, want or deserve a £350,000 house fresh out of uni.

"Everything is expensive, I'm so poor unlike my parents". Your parents didn't have sky, hulu, gamepass, £50/month mobile phones, £400/month uber eats, the internet, an addiction to chinesium purchases and a whole host of NON-ESSENTIAL purchases.

People who complain that they are poor are almost always people with low impulse control. Cancel your subscriptions, buy a cheap pay-as-you-go burner phone, cancel the internet, cook your own food and do a fucking budget you whiney cunts.

MATI

The problem is that the cheap shitty starter home costs 100k and has been purchased by blackrock.

 

[vern]

I worked both a 4x10 hour shift and the normal 5x8 shift at the same job and there are pros and cons to both

Starting with the 10 hours, the extra day is nice, especially if you can get it on a Wednesday so your never actually working more then 2 days in a row and its a lot easier to run errands in the middle of the work week, Plus the commute time is shorter not just because you have 1 less extra day you have to drive, but if you schedule it right you can avoid one if not both the morning and evening rush hour.

On the downside you have less time to do shit before or after work so its a lot harder to keep up with any daily chores or activities and one of your extra days is gonna be filled doing both. also a bit awkward if you get breaks or lunch's since most of them are timed for the 8 hour shift as well as not really being able to take lunch the same time as your coworkers.
Also holiday's can be a coinflip, if its on the day you have off, the whole week is easier (there where times where I said fuck it and worked 32 hours in 3 days to get a 4 day weekend). But if its on one of your working days, you get screwed out of 2 extra hours that you have to make up by working a bit longer or using a bit of PTO .

 

[Netizennameless]

Codemonkeys found a loop hole but that's quickly getting filled with h1-b pajeets, increased automation and a workplace culture that promotes trooning out for promotion.

It's getting filled with pajeets because literally there is no one else to do the work. Automation has taken away 0 programming jobs, quite the opposite actually. Someone has to put that automation into place, and that would be codemonkeys. This all reads like you read an article about Big Tech and think that's the whole industry.

Also the whole "troons in programming" thing is essentially a myth. By it's nature the job does not accept excuses and you can't hide failure. You have to deliver, and the code either works right or it doesn't.

90% of the troon developers you hear about are working on open source projects where literally anyone can participate. They'll add a couple of lines of documentation or comments to the project and treat that as if it were a serious engineering contribution. Then non-programmers can't tell the difference and think the whole industry is infected.

I don't want to seethe too much (knowing the occupational demographics of this site) but the lrn2code gravy train is long over. I think anyone with the privilege to work remotely should stick it out for as long as they can, its the best disruption of the zeitgeist and I applaud everyone's efforts.

It is literally easier than ever to be a codemonkey. There are more resources than ever before online and the industry has focused on "skills-based" hiring for years now over education. 99.99% of people can't hack it as a programmer, and those that can get jobs no problem.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

It's getting filled with pajeets because literally there is no one else to do the work.

This is a lie. Importing people nowadays is always about lowering wages for natives.

Automation has taken away 0 programming jobs, quite the opposite actually.

Consider that employers prefer it that way. An employer would rather have one hundred workers he can abuse than a single irreplaceable worker controlling the automation. Employers enforce bad languages for this. Google uses Go specifically to weaken and disempower its programmers.

 

[BPD Gunt Rider]

(not picking on you, just choosing your quote).

This line of reasoning is absolute bullshit. People have never been richer and I'm sick of hearing people complain about 'poverty', when they wouldn't know poverty if it slapped them in the face.

"Oh but houses are more expensive", then do what your parents did and buy a cheap shitty starter home somewhere. You don't need, want or deserve a £350,000 house fresh out of uni.

I did this. I bought a very cheap house for $60k in an area nobody chooses to live in. I worked, saved money, all that. My area slowly turned to shit with poor people and niggers. If I chose a better location, I'd be burying myself in debt like many do, and that brings up other problems.

Hence why I said SAFE shelter. A home where you would want to build a family, or even a home that a woman would feel secure in to begin with.

 

[VargReallyDidNothingWrong]

This line of reasoning is absolute bullshit. People have never been richer and I'm sick of hearing people complain about 'poverty', when they wouldn't know poverty if it slapped them in the face.

"Oh but houses are more expensive", then do what your parents did and buy a cheap shitty starter home somewhere. You don't need, want or deserve a £350,000 house fresh out of uni.

"Everything is expensive, I'm so poor unlike my parents". Your parents didn't have sky, hulu, gamepass, £50/month mobile phones, £400/month uber eats, the internet, an addiction to chinesium purchases and a whole host of NON-ESSENTIAL purchases.

People do throw around the term "poverty" a lot but there are some things you are wrong on.

1. Cancelling your 50 quid a month phone payments won't get you a house or property worth mentioning.
2. You might be able to find me some cheap parcel of land off in bumfuck nowhere on the edge of some craggy cliff 50 kilometers from the nearest town but this is not a viable "starter house" for anyone except a hermit or someone who fucks sheep (possibly both).

Everything IS expensive.

Another part of it is that so many people have trouble committing nowadays. Buying a house is a huge long-term affair and so many people have trouble getting over that mental block of "ok well i'm going to live here for the next 30 years paying off this house".

However, I will share an anecdote with regards to prices being high and "people being more wealthy now than ever before".

A guy I know owns property. He bought a flat in a newly constructed tower block building in a generic Eastern European country. This 1 bedroom flat cost him less than 1 year of his salary all in. His salary is not tremendously high (decent, but not fantastical). He took out a loan to buy the flat and the loan was paid off in 2 years and he now owns this flat in perpetuity, owes nothing to the bank, and he did it all on his own.

Can any young person living in England do the same? We'll discount the people making minimum wage at McDonalds - say they finished university and started working an entry level position at some company in the field of their choice (lowest indian on the totem pole at some engineering firm, for example, or something like that).

 

[Netizennameless]

This is a lie. Importing people nowadays is always about lowering wages for natives.

Wrong. Overburdening your talented developers with menial work because you are constantly short-handed causes them to leave and puts additional pressure on the talent that is left. Rinse and repeat until you no longer have a capable engineering team.

It doesn't take a superstar to debug code, write unit tests, or make minor updates to legacy code. Handing off the bitch work to cheap developers frees up your actual talent to architect and focus on difficult problems, while teaching the juniors by showing them well-written patterns to emulate.

There has been at least a 10 year period of time where native junior developers refuse to put in any meaningful work to grow into senior developers. They pair that with ridiculous salary demands that make performing junior level work a loss for the company. The few that do put in the work get promoted and/or recruited by rival companies in very short order.

Companies are extremely willing to pay high salaries to talented developers. The problem is they simply cannot find them in great enough numbers. It takes 6 months to a year to realistically fill a senior engineering role but the workload doesn't stop while the company is searching.

So the only realistic alternative for companies is to hire three pajeets to do the same job as that senior engineer and have them do the bitch work so the seniors can focus.

Lastly, H1Bs are expensive for a company to maintain. They're not actually saving anything, and requires an entire additional department to maintain.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

Overburdening your talented developers with menial work because you are constantly short-handed causes them to leave and puts additional pressure on the talent that is left.

It's a good thing people aren't inclined to leave jobs in these tough economic times. The so-called menial work should be automated, because that's what the computer is meant to do.

Handing off the bitch work to cheap developers frees up your actual talent to architect and focus on difficult problems, while teaching the juniors by showing them well-written patterns to emulate.

There are languages where well-written patterns are captured into what are by some called macros, so that they need be written only once.

There has been at least a 10 year period of time where native junior developers refuse to put in any meaningful work to grow into senior developers.

It helps that most so-called senior developers don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Companies are extremely willing to pay high salaries to talented developers.

No, they're willing to pay six-figure salaries to people who make them seven-figure profits.

So the only realistic alternative for companies is to hire three pajeets to do the same job as that senior engineer and have them do the bitch work so the seniors can focus.

How convenient for them.

Lastly, H1Bs are expensive for a company to maintain. They're not actually saving anything, and requires an entire additional department to maintain.

I don't believe this.

 

[Netizennameless]

No, they're willing to pay six-figure salaries to people who make them seven-figure profits.

Like I said, talented developers. They get paid 6 figures and not 7 because they don't deal with sales, or customer service, or the business analyst work, and the QA work, and the project management work, etc. There is more to making that seven figures than a developer writing code.

I don't believe this.

https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-visa-processing-fees-2016/

It costs between $2000-7000 per employee to obtain an H1b, and that has to be renewed every 6 years. All of that has to be paid by the employer. None of that includes the immigration lawyer(s) the company will need on retainer.

The average H1b salary in the US is $108,000 per year.

https://www.cato.org/blog/h-1b-wages-surge-top-10-all-wages-us#:~:text=Meanwhile%2C%20according%20to%20the%20Department,8%20percent%20of%20U.S.%20workers.

Additionally, by law all H1b employees have to be paid at minimum the average salary for the position, as determined by a national database. It's called the prevailing wage. The hard floor is $60,000 per year.

https://www.immi-usa.com/perm/perm-prevailing-wages/

It helps that most so-called senior developers don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Like i have been trying to tell you, there are not enough developers to go around. So companies are forced to just do the best they can.

It's a good thing people aren't inclined to leave jobs in these tough economic times. The so-called menial work should be automated, because that's what the computer is meant to do.

The biggest requirement for automation is that there is a consistent and replicable process to follow. That does not apply to software engineering as a job at all. Taking customer requests, understanding what they are really asking for and translating that to technical requirements is not something that can be automated. The software developers write IS generally the automation being done at companies.

There are languages where well-written patterns are captured into what are by some called macros, so that they need be written only once.

Calling them macros sounds more like interacting with machinery than software engineering, and is generally done by mechanics and not developers.

And the idea you are describing is called object-oriented programming. It's been around since the 1950's.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Do you understand how an H1-B works in real life? It's very simple.

"Do whatever we fucking tell you, at any price we tell you, or we revoke your sponsorship and send you back."

It's just slightly better paid slavery, regardless of what's on the books.

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

The 40 hour work week was invented by Henry Ford to optimize car assembly lines. Now maybe 40 hours is the correct schedule for that, I really don't know. But what about literally everythng else? Is 40 hours a week right for an electrician? A construction worker? A programmer? A nurse? We have no idea. Nobody has bothered to check, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why. Even if you're a ruthless capitalist who would sell your employee's organs for a nickel, you should want a schedule that's optimal for employee productivity. Nobody is even trying that. They're just blinding applying 40 hours across the board and wondering why everything sucks.

40 hours is, if not obsolete, at the very least a number that needs to be revisited.

Ruthless capitalists would abolish 40 hour work weeks in a heart beat. Problem is, I'd wager there is a twisted web of regulation and other wool spun bull shit that prevents employers from implementing a more laxed work schedule. Either due to losing tax incentives, gov grants/other gifts, etc. At this point in time yeah, I'd actively just seek out a part time job. If you need medical, just do what the illegals do and go to the emergency care clinics. Unlike the illegals, you're gonna pay it back because you don't have the protection of being undocumented. The risk reward gets worse as you age and need more consistent medical checkups but by that point you better have built a nice nest in the mean time.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

I did this. I bought a very cheap house for $60k in an area nobody chooses to live in. I worked, saved money, all that. My area slowly turned to shit with poor people and niggers. If I chose a better location, I'd be burying myself in debt like many do, and that brings up other problems.

Hence why I said SAFE shelter. A home where you would want to build a family, or even a home that a woman would feel secure in to begin with.

Very few places are safe and none are affordable to the majority of the population. In the UK, every town, city and village has degraded in safety and quality, regardless of location and net-worth of the town.

Setting up home in one place and living there forever is not an option anymore. Buy cheap during a recession, sell during the peak, move and start again. That's your only option. Reality is not an ideal, it's reality.

People do throw around the term "poverty" a lot but there are some things you are wrong on.

1. Cancelling your 50 quid a month phone payments won't get you a house or property worth mentioning.
2. You might be able to find me some cheap parcel of land off in bumfuck nowhere on the edge of some craggy cliff 50 kilometers from the nearest town but this is not a viable "starter house" for anyone except a hermit or someone who fucks sheep (possibly both).

reducing your bills will absolutely get you a house. I left a relationship with £18k in debt and two years later I cle

"ok well i'm going to live here for the next 30 years paying off this house".

 

[VargReallyDidNothingWrong]

reducing your bills will absolutely get you a house. I left a relationship with £18k in debt and two years later I cle

Did you have a stroke halfway through or what

 

[Rungle]

The best part of working IT is that the one that employed you doesn't know what the fuck you are doing.
You can do whatever, and they are afraid to ask questions because they think they will sound retarded.
This way you can do alot of personal stuff of play some vidya during your 40 hour work week.
I believe of my 40h week i only work like 20.

 

[VargReallyDidNothingWrong]

The best part of working IT is that the one that employed you doesn't know what the fuck you are doing.
You can do whatever, and they are afraid to ask questions because they think they will sound retarded.
This way you can do alot of personal stuff of play some vidya during your 40 hour work week.
I believe of my 40h week i only work like 20.

As long as you're getting shit done on time or you're on-call for catastrophic downtime fixes, nobody cares if you're actually spending 40 hours doing your task or not.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

As long as you're getting shit done on time or you're on-call for catastrophic downtime fixes, nobody cares if you're actually spending 40 hours doing your task or not.

That’s not even out of line with trades. When you hire an HVAC guy, do you think he’s sweating for the duration of all billed hours?

All but the very worst jobs allow the people who do them to figure out how to make them livable. As long as you’re not like a retail cashier tied to a register, or on an I Love Lucy style constant production line, you’re probably ok