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Re:What happened when Swedes tried six-hour days? by user5994461 on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @01:37PM (#13600761)
Most tech workers could easily work fewer hours by simply leaving the office when their time is done.

Look around you and count how many people are working overtime on their own, sacrificing their life for free food, a fuzzball table, the expectations of 0.1% equity down the road, the hope of giving a good impression to their manager, the expectations of a raise later for hard work, or the pressure to work night and week-end unpaid on-call.

When not thinking about it, people choose neither money not free time :D

Re:What happened when Swedes tried six-hour days? by matwood on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @02:32PM (#13601280)
If someone is eating and playing fuzzball then I'm not sure I would count that as working overtime. In tech companies in particular at work does not necessarily equate to working.
Re:What happened when Swedes tried six-hour days? by Bartweiss on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @03:11PM (#13601570)
I'm always confused by the hatred for people staying late at tech companies doing not-work. It's described like some elaborate anti-worker scam, but a lot of people I know are genuinely friends with coworkers (and often pretty introverted outside of that) and just enjoy doing that after work.

I suppose I can understand the conspiracy theory of "they want you to only have work friends", but I really don't understand "they're replacing a good raise with a $100 ping-pong table". It's just not a sane model of what's happening, keeping employees in the building is not inherently profitable.

Re:What happened when Swedes tried six-hour days? by user5994461 on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @03:48PM (#13601925)
It's not hatred. It's about running a business efficiently, while the employees don't even realize it.

1) Keeping tech employees in the building is profitable.

2) In tech companies in particular, you don't have to be at work behind a computer to be productive.

Once you both understand that these things are true and correct, you can begin to understand the business of the SV and why these perks come to be.

While people are in the office, they are with co-worker, thinking about work, talking about work, progressing on their work. And the magic thing is you don't have to pay them for it, because they ain't working officially.

A bad thing happen in production late? Fine, they're already there and they won't even think that fixing it is doing actual work because they are already there. That foosball table was way cheaper than paying overtime.

How about serving breakfast at 9 am and dinner at 19? Then people who wants both will stay. Most likely, people who are a bit close to one or the other might extend their schedule slightly just to grab it. But no way they think of it as extra work.

Re:What happened when Swedes tried six-hour days? by warcher on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @05:03PM (#13602599)
Honestly, it's people with lives external to work (families, hobbies, friends, kids) seeing people with nothing better to do than hang out in the office all day seizing the inside lane wrt office politics by doing stuff that's not related to their actual work at all. I don't know necessarily whether that's unfair, as a manager might see somebody with nothing better to do with their time but work as an asset, but I can empathize with the resentment.