> kill the 40 hour week and replace it with a 30 hour week.

Or less. If you're over 40, cognitive function declines if you work more than 25 hours a week (and declines more the more you exceed). Up to 25 hours a week, cognitive function increases with more work.

Not that increasing cognitive function is the be-all and end-all, but (a) it's certainly something to consider whether you're degrading your brain and (b) 25 hours probably also works well for other reasons and for other ends.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2737742

But is it not also true that cognitive function declines if you work more than 25 hours a week for those _under_ 40 also? In fact, isn't it true that cognitive function declines after only 10 minutes of focussing on a single problem!

My main wonder: Why did they limit the study to persons over 40 only?

Oh, well, I can always take solace in

"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" John P. A. Ioannidis Published: August 30, 2005

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...

and

"We have an epidemic of deeply flawed meta-analyses"

by the same author:

http://retractionwatch.com/2016/09/13/we-have-an-epidemic-of...

and the original paper "he Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses" at:

https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/mass-production-r...

> Why did they limit the study to persons over 40 only?

1st sentence of introduction of the fine paper:

"Many countries have already increased their retirement ages by delaying the age at which people are eligible to start receiving pension payments."

in france there were the 35h weeks by law. result... everyone mocked the country and employers gave everyone a manager title which has no 35h restriction.

good luck

That experiment started in February 2000, a time where telework and work from home and other policies were much less common. Automation in the past 17 years have invalidated a lot of 'work' people do as well.

The idea that 40-50 is some magic number is the more ridicouls claim imo. If anything, progress, technology, and automation should naturally drive down hours needed per week. No one at my job does nearly the same amount of work we did 10-15 years ago. Our Fridays are all 'work from home' which is code for 'maybe check your email or finish up something.'

Our work world is only changing. Rolling with the changes makes sense to me and 35 hour or 4 day work-weeks seem like the a rational change. We should be benefiting from automation, not punished by it by pretending to be busy or working at much slower paces in fear of layoffs.

Also French experiemnt only lasted until 2004, when reforms were put in to raise the maximum amount of work allowable per month. I think its disingenuous to say that it 'failed.' It had a short 4 year run almost two decades ago. The world of 2017 is very different from the world of 2000-2004.

> We should be benefiting from automation, not punished by it

That's such a great point. It's a signal that something is wrong if automating tedious work away creates more misery instead of less.

Getting paid to do a job = 'misery' now, apparently. Maybe we should all go back to working in the fields from sunrise to sunset and avoid all this 'tedious work' for regular pay, benefits, vacation time, lunch breaks and closing bells.

If automation was creating 40-hour/week jobs with benefits, I think people would be pretty happy with it. Instead it's polarizing the labor market into underemployed service workers and overemployed professionals.

Children working in factories losing fingers every month got paid too. I think the idea that we've now, in 2017, reached perfection in employment is ridiculous.

I also think "go do farmwork if your job sucks" is dismissive and below the standards of HN discussions. There's always something worse, that doesn't mean we shouldn't ever complain.

I agree. I have a job I love (after numerous jobs which sucked), but I'd still vote for less working hours/days so I could actually, you know, LIVE: spend time with family and friends, enjoy nature, have hobbies, etc. The way I see it half the week should be for work, and half for life. So we should all work Monday through Wednesday, and half a day on Thursday.

>Getting paid to do a job = 'misery' now, apparently

It has always been a misery, even back to biblical times. In fact, having to work for his living was the original punishment for Adam.

Ancient Greeks and Romans, as another example, considered work beneath the dignity of free citizens. Not even Christianism was pro-work for the better part of 2 millennia. Older societies valued the fruits of work, but not work itself as much. Work only became a virtue in modern times because of the protestant-derived work ethic and the Horatio Alger types.

>* Maybe we should all go back to working in the fields from sunrise to sunset and avoid all this 'tedious work' for regular pay, benefits, vacation time, lunch breaks and closing bells.*

You'd be surprised. People work more in tedious cubicles than they did in medieval times (where scholars calculate something like 150+ days of the year devoted to festivities and holidays). Much less stressed, too, especially for those farmers free from feudal lords asking for most of their produce. The life of a farmer in France (and I know of several) is so much better (in vacation time, lunch breaks and closing bells -- and sometimes in pay too) than the average office drone that it's not even funny.

But that's a strawman, anyway, as nobody suggested we get back to the farms.

Aren't suicide rates among modern farmers among the higher. Long working hours and low wages because of the demanding market.

Peasants don't get emails after sunset and their vacation time were entire seasons off between harvest and seeding.

Sounds great to be a peasant. Wonder why so many peasants try so hard not to be one.[1]

[1]https://www.ft.com/content/44096ed2-eeb0-11e4-a5cd-00144feab...

From the very article you've linked to:

“Rapidly rising migrant wages in cities and shortages of low-skilled labor suggest that fewer people than before — and fewer than warranted on economic grounds — choose to leave the countryside to move to the city.”

And, from the same article:

"Becoming a migrant was a matter of necessity for her and her husband as they attempted to save their family from a crushing debt. She is now materially wealthier than she could ever be from working her family’s tiny plot of land. But the things she has lost, including her marriage and the chance to watch her two daughters (now aged 14 and 21) grow into young women, make it hard to convince herself she made the right choice. For her and her family, the things they held most precious have been destroyed in the process of trying to save them".

It's easy to be lured by BS promises of wealth and consumerism and life in the "big city" and many did. But even the article you've posted argues that the trend is reversing...

No one here is making a "back to nature" argument.

Up until the great depression this was taken for granted.

There was even a "share the work" movement, something we could probably do with now.

Is that 35h with lunch, or without lunch? Different countries measure it differently.

e.g. I believe my contract says I have a 35h work week, but that doesn't include an hour a day for a lunch break. But I believe the US measurement does include the lunchbreak, which makes my 35h work week the same as the US 40h work week.

State law is what determines when and how breaks are to be taken. In most states, there is no law that requires an employer to give their employee breaks, let alone pay for them. In my experience, I've had mostly unpaid break times while an hourly employee.

So it's common to earn 8 hours pay working 8-5, with two 15 minute "cigarette" breaks and a 30 minute lunch break.

Typically a 35 hour workweek is 7 hour days with up to an hour of unpaid lunch.

Don't rely on laws to fix this. Simply don't sign employment contracts that don't work for you. I think a lot of the HN crowd can afford that.

This will guarantee that a change won't happen. I think a whole lot more of the HN crowd and the greater crowd won't demand less hour when "everyone else" is doing "normal" hours, even if they might "afford" it. I think you underestimate the power of wanting to be normal.

If enough special snowflake people would demand 6 hour work week that might become the new normal. But in my experience these demanding flake people seem to on the contrary be very confident that they can do 60 hr work weeks and be 10x productive so the demand is rather astronomical pay rather than fewer hours. Which is why currently the "normal" working hours instead seem to be increasing.

But if you believe in free will. This is correct answer, because everybody get to choose to work 60 hrs and no laws should interfere with that. No matter how much research says that this is not a sustainable way of life.

> We should absolutely kill the 40 hour week and replace it with a 30 hour week.

How about this: we should absolutely become more flexible and let people find the workweek that works for themselves.

If you can get as much shit done in 20 hours as the average employee can in 40 hours, I will assign you twice the work.

No, I won't pay you twice as much. (But as a top performer, you can expect a 5% YoY pay raise, and a 15%, instead of a 12% bonus.)

This has always been a thing that bothers me. The incentive structure is for me to be more productive than my peers rather than as productive as I can be.

LOL. Well put. This is totally the bullshit way things work in the US. You can work as hard as you can and still only make the same salary. Hell, most places I've worked have what amounts to a cost of living adjustment (the so called "performance review") of 2-5%, and, if you're lucky, a 3-5% bonus which is tied to company performance and paid annually. The inventive is always to find the smallest amount of work necessary to keep the job. That said, smart employers (like my current employer) focus on desired output. They don't care how much time it takes to get there, just so long as you do by the agreed upon date. So if you can achieve the objective that they're willing to pay you $X/year for in 20 hours a week, everybody's happy. Essentially they're paying on a freeform production basis. "We imagine that in a year you'll be able to get X done, and getting X done is with $Y to us." So far I find it immensely freeing and motivating. If I can work smarter then I can essentially work less, while still upholding my end of the bargain.

As a society we just need to stop focusing on hours and start focusing on output. But in a babysitter culture where we indoctrinate kids with the 8-hour school day and production process, this change is slow to occur. Just imagine if, in highschool, we said "here's the list of things you need to know to graduate. We provide resources on the premises--teachers, mentors, technology, books, etc--for achieving this, and it can take as long or short as you are capable and motivated. Go!" Yes, some would take forever, but I suspect many would blow through it so they could focus on doing whatever they really valued. But this will never happen because what parents really value out of highschool is the daycare aspect. While the parents are at work they can rest easy deluding themselves that their kids are 1) relatively safe, and 2) "learning" something. Safe, perhaps, but learning? Not enough, and super inefficiently. I've been in both public school and home school, and I've seen what I could do when properly incentivized. In home school I was efficiency in motion because I wanted to finish so I could go play. In public school I barely applied myself because what point was there. I'd be there for 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday, no matter what I did so...

But daycare, ahem, highschool isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

"...absolutely become more flexible ..."

There's something not quite right about this phrase.

To add to this, human labor doesn't begin with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to it, people produced the bulk of their own food, clothing, furniture and tools. Most manufacturing was done in homes or small, rural shops, using hand tools or simple machines. Serfs may have been tied to the land, but they worked for themselves on their own schedule, not a micromanaging lord who demanded set working hours. Before mechanization and factories, textiles were made mainly in people’s homes (giving rise to the term cottage industry), with merchants often providing the raw materials and basic equipment, and then picking up the finished product. Workers set their own schedules under this system.

The Industrial Revolution's effect on the working class is somewhat similar to what Chinese peasants who are forced to move out of their ancestral villages experience. Sure, the economist will tell you that real wages increased and the working classes began to have a more varied diet, as if that in total defines the overall happiness of a person. But despite the rise in income, many feel worse off..going from working outside and in a small, yet tight-knit community to being forced to live in polluted cities in cramped apartments where even though there are more people, there is more loneliness and alienation.

I'm fortunate and I work remotely. Due to not having to deal with all the distractions and wastes of time that are part of the modern office, I'm able to be roughly 1.8x more productive (stats from github & RescueTime). I do the same amount of work in 20-25 hours/wk that I did in 40+hrs/wk (not even including commute times). My morale, motivation, and creativity has increased greatly. I don't have to take a vacation day to deal with doctor's appointments, picking up clothes from the cleaners, going to the DMV, or whatever else you can only do from 8-5 M-F. In short, the company I work for is getting the same, if not more productivity out of me (my code is definitely of a higher quality and I'm never burned out enough to take shortcuts.) without any cost. I don't have to commute, pay, spend less on gas, eat healthier and cheaper because I have access to my kitchen, etc. It's a win for both sides without costing either party anything beyond the risk it took on allowing a remote culture.

So much of work in the modern office is pure optics. So many times after lunch I would be well served by taking a nap for an hour or two instead of wasting 2-3 hours staring blankly at a screen while I'm doing the microsleep, head bob dance.

Do you feel this dynamic holds true for all developers? What about non-developers?

I'm a data scientist and this certainly is true for me, too. I think it applies to any knowledge worker.

Of course my sentiments don't hold for the entirety of the labor market. As I said, i'm fortunate that I'm a knowledge worker whose physical presence is normally not necessary for me to complete my duties. I'll address your two questions separately.

> Do you feel this dynamic holds true for all developers?

I believe that software engineering is one of the professions that can stand to benefit the most from allowing remote work. It depends on your personality type, transparency/maturity, and, most importantly, communication skills. I currently lead a team of 3 junior developers and we have few if any issues working remotely. For those guys, it's most important for them to speak up when they are having issues, not when there is a deadline. Maybe I'm lucky that they have no problem admitting defeat. When they do have a problem, I've instructed them to prepare their questions as if they are asking Stack Overflow, though not nearly as exhaustive. I've found that this forces them to think critically and exercise their problem solving skills. Often times allows them to find the answer themselves instead of coming to me and disturbing my flow state, gesticulating and waving their hands because they don't even know how to phrase the problem. We all go into the office about 2x a month and those days are usually spent on the more troublesome issues and general shooting of the shit, Overwatch sessions, etc.

Before I started coding professionally, I hadn't worked in a team environment before nor had I been exposed to professional software development, release cycles, etc. I think we live in a different time now where more of those resources are available via the internet, but it wouldn't be ideal for a complete noob.

> What about non-developers?

It depends on the nature and responsibiliteis of the job. It certainly wouldn't work for some of my past gigs, such as being the Systems and Inventory Manager of a chemical storeroom. A lot of that job entailed babysitting my team and repeating over and over don't handle frickin chemicals without wearing PPE's , handle peroxide formers with care, go in the fucking eye wash if you got something on your face, etc. For some, it depends on your personality type. I know a lot of startups want the company to feel like a family. But, if I had a family, I'd opt to spend more time with my real family than the family I am paid to be around.

However, that's not me. I'm an extroverted introvert. I'd rather spend 40 hrs/wk with my girlfriend, dog, and friends (sometimes meet up at co-working spots, each other's place lunch, etc.) than in an office. I like Slack as I have just as much verbal communication and its async/doesn't require immediate response. When I get stuck with a problem, I can take a break and shoot some hoops, lift weights, go for a run, or vape some pot and sometimes I work for 12 hours straight without speaking to a soul....and I don't have to worry how my behavior is being judged.

It vastly cuts down on meetings. In my experience, people tend to prolong meetings often times just so they have said something to look like they are contributing and haven't remained silent. My pet peeve were impromptu brainstorming meetings. Brainstorming without any preparation is such a waste of time.

In some places 8 hour workday was achieved by union organized strikes, in other places by law decree and in other places by non-unionized workers and employers as an agreement.

The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements ...

> The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements

I think that's actually also ahistorical. There are some scholars who believe that before industrial revolution, commoners only worked on average 6 hours per day.

You are right, but that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Most preindustrial work was agricultural, and therefore heavily tied to the seasonal cycles of the year. While your comment is factually correct, it conveys the wrong image to the listener. The first thing modern people with white collar lifestyles will think when they hear "average 6 hrs per day" is some sort of utopia where they go to their jobs one hour later and leave one hour earlier.

The experience of those preindustrial laborers would have been closer to being employed in a sweatshop, working 70+hrs per week for 5 months; then being unemployed for the rest of the year. During those lean times, they would split their time between small DIY home improvement projects, unpaid civic duty activities, maybe working small one-off jigs for wealthier neighbours, drinking cheap ale, and in general worring about running out of food before the sweatshops open up again next year.

I am not saying life was easy, but rather, there was no intrinsic reason to bump lifestyle into 70+ hrs sweatshop year round.

My take from "economic transformation" in Czechoslovakia is - if someone promises you to "tighten your belt" now because you will be much better off tomorrow, run! It's bait and switch and the other part is not coming. The same applies to "austerity" in Europe today.

>The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements ...

Social factors can drive technological innovation, which then makes it possible to more peaceably accommodate the social movements' demands.