Start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week

Re:Start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week by dahart on Thursday March 02, 2017 @09:45AM (#13774270)

> 15 hours seems like some kind of bare minimum level just to sustain rudimentary skill, let alone develop it

I've been programming professionally, and developing my skills at a medium pace for a couple of decades. After a few years now of actually tracking my time to the minute, I often get less than 15 hours of programming in a 40 hour work week. Meetings, chat & email, lunches & breaks, and sooner or later some degree of management, these things add up to a majority of your time.

If you filled a 15 hour work week with meetings and included a lunch hour, then yeah, there's no coding getting done. But I would hope spending less time working means and implies to a greater degree shedding all the time we spend at work not working.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week by valuearb on Thursday March 02, 2017 @09:49AM (#13774305)

As much as i hate to say it, meetings and planning matter. blindly programming isn't work.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week by gregmac on Thursday March 02, 2017 @10:08AM (#13774483)

The key is having productive meetings.

If a meeting ends with no action items (assigned to specific people) and no decisions made, it was a useless meeting, and you should stop having it. Status updates can be written down and emailed, or better, posted to a wiki.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week by aaron-lebo on Thursday March 02, 2017 @09:51AM (#13774331)

Does it scale like that though?

If you do 15 hours of work over a 40 hour week, do you still do 15 hours of work over a 15 hour week, or do people end up doing 5 hours of work?

Is there any evidence either way? These discussions always bring out the anecdotes, but we need hard stats to show whether this is even doable.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week by logfromblammo on Thursday March 02, 2017 @10:10AM (#13774504)

I have worked in at least one organization where the meetings were likely there to prevent work from being done too quickly with an activity that still counted as billable hours. Just before I left, the "daily stand-up" included the entire development team and testing team, and lasted a minimum of 45 minutes. That was nearly 20 people, packed into one office, justifying their existence on a daily basis.

So some people would actually dedicate that 15 hours to getting things done, and some people would still fill it up with bullshit and game the management metrics to maximize pay per unit of effort.

[ Parent | on HN ]