I have worked at a job you describe where people do not do much, but I would hardly say that is the norm.
Especially for people on the lower end of the pay scale. In my experience they typically work more than they are paid for (forced to work off the clock) than there are people just sitting around on facebook.
That's great for you that your life is so comfortable but do not assume it applies universally.
You really think the working poor in this country who have 2 or 3 jobs are just on facebook all day? This has to be one of the most out of touch comments I have ever read on HN.
Disregarding the quality of the work, the most obvious solution to the ubiquitous presence of overtime in the industry would be to hire more people, but there doesn’t seem to be enough money to go around - especially if you want to do something even slightly outside the norm.
I'm an independent contractor, I just go from company to company. I just witness it, it doesn't apply to my life.
> I have worked at a job you describe where people do not do much, but I would hardly say that is the norm.
You stay very long at the same company. I don't. My job involve dev and training, and hence I go from company to company. There is a trend in what I see.
First, employee don't want less money and fake it. Employers want the employee to be on site because they paid for it.
Second, society praises people for working. You will look better if say you are busy.
Third, our systems would collapse if people were actually paid to their real value. You would see the total unfairness of it, and also how truly brilliant or useless people are.
Fourth, laws, syndicates, medias and logistics come in the way. And with a big inertia.
Fifth, humans are not rational and don't do "the right thing" according to the intellectual or displayed objectives. And they have all their own agenda.
The other problem is that if you measured people purely by output, 10x developers (assuming you believe in such a concept) would be able to work 1/10th as much and would very visibly be missing much of the rest of the time. This would lead to a lot of resentment from people who are less productive and would be having it rubbed in their faces.
To get to a place where people are judged purely on output we would need to change society such that the notion of equality was essentially never mentioned or thought about at all. Because people's productivity is wildly, wildly unequal.
Hardly. My job consist in dev and training. I go to those companies, and I'm paid because they can't get things done. Then I go to another one, rinse and repeat.
This situation plays very much in my favor.
But last year, 2 of my friends fire their 5 employees and started again, them alone. They made the calculation: there productivity ratio was better with only them 2, than with the 5 part time workers they had that they were paying full time + benefits. And their team was "good" in my book. Most teams I meet are not, and I travel from companies to companies all the time.
If this were really the problem, it would be pretty easy to solve... (HINT: this isn't really the problem!)
These factors are irrelevant when compared with the fact that the active population essentially doubled since WW2 with women entering the workforce.
80 years ago your worked more hours, and you could not slack at work.
Today, you work not only less, but half of the people in the offices I go to don't work their full shift. They go to facebook, send text messages, take long breaks, do their shopping and watch porno (yep), etc.
Also, an hour of work doesn't have the same value.
When your work is moving boxes, an hour is an hour.
But in an office work, there are plenty of opportunities to be busy without being productive. I'd say 30% of the work I see in offices is at best useless, at worst harmful.
So we have more office jobs, which have less hours, during which we work less, said hours being worth less.
And this is very uneven, because a nurse probably works more now than before. But all in all, office jobs are talking over in rich countries.