In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas

Re:In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas by komali2 on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @06:36PM (#21468794)

The least productive places I've worked had the longest hours - companies in Japan and Taiwan. Lots of time fuckin around on phones, and the obligatory period from 5pm - 8pm to "wait for the boss to go home" was almost entirely filled with Candy Crush. Stupid.

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Re:In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas by VRay on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @08:48PM (#21469657)

haha, yeah, I've never seen anyone so unproductive as a Japanese or Chinese engineer putting in 72 hours a week

I think this whole system of paying people an hourly wage or a salary is toxic when it comes to knowledge work. I'm pretty confident that today I could do something in a day that would have taken me a month when I started out 10 years ago. (And I can do stuff that would have been inconceivable when I was at the college student/new hire level) But I'm only making about 2-3x as much as a new hire at my current company.

I wish the whole system were a lot more freeform and mercenary.. I'd love to roll in and spend a few months building some GPU firmware or debugging camera latency issues, collect $100k at the end, and then spend a few months backpacking or whatever.

I guess that only a tiny fraction of the people I've met would be OK with that sort of existence, though..

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Re:In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas by rightbyte on Thursday November 07, 2019 @11:33AM (#21474673)

Wouldn't work sharing among collegues be quite toxic? Who would pick the need to be done-paperwork or whatever time consuming less glamourus tasks when the collegues do the glamourus quicker tasks and go home.

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Re:In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas by komali2 on Thursday November 07, 2019 @01:26PM (#21475822)

I've met people that are perfectly content doing mundane tasks for a set amount of time, then going home to watch TV or whatever. It's unlikely to find them on this site though...

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Re:In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas by VRay on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @07:22PM (#21590156)

If I pulled up the bounty board and had the choice between "Dig latrines for 20 hours: $3,000" and "Fire-breathing dragon terrorizing village, scales impervious to arrows: $80,000" I could go either way myself

"Maybe I'll take a break on the ultra-rare deadlock and go bang out some python test scripts for a few days.."

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Re:In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas by __s on Thursday November 07, 2019 @03:59AM (#21471575)

Sounds like too many places are willing to pay young developers too much. Why pay a third what they pay you for an order of magnitude less value?

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Re:In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas by alexgmcm on Thursday November 07, 2019 @08:31AM (#21472979)

Are they paying young devs too much or OP too little?

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Re:In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas by robryan on Thursday November 07, 2019 @01:04AM (#21470834)

Surely the boss realises what is going on in that kind of case? I guess they are a slave to the culture just as much as those beneath them?

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Re:In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas by komali2 on Thursday November 07, 2019 @01:27PM (#21475829)

Yea, I mean, slave is a strong word but they're fully "indoctrinated" to it. Like many elders in any given culture. Nothing surprising imo.

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