[jzd131]

I find it interesting when employees ask for this without reducing pay. They then think it’s a 20% reduction as it’s 20% less work. But then you factor the overhead including normal overhead like benefits, HR, office space and additional overhead like management (a manager can only many so many people so now we need two managers for a group) and your at around a 40% reduction in pay to support one less day of output.

[whstl]

A few things:

- The employer pays salaries based on negotiation, not on merit or some scientific measurement. An employee is allowed to do the same.

- Unless the employee is privy to all the details and math pertaining this overhead and is the one who asked for this overhead, then it's appropriate that the employee doesn't care about the overhead at all.

- There is also overhead in the employees side that is not taken into account by the employer. Commuting to that "office space" also spends the employee's time and money, for example.

- A 20% reduction of work time never amounts to a 20% reduction of productivity or work output, unless the work consists solely of sitting in a chair (and that's not counting bathroom breaks).

[rascul]

> - A 20% reduction of work time never amounts to a 20% reduction of productivity or work output, unless the work consists solely of sitting in a chair (and that's not counting bathroom breaks).

I don't understand what you're saying here. If I work 20% less then that's 20% less work that I get done. I don't sit in a chair for work.

[truckerbill]

Your assumptions only work when things are linear. Reality is generally non-linear as it is one huge tangled mess of feedback loops

[rascul]

I only have my own work history to go off of.

Edit: An example. If it takes me 5 days to hang siding on a house, and I don't work one of those days, that's 20% less I didn't work and about 20% less of the work that got done.

[truckerbill]

Lets say you have enough spare time and energy to make a jig, a trolley, an improved tool of some kind that helps you hang siding. For the time you spend making it you are behind on your general average siding panels per day. Once you finish your tool you will surpass your average. This is one of many many non-linear holes in your theory.

You may say 'but you can't guarantee I will make a jig, a trolley or an improved tool', at which point I give up trying to argue with someone on the internet and feel slightly deflated that the point was missed

[rascul]

> Lets say you have enough spare time and energy to make a jig, a trolley, an improved tool of some kind that helps you hang siding. For the time you spend making it you are behind on your general average siding panels per day. Once you finish your tool you will surpass your average. This is one of many many non-linear holes in your theory.

I like this. Thank you for providing me some more understanding.

[fnordian_slip]

Iirc, there are several of studies that imply that if you have the same developer working 40 vs 32 hours, the difference in output is often negligible, since not all hours worked are the same in terms of effectiveness.

You might not be aware of that effect, since you deny it explicitly when it comes to your own work, but you might view it in a different light if you turn it around:

Would you produce twice as much if you were to work 80 hours? Probably not, right? You'd maybe produce about 1.5 times as much, and the quality of your work would suffer greatly, leading to more work in the future.

The same effect might work in the other direction, up to a certain point.

The 40 hour work week is not god-given, in fact it has been reduced quite a number of times in the past (mostly due to unions, like most working condition improvemens). So I can not understand why so many people act as if it were set in stone.

[rascul]

> Iirc, there are several of studies that imply that if you have the same developer working 40 vs 32 hours, the difference in output is often negligible, since not all hours worked are the same in terms of effectiveness.

I guess it depends on the work. In my example, hanging siding on a house, the non-productive work is quite minimal. I guess that can vary depending on the work one is doing. The non-productive work still needs to get done so the productive work can get done, though.

> Would you produce twice as much if you were to work 80 hours? Probably not, right? You'd maybe produce about 1.5 times as much, and the quality of your work would suffer greatly, leading to more work in the future.

I doubt many people can sustain their work output over 16 hours for most jobs. But that's not really what we're talking about here.

> The same effect might work in the other direction, up to a certain point.

Sure, if you work faster when you work less hours. Are you saying this is what happens? Are you seeing people get too fatigued after 6 hours of work so that their productivity is diminished? I've not seen that in general with the people I've worked with or the work I do over the years.

> The 40 hour work week is not god-given, in fact it has been reduced quite a number of times in the past (mostly due to unions, like most working condition improvemens). So I can not understand why so many people act as if it were set in stone.

I'm not sure where this came from because I don't think any of those things. I think that the only way for work to get done is to do it. However many hours per week that takes is fine. I don't understand the argument that working less doesn't mean you get less work done in general.

All that said, I realize there might be something different to brain fatigue vs body fatigue when doing brain work (software development) vs physical work (construction). I've largely done physical work and can't relate well to brain work except as a hobby and occasional small bits of work.

[whstl]

20% reduction of work is not working 20% less. It's working 20% less time.

Productivity and time aren't correlated.

[rascul]

They are largely correlated in just about all work that I've done. Is your experience different?

[whstl]

Yes. Heavily.

Even in cases such as manual work it doesn’t have a directly proportional correlation, since people get tired.

[rascul]

Yes people get tired but I don't see that significantly affecting the amount of work done in general, for 8-9 hour work days. Do you?

[Vespasian]

Sure but even without factoring in additional factors like unions and labour laws that is solely a question of negotiating a deal between an employer and an employee.

Getting a significant raise is not unheard of, in particular when switching jobs, and a 4 day work week is basically the same.

Basic negotiation strategy suggest that "labour shortage" is the right time to ask for this.

Some companies have extremely fat margins and regular employees may very well feel that some of that money is better spent on their salaries than dividends, C-suite compensation or stock buybacks.