[whatshisface]

Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.

What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people. The reason behind that is communication overhead - the more context an individual carries in their heads, the less likely their role will exist on an hourly basis in the industry.

So, if anyone wants AI to give us another day off, we need to think about how it can reduce the cost of "context switching" a whole person on and off a task, without simultaneously formalizing our roles so much that it gives us all five. ;-)

[majormajor]

> Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.

This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place.

If everyone sufficiently "flips out" about it being 5 then the problem of "reduce the context switching problem" is something the owner can try to figure out.

Cause otherwise, you could find a perfect solution to that problem, and still not have leverage to make ownership actually change anything vs just raise expectations that much higher.

(Meanwhile, some companies are trying to import 996 and push it past 5 for white-collar work anyway, so any sort of non-political, non-disruptive action seems doomed to fail since the status quo is moving the wrong direction.)

[whatshisface]

The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.

[majormajor]

>The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.

How so? Without technology we wouldn't have a "work week" in the first place and work would be much more directly tied to survival of the community and generally less negotiable in the first place. The "flipping out" came about precisely because technology changed what work was and what the conditions around it were while people noticed that those new expectations and conditions didn't actually seem necessary for their survival (or even much to their personal direct benefit vs the benefit of business owners).

Any technology that lets more be done with less time is an opportunity for a population to make an attempt to claim some of those gains for themselves.

[whatshisface]

The past had slaves too. The feudal arrangement of tenant farmers was only one system of labor. I don't think union bargaining was ever tied to specific advances in technology.

[majormajor]

Sorry, I'm drawing a blank on much history of slaves in a extremely-low-technological society or how it was imposed or ended in those societies, could you provide some examples of what you're meaning exactly by bringing slavery up? Feudalism or other things happening in those centuries is well into the technological era.

Are you saying you can't think of examples from the past of the introduction of technology changing labor dynamics or organization? Say, mechanical agriculture?

The changes are hardly going to always be good - there's no determinism of "new technology means society will get 'better'". But they've often been periods of change, and such periods are when it's easier to influence the direction if you happen to care about the direction of the change.

[whatshisface]

When you say technological era, do you mean anything after the introduction of potery, writing, or what? Because you can trace slavery back to the earliest recorded civilizations, but it won't be easy to trace it to before a written record.

[thaumasiotes]

> What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people.

Why make that assumption? The company has a lot of per-employee fixed costs, which means that it's much more expensive to have 5 employees than 4 employees under the assumption that total productivity is exactly equal in both cases. (And the further assumption that you pay more productive workers more than you pay less productive workers.)

If you want flexibility on the work week, get rid of the concept of "full-time employee" status and make everyone contractors.

[whatshisface]

Not every role is suitable for contracting. An individual can become a part-time developer by freelancing, but if you do that you get very specific kinds of jobs, ones with high compartmentalization.

[thaumasiotes]

Contracting is a legal status. It has nothing to do with the role.

Within software development, most contractors aren't freelancing.

[ikr678]

Its not a communication overhead, it's that business owners want to maximise their returns on their fixed operating costs subject to the 5 day limit. One extra staff member in a traditional office is extra software license, extra seating, extra hardware, extra HR/payroll/insurance, extra risk, extra training etc etc.

Remember to thank your unions for the weekend.

[whatshisface]

If it was utilization of fixed capital that motivated the maximum-length workweek of today and centuries past, they wouldn't mind who was on the shifts or how many so long as there were three of them.

[majormajor]

I'd be surprised if the jobs where it highly matters which employer covers the shift weren't significantly outnumbered by the ones where it generally doesn't. Labor-as-a-commodity has been an explicit goal of a lot of industrialization management methods.

[qazxcvbnmlp]

I think this is where one of the biggest gains in productivity from AI will come from. Even if it levels off at current levels of “intelligence” a 30% reduction in team size will save alot of communication overhead.

We think of productivity as linear to the number of employees, but it’s more of Log(N) for knowledge work because of the communication overhead. If your AI spend and employee productivity improvement ends up being proportional to headcount thats a linear gain that used to be Log(N).

[whatshisface]

The drivers behind the asymptotic scaling are the tasks that can't be compartmentalized into prompts, the same tasks that couldn't be compartmentalized into a request for another person to do.

[cm11]

This analysis makes sense to me. I'll add that the little bit of research that's come out suggests individual people are as productive in four day work weeks as five, which doesn't contradict your point.

The other thing is that if leadership is better—they have stronger vision and coordinate the silos (of people or teams) themselves—the communication overhead is less. The more each level needs to communicate, sync, and align with each other, the more it reflects the top not doing it. This is so thoroughly normalized today that it's hard to see otherwise. As you move down the hierarchy, the theory embedded in the chosen org structure that most tech companies have, is that less communicating should be necessary. This is what middle managers (and product managers) are supposed to be for—coordinating and communicating to take that off the plate of their subordinates. The lack of leadership above is why the managers below get hired. Those managers then do the same and eventually ICs need to coordinate amongst themselves.

[duskdozer]

It is also incentivized because a demand for 25% more employees (assuming constant person-days) shifts power to labor from employers.