[ams6110]

It is possible and commonplace in jobs where you physically work. Construction, any of the trades, factory work, food service... if you work 40 hours you have actually worked very close to 40 hours. There isn't any real opportunity to slack off or stand around in those jobs.

Office jobs, yeah. Many of those are bullshit jobs.

[waterlesscloud]

Having worked construction jobs, a lot of it is waiting. Waiting for someone else to finish their job, waiting for materials to arrive, etc. While it could sometimes be non-stop (once what you were waiting for is done, now someone is waiting on you), even then you'd pace yourself. No one goes all out for 16 hours.

[cptskippy]

That sounds surprisingly like my job with the exception that sometimes I do actually go all out for 16 hours.

[jug6ernaut]

I am mainly speaking to jobs that require a lot of critical thought. Your brain like the rest of your body can get fatigued, but unlike most of the other muscles in your body it is not easy to increase its conditioning.

IE mental exhaustion, there is a limit to how much intensive mental work everyone can put in in a given period of time. This is mainly to what i am speaking of.

And yes of course there are BS jobs, I never said there wasn't. There always will be, its just a matter of nothing is perfect.

[shkkmo]

Many of the physical jobs also require a lot of critical thought. There is a reason why accident rates go up significanly the more hours people are forced to work.

The difference is not that office jobs require more critical thought, but that physical jobs tend to produce actual value, and tend to produce value that is more easily measured.

[JoeAltmaier]

It is ultimately very satisfying to see your complete roof, new shingles neatly laid across 5000 square feet. Or your plowed field ready for the planter, 80 acres of potential fertility. Even a half-acre neatly mowed. I don't know if it beats a library debugged and turning over 50,000 calls per second, but at least you can look at the other ones, see the whole expanse of what you accomplished laid out under the sun.

[waterlesscloud]

Yep, that was definitely the great satisfaction of construction work- seeing what you'd done at the end of the day. It's worth a lot more than many might expect.

[padobson]

Whenever I walk through a Home Depot, I think "Man, the people that use this stuff are really MAKING things." Inevitably, my next thought is, "And a place like Home Depot could never operate without software making it work behind the scenes."

[saalweachter]

Whenever I walk through a Home Depot, I think "This building is full of houses."

[tedks]

Home Depot existed long before software.

It'll exist long after software, too.

Remember that we live in a bubble.

[oldmanjay]

There isn't going to be an "after software" with any sort of meaningful human civilization still around.

[corin_]

Purely for the sake of pedantry, Home Depot is actually under 40 years old, so it didn't even exist before software, yet alone after.

[Shorel]

I don't see software going away anytime soon.

It's like expecting writing and/or books to go away three thousand years ago.

[retrogradeMT]

This is why started to build web projects on the side. I have one these white collar jobs and I don't get to create things. I work closely with construction workers and get to see how satisfying it is for them to build something real.

Now I come home form 8 hours of work and spend 4 hours building things. Pretty bizarre.

[duaneb]

> I don't know if it beats a library debugged and turning over 50,000 calls per second, but at least you can look at the other ones, see the whole expanse of what you accomplished laid out under the sun

To me, being able to physically view work is orders of magnitude better to my mood than abstract accomplishments.

[VBprogrammer]

I know what you're getting at, but I'd be reasonably confident in speculating that there is just as much slacking off on construction projects as any other employment. Some of it maybe genuinely waiting for something to happen (crane to move something, cement truck to arrive etc). I'm not sure whether you'd count that as slacking off but it's certainly not working.

[randlet]

It probably varies. In my experience working construction this was absolutely not true. There was definitely some down time here and there but the majority of days we worked close to flat out from 7-4:30 (2 15min breaks + 30min lunch). Ditto for summer I spent working on an assembly line where there was even less downtime (although it was not nearly as physically demanding).

Frankly, working a manual labour job would be an eye opening experience to a lot of white collar workers.

[Cthulhu_]

Definitely, and probably better for their health, too. Government workers should IMO also have worked a physically demanding job at the same (low) pay rates, to go a bit off-topic here. People shouldn't be allowed to decide for others if they haven't stood in their shoes IMO.

[narag]

I've done blue collar work (construction was one) without much slacking at all, stops just to light a cigarrette o drink a beer, but it was mostly a continuous stream of little tasks. It made sense to not rush but neither stop, so it 'flows': you're never to tired and keep "the engine" warm.

[thekingofspain]

How are you allowed to drink beer on a construction site?

[narag]

It was a minor work: building a wall, over two or three days, in an individual's house. It was considered basic hospitality to offer some beverage to workers (sherry or beer) on top of the negotiated pay.

As the king you should know local customs, shouldn't you? ;-)

I wouldn't recommend including this kind of perk in the official builders guild code. But honestly, at that rate of physical activity with sudoration and deep breath, alcohol had little noticeable effect and for a very short time.

Also I was doing pawn work (not sure how to translate to English) that's very simple and not dangerous.

Edit: I did work for months delivering beer to bars and little shops with a truck. That was also very continuous work: you were either downloading beer cases or barrels from the truck, very physical work or driving or filling the invoices... to complete the route on time, you could stop very little. Of course nothing that could be called slacking and no alcohol. But mostly everybody got wasted Friday afternoons after work.

[retrogradeMT]

It seems that the answer should be, at least in the shot term, for good managers to recognize the 40 hours "available" concept and provide more flexible schedules. No one gains from having an office full of workers surfing Facebook on friday afternoon. Let people be someplace else if it their queue is empty.

From the outside, it seems like startups do this better than most.

[xanderstrike]

> From the outside, it seems like startups do this better than most.

As someone on the outside, hearing horror stories about mandatory 14 hour days and regularly working nights and weekends for startups I'd think they were doing it much worse. It's one of the things that has steered me away from working for a recent startup because I refuse to work more than 8 hours a week.

I had an interview at a startup where I asked the interviewer to take me through my average day at the company. He basically said I'd arrive at 8:30 and leave at 6:30 or 7, sometimes later. I told him that to maintain a healthy work/life balance I would be leaving at 5pm every day and asked him his opinion on that. He said it would be technically acceptable since they can't force you to work more than 8 hours, but would be heavily looked down upon. I didn't take the job.

[JimboOmega]

I was surprised to find so much discussion around the concept of the 15-20 hour actual productive week here, because Hacker News is such a startup friendly environment.

I've often seriously questioned if I'm cut out for startups because of the relatively low number (much less than 40) of productive hours I put in when things are not pressing at regular jobs.

[retrogradeMT]

Perhaps "better than most" isn't the right way to say it. My less than clear point was that there is less idle time at a startup than in traditional offices and when you don't have anything to do you do not need to be in the office.

I could also just be making a bad assumption.

[shkkmo]

Except what seems to actually be happening in some cases is "40 hours onsite" and "available 24/7 via email"

[Shorel]

Yeah but physical work is kind of invigorating in its own way. It can be said we evolved for that.

On the other hand stuff like computer programming can be very exhausting if we don't add at least a bit of physical activity to the mix.

And employers in white collar industries perceive such added physical activity as slacking off.