I do not know how to explain this properly, but there is some amount of “non-work” work hours in every job I have done. If I were allowed to do everything that needed to get done and then go home at the end, no question, no raised eyebrows, etc, then most office jobs I have had would have been 2-4 hour work days.
Indeed, it’s hard to get more than four solid hours of cognitively intense work done on any given day anyway, and if I have done this, I consider it an especially productive day. I mostly work for myself now and typically do my 2-4 hours of intense cognitive “real production” work starting a half an hour after I wake up, with all the benefits of a night of sleep, good blood sugar, and a fresh pot of coffee. After lunch, I might work on a couple of hours of boring housekeeping type stuff, answering emails, ordering supplies, talking to providers, cash i/o, etc.
But those office jobs, really, most days were spent filling 8 hours and a half with what could have been a single uninterrupted 4 hour block. I think some of the filler is also “meetings.” I think a lot of people in broadly “middle level administrative” roles have probably experienced something similar.
Good point, and one of the hypotheses I considered including was “tech workers already only work 4 hours a day…” but decided it was a bit too snarky and cynical.
There may be some truth to this, but note that there has always been some degree of loafing on the job! In factories it used to be called “soldiering”—see the bit on Taylor and scientific management in this essay.
I’m a tech worker. I work 40-70 hours a week, depending on incident load. Nobody I work with or see on a regular basis works less than 40 hours a week, and some are substantially more than that.
My most cognitively productive hours are the four hours in the morning, but there’s plenty of lower effort important organizational stuff to fill out the afternoons. I think a good fraction of my coworkers are like me and don’t actually need the job anymore, but we still put forth effort.
I think one of the major missing pieces of your article is “social status pressure”. Most people play the status game; they struggle to get ahead of their neighbors, even if it doesn’t make any sense. They work extra hours to afford that struggle. They demand more than the base necessities and comfort, because that’s how you signal status. It’s pointless and stupid, but IMO one of the biggest issues.
Status is a zero-sum game, and there is no limit how expensive the zero-sum games can get.
But also, the relation between salary and “time actually worked” is counter-intuitive. Naively, the more you work, the more the employer should pay you. Because, why would anyone choose to pay more for less work, or why would anyone accept lower salary for more work?
If you introduce other variables besides salary and work time, it gets complicated. For example, people with more experience can be paid more, and maybe can also do their work sooner… if they can prevent the employers from giving them as much work as possible, which maybe they can, because their negotiation position is stronger. This could make the correlation between salary and work time smaller, maybe even negative. But at least it sounds fair—higher salary and less work is your reward for the time having spent learning and practicing your craft.
There are also completely unfair variables. Most obviously, the country you live in. People in poor countries work more and get paid less, duh. But a smaller version of this effect also exists between companies in the same country. The more stingy companies pay less and make sure that their employees work all the time.
There is a related skill, not sure what would be the best name, let’s call it “job market savvy”. It is the ability to recognize and exploit the fact that the relation between work and salary is not what people might naively expect, even after controlling for skill level (and country). Its minimum version is recognizing when you are in a bad place, and quitting. That alone already lets you can get Pareto-better combination of work and salary than some people without this skill have. A higher version of this skill (I can only guess, because I am not there yet) probably involves actively scanning the job market for imbalances, probably using a network of people who play the same game, and applying for the Pareto-optimal jobs (and quitting when they stop being such).
In other words, I have a strong suspicion that if you are a tech worker who works 40+ hours a week, there is very likely a job that would pay you the same, for less work (though you might still need to spend 40 hours a week in the office), that you could get with the technical skills you currently have.
This seems to go against the “Econ 101” logic, but in my experience, the most exhausting jobs I had were actually not the ones that paid best. Sometimes they actually paid below the market rate (but the people who worked there were often too exhausted to notice, or too exhausted to prepare for a job interview).
The exceptions to what I said above, which are very bad are always the waiting. I hate it when I have 28 minutes of work to do, but it ain’t gonna happen until Joe gets that other thing on my desk. Then Supervisor Jake wants me to help him pick up a rental car. The inefficiencies in those two processes in the worst case, might eat a whole day and have me home late. This kind of stuff is demoralizing.
I think in the past, factory workers might savor that. It’s variety from the line, and it’s “easy.” For us management and information worker types, or at least me (lets say it’s just me) this makes me want to punch holes in drywall. Between people wanting to have meetings in rooms with chairs, and processes involving waiting, those office jobs can get very taxing. Working for myself I mostly avoid the meetings, but I still have those days of time-eating activities.
Perhaps a common culture here on lesswrong is jobs where “we’re gonna be here until everything is done” (including entrepreneurs and consultants) and so waiting is painful. Maybe for something like a government bureaucrat or a factory worker or similar, it would still be a boon.
Thats never been my experience, and it doesn’t make much sense. Since tech workers are expensive, you could just manage with half as many if everyone is doing 4 hour a day.
I do not know how to explain this properly, but there is some amount of “non-work” work hours in every job I have done. If I were allowed to do everything that needed to get done and then go home at the end, no question, no raised eyebrows, etc, then most office jobs I have had would have been 2-4 hour work days.
Indeed, it’s hard to get more than four solid hours of cognitively intense work done on any given day anyway, and if I have done this, I consider it an especially productive day. I mostly work for myself now and typically do my 2-4 hours of intense cognitive “real production” work starting a half an hour after I wake up, with all the benefits of a night of sleep, good blood sugar, and a fresh pot of coffee. After lunch, I might work on a couple of hours of boring housekeeping type stuff, answering emails, ordering supplies, talking to providers, cash i/o, etc.
But those office jobs, really, most days were spent filling 8 hours and a half with what could have been a single uninterrupted 4 hour block. I think some of the filler is also “meetings.” I think a lot of people in broadly “middle level administrative” roles have probably experienced something similar.
Good point, and one of the hypotheses I considered including was “tech workers already only work 4 hours a day…” but decided it was a bit too snarky and cynical.
There may be some truth to this, but note that there has always been some degree of loafing on the job! In factories it used to be called “soldiering”—see the bit on Taylor and scientific management in this essay.
I’m a tech worker. I work 40-70 hours a week, depending on incident load. Nobody I work with or see on a regular basis works less than 40 hours a week, and some are substantially more than that.
My most cognitively productive hours are the four hours in the morning, but there’s plenty of lower effort important organizational stuff to fill out the afternoons. I think a good fraction of my coworkers are like me and don’t actually need the job anymore, but we still put forth effort.
I think one of the major missing pieces of your article is “social status pressure”. Most people play the status game; they struggle to get ahead of their neighbors, even if it doesn’t make any sense. They work extra hours to afford that struggle. They demand more than the base necessities and comfort, because that’s how you signal status. It’s pointless and stupid, but IMO one of the biggest issues.
Status is a zero-sum game, and there is no limit how expensive the zero-sum games can get.
But also, the relation between salary and “time actually worked” is counter-intuitive. Naively, the more you work, the more the employer should pay you. Because, why would anyone choose to pay more for less work, or why would anyone accept lower salary for more work?
If you introduce other variables besides salary and work time, it gets complicated. For example, people with more experience can be paid more, and maybe can also do their work sooner… if they can prevent the employers from giving them as much work as possible, which maybe they can, because their negotiation position is stronger. This could make the correlation between salary and work time smaller, maybe even negative. But at least it sounds fair—higher salary and less work is your reward for the time having spent learning and practicing your craft.
There are also completely unfair variables. Most obviously, the country you live in. People in poor countries work more and get paid less, duh. But a smaller version of this effect also exists between companies in the same country. The more stingy companies pay less and make sure that their employees work all the time.
There is a related skill, not sure what would be the best name, let’s call it “job market savvy”. It is the ability to recognize and exploit the fact that the relation between work and salary is not what people might naively expect, even after controlling for skill level (and country). Its minimum version is recognizing when you are in a bad place, and quitting. That alone already lets you can get Pareto-better combination of work and salary than some people without this skill have. A higher version of this skill (I can only guess, because I am not there yet) probably involves actively scanning the job market for imbalances, probably using a network of people who play the same game, and applying for the Pareto-optimal jobs (and quitting when they stop being such).
In other words, I have a strong suspicion that if you are a tech worker who works 40+ hours a week, there is very likely a job that would pay you the same, for less work (though you might still need to spend 40 hours a week in the office), that you could get with the technical skills you currently have.
This seems to go against the “Econ 101” logic, but in my experience, the most exhausting jobs I had were actually not the ones that paid best. Sometimes they actually paid below the market rate (but the people who worked there were often too exhausted to notice, or too exhausted to prepare for a job interview).
The exceptions to what I said above, which are very bad are always the waiting. I hate it when I have 28 minutes of work to do, but it ain’t gonna happen until Joe gets that other thing on my desk. Then Supervisor Jake wants me to help him pick up a rental car. The inefficiencies in those two processes in the worst case, might eat a whole day and have me home late. This kind of stuff is demoralizing.
I think in the past, factory workers might savor that. It’s variety from the line, and it’s “easy.” For us management and information worker types, or at least me (lets say it’s just me) this makes me want to punch holes in drywall. Between people wanting to have meetings in rooms with chairs, and processes involving waiting, those office jobs can get very taxing. Working for myself I mostly avoid the meetings, but I still have those days of time-eating activities.
Perhaps a common culture here on lesswrong is jobs where “we’re gonna be here until everything is done” (including entrepreneurs and consultants) and so waiting is painful. Maybe for something like a government bureaucrat or a factory worker or similar, it would still be a boon.
Thats never been my experience, and it doesn’t make much sense. Since tech workers are expensive, you could just manage with half as many if everyone is doing 4 hour a day.
Yes. Exactly. Assuming they can actually focus on the work and work for the whole 4h. Which is sort of the whole issue.
If you only have half as many workers, you’ll end up with half the amount of work, as they’re also only working for 4h/day.