You really don’t need to work so much | Hacker News Reader

You really don’t need to work so much

newyorker.com

88 pointssinak58 comments

Much of this is the overhead of competition. Consider athletics. The amount of training and effort required increases steeply as you approach world-class performance levels. Yet those levels are maybe 20% beyond reasonable performance levels. A good high school mile run is 5 minutes; 4 minutes is world class, and the world record is 3:43:13. The level of effort to get the last 20% is huge.

Manufacturing isn't like that at all. In manufacturing, if you double your inputs, you get at least twice as much stuff out, and through economies of scale, may get more. This works so well that manufacturing employment is only 7% of the US workforce, yet the US produces more stuff than ever. (Yes, even with importing a lot of stuff.) This also applies to construction, mining, and agriculture - all the real stuff.

Finance, however, isn't like that at all, because it's mostly zero-sum. Winning matters. Avoiding losing matters more. In subsystems where winning matters, there is an incentive to put excessive resources in to avoid losing. This is also true of advertising, startups in crowded fields, and businesses with high brand recognition.

The reason people in the US are working so hard is that there's no effective pushback against this in the zero-sum sectors.

How could an effective pushback look like?

Removing most of the exemptions to the overtime requirement of the Fair Labor Standards Act would be a good start.[1] Bigger penalties for non-compliance, like triple damages, would help, too.

[1] http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs23.pdf

Exactly. Adopting a world wide standard based on the European Working Time Directive would be a step in the right direction.

They need to negotiate things like this in trade agreements. Labor standards need to be the similar worldwide and not be a race to the bottom.

Why would any country agree to this if others do not? And it is a big advantage to be able to outwork your competitors so there will always be holdouts.

In the context of a trade agreement.

If they don't agree to harmonized rules, then they aren't part of the trade agreement, and they pay a tariff on all exported goods to balance it out.

Unions? Seems to be the only proven to be working solution.

I wonder though if high paid professionals are actually looking for lower hours or just more pay. That is, is it the employers or the employees driving it? Perhaps some companies are willing to hire part timers but can't find suitable applicants?

  > This is also true of advertising, startups in crowded 
  > fields, and businesses with high brand recognition.

Peter Thiel has an interesting stance about startups in crowded fields. He argues that you should pick a niche with little competition and own that niche completely. While growing from that always avoid competition and aim for a monopoly.

Lecture 5 - Competition is for Losers (Peter Thiel)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_0dVHMpJlo

Transcript:

http://genius.com/Peter-thiel-lecture-5-business-strategy-an...

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8310301

I think there are good ideas in your comment, but you are also skipping some key points. A worker doesn't "inherit" the market his company is operating in, so the competition and profits to be had in that market don't automatically flow to the workers. For instance, the iPhone dominates the smartphone market, but that matters little to the Foxconn workers who make it in China.

A worker operates in his own market - the labor market. His/her pay and working conditions depend on the supply and demand for workers with his skills in the market.

In the last 15 years or so, the US labor market was opened up to workers from all over the world through a wide range of measures - outsourcing, free trade, illegal immigration, H1B visas, etc. So now you have workers from a population of 3-4 billion people competing for US jobs. The trouble is the US economy is still sized for 320 million people.

Corporate interests want you to believe this is the "technological future", but it's really just the huge labor market imbalance that's causing low pay and poor working conditions.

Isn't a global labor market a net win? Lower pay than a closed US market, but higher than a closed Indian market. And more productive overall so better for the consumers.

The problem is that they (US corporations and local elites in the developing countries) haven't built a global labor market. Rather they built very large pipelines into the US labor market.

This means that workers in a country such as China work 14 - 16 hours a day, eat in the company dining hall, and sleep in the company dorm. But they get paid a tiny amount, while US corporations and local elites who control the pipeline capture most of the profit.

Because of this, workers in developing countries act like a full worker (or 1.5 - 2x a full worker) but they don't act like a consumer. So you get 3-4 billion workers competing for jobs in an economy of 320 million people.

That Chinese worker may be worse off than the US worker he replaced, but he's better off than whatever else he would have done instead. That's why it's a win for the Chinese worker. It's also a win for the consumer who gets a cheaper phone and a win for the US company which reduces costs. The only loser seems to be the US worker, but is that really such a bad thing? Isn't this a force for equality? The poor getting richer and the (relatively) rich getting poorer?

I won't disagree that a privileged minority is making huge profits from this, but it's not a zero sum game so it isn't necessarily bad that that's happening.

I'd like to know if there's any other reason to restrict the international labor market beyond US workers being seen as more deserving than foreigners.

Well, there is the fact that is US (and other) corporations that sell products in the US market, but are able to skirt US rules by offloading those costs to other countries without contributing much to the US wellbeing. It is not about being more deserving, is about taking advantage of 'loopholes' in the whole process. For example, in Europe, it is quite common for employers pay on top of the salary 20-40% extra in taxes and social security for a local employee. Even if they pay the same salary to an offshore person, and skirt those 20-40% of taxes, the company wins, the offshore person may win, but the company that uses the country it is doing business in isn't paying it's fair share.

Think of this differently. Imagine a company that offshores all costs (employees, manufacturing, etc) and just has a director/owner in the US. They also use creative accounting so their tax rate is very low. Lets ignore the costs of using the infrastructure as well. Now, this seems like an amazing deal for the owner + their non-us suppliers right? IS it fair for the citizens? What would the owner ask the gov. to do if the citizens then just decided to rob the owner blind? Or destroy the cargo ships as soon as they entered the US? Would he just say "well, tough luck" or they would fight tooth and nail to get the gov/police involved?

I'm fairly liberal, but more and more believe there has to be a balance of responsibilities between corporations and the citizens, because if not, there will be a point where something will change, and most likely by force (check European countries history in the last decade for example)

The taxes attached to a local salary are hopefully paying for services that an offshore worker is not consuming.

Which is to say, determining what is fair is not a simple thing.

The Chinese worker loses because instead of participating in a functioning labor market (like the ones in US, most of Latin America, East/West Europe, etc) his only choice is slave-like factories. The US worker loses because he loses his job. "The consumer" is the same as the US worker, so under this scheme everyone loses, except a small cartel of US corporations and local elites in some developing countries.

The point is not to restrict the international labor market, but to free it from this artificial pipeline that is only possible because US corporations work together with local elites in countries like China to suppress their local labor markets.

The Chinese worker can't participate in the US market because as you said, it's too small even if he was allowed in. So that's not an alternative that might have happened. He couldn't do it in China because either because the value of the RMB was too low for him to buy a nice imported car and phone. Factory workers now can afford iphones of course, but only because of the exports they're producing.

With the US worker and consumer being the same person - I'm not so sure, we're mainly talking about manufacturing, where most people don't work - The rest of the consumers would otherwise be subsidizing the overpaid US worker. Is it right that all consumers (people) in America pay a bit extra in charity to a minority of people who somehow aren't being as productive as they could?

What kind of solution do you propose? More freedom of the labor markets, or less, or something else?

severus_bro. I'm still not sure what you're suggesting. Is it that the Chinese government is allowing its people to be treated badly by employers? That may be true, but could they actually do much better? Improved working conditions mean reduced competitiveness and more unemployment.

Anyway, "I don't want to repeat myself" tends to be a sign that somebody has come to the end of their chain of reasoning. So there's probably nothing further for us to discuss. I hoped you might be someone who could explain a valid reason behind this popular idea. More than "Be like the better ones."

Global labor is not automatically a net win. If companies shop for legal regimes where labor protection is minimal or nonexistent, all you get is a race to the bottom where no one wins, not even the capitalist class, not after the economy contracts because there is hardly anyone left with any leisure time or disposable income.

One thing I haven't seen much of in the Amazon discussion of the last week is the fact that there is little evidence showing chronically overworked employees are more productive than well-balanced ones.

Why has every article in the last week assumed that the Amazonians working 80 hr weeks are getting twice the work done? Has every journalist and blogger in the country collectively forgotten the concept of diminishing returns on hours worked?

If they worked their employees less, the jobs would be more desirable, and they'd have to pay them more.

Wouldn't they be able to get away with paying them less, because a more desirable job has a larger pool of people willing to take it?

More desirable = more competition = drive down wage

I simply think it's all about cost cutting. Salaried workers do not get over time. On paper it doesn't cost the company anything. Why pay for 2 workers when you can make 1 work twice as much.

> Why pay for 2 workers when you can make 1 work twice as much.

Even if the quality drops off so that it's only as good as say, 1.5 well-rested workers, they still got an extra 0.5 for free.

Unless employee churn goes up, and they have to pay for recruitment and training.

Sure. I wasn't necessarily agreeing, just saying that may be their reasoning even if they are fully aware productivity drops. The original comment also said it doesn't cost anything "on paper."

Could this be a way of passing the cost to another department? Maybe a department manager is a slavedriver and knows it's not efficient long term, but he doesn't care as long as the costs (like replacement recruiting) don't come out of his budget. I don't know if that's how budgets really work though.

From the things I've seen, an 80-hour employee is worth 0.8 a 40-hour employee.

Here's the thing, it's unmeasurable.

Most of software is invisible, and would take a tremendous amount of effort to analyze well (for quality, value, etc.), only a fraction of which is ever expended in the moment (if at all). The reality is that good people work under poor conditions and do poorly, other people get burnt out, other people with talent "evaporate" out of the team/org/company because they are fed up or what-have-you. All of this degrades the ability of the team/company to execute on difficult projects well, but that is incredibly hard to measure objectively. Especially since every iteration and every project tends to have its own unique qualities which make direct comparisons to previous projects non-trivial. That leaves only subjective judgments. People may look around and ask "why can't we execute as well as we used to?" but unless it's a drastic difference it may not be very noticeable, if at all.

And that's the thing, objective measures are nearly impossible to come by, and a lot of the data for subjective measures is not well known beyond only a handful of people. Software is fundamentally a creative endeavor, and this shows the most during the development process. Judging the quality of a company overall from year to year then becomes similar to judging the quality of, say, a band or an actor or a comedian. Debating which, say, Smashing Pumpkins album was the best is fundamentally similar to judging whether the developing capability at, say, google (or microsoft or facebook or amazon) was better in 2012 or 2010 or what-have-you. And this is even difficult to judge over long periods (say, time slices of an entire decade) when looking back years after the fact. It's essentially impossible in the moment, especially in micro-cosm.

All of which is to say, there's no sure, objective way to tell whether you're getting 1.5x well-rested workers worth of work, 2x, 10x, 0.5x, 0x, -1x, or -5x. All you know for sure is that they're putting in more hours or "crushing" more bugs, so you focus on the metrics you do have even if they are bad metrics and could lead you to make all of the wrong choices.

They aren't. In fact, there's a lot of research showing otherwise, going back decades, at least since the '80s/'90s or so.

They don't have chronically overworked employees. They simply burn them out and then replace them with newer/younger workers.

I think the NYT reported that the average tenure of an Amazon worker is 1 year. Just let that sink in for a minute.

Oh, I know, I was there (for 1 year, ironically). I was talking more generally.

Amazon is at the higher end of unsustainable, like most of the gamedev industry (for example), but on the company scale there's always more workers feeding into the top of the funnel, so they can still get the work done, they don't care that they're churning through employees.

Nevertheless, fundamentally most tech companies work on a similar model, they're just not as horrid as Amazon so the process isn't as obviously absurd. But it's still a broken system that I don't think anyone really knows how to fix, yet.

I don't think Amazon and the other corporations perceive this as a broken system. It looks like they want/designed it like this.

Since you were there:

What effect does that churn have on their technology? If the average developer only sticks around for one or two years before burning out, subject-matter experts are going to be really scarce, and once you don't have any of those you lose the ability to innovate in any meaningful sense.

One thing that is difficult to appreciate and hasn't been studied much is the drastic differences between what constitute a "high workload" for manual labor and for cognitive labor. All of our labor laws and all of our cultural intuition has been calibrated to manual labor, which leads to incorrect conclusions when we try to apply those same norms and boundaries to cognitive labor. You can work less than 40 hours a week and still be overburdened when it comes to cognitive labor due to the high amount of stress and the difference in workload capacity.

From my experience and observation I'd say that getting even 4 hours a day for 5 days a week of cognitive labor is near the high end of the normal range of what might be long-term sustainable. Also, I suspect that people in the tech industry switch jobs and switch companies on a comparatively short time scale partly because doing so helps reset the cognitive load burden to some degree. Partly because often it involves taking a bit of time off in between jobs, partly because it involves being granted a "grace period" where taking extra time to get stuff done and being allowed to make mistakes is allowed.

It makes me wonder what a truly "sustainable" environment for software development or other cognitive work would look like. And how different it would be from the norms we accept for such work today.

Overwork is directly related to the impossibility of measuring performance, and the cargo cultish attempt to increase output.

Say you're doing some white-collar job, like managing a set of accounts for a large corporation. In all likelihood, you didn't build that business. You inherited it from some other guy. You can't say to your boss you're responsible for 100M in sales, because a good chunk of that would have been there regardless. There's also the noise: other firms are doing things too, there's an economy that goes up and down, customer orders may be lumpy. So how much did you make? Hard to say.

What you can do is to look like you really care.

I agree, performance-led cultures can lead to overwork, but non-performance-led cultures can do the same. Let's just say I've worked in companies where the level of bureaucracy and inefficiency has been sizeable... copious amounts of meetings, work that could easily been handled automatically been done manually, etc... I didn't say anything because I didn't want anyone to lose their job, the company was still stable enough to support the people they employed, and whilst I don't regret that decision, there's no doubt it added to people being overworked.

This is true as well. In something like a government bureaucracy things need to be done in a specific way so that nobody thinks anyone is being favoured, there's no perception of corruption, and everyone who encounters the system gets an equal treatment.

In practice it means a lot of procedures that don't seem to make any sense and a lot of work complying with those procedures. Quite stressful for the people doing it actually.

   Once upon a time, it was taken for granted that the
   wealthier classes enjoyed a life of leisure on the backs
   of the proletariat. Today it is people in skilled trades
   who can most find reasonable hours coupled with good pay;
   the American professional is among those subject to
   humiliation and driven like a beast of burden.

This is very reminiscent of Orwell's 1984, where the "proles" [1], while suffering under poor living conditions, had more freedom than party members, who were constantly under watch and had their behaviors strictly controlled.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proles

"They may be the byproduct of systems and institutions that have taken on lives of their own and serve no one’s interests. That can happen if some industries have simply become giant make-work projects that trap everyone within them."

Is it possible that some of this overwork is being driven by general existential malaise? Having a lot of free time without purpose (and especially without meaningful relationships to occupy it) is actually pretty boring and depressing after a few days.

I've found myself working many more hours / weekends during points of my life when I didn't have many friends around just so I didn't have to sit at my apartment by myself and feel bored or feel like drinking. The work wasn't incredibly productive, but at least it was interesting and filled me with some sense of meaning.

That's definitely a real phenomenon, but more sustainably less work time / more free time is more time to develop meaningful relationships & hobbies, in turn reducing existential malaise. All of that is much easier said than done of course.

If we were more efficient we'd full that extra time with more work. And if we didn't, someone else would. Ultimately that's sort of the problem. We need to work really hard and long to pay off student loans, buy a house, pay for good schools. If we don't we don't get those things. It's an arms race where there are fewer high paying jobs than there are people to fill them generations ahead limit upward mobility.

The title is misleading. You really DO need to work so much and probably even more. Two observations: 1.The competition about less and less jobs gets stronger 2.The people don't believe in unions anymore, which is the only way to negotiate for better working conditions and less hours. So this is a I versus You race to the bottom. This is going to be fun. :-)

> If we assume that there is, to a certain degree, a fixed amount of work necessary for society to function...

That is a terrible assumption. The scope of work that is both physically possible and economically feasible is constantly shifting.

To believe that we're "out of work to do" you have to believe every human need is already being met.

I think the article is missing a certain point. I work 40 hours a week as an english teacher, my wife works full time. Thats the only way we can save money, im soending over 80% of my free time coding to try and get sales so we can buy a house . I dont know if im missing the point of the article, i may be.

> Thats the only way we can save money

Please take this in the constructive manner in which it is intended:

Do you drive 2 cars newer than 2009? Paying a loan payment on both (or worse, leasing)?

Do you eat out at restaurants more than once a month [for very special occasions]?

Do you regularly buy Starbucks or the equivalent?

Do you pay $100 to your cable company and $120 to your cell phone company every month?

If you're anything like the average American, you are leaking a large amount of consumption that's on autopilot. Expensive, nearly new cars, in multiples, upgraded frequently, each with a loan or lease payment and expensive collision insurance required by the bank, paying an army of servants to cater to your food needs, buying $5 cups of hot water poured over roasted beans, etc.

"But, but, I need all of those things to get to our jobs reliably, to de-stress after so much work, etc!" No, no, you don't, but American marketers have convinced you that you do, and you see it reinforced by most of your peers, so you do.

For those who want to learn more, start with: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/04/22/curing-your-clown-... and http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim... and then randomly click around his blog)

Even if you don't want to buy a bike to commute with immediately, you can make small changes, like keeping your sensible, reliable car for 12 years instead of 4, cutting out $5 coffee runs entirely, switching to a $50/mo plan for 2 cell phones, cook at home more, etc.

(I have no connection to MMM and I don't follow all of his guidance, but I find his perspective to be amazingly helpful in challenging auto-pilot consumption. I use Ting [Sprint reseller] as my cell phone plan; wife and I pay $45-55/mo for 3 phones, two iPhones and a Nexus. www.ting.com is the non-referral link, [ https://z9prmb2f3t5.ting.com/ is my referral link, but I care more about you saving money than getting a referral credit, so I listed the other first ])

Gods i wish.

I dont own a car, we have talked about renting one, but it hasnt come about yet.

We eat at a restaurant maybe once every month, and we try to keep it under $50.

I take my own coffee to work(nice big starbucks mug though! haha... sigh)

No cable TV, we do have internet, thats $50 a month.

We dont live in america, its easier here in Japan compared to Australia where i came from, i get a comparable wage(about 2k per month AUD approx), and instead of paying 1200 per month in rent, i pay 870, so we can save now.

But we have public transport costs, food bills etc. Honestly i have no idea how anyone could survive if they had cable tv, starbucks coffee, restaurants too often AND a car. We could pick one, maybe two if we didnt want to save.

I think their idea of a standard wage is not accurate. IF you are programming in some big company, yeah maybe, but i earn less than 40k US per year (which btw is more than i was earning as a fully qualified chef in Australia, with over 10 years experience - when you consider the hours 50+ hours then vs 40 now).

As i said originally, i may be missing the point of the article, but for me, if i was earning enough to get what you mentioned, id be quite happy. Id have my house very quickly.

Side note: My apartment/house is my goal, a shitty little place that will allow me to save half my rent a month towards another shitty little apartment that i can rent out.

Again, maybe im missing something here?

I loved visiting Tokyo, but I recall an almost overwhelming sense of not understanding how the economy worked for the people there. It did seem insanely difficult to just break-even working a job there, yet everyone I met was unfailingly polite and pleasant to interact with.

I get a fairly good wage comparatively to australia, and infact compared to locals in the same industry. So technicly im being paid well, and if you compare costs/income, im sure you could find the issue i have here -.-

Looks like you are in a tight situation regarding income/expenses. If I were you, I would try really hard to switch markets.

Here's one scenario - you move to the US, and become nurses, both you and your wife. After a few years, that will give you at least $60k x 2 = $120k in income. But you only need about $70k in income to live well away from the coasts in the US (a little more with kids).

Also, whether this kind of transition is worth it depends on how old you are.

My cousin in Perth was earning AUD$100K+ driving a bus. But...you guessed it...as a fly-in, fly-out employee of the mining industry in Western Australia.

I've come to think of that as a typical wage for an uneducated person in Australia...then I read what you earn as a qualified chef, and realize that Perth's economy is a bubble.

> "My cousin in Perth was earning AUD$100K+ driving a bus. But...you guessed it...as a fly-in, fly-out employee of the mining industry in Western Australia."

I wonder what the pay would be if the Australian mining industry wasn't so corrupt (this isn't a slight on your cousin in any way, it's those who arrange the tax breaks and lie about the economic impact of mining in Australia that are at fault)...

http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-25/nrn-dist-mining-sub...

http://m.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/mining-...

Was in a bubble, it's not looking too hot now with current iron ore prices.

$40k is staggeringly crap pay for a chef; minimum wage for a full time job in Australia is about $34k ($17.29/hr minimum wage). Average salary is somewhere north of $70k and that's roughly what my brother in law earns as a full time chef.

Move to Shanghai. I make 20k rmb a month, roughly 2.5k usd and rent is a fifth of that. I eat out regularly and save half what I make. I teach English too.

Honestly - it is tempting, but ontop of that i dont have a uni degree - im a self taught programmer, so im stuck between a rock and getting my own software out haha. Sigh, im pretty happy, were getting by, but articles like this, seem to piss me off a little (im sorry it was also a bad day), i wish i earnt enough to follow what it said.

What if you could earn a living wage on part-time hours, would you take that opportunity?

The underlying message of the article may be not obvious at first, but my impression was that it's a criticism on the effects of unrestrained competition.

On the surface it's about how the game is structured, people are rewarded for the hours spent working rather than their work output, and questions about why do we need to do more work once the work we have signed up to do is done. However, if you dig deeper a different message emerges... imagine every worker was on flexitime, and could choose how much or little they worked so long as they got their tasks done, companies would start expecting more and more tasks to be done right? The blame for this isn't solely with the employer, whilst they might be partly motivated by greed, there is also the issue of competition, and as a general rule the more competitive a market is, the fewer resources are directly available to a company, and the fewer resources available the more demands are going to be placed on the worker.

Imagine what work would be like if we didn't need to compete in order to earn a living. It's not a pipe dream, it could happen, for example a universal basic income would be a step towards this.

Where's the second half of the essay? He just drops off in mid thought without making any suggestions or deeper analysis. Just lazy.

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