It's because jobs are not about work. Nobody really wants or needs 99.999...% of the the things companies make or do. But everybody needs a job. So we have a ponzi scheme - driven by people who can't really do anything. They have a job with a fancy-sounding title. To make it look like they are doing something, they get a bunch of other people who also can't really do anything to have meetings with. Now they are doing something! Those people do the same - so there needs to be even more people, to have more meetings.
It goes like this all the way down until there actually has to be something tangible. It doesn't have to be good, or useful - just tangible. They give those jobs to some programmers. They are smug and think they are actually doing work, but really a programmer's sole responsibility is to give their managers something to have meetings about.
If we admitted things would work better with less worker time, it would start to undermine the whole system, and everything would fall apart. So 5 days (with as much overtime as possible) it is.
"Nobody really wants or needs 99.999...% of the the things companies make or do."
Heh, you must have built a real business.
There's a lot of things you need to keep an organisation going. Anything from insurance, contract lawyers, wifi routers, offices, kitchens, producers, suppliers, customer service agents, the headphones and computers and keyboards they use (which all had to be transported). You need all this stuff just to run a small company succesfully.
Having said that, many companies could probably make it work in a 4-day workweek, which I'm in favor of.
Yes, all that stuff - wifi routers, offices, customer service agents - are needed to to run an organisation. For every company I've ever worked for, and every company of every computer programmer I've ever known so far - the organisation exists either so managers can have meetings, or to provide products/services that support some other organisation... which exists so managers can have meetings. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it's a ponzi scheme all the way to the top.
Perhaps...you're just not aware of what managers do, or you've never been exposed to good management? 10 years ago, I probably would have agreed with you. After running my own consulting practice for a few years, being the technical lead on a couple of big projects, and generally gaining more experience / wisdom - I definitely don't agree.
It turns out that coordinating people, and getting them to work towards a common goal, is hard. There's all those pesky individual motivations, major life events and crises, and psychological strengths and weaknesses. Add to that a modern work environment in which many of us work on complex systems with many pieces and dependencies, any of which can break down and block forward progress. Plus, like it or not, businesses have hard legal requirements - financial reporting, human resources practices, etc. - to satisfy, along with their usual goal of building products other people (with equally complex motivations and incentives) want enough that they'll pay for them.
A good manager shields individual contributors from as much of this as possible. In other words: the better a manager is at doing their job, the more it looks to ICs like that manager is doing nothing at all - because the ICs experience so little of the behind-the-scenes logistics that they can imagine, to a first approximation, that the business magically runs exclusively on engineering effort. It's sort of a weird spin on the Dunning-Kruger effect, where your worth is inversely proportional to the external perception of that worth (as opposed to internal perception) - which is deepened by the fact that a good manager also takes blame and gives praise.
That's not to say that meetings are good, or even necessary in most cases! They're just one tool for building shared vision, and like any tool they can be (and often are) misused - long, pointless meetings with too many attendees and no agenda. I've been at those meetings. I'll admit to having held a couple of those meetings - though by now I like to think I've learned better; now, I'll always make sure there's a clear agenda with clear desired outcomes, that only truly necessary attendees are invited, and that it's not the sort of thing for which an email or async discussion would be fine. (Plus I invest some of my time in learning how to properly facilitate.)
Jobs with real output often have radically different schedules than the typical 5 day office schedule (for better or worse). No one worries that nurses do 3 x 13hrs a week or whatever since there is a very concrete exchange of hourly pay and hours worked. I know a pilot who works like 1 day a week.
Salaried office work may not always be BS but is at least somewhat unclear in terms of output and varies by individual. So if anyone tries to go below our current 5 day 40hr Schelling point there will be all kinds of issues from jealousy, competition etc. Its a social thing not a productivity thing, but that doesn’t make it any less real. We saw how only something like Covid could force attitude changes on full time remote work.
This is correct. As a salaried employee, I am paid for my loyalty in the way a nurse is not. In exchange for a fixed yearly sum, I promise my employer to basically have their interests at heart and work only for them, which we agree, for reasonableness' sake, means about 40 hours / week. In reality, most salaried employees work much less. My dad was in sales my whole life until he retired, and he never worked an actual 9 - 5 week in his entire sales career. After schmoozing, calling, marketing, etc, he'd come home and take a nap or play with us.
IMO, the 40 hour work week is mainly a problem in a certain subset of high-achieving, highly educated employees, be they engineers, consultants, attorneys, etc. It's their own internal shame mechanisms which make them work 40 hours / week
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It's because jobs are not about work. Nobody really wants or needs 99.999...% of the the things companies make or do. But everybody needs a job. So we have a ponzi scheme - driven by people who can't really do anything. They have a job with a fancy-sounding title. To make it look like they are doing something, they get a bunch of other people who also can't really do anything to have meetings with. Now they are doing something! Those people do the same - so there needs to be even more people, to have more meetings.
It goes like this all the way down until there actually has to be something tangible. It doesn't have to be good, or useful - just tangible. They give those jobs to some programmers. They are smug and think they are actually doing work, but really a programmer's sole responsibility is to give their managers something to have meetings about.
If we admitted things would work better with less worker time, it would start to undermine the whole system, and everything would fall apart. So 5 days (with as much overtime as possible) it is.
"Nobody really wants or needs 99.999...% of the the things companies make or do."
Heh, you must have built a real business.
There's a lot of things you need to keep an organisation going. Anything from insurance, contract lawyers, wifi routers, offices, kitchens, producers, suppliers, customer service agents, the headphones and computers and keyboards they use (which all had to be transported). You need all this stuff just to run a small company succesfully.
Having said that, many companies could probably make it work in a 4-day workweek, which I'm in favor of.
Yes, all that stuff - wifi routers, offices, customer service agents - are needed to to run an organisation. For every company I've ever worked for, and every company of every computer programmer I've ever known so far - the organisation exists either so managers can have meetings, or to provide products/services that support some other organisation... which exists so managers can have meetings. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it's a ponzi scheme all the way to the top.
Perhaps...you're just not aware of what managers do, or you've never been exposed to good management? 10 years ago, I probably would have agreed with you. After running my own consulting practice for a few years, being the technical lead on a couple of big projects, and generally gaining more experience / wisdom - I definitely don't agree.
It turns out that coordinating people, and getting them to work towards a common goal, is hard. There's all those pesky individual motivations, major life events and crises, and psychological strengths and weaknesses. Add to that a modern work environment in which many of us work on complex systems with many pieces and dependencies, any of which can break down and block forward progress. Plus, like it or not, businesses have hard legal requirements - financial reporting, human resources practices, etc. - to satisfy, along with their usual goal of building products other people (with equally complex motivations and incentives) want enough that they'll pay for them.
A good manager shields individual contributors from as much of this as possible. In other words: the better a manager is at doing their job, the more it looks to ICs like that manager is doing nothing at all - because the ICs experience so little of the behind-the-scenes logistics that they can imagine, to a first approximation, that the business magically runs exclusively on engineering effort. It's sort of a weird spin on the Dunning-Kruger effect, where your worth is inversely proportional to the external perception of that worth (as opposed to internal perception) - which is deepened by the fact that a good manager also takes blame and gives praise.
That's not to say that meetings are good, or even necessary in most cases! They're just one tool for building shared vision, and like any tool they can be (and often are) misused - long, pointless meetings with too many attendees and no agenda. I've been at those meetings. I'll admit to having held a couple of those meetings - though by now I like to think I've learned better; now, I'll always make sure there's a clear agenda with clear desired outcomes, that only truly necessary attendees are invited, and that it's not the sort of thing for which an email or async discussion would be fine. (Plus I invest some of my time in learning how to properly facilitate.)
$20 says you’re a manager
Jobs with real output often have radically different schedules than the typical 5 day office schedule (for better or worse). No one worries that nurses do 3 x 13hrs a week or whatever since there is a very concrete exchange of hourly pay and hours worked. I know a pilot who works like 1 day a week.
Salaried office work may not always be BS but is at least somewhat unclear in terms of output and varies by individual. So if anyone tries to go below our current 5 day 40hr Schelling point there will be all kinds of issues from jealousy, competition etc. Its a social thing not a productivity thing, but that doesn’t make it any less real. We saw how only something like Covid could force attitude changes on full time remote work.
This is correct. As a salaried employee, I am paid for my loyalty in the way a nurse is not. In exchange for a fixed yearly sum, I promise my employer to basically have their interests at heart and work only for them, which we agree, for reasonableness' sake, means about 40 hours / week. In reality, most salaried employees work much less. My dad was in sales my whole life until he retired, and he never worked an actual 9 - 5 week in his entire sales career. After schmoozing, calling, marketing, etc, he'd come home and take a nap or play with us.
IMO, the 40 hour work week is mainly a problem in a certain subset of high-achieving, highly educated employees, be they engineers, consultants, attorneys, etc. It's their own internal shame mechanisms which make them work 40 hours / week
Not to mention tying essential benefits like healthcare to workplaces, which drums up the cost of employing more people.