alt Hacker NewsCan we have the day off?
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My dad was a stock broker in the late 1970s and remembers when most of trading was 100% manual and firms actually had "runners" who would take stock certificates back and forth between trading firms.
He has this great quote about when computers came out:
"We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the same number of hours. "
The four day work week is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone did it, then we'd all get a payoff, but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose.
It's funny how underappreciated it is how the five day work week is powered by norms...at least in the US. People assume there are laws about it.
The only laws dictate compensation past certain thresholds, and in the case of well paid knowledge workers those don't even tend to apply. If you ever read HR material referring to your role as "exempt" now you know what you're exempt from.
Benefits for extra productivity filter up to the shareholders not to the workers producing the extra productivity.
This reminds me of the Luddite movement in England. Industrial machines were disrupting the textile industry. The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity.
As we know their movement was not successful giving rise to the bleak images of industrial factory life in England. I think all that will happen is workers will expect to be more productive than before but their skills will be less compensated because “the machine” did most of the work.
https://theconversation.com/im-a-luddite-you-should-be-one-t...
I never understand why software engineers are so excited about AI as a whole.
If you are excited about the technology, sure. But if you are excited about the increase in productivity, unless you are a manager, I don't really understand it. Like, why? You are not working one hour less than before. If anything, it's more likely you'll get laid off and have trouble finding your next job.
I've worked 3x12, 4x10, and 5x8, without AI. I think I was most productive on the 3x12 schedule. On the days I worked, I was able to lock in and get a lot done, and had a significant amount of time outside of the normal working hours, which were free from meetings and distractions. During those 3 days all I really did was work and sleep. On the 4 days off I was able to rest and recover and actually have a life. It also gave my mind time to process issues in the background. When I had an ah-ha moment during my time off, I could note it down, and when I showed up on a work day, I was able to solve some of those problems I wasn't able to solve in the moment. It was a great system.
I've been trying to figure out how to bring the idea up to my boss of going back to it... at least the 4x10.
> So can I just take Friday off? From here on out, I’ll work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then take Friday off.
Yeah, if you switch to working as an independent contractor, you can work any amount of time you want. If you run your own business, you can work crazy hours or none at all. The world is truly your oyster
I'm not being facetious either. That's exactly what I did, and I got what I asked for
We can all talk about supply and demand here, whether companies should be forced to do X or Y, and how Keynes got his 15 hour work week prediction so wrong, ad nauseam. But if you truly want something beyond the talk, like a more flexible work schedule, there's real ways to get it right now
Effective working hours are not set by absolute productivity - they are set by an equilibrium between two forces:
1. Competitive market dynamics. If you only work four days a week, other employees and companies who are willing to work five days a week will do so and get ahead of you, and you are more likely to get fired or to go out of business. This force pushes us all to work longer (and harder) so we have more money to enjoy in our leisure time.
2. A society's willingness to sacrifice days of leisure for days of work. There are only seven days in a week. The tradeoff between work and leisure - production and consumption - is ultimately what determines how hard we all work. This force pushes us all to work less so we have more time to spend our money.
Economists think on the margin. It's easy to demonstrate these two principles to yourself by thinking through worked examples from different starting points.
Whether the equilibrium lands at 2 days of work to 5 days of leisure, or 5 days of work to 2 days of leisure, depends on our collective preferences, which vary between countries and cultures but have tended to be relatively durable over time.
No technology so far has shifted this balance much - not the steam engine, the industrial revolution, the invention of the personal computer, the internet - and there's no reason to believe "AI" will be any different.
The logical conclusion of this is that - assuming we're all 10x more productive - we'll still be working 5 days and enjoying 2 days a week, but we'll consume 10x more, or everything we consume will be 10x higher quality. Hardly a bad thing.
"Everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented ... a 15-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For 3 hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" - Keynes, 1930
Though this was a 100-year prediction so we still got three and half to go!
I work 3 days one week, 4 days the next week. Never more than 3 days in a row. It's 12 hour shifts, which sucked at first, but I got used to it pretty quick. The free time is amazing. I took 2 days vacation this week and ended up with 9 days off in a row because of the holiday.
Maynard Keynes posited a future 15 hour work week in 1930 based on the productivity gains after WW1, nearly 100 years ago now.
WFH alone, let alone compressed work schedules, can improve the "fertility crisis": https://www.nber.org/papers/w34963
Couples (in prime reproducing age) where both members WFH at least 1 day a week have 0.32 more live births per woman per lifetime than couples where neither does.
the four day work week has been trialed many times and already would have been the same or higher productivity before agents, honestly. if agents get really good let's just go to 3?
Star Trek post-scarcity economy when??
https://rickwebb.medium.com/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab...
> So can I just take Friday off? ... And like, this would apply across the board, of course . So you, the board of directors, and the C-suite, you guys could take Friday off to go to play an entire 18 holes at the golf course
Joke's on you peasant. They're already playing golf on Fridays.
What strikes me a significant percentage of the time I see posts like this and the responses to it is how shit other people’s jobs seem and how unfair their employers appear to be. I don’t know if this is because it’s US centric or tech centric or just full of people under a particular HN-like duress. But, man, it sounds crappy out there. Is there anyone here who actually likes what they do, has a decent employer, has a nice life…?
This entire thread is drenched in class consciousness and I am here for it.
The author's https://mlsu.io/posts/llm/cheats/ is also pretty good.
Yes, you can take the day off, but your pay will be reduced by 20%. Just because technology and productivity are advancing doesn’t mean you can work less and still get the same pay. By that logic, hardly anyone would need to work today, as productivity has increased many times over compared to previous centuries. If one company works less, then other companies that work more have an advantage. That’s why it doesn’t work.
As someone who negotiated 4 day weeks since early 2020 its been awesome. I get chores and yard work done and more family time every week. Wish it was standard.
Until we fix the artificial scarcity of necessities (particularly housing), peer competition ensures that people will work as hard as they practically can in order to outbid their peers for said necessities.
We could have abundance, but then people might not have to maximize their efforts to produce wealth for capital holders.
My wife and I work full time so we could outbid other people who wanted our house.
Top professionals whose comp is tied to performance didn't work 40hr 9-5s in the first place - but their comp is tied to performance, so when they have 10x the output they are compensated accordingly
Roles that come with a 40hr work week were already decoupled from performance, if AI made those workers 10x more productive they will rarely see the fruits of their productivity
On an individual level it seems like the correct move is to either move to a role that rewards output or organize and get equity comp as part of everyone's package
You can absolutely negotiate to work 4 days weeks and get 80% salary. I've been working like this for the last 3-4 years.
Given the pace of AI growth, it is quite possible to have years off if layoffs begin in many places. We are training AI to replace many jobs. It seems like entry-level jobs are the only ones affected, but that's for now. Anything short of executive level jobs are perhaps on the chopping block for time to come. Now, why wouldn't be execs be replaced? They could, but they wouldn't cut themselves off.
The solution to this is political. Under hyper-efficient capitalism, if there is truly such a 10x productivity improvement, a large number of people will be laid off in response and the rest will be squeezed. This is already happening.
The logical response should be to elect left-leaning politicians that recognize this; or educate your existing left-leaning politicians; or stand for office yourself with this as your platform.
If there are huge fines on any AI-related layoffs, substantially higher taxes on the top 1%, and an extra wealth tax then maybe we can fund some kind of UBI or stopgap support for the masses that will lose their jobs.
There was an article here, 18 years ago, called The Gospel of Consumption. It also noticed that since 1950s, the productivity had gone so far, it would have been enough to work just 2 hours a day.
The issue of productivity and demand has existed for a long time, but the explosion in productivity caused by the AI trend has made it even more apparent: in most markets, demand can grow indefinitely, and products always have room for improvement. Increased productivity only intensifies competition, and while actual workers are not truly liberated, their products do benefit consumers.
Nearly 100 years ago, John Maynard Keynes said that by now we'd be working just 15 hours a week, because productivity gains would mean we could get a whole work-week of work done in that time.
In reality, higher productivity just means companies can do more with the same amount of time/effort, and so nothing will change. Wage-slaving will still be wage-slaving. We won't move the bar toward more leisure time; we'll move the bar toward more work completed in the same amount of time.
Then again, the labor movement gave us the 5-day work week, and the concept of weekends for resting from work. Maybe a new labor movement can give us more days a week off. Labor movements have been declining of late, of course, but perhaps that sort of thing can be reversed.
So I freelance and I still write all the code by hand. I'm not sure how to honestly inject LLM code and bill for it. It would also probably cause me a lot of downstream problems if I did. But I asked my largest client if they were willing to begin donating $20k a year to my retirement fund if I'm going to be helping them to phase me out over some number of years. They did agree to that.
The reality is that if you were already a 10x coder, you can't be 10x more productive even if the LLMs made you so, because there's only so much work.
And even just using LLMs in my private projects, I feel my daily coding skills slipping. I want to ask Claude to do some dumb API integration instead of doing it myself. But I know if I don't do it myself, I'll be lost at sea and never able to debug it without more Claude.
This is a drunk state of mind post, feel free to ignore it.
This reminds me of Ted Chiang's point that fear of technology is really fear of capitalism. https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-...
"Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs."
I feel like we're actually getting there with one of my clients. The business is very close to being constrained on the customer again.
A lot of the paradox in productivity and labor may be attributable to a severe debt that needs to be paid down and now finally can be. Some of the 996 (or 007) working hour system stuff is coming from your peers feeling this new hope. The tone will continue to shift as backlogs get exhausted.
If you are pure software play I think you are on track to get more days off than you bargained for, one way or the other.
Oh, don't worry. The way things are going with AI you're going to get a lot of days off.
No, gains of productivity exclusively accrue to the owners of capital. Learn your place, human capital.
This is the most important thing about AI, that the policymakers and AI companies need to discuss more. If AI is making us, as a race, more productive, who is reaping the benefits of that productivity?
It seems to me that cranking up the heat on developers would not be the only way to harness this increase in productivity, if it's real. For instance just let projects finish on time, or on a predictable timeline.
End the "software crisis" that's been with us since the 1960s. This would result in a quality-of-life improvement for every manager, stakeholder, user, etc.
Another idea: Alleviate some side effects of the crisis, such as vital functions being taken care of by "shadow IT" for decades.
Abolish Excel as the front end for business computation.
Did we get days off when industrialization bumped output? Days off when industrial agriculture made food supplies abundant? Did we get days off when computers automated administrative office tasks?
Excellent. Besides the article, I've always questioned myself many many times how is it that the whole world has agreed that we have to work 5 days and rest 2. Why is it that, why can't be 4 and 3? I truly wish that in general we work a bit less. Even if it is not a whole day off, then having a workday of around 6 hours would mean that you could still have some free time for yourself.
You can have the day off. Don't think for a million years you will be paid for it.
Back when I was a young lad I wanted engineering to be a real discipline - formal qualifications, codes, held to account, and limitations on who could call themself an Engineer(TM).
But the money was so good we (The royal we) didn't think we needed it, that would just get in the way. Did you see how much FB employees were getting paid in 2015! Insanity! Now, even the skutters have a better union than us.
A plumber, or an electrician has a better union, and hence rights and protection than us.
But if you're building a brand new field you can still build a guild.
This is certainly a fun exercise in economics. By taking a shortened work-week, should the companies then pay us 80% of our current comp? Or maybe a little less since they will have to pay for the added tokens we are now using as part of our job that we used to do manually (i.e. time)? Or perhaps we are able to justify that now they can save overhead by reducing facilities costs by 20% as well. Oh but maybe their business lease has a continuous occupancy clause and now the reduction in foot traffic causes them to get penalized so they need to reduce our salaries even more. Slippery slope my friend.
Not saying we shouldn't do 4-day weeks (we should), but you can sorta do this for short periods. Take a vacation day every Friday through summer. For 14 vacation days that's 3.5 months of 4-day weeks. Block your schedule on Fridays with lots of random meetings ("meeting friday!"). If you don't tell anybody, nobody really notices.
I'm very frustrated that I don't have time to learn stuffs on job. They basically assume the productivity I'm supposed to get from using AI on tasks I'm familiar with.
And it definitely doesn't help when everyone hires "Seniors" only, so it's virtually impossible to switch tracks unless I sleep with the CXOs I guess. I have been nudging towards system programming for the previous 8 years, starting as a data analyst, to BI developer, and to data engineer -- well, I guess data engineer is my last stop for life.
Sadly this won’t happen for the same reasons that the median salary hasn’t increased with increases in productivity over the past few decades. You are compensated (or given time off) based on what your employer can get away with, not based on what they get in return. The system is designed to accrue all excess value to shareholders, not employees.
Farm, and you won't have to scavenge for food.
Get a tractor, and spend less time farming.
The factory will save time making tractors, so everybody can have one.
Computers will make the factories more efficient.
AI will make the computers more efficient.
You seem to be under the mistaken belief that AI (or insert technology) is here to make your life easier and not to make your company's owners richer.
My Dad used to cover a territory in the Northeast where he was on the road for up to 2 weeks at a time. Sometimes we'd see him just long enough for him to grab a haircut and remember everyone's names in the right order. Everyday he showed up to work he needed to be in a full suit and tie. Everyone did. If those suits weren't in good shape, and you weren't on time they were probably picking a different guy for promotion.
The expectation for him was to work 50-60 hours a week, not including commute, getting ready for work, and corporate social events. Time off was strictly 2 weeks until you hit a certain level and then you'd get 3 weeks. He didn't get sick often but if he was he still went to work.
Dad had it good. I used to jump on landscaping crews during the summer in SoCal and watch 60 year old guys break their backs for 12 hours to get ~$250 a day. I'd do it on the weekends for spending money.
I enjoyed the article but reading through all of the comments in this thread I'm genuinely surprised by the lack of appreciation for how good we have it. There's a "demographic" on HN and I'm pretty confident it aint the guys doing concrete work or running vampire hours at the local 7-11.
Moving around some 1s and 0s in between some coffee and meetings even at the bad companies isn't that rough in the grand scheme of things. I get what the article is trying to say - with all the productivity improvements when do the grunts get a little bit of those gains back?Unfortunately thats not how it works. It's "Red Queen Theory"... when something new changes the game you adapt or die - "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
Fine, we'll even call it "Elons Gambit" if that helps - in exchange for accepting AI in our lives 3 day weekends from here on out ...forever.
You should not be asking Elon if you can work 4 days a week; he believes you should already be working 7.
Under capitalism is a question of either the benevolence of your employer (rare but it may happen), or your capacity to impose a day off
In turn, your capacity to impose a day off is a question of either your personal power or of class struggle.
Of course when you arrive at the question of the class struggle, the discourse becomes funny
This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
So far we’re all kind of being chumps about this, bragging on Linkedin about all of our new found AI productivity while accepting less job security and no increase in comp.