I recently started working for a professor. I’m writing computer programs for him. They are challenging (to me), and I get to work from home and set my own hours. Cushy.
I’m appointed for 40 hours a week, but I find it very very difficult to work that long. After giving up, and settling for working 20 hours a week, my professor told me my work speed was lightning fast. I was surprised because I thought someone in my position would actually work 40 hours. I expected to be behind on my work, and I wasn’t.
It brought me to the realization that people can’t really work 40 hours a week. Its just impossible. Roughnecks on the ranch I used to work on spend only 1/4rd of their time doing real work. Most of the time they stand around waiting for something to happen. Desk jobs must be similar… Human beings don’t have the mental and physical strength to engage in continuous performance.
I don’t think people are necessarily lazy. If I were working from an office at 40 hours/week, I would spend half of my time not working, just cooling off. Obviously it would be more optimal if I went in for 4 hours 5 days a week, got a ton of work done, and went home, but I doubt my boss would let me work 20 hours a week for the same pay.
Whats the fixation with keeping on idle employees? Are there any documentaries or essays about this phenomenon?
It brought me to the realization that people can’t really work 40 hours a week. Its just impossible. Roughnecks on the ranch I used to work on spend only 1/4rd of their time doing real work. Most of the time they stand around waiting for something to happen. Desk jobs must be similar… Human beings don’t have the mental and physical strength to engage in continuous performance.
I’m not sure if thats correct. I worked in a power plant and moved from engine to engine with almost no downtime at all (not that I wouldn’t have preferred downtime) for about ten hours a day, perhaps your idea of “real work” is different than my own though.
“Real Work” is a little pejorative. What I meant was working at an uninhibited pace. If you have to wait for machines to do something, equipment to arrive, or software to run, thats kind of like a break from working (even though it is necessary).
So programming, when you’re just writing straight code and runtime are small, is an example.
This is interesting. Workers are ultimately paid for the fruits of their labour. Yet the reasons for firms and the fact workers are paid at a certain rate originated from conditions of uncertainty and transaction costs. Indeed, in certain professions the pay model is far more comissioned based, e.g. in sales, and could possibly be even more so, if labour regulations were eased. Not that I’m a fan of Lincoln, but there’s a phrase we used to say at my old workplace which resonated with me:
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
This is the way I feel it is with a lot of work, with much time spent learning and preparing. People often go spastic with the whole pareto 80-20 rule, and unproductive to productive hours of work is one ratio in which that is often claimed to fit.
Yes, great stuff abskebabs. Online, most work is piecework. Very few people are paid by the hour in the digital economy. It is a completely different paradigm from wage labor.
Well, in the UK, there is the minimium wage rate, and the arbitrary “right not to have to work” in the government’s own words to describe the 48 hour work week. Neither take into account the type of work one is engaged in of course(aside of obvious exclusions from the minimum wage like the self employed…). I was working in sales as a work experience student however, so we were not affected by the former regulation, though our employer actually paid us at a regular rate anyway. Indeed, the vast majority of us were ambitious and wanting to work longer hours in the field at times anyway. One often gets into “the frame” as it were, like with many other things and doesn’t want to stop arbitrarily.