Started my career in Portugal, were in Service domains it’s so common for people to work 10h/day (with no overtime pay) that it’s just seen as “the way thing are”.
From Greek friends and colleagues I’ve had over the years, I’ve heard that Greek work culture is pretty similar to the Portuguese one.
After my first job, I moved to The Netherlands to work in the same area, were people have way better work-life balance, working longer hours is actually seen as a reflection of management incompetence (it means management is bad at planning and resourcing) and people tend to be strict about doing precisely 8h a day (to the point of me, working as a freelancer in Banking - which from my experience in several countries tends to fall towards working long hours - being told by a manager at 6:05 PM on a Friday whilst staying there of my own initiative to just finish something, to “go home, you’re not supposed to be here”).
Anyway, my weekly productivity measured in terms of actual results (software requirements implemented that actually worked as specified) in The Netherlands working 8h/day completelly blew out of the water my productivity in Portugal working 10h/day.
Even better, some years later I moved to Finance in Britain (typically a long-hours environment) and kept working like in The Netherlands (both in terms of doing exactly 8h/day and of the way I worked) and my productivity was well above that of my colleagues doing the whole long hours thing, plus I was way more reliable in terms of the quality of deliverables and fullfilling estimated deadlines.
At least in areas where you have to actually use your brain a lot to do your work, long hours is about the most idiotic thing imaginable and, IMHO, a reflection of a management culture were incompetence is a systemic problem.
I bet that in Greece, like in my own country, Politicians are the worst of all managers (sales-oriented people tend to be horrible managers, and politicians are ideas salesmen) from a management culture which itself is already total crap, hence it makes absolute sense for them to think that 13h work days is a good thing.
Anyway, my weekly productivity measured in terms of actual results (software requirements implemented that actually worked as specified) in The Netherlands working 8h/day completelly blew out of the water my productivity in Portugal working 10h/day.
I don’t really like this rhetoric.
It frames time off as something that should only be given so that it makes workers more productive.
I’m Dutch too, and I used to work 8h/day 4 days a week. And my productivity became even better than when I worked 5 days a week. I could kill it those 4 days, and be rested enough the next week so I could kill it again. It worked wonders.
I like the rhetoric, because it means that my employer got something out of it too. But I don’t think it implies that was the only reason it should be given. I obviously enjoyed the time off for my own reasons.
Working 8h/day (aka 40h/week) is the normal working length around here: nothing at all to do with time off.
Also productivity does not have a liner relation to hour-of-work-per-day, so you can’t really extrapolate from the difference in productivity between 8h/day and 10h/day to working fewer hours per day.
Last but not least, even if time off gave a massive boost to productivity (which cannot be implied from my experience since the relation between hours-worked and productivity is, as I stated, not linear), logically that would still say nothing at all about the existence or not of other equally or even more valid reasons for people to “be given” time off.
What you say does not at all logically follow from what I wrote.
I think you should give more information about the relationship between productivity and hours worked. It is too difficult to understand your position.
Saying the relationship is not linear does not tell us what you think the relationship is.
My experience in my own area (software development) is that above working 8h/day people quick start getting chronically tired and tired people make more bugs and more incorrect design decisions, which have to be fixed which is something that consumes far more work than doing things right in the first place - in other words, tired people, alongside doing the work they’re supposed to do, also unwittingly create additional work that needs to be done. As the hours worked per day goes up, this effect quickly eats up the gains from working more hours a day and eventually you’re actually producing less in overall than you would working fewer hours a day.
Whilst were the sweet spot is varies from person to person, in my experience in my area 10h/day is too much for just about everybody and 13h/day would be insane.
On the other directing you get a reverse effect were you lose work done from fewer hours being worked but you gain some per-hour productivity from being rested that increases work being done. Clearly at 0h/day overall productivity is zero so there must be a point somewhere in there were the losses from fewer hours worked exceed the gains from higher productivity per-hour. Further, I have the impression that productivity gains from being rested actually plateau - as in, you can’t really get more rested and productive than a certain level.
As with the other one, I also think it varies from person to person, but I’m less experienced with working shorter hours than working longer hours so don’t really know were the sweet spot would be.
Keep in mind that all this is for long term practicing of a schedule, not for, say, people being very tired from working long hours and then switching to working short hours to rest. Recovery from overwork is a whole different ball game and in my experience the fastest way to recover and get back to maximum rest and hence productivity is to just take one (or more) whole days off work, rather than reducing hours worked per day.
I’d say your assessment is pretty accurate. Right out of college I took time off before looking for a career and got a job driving a van for the Holiday Inn, which was awesome.
My work week was 32 hours and I have to say that was a pretty sweet spot for full time.
It’s not (just) incompetence. Capitalism relies on exploitation, so things like a culture of long working hours are deliberate strategies to prevent workers from having the time and energy to organize against their oppressors.
In my own personal experience of that shit, it’s just plain managerial incompetence at all levels - basically “bums on seats” is an easy thing to measure whilst in Services, outside domains with actual direct easy to measure results like sales, actual productivity is hard to define and hard to measure, especially in areas like Software Development where most projects are unique, so whenever you have management styles which are low on analysis and organisation - typically places with shot-from-the-hip management - you see low and mid-level management quality being judged on such easy to observe and measure things like people working more hours (“he inspires his people to work hard”) rather than on things which are much harder to measure in a way which is standard across projects which are highly correlated to productivity.
From what I’ve seen there’s a huge cultural component to this: countries with cultures which value being organised a lot have much more structured ways of work and of measuring the output of work and those are also countries where working long hours is rare, were countries which value improvisational skills above organisational (like my own Portugal, which in addition to one for “improvise” even has a unique verb for solving something on the spot without preparation) tend to not have standardized ways of measuring the output of work (unless that output is something obvious, like manufactured widgets) and working long hours is very common.
I don’t think this is at all 5D chess by the Oppressor Class in Capitalism, I think it’s a reflection of how much the local culture values organising and preparation as skills.
Now, people working long hours because they have to have multiple jobs to be able to survive, that’s a different story and you would probably be right if you were saying that about those situations.
I don’t think there’s some cabal of Oligarchs that directly control the world order, that’s conspiratorial thinking. It’s more that power manufactures culture, and the power in this case is one that requires exploitation to continue to exist.
I agree that there are cultural differences that result in different approaches to work and productivity, but there are historical and material reasons why those cultural differences exist that largely have to do with the degree of inequality in that society. In a wealthy social democracy with less inequality like the Netherlands, people are not oppressed by long working hours, they are instead bribed with a higher quality of living and endless commodities.
The Netherlands is very Capitalist in my experience and yet they do not have a long hours work culture, whilst for example my own country (Portugal) after the Revolution that overthrew Fascism when the country was pretty Leftwing, had a long hours culture.
Also you see the different takes on working long hours in situations where people are their own bosses and aren’t exactly the victims of oppression by their employer.
I think we need to separate people’s tendency for disorganised work (which includes a management culture which is bad at organising) which then leads to people working extra hours and the exploitation of people around working extra hours (such as them having no choice but doing it and even them not getting paid overtime).
The former is, IMHO, inherently cultural, but the latter is fully Capitalism in action (and very much reflects the inbalance of power between the Owner Class and the Worker Class when Organised Work is weak and governments do not represent the interests of the majority).
Whilst the two sides are correlated (i.e. if overwork costs money to employees it naturaly tends to be done less than when it doesn’t cost extra), it’s my impression that in Industries were overwork is paid, and similarly, in two different countries, there is more overwork in countries which don’t have a culture of being organised than in those which do have such a culture, even though in both there is a similar pressure not to do overwork because it costs extra money over just having people do the work in their normal work time. I think this is because in the most disorganised countries resourcing, planning and predictability are worse so situations were overwork is the only viable option arise more often even when there are actual higher costs in using it than in doing things during the normal work period.
In summary, I think you are right in that Capitalism is part of the reason, I just think it’s not the only reason and the way it interacts with the other causes of the problem is complex, so in some situations Capitalism is very straightforwardly by far the main reason of long hours of work, whilst in other situations it’s not at all the reason.
There’s no fucking chance people are actually effective at their job that long day after day after week
I’m Portuguese, working in IT.
Started my career in Portugal, were in Service domains it’s so common for people to work 10h/day (with no overtime pay) that it’s just seen as “the way thing are”.
From Greek friends and colleagues I’ve had over the years, I’ve heard that Greek work culture is pretty similar to the Portuguese one.
After my first job, I moved to The Netherlands to work in the same area, were people have way better work-life balance, working longer hours is actually seen as a reflection of management incompetence (it means management is bad at planning and resourcing) and people tend to be strict about doing precisely 8h a day (to the point of me, working as a freelancer in Banking - which from my experience in several countries tends to fall towards working long hours - being told by a manager at 6:05 PM on a Friday whilst staying there of my own initiative to just finish something, to “go home, you’re not supposed to be here”).
Anyway, my weekly productivity measured in terms of actual results (software requirements implemented that actually worked as specified) in The Netherlands working 8h/day completelly blew out of the water my productivity in Portugal working 10h/day.
Even better, some years later I moved to Finance in Britain (typically a long-hours environment) and kept working like in The Netherlands (both in terms of doing exactly 8h/day and of the way I worked) and my productivity was well above that of my colleagues doing the whole long hours thing, plus I was way more reliable in terms of the quality of deliverables and fullfilling estimated deadlines.
At least in areas where you have to actually use your brain a lot to do your work, long hours is about the most idiotic thing imaginable and, IMHO, a reflection of a management culture were incompetence is a systemic problem.
I bet that in Greece, like in my own country, Politicians are the worst of all managers (sales-oriented people tend to be horrible managers, and politicians are ideas salesmen) from a management culture which itself is already total crap, hence it makes absolute sense for them to think that 13h work days is a good thing.
I don’t really like this rhetoric.
It frames time off as something that should only be given so that it makes workers more productive.
If that is the argument that gets through to their thick management skulls, then so be it.
I’m Dutch too, and I used to work 8h/day 4 days a week. And my productivity became even better than when I worked 5 days a week. I could kill it those 4 days, and be rested enough the next week so I could kill it again. It worked wonders.
I like the rhetoric, because it means that my employer got something out of it too. But I don’t think it implies that was the only reason it should be given. I obviously enjoyed the time off for my own reasons.
Working 8h/day (aka 40h/week) is the normal working length around here: nothing at all to do with time off.
Also productivity does not have a liner relation to hour-of-work-per-day, so you can’t really extrapolate from the difference in productivity between 8h/day and 10h/day to working fewer hours per day.
Last but not least, even if time off gave a massive boost to productivity (which cannot be implied from my experience since the relation between hours-worked and productivity is, as I stated, not linear), logically that would still say nothing at all about the existence or not of other equally or even more valid reasons for people to “be given” time off.
What you say does not at all logically follow from what I wrote.
Average internet user detected. Response discarded.
User ignored.
Please be smarter.
I think you should give more information about the relationship between productivity and hours worked. It is too difficult to understand your position.
Saying the relationship is not linear does not tell us what you think the relationship is.
My experience in my own area (software development) is that above working 8h/day people quick start getting chronically tired and tired people make more bugs and more incorrect design decisions, which have to be fixed which is something that consumes far more work than doing things right in the first place - in other words, tired people, alongside doing the work they’re supposed to do, also unwittingly create additional work that needs to be done. As the hours worked per day goes up, this effect quickly eats up the gains from working more hours a day and eventually you’re actually producing less in overall than you would working fewer hours a day.
Whilst were the sweet spot is varies from person to person, in my experience in my area 10h/day is too much for just about everybody and 13h/day would be insane.
On the other directing you get a reverse effect were you lose work done from fewer hours being worked but you gain some per-hour productivity from being rested that increases work being done. Clearly at 0h/day overall productivity is zero so there must be a point somewhere in there were the losses from fewer hours worked exceed the gains from higher productivity per-hour. Further, I have the impression that productivity gains from being rested actually plateau - as in, you can’t really get more rested and productive than a certain level.
As with the other one, I also think it varies from person to person, but I’m less experienced with working shorter hours than working longer hours so don’t really know were the sweet spot would be.
Keep in mind that all this is for long term practicing of a schedule, not for, say, people being very tired from working long hours and then switching to working short hours to rest. Recovery from overwork is a whole different ball game and in my experience the fastest way to recover and get back to maximum rest and hence productivity is to just take one (or more) whole days off work, rather than reducing hours worked per day.
I’d say your assessment is pretty accurate. Right out of college I took time off before looking for a career and got a job driving a van for the Holiday Inn, which was awesome.
My work week was 32 hours and I have to say that was a pretty sweet spot for full time.
It’s not (just) incompetence. Capitalism relies on exploitation, so things like a culture of long working hours are deliberate strategies to prevent workers from having the time and energy to organize against their oppressors.
In my own personal experience of that shit, it’s just plain managerial incompetence at all levels - basically “bums on seats” is an easy thing to measure whilst in Services, outside domains with actual direct easy to measure results like sales, actual productivity is hard to define and hard to measure, especially in areas like Software Development where most projects are unique, so whenever you have management styles which are low on analysis and organisation - typically places with shot-from-the-hip management - you see low and mid-level management quality being judged on such easy to observe and measure things like people working more hours (“he inspires his people to work hard”) rather than on things which are much harder to measure in a way which is standard across projects which are highly correlated to productivity.
From what I’ve seen there’s a huge cultural component to this: countries with cultures which value being organised a lot have much more structured ways of work and of measuring the output of work and those are also countries where working long hours is rare, were countries which value improvisational skills above organisational (like my own Portugal, which in addition to one for “improvise” even has a unique verb for solving something on the spot without preparation) tend to not have standardized ways of measuring the output of work (unless that output is something obvious, like manufactured widgets) and working long hours is very common.
I don’t think this is at all 5D chess by the Oppressor Class in Capitalism, I think it’s a reflection of how much the local culture values organising and preparation as skills.
Now, people working long hours because they have to have multiple jobs to be able to survive, that’s a different story and you would probably be right if you were saying that about those situations.
I don’t think there’s some cabal of Oligarchs that directly control the world order, that’s conspiratorial thinking. It’s more that power manufactures culture, and the power in this case is one that requires exploitation to continue to exist.
I agree that there are cultural differences that result in different approaches to work and productivity, but there are historical and material reasons why those cultural differences exist that largely have to do with the degree of inequality in that society. In a wealthy social democracy with less inequality like the Netherlands, people are not oppressed by long working hours, they are instead bribed with a higher quality of living and endless commodities.
The Netherlands is very Capitalist in my experience and yet they do not have a long hours work culture, whilst for example my own country (Portugal) after the Revolution that overthrew Fascism when the country was pretty Leftwing, had a long hours culture.
Also you see the different takes on working long hours in situations where people are their own bosses and aren’t exactly the victims of oppression by their employer.
I think we need to separate people’s tendency for disorganised work (which includes a management culture which is bad at organising) which then leads to people working extra hours and the exploitation of people around working extra hours (such as them having no choice but doing it and even them not getting paid overtime).
The former is, IMHO, inherently cultural, but the latter is fully Capitalism in action (and very much reflects the inbalance of power between the Owner Class and the Worker Class when Organised Work is weak and governments do not represent the interests of the majority).
Whilst the two sides are correlated (i.e. if overwork costs money to employees it naturaly tends to be done less than when it doesn’t cost extra), it’s my impression that in Industries were overwork is paid, and similarly, in two different countries, there is more overwork in countries which don’t have a culture of being organised than in those which do have such a culture, even though in both there is a similar pressure not to do overwork because it costs extra money over just having people do the work in their normal work time. I think this is because in the most disorganised countries resourcing, planning and predictability are worse so situations were overwork is the only viable option arise more often even when there are actual higher costs in using it than in doing things during the normal work period.
In summary, I think you are right in that Capitalism is part of the reason, I just think it’s not the only reason and the way it interacts with the other causes of the problem is complex, so in some situations Capitalism is very straightforwardly by far the main reason of long hours of work, whilst in other situations it’s not at all the reason.
I’m not effective for the first 3 hrs or the latter 4. In fucking great at having lunch though.