When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?
digest.bps.org.ukBefore you draw any firm conclusions, be sure to read the details in the last couple of paragraphs: The subjects' hours were only reduced by about 10%, an average of five hours a week; many of them were still working 40-50 hours; and many of them were still expected to get the same amount of work done, forcing them to take work home with them.
The article author suggests that the Korean laws may not have gone far enough.
Exactly. The key here is that the expectations did not change. The private sector still expected the work to be done in the time allocated. With people having the ability to work remotely, it becomes even more difficult to stop yourself from working. You need a combination of both, the employee being able to stand up and demand the employer to scale down expectations and the state to step in and protect the employee from the employer retaliating and firing this individual.
"The article author suggests that the Korean laws may not have gone far enough."
That's a really scary line of logic though. "We did a thing, and there was no effect. We propose that to obtain the desired effect we should do even more of the thing that had no effect."
That's undisprovable.
It's possible that doing the thing that produced no results even harder could have some positive effect, but the world is probably even more full of things that produced no results but if pushed harder will have negative effects. Part of being a real scientist is acknowledging that this can only be interpreted as evidence against the idea that forcing shorter work hours will make people happier, no matter how cognitively or emotionally challenging it is. That's being a scientist.
(To forstall the two obvious replies: Consider the difference between the words "evidence" and "proof". And once again, let me underline the scientific dangers in "We tested for X->Y and found no evidence for it, but we're still going to assert that X->Y." This logic doesn't just apply to "work hour reduction", it applies to all null results, of all kinds.)
>That's a really scary line of logic though. "We did a thing, and there was no effect. We propose that to obtain the desired effect we should do even more of the thing that had no effect."
Is it scary? I mean, if I go from getting no exercise to spending 30 seconds a day exercising, but see no change in my weight, should I therefore conclude that exercising is pointless? Or should I try exercising more and also maybe be more careful with my eating habits?
I think the scary thing is when people try to take complicated subjects and distill them down to shallow talking points.
You cannot simply extrapolate from smaller intervention but it does lower the prior for a larger one, of course. Maybe unless you have a specific hypothesis which predicts a non-linear effect.
Also, exercising will actually do very little for your weight because calories have became too cheap and readily available to burn them off. You can eat more by accident than you will use in a fairly vigorous workout.
That is not how a true scientist thinks. Effects are not necessarily linear. For example, in order to see some effects in quantum mechanics, a threshold must be passed. Or in physics, a certain amount of force to overcome the minimum threshold as a result of friction.
Problem solving isn't such a simple operation. One must be careful with logic.
See my other post. You are not entitled to simply leap to the conclusion that because we did not see a predicted effect, that we must have simply not reached the threshold. There is still the distinct possibility that we're entirely wrong about what will happen if we increase the input.
Basically, everybody here is not thinking with their science hats. They are thinking with their social engineering/political hats, where a government action to forcibly reduce working hours simply must have positive benefits, essentially axiomatically, and if we're not seeing them yet we must simply not be trying hard enough yet, a classic social engineering mindset. But that's not a scientific mindset. There's no guarantee this intervention must have positive results. There's no guarantee the axiom is actually true.
> It's possible that doing the thing that produced no results even harder could have some positive effect, but the world is probably even more full of things that produced no results but if pushed harder will have negative effects. Part of being a real scientist is acknowledging that this can only be interpreted as evidence against the idea that forcing shorter work hours will make people happier, no matter how cognitively or emotionally challenging it is. That's being a scientist.
Real science, huh? A mild change in X did nothing, so you should assume a major change in X will do nothing?
Ever looked at a reaction graph?
If you are testing A vs notA, and you exclude some scenarios in which A is true (and dont exclude anything else), that is (by definition) evidence for notA and against A. (at least by a bayesian definition)
Now, might be that the priors for A were very large, and A is still the most likely hypothesis. But the evidence just received reduced those priors
-----------------
(I know that the case in point does not fit the rather strict requirements of the first paragraph. But I think the affirmation "the hypothesis that reducing the workload improves the life of the worker, while still very likely, is now a bit less likely" is true in this case.)
(The phrase in " " sounds odd to me. If I knew numbers, it would be much better to say P(A) was 95% and now is 90%)
"A mild change in X did nothing, so you should assume a major change in X will do nothing?"
Wrong direction. We are not entitled to take a result that a minor change had no effect on the target variable and treat that as evidence that a major change must do the thing we expect it to do. We must accept this as evidence that in fact the major version of our change will, at the very least, do something other than what we expected; our theory made predictions and our theory predicted wrong. This is not a thing to be glossed over lightly! Forcing further reductions in hours may very well have some other net-negative benefit, for instance.
You are all, frankly, making exactly the mistake I'm talking about, and doubling down on it.
A more charitable reading of the comment might have taken the phrase "not have gone far enough" in terms of the policy achieving its objectives. Regulating work hours was the means, not the ends.
My question is can the government actually regulate this kind of thing? As our Greek friend above said, people worked off the books. One might argue that a rational response to the issue is the works to unite against the tyranny. My rebut is that if you're poor, living paycheck to paycheck, you can't unionize because you'll be out of work and starving.
Happiness-wise South Korea ranks 41. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report).
Here in Switzerland (3rd in happiness) it is not unusual that people are employed only 3-4 days / week and still make enough money to live well. I don't know of any other country where this is commonplace.
(Full disclosure: If you're from the EU and looking for a tech-job over here, I'd be happy to help out).
It's recently also becoming common in Denmark to work only a few days a week, especially in tech. Working 2-4 days/week at a "regular" tech job is a popular way to fund your startup. Usually it's fairly linear, e.g. you can negotiate to work 75% time for 75% pay. The fact that companies don't typically provide benefits other than pay and pension contribution helps, I think. I have friends in the U.S. who are worried about going from "full-time" to "part-time" status, because they'd lose things like healthcare coverage, childcare, maternity/paternity leave, etc. But full-time vs. part-time doesn't matter as much when the social system is decoupled from employment.
Same here at the number 4 on the list... I work 4 days a week, my wife works 3. My employer also works 4.
My day off is awesome, and accounts for a lot of my happiness. And the happiness of my kids, I'm sure!
US may be the leading in economy, but we (Northern and Western Europe) are way ahead of you guys when it comes to a healthy work-life balance...
Isn't it all very individual though? What if someone derives happiness and satisfaction from working? Should they be prohibited from working more than a set number of days/hours per week?
I agree. most of my long hours are self imposed. Often time it's fun to finish things, or take longer to do something in the best way possible (vs rush through during normal hours), and have a certain number of accomplishments in a year.
However I understand that other people may feel pressure to do the same even thought they value family life more. Some employers probably don't do a great job in encouraging the family life and set out goals that require extra hours to complete (over 40 hr work week), which is what such a regulation may aim to alleviate. In practice I think it will cause more harm by dabbling in company culture.
You can always work from home if it is your fancy.
It sucks if your employer owns whatever you do offsite, though. Specially if they do not pay overtime.
You see... do not attribute to sloth that which can be explained by envy.
Maybe also that is why big things come from the US? True pain-points are more obvious in a place where one is not pampered and protected by society too much?
Talk about jumping to conclusions. This is both a gross misunderstanding of their culture and government, as well as unsubstantiated claims of causation.
I am not sure, if I can confirm this, but I find this really amusing:
"If Hewlett and Packard tried running an electronics company out of their garage in Switzerland, the old lady next door would report them to the municipal authorities."
http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html
(I guess, PG visited Switzerland, while he was an exchange student in Italy.)
Or out of their Tiefgarage - can you imagine the fun ;)
Maybe it did not came across because I am not a native speaker. I meant something along the lines what PG is pointing out in the "Why startups condense in America" essay:
"The problem in more traditional places like Europe [...] is the attitude they reflect: that an employee is a kind of servant, whom the employer has a duty to protect. It used to be that way in America too. In 1970 you were still supposed to get a job with a big company, for whom ideally you'd work your whole career. In return the company would take care of you: they'd try not to fire you, cover your medical expenses, and support you in old age.
Gradually employment has been shedding such paternalistic overtones and becoming simply an economic exchange. But the importance of the new model is not just that it makes it easier for startups to grow. More important, I think, is that it it makes it easier for people to start startups."
A major manager of T-Mobile in Germany was in the news when he pointed out what PG is talking about. "Generation Y" in Germany prefers to work for BMW until they retire instead of starting something on their own. According to this manager, Germany is stagnating. We're neither cheaper than China nor more innovative than the US, because young people don't and don't have to take risks. (http://huffingtonpost.de/2014/08/11/thomas-sattelberger-gene...)
Low regulatory environments with lot of capital and a motivated work force usually equals success. This is why you're on HN and I'm not on swiss-tech-news.com.
Probably, the point is that European and USA folks have different ways to measure success.
I guess that for a Scandinavian or a Swiss guy, working 60 hours a week, and not being able to see their kids grow up, would be a personal failure. No matter how many sport cars he owns.
I think he/she means that companies like Google, Apple and Tesla are all US-based, not to mention crazy/niche stuff like Oculus. Europe-based high-profile tech companies (like Nokia and Skype) seem more like outliers than the norm. The US seems to be the "technology king", so to say (disclaimer: I'm not an American).
The logic of this falls apart the moment you take it literally:
I have a baseball bat. I can make you bleed innovation.
And when you can't take it literally, you're missing something significant in the claim.
I think working hours is just a symptom. Look at the funnel... Korean kids spend an ungodly amount of time in class and doing test prep. Putting a cosmetic limit to the amount of hours worked doesn't change society on it's own.
Yet, South Korea ranks high for a First-World-Country in "increase in happiness".
If one sorts "World Happiness Report" according to "change in happiness 2005-2007", the top countries are mostly from the second- or third-world with the exception of South Korea.
I think that the parsimonious explanation for that is that Korea's wealth per capita has exploded in the late 20th and early 21st Century.
Excuse me? I work in CH and I have never heard of that, in fact it's not unheard of to have urgent work to be done on a saturday or sunday 'for free'.
The most curios job-offer I found recently is this: "Head of Development 20%" (means 1 day per week of work only): http://mindband.ch/were-hiring-junior-head-development-20
I'd think that Switzerland is one of the hardest countries to move to because of all the prices. Starting to live there should be VERY expensive. I wonder if anyone's had to go through that experience?
P.S. I'd love to live in Switzerland, being in the somewhat-neutral land where you're not that threatened by Russia or other things that might make your days miserable :|
Actually, I try blogging about my experience moving here. You can read a first draft here: http://goo.gl/EIX4UX.
Things are way cheaper than I thought, considering the salaries. As a Python entry-level developer who has to be pampered I make around 5000 Euro net-salary at a no-name SMB. I could make 10%-15% more at a bank doing Java.
The bottom-line is that I can save 4000,- Euro each month, because I spend only 1000 Euro on accommodation and food. In only one year, I will be able to buy a two-room apartment in a German town (where I like to hangout on weekends), without taking a mortgage...
That was an interesting read, thanks! Sounds like the country is amazing and giving.
I'll have dreams about it tonight ;)
Check out my blog, what jobs do you have? :) http://webdesignporto.com/
If you're from the EU and looking for a tech-job over here, I'd be happy to help out
How important is it to speak German?
You'd be fine. Everything here (products etc.) have to be in at least two languages. In a city like Zurich, you'd get along very well in English only. Also, there are many companies around that have English as their "company language" (for instance Google) .
Btw. Google-Maps was largely developed by Zooglers (Google's Zurich office). They call it also "the real mountain-view".
My ancestors are Swiss, and I have seriously considered moving back. :)
At the very least, start the paperwork now to get your citizenship and passport. It only costs a few hundred dollars, and it's like having an ace up your sleeve.
You might never use it, but the beauty is it's there if you want it.
(I recently did ~18 months of paperwork to get my Polish citizenship and passport. I've never been to Europe, and really don't know if I ever will. But 10 years from now if I want to move there, I can)
I am VERY interested in what you are proposing, but I have no idea where to get more information. Can you please provide me with a couple of links you found useful in doing this?
It all depends on you and your family.
Find out where your relatives are from (which countries), then start investigating the citizenship requirements for those countries. Your embassy for that country will likely even have a "citizenship application" section on their website that lays out exactly what you need and how to go about applying.
In my case, Poland is a country that says you have the right to be a citizen if one of your parents is a citizen. Irrelevant that I've never been there, don't speak the language, etc. etc.
My grandfather was born there and was a citizen before he passed away, so I pressured my Dad endlessly until he got his Polish citizenship (I did half the paperwork for him because he was being lazy....).. then once he had his citizenship I could go ahead and apply for mine.
Obviously every country is going to be different, so it depends on where your relatives are from, and what the citizenship requirements for that country actually are.
Also note if you're in the US, I think the US doesn't allow you to have citizenship from another country (don't quote me on that, I'm not a US citizen - well actually, it looks really strange[1]. I have no idea.)
[1] http://travel.state.gov/content/travel/english/legal-conside...
Okay, thank you for the clarification. I knew this information previously, I was just hoping you knew of something I didn't. My ancestors came from Switzerland many years ago and using this sort of method wouldn't work for me. I have heard that in Switzerland it is relatively difficult to get citizenship, as I've been a few times and asked around while visiting.
I do know for certain (my wife is Swedish and American) that you are allowed at least dual citizenship as long as you don't present yourself at the border with your passport issued by another country. There are several technicalities which "rescind" your American citizenship, but they mostly are not enforced unless you make a big deal out of it (e.g. turning in your passport to an overseas American embassy and declaring that you are no longer a citizen), but presenting at the border your passport issued by another country has lately been interpreted to mean that you are declaring yourself citizen of that nation. IANAL but many of these kinds of things are not black-and-white and depend largely upon the border agent which you are dealing with.
Again thanks for your reply!
Can you get Swedish citizenship through your wife?
I'd be surprised if the two of you can't go and live there together and after a while I expect you'd be eligible to apply...
Yes, we are moving to Sweden soon, and I'll get my citizenship in a couple of years afterwards with the relative-of-citizen residency clause (i.e. married to and residing in Sweden with with a Swedish citizen). I was just always interested in Swiss citizenship specifically.
What does Swiss citizenship get you that Swedish doesn't?
I can speek for Greece, where is ban on sunday work. For workers it just means they have to work unpaid (and undeclared) overtimes.
If you wont to make people happy, just introduce double pay for overtimes and really enforce it!
I worked at lots of places with official 8 hour days. In reality some (senior) people worked 6, and many (junior) worked 12-16. Hard to imagine a top down law limiting working hours will have much effect. It's attacking the cosmetics of a symptom, and not the real cause.
That said... Let's list several big ifs...
If... The last few marginal hours are more productive than hiring someone new.
And If... The economy is a zero-sum game. (For my company to make money, yours has to lose it)
And If... We can coordinate everyone in the world.
And If... We can enforce it.
Then doing something like putting a formal limit on hours makes sense. This is much more in line with a communist/socialist world-view.
Enforcement of the Working Time Directive varies a lot within Europe, but in many countries it is quite strictly enforced for most roles (at least for companies of more than a certain size).
I previously worked for a private French firm with ~700 Paris based employees. They worked very long hours, even by US standards. I thought, "If it can't be mandated here, it can't be mandated anywhere."
Hmm, that's quite surprising; in Ireland, at least for large companies, it is generally enforced fairly well (though there's an ongoing problem with the hospitals; it turns out there aren't really enough doctors if you can't make them do overtime), and France is generally stricter about this stuff than us. Were these normal employees or some sort of weird contractor arrangement?
Normal employees. We had an Irish subsidiary too, though I never visited and saw the hours they put in. My impression is they were very industrious. (Though industrious doesn't have to connect with hours)
Ireland is usually industrious without long hours. There was a UK based study on it recently that gave positive results. I can't find the link at the moment.
If you cannot "really enforce" one policy why do you think you will be able to "really enforce" the other?
When enforcement doesn't work rules are guidelines.
And while you are at wishful thinking, one could also ban the whole “undeclared” Greek system such as how you have to give cash to your MD to get proper treatment, how you declare half the value of a house when you sell and buy it, or how you have to pay extra to get receipts (to attach them to your tax return, well hand-washing done corrupted governments!).
Some rules "enforce themselfs". Unpaid overtime brings positive motivation for emplyers to broken. Paid overtime is negative motivations, and people are more likely to report it and sue due to lost money.
And they don't sue for the free hours worked on Sunday because...?
As I said, you start by creating a culture where rules are enforced, then work from there.
Nice one :-)
Sunday is free because it is 'overtime'. Workers are paid fixed pay per month. Suing for Sunday would not bring any extra money to worker.
Reading the abstract from the actual paper itself seems to indicate that people were not more or less satisfied with their jobs after the reduction of working hours.
"While satisfaction with working hours increased, reductions had no impact on job and life satisfaction."
It seems people did actually like the reduced number of hours, they didn't say that they liked their job more, or found more satisfaction in their life. I feel like for most people a job is something you do to fund the things you really want to do.
I would love to see what worker satisfaction would be if their income was fixed, but they could choose whichever job they wanted. (aka. you'll always get paid the same amount of money regardless of what job you do).
This sounds like it might relate to the "hedonic treadmill":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman were among the first to investigate the hedonic treadmill in their 1978 study, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?”. Lottery winners and paraplegics were compared to a control group and as predicted, comparison (with past experiences and current communities) and habituation (to new circumstances) affected levels of happiness such that after the initial impact of the extremely positive or negative events, happiness levels typically went back to the average levels.
If things like winning the lottery or losing a limb tend to have short-term effects on happiness, then it's not surprising that a ~10% change in working hours has little effect. Especially if—as another poster mentioned—you just end up taking the work home.
Wow, I wonder what effect this has on politics?
It was noted that the Arab Spring was largely not the result of political discontent but the fact food prices were becoming very high [0]. It might be the case that unless the basic livelihood of people is consistently threatened - such as not being able to eat - that they will always put up with the political status quo.
As we're seeing now with the non-existent political reaction to mass surveillance.
For a revolution you need a revolutionary situation in a society, Lenin described two conditions "The bottoms don't want and the tops cannot live in the old way".
It is often connected to food or another word necessity's. That was the case during the "arab spring" and was also the case in 1917 Russia, the main slogan for the Russian revolution being "bread and peace". The Russian people had nothing left to lose and the ruling class had nothing left to give(to sustain their power) thus fulfilling the two conditions.
All you need then is a catalyst. Which in the case of the "arab spring" was when Mohamed Bouazizi set him self on fire.
When it concerns America and mass-surveillance I would see that as a possible catalyst that lacked a revolutionary situation.
Somebody said something about never being more than three meals away from revolution? Makes sense.
Of course a significant contributory factor behind the "hedonic treadmill" is that subjective indications of happiness as survey responses are essentially a proxy for the person's actual emotional state (which of course is largely unmeasurable mental activity). That is of course assuming that happiness actually is a tendency towards certain mental states. People's recollection of how they actually felt during a prior time period is imperfect, and subjective expectations for their maximum possible level of mental satisfaction are subject to revision. Its possible for survey participants to sincerely believe their overall satisfaction is still six out of ten on some crude scale whilst every single measurable or unmeasurable aspect of their mental well being has actually moved in the right direction (fewer anxiety symptoms, higher dopamine levels, less brain activity devoted to sources of irritation, higher confidence etc.)
Of course its also quite possible for participants to forget prior survey responses resulting in participants assigning same cardinal score to their happiness when surveyed in two different time periods, yet being able to unequivocally agree that their happiness (or indeed satisfaction with work) is a fair bit higher in period B than period A.
I don't think we should have expected the temporary news of decreased hours to account for greater happiness, but rather that people filled their newly free time with pursuits that made them happy.
Interesting spin of the facts indeed. I wonder who paid Rudolph to make this study.. I suspect it wasn't the workers :D
It's very rare for anyone to commission studies like this in the social sciences. Rudolph is a professor at Korea University, and professors do research without extra compensation because it is part of how they get tenure.
I favor something more like a Results-Only Work Environment (http://gorowe.com/pages/rowe-standards), where the focus is on the results and not on how many hours are worked.
Too many companies (even startups) are conservatives and traditionalists in the sense of thinking that work needs to be done within certain hours and at a certain place, even when those are not drivers of the results.
I'm hired to deliver certain results, not to work a number of hours. If it takes me 10 hours or 40 hours to deliver those results, that's up to me, as long as the deadlines are hit and the deliverables are high-quality. And there's no reason to be in an office, unless the office is instrumental to achieving those results.
The focus on how many hours people should work is a fetish that reinforces a still-dominant 20th century office culture.
I agree with you personally, but to play the devil's advocate a little:
>If it takes me 10 hours or 40 hours to deliver those results, that's up to me, as long as the deadlines are hit and the deliverables are high-quality.
If you are able to consistently deliver the required results in only 10 hours of "work", it's clear that any organization will slowly ramp up the required results more and more until you are working 40 hours a week.
How would you agree on results that are "enough for the company" that won't grow endlessly when they see you're only working 10 hours a week?
This is a cultural change that the company has to go through.
They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours.
Thinking that they'll "ramp up the required results more and more until you are working 40 hours a week" means that you're still thinking that you're paying for hours.
Still, it's the responsibility of all employees to improve the process that they work in, just as part of the company's continuous improvement. Which means that more/better results will be delivered over time anyways.
How do you agree on results that are "enough for the company" when you hire a consultant (assuming they're an intelligent consultant and don't charge by the hour).
The queues of things to do is always extremely long.
There are 1000 tickets in your JIRA queue. They then ask you, what can you do in the 2 week (or 1 week) sprint?
What do you say? Is it the 10 hour or 40 hour timeframe? That happens all the time in development, and people do a few things. They underestimate a lot or they write code that is 90%, where when bad things happen, it's ugly to clean up.
So the results are what you say you can do in your week of work. And of course, they will put the pressure of "but that's easy." Yada yada.
As a results oriented place, some companies pack in what you think is 80 in your 40 hour work week (a lot of companies will try to do this). So what happens then? You switch jobs?
As for improving the process, most engineers don't know exactly how. They speculate and guess, hoping to hit it right. It's really up to the people driving it to affect the company culture. Doing it as an individual within an organization is quite difficult.
That's what I've experienced at certain companies anyways, generally with management with less experience, tbh.
Let's be honest. Both a Results-Only Work Environment or a "9-5 in the office" environment try to pack as much into an employee's schedule as possible. That's not unique to ROWE.
Some of the answers to your questions are: well, what do you do now, and how can that be made better? ROWE isn't magic. It's just a recognition that pretending that you're paying for hours spent in an office is nonsense, and that we should talk about the work itself rather than the things that don't have to do with the work.
The old equation (fetishistically held to, even in the face of its absurdity) of TIME + PRESENCE = RESULTS typically takes the focus of the conversation, and we end up in conversations about who can work remotely, and how many hours people should put in, etc. Instead of talking about the stuff we're actually paid to deliver.
As for not knowing how to improve processes, I don't mean that we should just say to them "hey, go improve things." It's a crucial management responsibility to make sure that people know how to do this sort of thing, to teach them how, and to provide ongoing coaching in doing it.
> They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours.
True. But since "results" aren't exactly quantifiable, how can they get steady value for their money?
Is result A equal to result B or result Q? If results M, N, and O are all equal, how many M/N/O results does it take to earn one week's worth of paycheck?
What if they decide that they're paying too much for M/N/O results, and want at least 11 of those per week instead of the current 4?
What if you wait an entire week for the dumb assholes in the other department to deliver the specifications? Do you not get paid that week?
You're paid by the hour not because hours are the best way to measure accomplishments, but because it's easy to measure hours and difficult to measure anything else.
I feel for you. Apparently you don't have a boss who can define what they want from you. This is not uncommon, and we're struggling with that ourselves. We've all spent so many years with the belief that putting in hours is the work, that we don't really know what we've hired people to actually do.
All your questions are the same questions you have in an TIME + PRESENCE = RESULTS job. What if they decide they want 11 instead of the current 4. What if you wait an entire week for the other department? These are all still problems. Are you excusing yourself from dealing with them because you say "hey, 40 hours in and I'm done, bye!"?
It's not difficult to measure results of work that you hire people to do. It's hard to decide to start doing that though.
I'm all for the 'results based' work environment but I think measuring results of work that you hire people to do IS quite hard.
A great example is refactoring. Say you hired a dev and he delivered a product that worked but is written terribly (already a question there, how do you gauge that in terms of 'results'?). Now you hire a second dev to clean it up and make it maintainable. How do you evaluate when he has delivered the 'results'?
edit: I think the closest thing to a true results based workplace would be an early stage startup. Everyone is invested in the product and striving towards creating it, not just putting in hours. In those cases people usually end up working WAY more than 40 hours a week.
> A great example is refactoring. Say you hired a dev and he delivered a product that worked but is written terribly (already a question there, how do you gauge that in terms of 'results'?). Now you hire a second dev to clean it up and make it maintainable. How do you evaluate when he has delivered the 'results'?
Easy. Lines of code.
The first developer did an awesome jobs, many lines of code were written. The second one is a lousy hack, he earned about $50 (not $50k).
This is ridiculous of course, but it does show how even bad measurements are preferred over non-measurement.
this sort of give/learn/take averaged over multiple employees could redefine how much can be done in a week, or what the average rate per hour is, but in the end the time would be spent more efficiently. I believe that having a set number of hours will grow the workload to meet those hours, and that's inefficient in most cases. No studies to back this up, but I've worked in a lot of places, and the percentage of people that are actually trying to get done as much as they can [in a working day] is very low.
Forcing someone to punch a clock is definitely misguided. But work hours are a useful proxy for effort spent, provided you have good estimation of your pace. And being in the office not only puts you in a “work” frame of mind, but also promotes serendipitous sharing with your coworkers—swapping productivity tips, planning features, explaining systems.
So even in a quite results-oriented workplace, with almost total freedom over my hours, I still often choose to go into the office for about six hours a day.
Work hours are certainly a good proxy for effort spent. But companies don't (or shouldn't) pay for effort, they pay for results.
Take 2 people: one a talented auto mechanic, one is me (not mechanically talented). Give us both the task of changing all 4 tires on a car.
I take 8 hours. The mechanic takes 1. (Made up numbers, but you get the idea).
8 hours reflect my effort, sure. But you want the tires changed. If the mechanic finishes in 1 hour, great. That's what you're paying for — changed tires. Not hours.
Sure, but I would be equally happy to pay either of you by the hour if you set your rates according to your respective skill levels, because the price would come out the same. Also there is an implicit expectation of reasonable competence.
For example, hourly pay is quite reasonable in jobs that just need a competent body to fill a shift—i.e., where the only “result” you want is “the shift gets filled”. When I was working in a kitchen, I put in the same four-hour shift every time I went into work—prep, serve, clean. If I worked n shifts a week, I got kn dollars that week, fair and square.
I would also point out Richard D. Wolff's arguments about forming cooperatives instead of corporations.
I think a helpful lens is to generally worry about what you are funging against. Time, as a fungible resource, can be allocated to work (generally done in fixed portions), and the remainder to other activities. In America (I have no knowledge specific to Korea), a large percentage of those other activities is "watch television". People self-assess as less happy watching television than they do while working. So giving out more time may increase access to things that make people happy (spending time with loved ones) but also increase time spent on things that make them unhappy. Obviously this is only part of the story, but looking at replacement activities would be a great next step.
S Korea just a generation ago was a developing world, with a harsh dictator.
Two generations ago, it was really at the rock bottom nation on the globe in terms of any ranking you can think of (poverty/violence/dictatorship/low-education/etc). Pick any poor nation in Asia/Africa and it was probably doing better than S Korea.
Remember these: History of Korean War, there's no much natural resource to sell off, with 3 powerful nations (who all have either invaded Korea in the past and view it as a potential target) nearby, with N Korea 30 miles from Seoul, AND (get this) no escape route over land in case of a military conflict (S Korea is pretty much an island now and you canNOT walk/drive to flee S Korea),
they better really really get their house in order to survive.
Younger S Korean sociologists/commentators lament about how the intense competition is driving people to commit suicides (yes tragic) but they forget many, many more people died/suffered from poverty/basic-medical-care not that long ago.
With all these in context, no wonder they work.
Btw, it's really really said for older S Korean that are passing these days. They really suffered hard lives and just when their older kids/grandkids are enjoying abundant lives, but they can't really enjoy as much due to age.
TLDR - No it didn't, they don't know why, it may have improved well-being.
It's not as if they do not have a clue why...
"Why might this be? Rudolf points out previous evidence that in the short term, capping hours often just means employees have to get the same work done in a shorter time, which is likely to be stress-inducing."
"Imposed" should be in gigantic scare quotes.
Many Korean businesses, big and small, routinely make employees work overtime without payment. Maybe we should ask the question after we do have an enforced limit.
The stories I've heard from friends & family working and living in Korea reflect exactly that.
There's not just uncompensated overtime, but you're also expected to join up when it comes to company retreats. So, not only do you give away 10+ hours every day to the company, but then you'll also be incorporated over the weekend, due to some company outing.
I also doubt that any imposed limit would actually be enforced or tolerated by the employer. The unpaid hours go directly into the prices, so some businesses wouldn't be able to compete anymore if they suddenly had to pay for that overtime.
The passion my friends put into their work is admirable and nothing short of impressive, but I can't help but notice that there's not much time left for family, or anything else besides work for that matter.