> I'd like to see 6-day work weeks as an experiment.
IMO this needs without a lot of additional context.
Being from the GDR (East Germany), before studying and then working in IT I got to experience a variety of production jobs. From brewery, sausage factory, chocolate factory, to various metal working and consumer equipment making jobs, both as part of regular education (yes, school kids went into production as part of the curriculum - and it was FUN and not "evil child work", and we only got as much as was reasonable at that early age and good training too), but later (after receiving a "Facharbeiter" - skilled worker title after three years of vocational training, combined with high-school, "Abitur", for me "mechatronics" in a large chemical fiber factory) also building factory electronics for VW as part-time job to finance my university life.
Most of those jobs would produce more output with longer times. A conveyor belt job such as in the brewery, the chocolate factory, or any of the other production jobs would mean less products with just four days of work.
HOWEVER, the big difference is what I did later. The IT stuff, the office and computer work, had quickly diminishing returns. When I worked at a large well-known and successful US software company I saw most people browsing the web, playing office golf, or just not being there, and the company HQ parking lot never filled up before 9 am and emptied again by 4 pm - that was late 1990s, with not that many working from home. Similar in almost all other IT related activities I participated in, which were a lot, in both Germany and in the US, in many companies (since my job almost always was at other companies then the one I was employed by, and I later worked as freelancer too).
Production work is manual and often not all that stressful. I could turn off my brain or at the very least not think too much while doing it. Sure, when using a lathe you have to pay some attention, but it's not nearly as stressful as planning and designing software, what I do now. I could easily do the lath job all day, I can't do the software design for more than ca. four hours without the resulting code quality getting significantly worse.
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When the discussion does not mention the context to me it's a sign that it's going off the rails and that people are talking past one another.
Some jobs are okay and useful to do 5 days a week, but others are not. The generalization of talking about ALL work at once makes for a very bad quality of the discussion IMHO.
I also wanted to add that those two things are separate for the purpose of this discussion:
- How people feel (after shorter or longer work periods)
- How productive people are.
From my experience, while doing a more mundane "conveyor belt" type of job I sure would like to have shorter work days too, I'm still able to churn out pretty much consistent quality to the end. That is different from (very design oriented, vs. standard not-much-brain-needed) code writing, where quality of what I produce suffers dramatically and I have to redo everything the next day(s) or get a lot of hard to maintain and/or debug code.
Of course, people may burn out more quickly or have negative health outcomes later, but that still is a different discussion than the one about productivity.
IMO this needs without a lot of additional context.
Being from the GDR (East Germany), before studying and then working in IT I got to experience a variety of production jobs. From brewery, sausage factory, chocolate factory, to various metal working and consumer equipment making jobs, both as part of regular education (yes, school kids went into production as part of the curriculum - and it was FUN and not "evil child work", and we only got as much as was reasonable at that early age and good training too), but later (after receiving a "Facharbeiter" - skilled worker title after three years of vocational training, combined with high-school, "Abitur", for me "mechatronics" in a large chemical fiber factory) also building factory electronics for VW as part-time job to finance my university life.
Most of those jobs would produce more output with longer times. A conveyor belt job such as in the brewery, the chocolate factory, or any of the other production jobs would mean less products with just four days of work.
HOWEVER, the big difference is what I did later. The IT stuff, the office and computer work, had quickly diminishing returns. When I worked at a large well-known and successful US software company I saw most people browsing the web, playing office golf, or just not being there, and the company HQ parking lot never filled up before 9 am and emptied again by 4 pm - that was late 1990s, with not that many working from home. Similar in almost all other IT related activities I participated in, which were a lot, in both Germany and in the US, in many companies (since my job almost always was at other companies then the one I was employed by, and I later worked as freelancer too).
Production work is manual and often not all that stressful. I could turn off my brain or at the very least not think too much while doing it. Sure, when using a lathe you have to pay some attention, but it's not nearly as stressful as planning and designing software, what I do now. I could easily do the lath job all day, I can't do the software design for more than ca. four hours without the resulting code quality getting significantly worse.
.
When the discussion does not mention the context to me it's a sign that it's going off the rails and that people are talking past one another.
Some jobs are okay and useful to do 5 days a week, but others are not. The generalization of talking about ALL work at once makes for a very bad quality of the discussion IMHO.