Can we have the day off?

by mlsu • 2 months ago

1415 763 2 months ago

nemomarx• 2 months ago

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?

Ancalagon3• 2 months ago

If agents get really good maybe we can just not work?

jayknight• 2 months ago

We'll just be serfs of the AI billionaires.

_carbyau_• 2 months ago

From an economic flow point of view:

Time not spent working could be time working on spending.

euroderf• 2 months ago

Yes. The leisure industry is, in fact, a real industry, and it is a service industry that creates a lot of employment.

kelnos5• 2 months ago

But if people's wages don't increase when we go from a 5- to 4-day work week, where do consumers get the extra money to spend on that extra day off?

darth_avocado• 2 months ago

No because the shareholders want more value. The best the C suite can do is downsize the team from 5 to 4 (or 3 if you like)

k12sosse• 2 months ago

Cut it in half and double the workforce.

maximinus_thrax• 2 months ago

If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.

You must be new here. No, that's not how this work. If you are able to produce the same amount of work by midday Monday we expect you to increase the amount of output in the current system by 14 x. And the owners pocket the financial gain from this productivity delta and you should be happy you even have a job.

cat5e• 2 months ago

FYI, you've already lost with this mindset! I know you don't consider yourself a loser :P

cebert• 2 months ago

And the owners pocket the financial gain from this productivity delta and you should be happy you even have a job.

This is why it’s prudent for more of us to figure out a way to be our own owners.

gdulli• 2 months ago

What a community of temporarily embarrassed unicorns we have here.

great_wubwub• 2 months ago

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."

mschuster913• 2 months ago

It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.

The problem is, it has always been that way - and not just in the US. The introduction of any kind of new technology or other way of disproportionately improving corporate bottom lines has always led to job losses, the key thing is what governments do in response to it.

The Industrial Revolution for example led to widespread devastation, the shift from agriculture being the dominant employer to industry and service sectors did not (as the ag workers were absorbed by the rapidly growing other sectors), the globalization / offshoring wave of neoliberalism once again led to widespread devastation, and AI will probably again lead to devastation.

And if Sam Altman isn't arrested for his blatant RAM market manipulation... I'm pretty sure there will be either people with pitchforks at the end or he will have ushered in, in retrospective, a new era of "stuff that uber rich people can get away with".

matchbok36• 2 months ago

All of those things also resulted in the massive increase in the quality of life for everyone. Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.

lorecore3• 2 months ago

I agree for the most part, but fear of technological weapons is sort of the opposite of capitalism. So much of our technology stack was built by the government for warfare (including the internet) and in that sense is a form of socialism.

I fear being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance. Neither of which are driven by capitalism (although being targeted by either of those by some billionaire because I refuse to RTO is related).

chipsrafferty5• 2 months ago

How are neither of them being driven by capitalism?

U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> you are more afraid of being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance -> companies that make those weapons of war for the government (prime contractors) make billions -> they use their money to influence politics and public opinion -> U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> etc.

tantalor• 2 months ago

Star Trek post-scarcity economy when??

https://rickwebb.medium.com/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab...

Henchman212• 2 months ago

Not until aliens land and show us the way. I firmly believe we aren’t presently capable of allowing a post-scarcity economy to exist — too much stuff is based on scarcity. So much so that we create scarcity instead of giving away excess. I’m thinking of food specifically.

marcus_holmes3• 2 months ago

If "stuff" === power over other people, then agree 100%.

There are people out there who would rather other people starve than they have one iota less prestige, power, influence or luxury. And, unfortunately, they are the people who wield most of the power in our society.

We have to solve that before we can solve the economics, which is the easy part.

irjustin• 2 months ago

What Star Trek doesn't show is how they got there. I promise you it's going to be extremely painful, but once we're on the other side it'll be worth it.

I argue - there's nothing we can do to stop it; humanity, I mean. We will either achieve Star Trek or get wiped out as a species.

As a Kardashev Type 3, we will have achieved full automation. I'll leave the door open for Elysium problems, but hopefully Mr. Damon will save us then too.

jfengel• 2 months ago

Star Trek predicted riots around now because of vast numbers of unemployed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp...

A couple of years ago, in fact. We're running late.

tredre32• 2 months ago

Star Trek might not show exactly how we got there, but they did put a lot of emphasis that humanity had to almost destroy itself before getting there.

WWIII lasted 25 years and it took another 100 years to rebuild after that. WWIII in universe is also scheduled for 2026 I believe.

bluegatty2• 2 months ago

we are very well past post-scarcity.

we definitely choose consumption over free time for the most part.

people generally choose nicer home, starbucks, vacay, neflix over work hours or retirement.

so this is a cultural issue

tredre32• 2 months ago

We are very well past the point where technology could allow post-scarcity.

Post-scarcity is no longer technological problem, it's a political one. But it's still very much a problem, so no, we are not anywhere near post-scarcity.

I also don't understand the point you're making about people wanting to spend $15 on netflix or $12 on a coffee. Would everybody cutting netflix and lattes allow us to live in that utopia more quickly?

Ifkaluva3• 2 months ago

It’s the healthcare for me.

abyssin4• 2 months ago

Yes, the hardest problem for me is the social aspect of opting out of consumerism. It makes most people feel really uncomfortable, like being sober in a group of social alcoholics. Clothes don’t look cool enough. Local vacations are seen as boring. Not going to restaurants is perceived as a lack of social aptitude.

Another problem is housing and living environment. Although it is very much possible to live in a smaller space, nice neighborhoods (quiet, clean, green) are expensive.

But basic necessities are almost free in rich societies, if you have time.

ZitchDog• 2 months ago

Shoot, I'd be happy with free health care.

avaer• 2 months ago

Many people would be happy with just a job in these times.

NDlurker3• 2 months ago

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.

yoyohello13• 2 months ago

What field? Medical? Those scheduled seem common for medicine and fire/police.

NDlurker3• 2 months ago

I don't want to get too specific, but I'm a supervisor at a factory. Food stuff.

My girlfriend had a similar schedule when she worked at a hospital.

Good shoes like Brooks or Hoka and a good sleep schedule and it's doable. I only work 15 or 16 days a month. I work every other weekend, but the weekends I have off are 3 days.

kevmo• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

insane_dreamer• 2 months ago

Sorry, not possible. The goal of AI is to build additional value for shareholders, not to improve anyone's else's lives.

codemog• 2 months ago

How about you meet me half way and work 996 instead?

awesome_dude• 2 months ago

When FAANG were over hiring, nobody was being given 4 day weeks, instead AIUI, people were just given meaningless work to waste their time with.

Employers have two modes, waste peoples time, or sack them

yadaeno2• 2 months ago

You can have the day off. Don't think for a million years you will be paid for it.

ux2664785• 2 months ago

One of the top 3 liberating experiences I've had was escaping wage labor. There's just something so utterly insulting about the whole affair.

bigbuppo3• 2 months ago

Exactly. In the four days that you worked you produced 40 days of output, so you should get 40x the pay. It would be unreasonable for the company to pay you 50x what you were getting before... they do have shareholders to think about after all.

yadaeno2• 2 months ago

I can promise you this is not how the MBAs are reading the situation.

quantummagic3• 2 months ago

What are you talking about? Four days work = four days of output, by definition.

qihqi• 2 months ago

The author's https://mlsu.io/posts/llm/cheats/ is also pretty good.

paulhebert5• 2 months ago

Thanks for sharing. Well worth the read. They’re a good writer

mlsu3• 2 months ago

Thank you both! The comments in this corner of the thread made my day.

krashidov3• 2 months ago

If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.

That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you. I don't get why people don't understand this.

lmm4• 2 months ago

That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you.

Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working. If we're talking about an actual productivity increase, let's just produce the same amount of stuff in 10x less time.

themanmaran2• 2 months ago

Sure the consumer won't consume 10x more, but they're still going to reach for the better products.

And let's say that work is correlated with quality. Company A wants to spend 10x less time working, while Company B works 10x more. Company B therefore has a better product than Company A, so eventually Company A goes away. The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.

markive• 2 months ago

Because your competitor can now produce 10x more work with the same resources that your company can only produce 1x, therefore in short order your company isn't competitive and will cease to exist.

krashidov3• 2 months ago

Why? I don't need 10x more stuff.

If everyone had said this 100 years ago we wouldn't have the Polio vaccine, air conditioning etc.

There are lots of problems in the world and there are still a ton of incentives to fix those problems. Yes there is also greed, scams, and exploitation - but that's never going to go away

mil224• 2 months ago

Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working.

It's a free market - if you can find someone willing to hire you to work 0.5 days a week, and are happy receiving the same income you do today, you can do so.

But your living standards won't improve, while everyone else's will, and by 10x.

And the people you are competing with to buy housing, a car, consumer goods, healthcare, food, and everything else - people who want to work 5 days a week - will have 10x more money than you. Resources like housing, which are supply constrained, will seem to go up dramatically in price relative to your income, and you'll be living in a slum.

Does that still sound like a good idea?

themanmaran2• 2 months ago

Yea it's always been competition that's the issue. Greed too. But complacency is really difficult as a business owner.

In the world where someone can take your cake by working 25% more hours, it's always going to happen.

thundergolfer• 2 months ago

This is downvoted but's it pointing out a fundamental dynamic in capitalism. Labour activists had to intervene in this dynamic to protect workers from being exhausted by the constant need for capital to increase labour exploitation to increase profits.

Almost this entire thread is people discussing a labour issue with no reference to the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.

mil224• 2 months ago

This comment should not be getting downvoted. It's exactly right.

matchbok36• 2 months ago

Sorry, I'd rather have a higher quality of living for most people (as evidenced by any huge development in technology) rather than humanity stagnating. This post is quite myopic.

mlsu3• 2 months ago

I would be able to see my niece in person and hear her laugh if I could have this Friday off.

ux2664785• 2 months ago

I'm deadly certain that routing more of society into producing SaaS webapp shovelware (and the infrastructure to support it) is not in fact going to improve quality of life, and will in fact cause us to stagnate.

matchbok36• 2 months ago

Please. Nobody is claiming that is the value here. Do better.

AngryData3• 2 months ago

You think if people worked less technological progress would just completely seize up and humanity stagnate? I find that pretty hard to believe and see no evidence to support that.

matchbok36• 2 months ago

Um, yes?

goosejuice• 2 months ago

The best way to take advantage right now is to consult. Take some time off and just do a little on the side. Then again the job market could collapse, so maybe keep your job?

lo_zamoyski• 2 months ago

Labor saving tech doesn't lead to more free time, and certainly not in a way that's proportional to the gains of automation. Instead, companies will expect still more productivity. Why give you more time off if they can keep workdays fixed and add still more productivity? Certainly, the competition will do it.

Appetite grows with eating.

9rx4• 2 months ago

Labor saving tech doesn't lead to more free time

It does when you own the tech. If you give the tech away then the people who you gave it to will continue to expect more of the same, naturally.

kingforaday• 2 months ago

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.

BoorishBears2• 2 months ago

Sorry, exactly what is a slippery slope?

You wrote a lot of words, but none of them describe a slippery slope, or explain how a supposed 10x increase in productivity precludes a 20% reduction in hours worked.

bigbuppo3• 2 months ago

No. They should give you 40x your current pay. The AI made you 10x more productive, and you worked four days, so you generated 40x the economic output. As such, you should get 40x in pay. At this point, you're doing the company a favor by taking a day off as otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford you.

9991• 2 months ago

Sounds like the AI should get 36x the current pay. It's not as if the employee is bringing that to the table.

chipsrafferty5• 2 months ago

If I am able to do 10x work with a tool that costs you Y, then my wages should rise by 10x - Y.

Then, let's do a 3 day work week and multiply it by 0.6.

Pretty simple math

dozerly2• 2 months ago

Sure, unless others are willing to do your job for less than that.

marcus_holmes3• 2 months ago

Are we paying people for their time, or for the results of their time?

If it's just time, then why are we doing so much overtime?

bruce5112• 2 months ago

I get where the writer is coming from, but it misses one very important point.

> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.

You are thinking of productivity as "code written". And certainly that part of your job will get more productive.

But that is just something you do when you're not in meetings. (or when you're in a meeting, but the camera is off, and you're not really listening). Your real job is to attend meetings. And unfortunately AI can't help with that (yet).

(I'm not even being sarcastic. Most programmers don't realize that they have been hired to have meetings.)

What it can do is free you up from the pesky code-writing part of your job, freeing you up to attend even more meetings. And this does indeed make management happy because (seriously now) their job is having meetings, and you being "unavailable" (because you know, you want to program) was hindering them in the first place.

So no, you can't have Friday off, but now that you mention it, let's set aside that time for "team building" exercises...

lorecore3• 2 months ago

AI definitely helps with attending meetings and writing documents that no one will read (both of which are huge parts of any modern job). The AI notes from any given meeting give you all of the content in 1/10th of the time.

bruce5112• 2 months ago

I don't disagree that AI tools around meetings are cool. But they don't help you to "not attend the meeting". (not yet anyway).

Many meetings have 0% content "that applies to you". But that doesn't stop you being "added to meetings".

distantprovince• 2 months ago

I'm fairly certain a lot of people do this. They don't literally take a day off, but just work fewer hours or less hard. And this makes sense, there is a strong incentive to not give away all the productivity gains to your employer.

zabzonk• 2 months ago

I was very happy working extra (I won't call them long) hours when I first learned about computing. A bit later on when I started working for financial entities I felt a bit different - the work was interesting, but I just wasn't prepared to sacrifice my time. And if we can have the day off, I think that can only be to the good.

cattown• 2 months ago

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.

calvinmorrison3• 2 months ago

well productivity gains are largely met with higher standard of living, quality of life and the upward movement of the lowest classes, for one.

p-e-w2• 2 months ago

That hasn’t been true for decades in the West, even though per-capita productivity has been steadily rising since WW2.

passive• 2 months ago

That's not generally true in the US over the last 40 years, where the gains from productivity increases have been accumulated almost entirely by the top classes.

Yes, lower classes have access to many more conveniences then they might have had in earlier decades, but they are working far more hours, and their expected lifespan has started decreasing.

chipsrafferty5• 2 months ago

Right. If I am producing 10x more output then I expect to be getting paid about 8x more or working 8x less.

arjvik2• 2 months ago

something something you're paid the amount the market values your work, which in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company

swatcoder• 2 months ago

You should talk to your union rep about that, because renegotiations like that won't happen on the individual basis just because you think its right. And almost all lack the leverage, individually, to make it happen.

Of course, until just recently, Big Tech workers were so proud to be on top of the world that they didn't think unions made sense for them.

Were you among them? Has that changed?

monkaiju• 2 months ago

I mean productivity gains don't usually go towards making the workers life any better. Also I'm still less than convinced there are any net productivity gains from AI anyway.

coro_1• 2 months ago

AI copy pasta misses beats. I've seen people forget to review their comms, and create a lot of confusion, wasting time actually.

Hamster7330• 2 months ago

Wow. Yes.

BrenBarn• 2 months ago

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?

More flour more water. More water more flour.

Cakez0r2• 2 months ago

The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.

kbar13• 2 months ago

is this not backwards? salaried employee means you get paid the same amount no matter how many hours you work.

aetch• 2 months ago

I think it’s the other way around. Hourly wages are paid directly for time at work

cm113• 2 months ago

I don't think this is the reality. It is part of it, but people get paid different salaries, why? Some are more productive than others. Aside from leadership's (and society's) biased ability to determine value, these people theoretically get more because they contribute more.

raincole• 2 months ago

They are paid for what they collectively output. The only reason that people seem to be paid by their time is that it's hard to measure each one's output individually and granularly.

nlawalker2• 2 months ago

Salaried employees aren't paid for their time, they're paid for a combination of their output and their availability. Availability used to be strongly coupled with time but technology has introduced some flexibility there.

bigmadshoe• 2 months ago

Yes but you are missing the point: our time can now make the company way more money. Can’t we demand a piece of this?

bwhiting23568• 2 months ago

When you work for a startup, or a zero-to-one project, it's hard to say you're even paid for your output. You're paid for probabilistic/expected future value output.

spike021• 2 months ago

At my most recent role we were definitely being judged by output metrics (both jira tickets completed and github prs merged). They showed us the jellyfish tool they used to check those metrics. Well, some of it. Regular ICs themselves didn't have that access.

4ndrewl• 2 months ago

The reality is huge swathes of the middle of large organisations are paid to take the blame for the layer above them. AI wont solve that.

ux2664785• 2 months ago

Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.

That doesn't increase shareholder value, so it would be a violation of the c-suite's fiduciary responsibility. Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.

rootusrootus2• 2 months ago

twbarr• 2 months ago

Fiduciary responsibility also requires long-term thinking. If AI is writing the code, I need the smartest, most well-rested supervisors I can get.

jmye2• 2 months ago

Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.

Given how start-up (and thus equity) heavy this board is, that should also directly multiply total comp, even though it was meant as a vapid snipe and isn't actually vaguely valid outside of a handful of very large companies.

armada651• 2 months ago

When your labor force makes gains in productivity you can choose to do one of two things:

1. Reduce working hours 2. Grow the economy

Guess which option was last picked in 1868 and never again despite massive gains in productivity?

majormajor7• 2 months ago

Are we really so sure that reducing working hours can't, itself, lead to improved economic health? Such as by increasing distribution of income flows, and increasing time available for economic consumption?

One of the greatest tricks of the modern era in the US has been to convince everyone that making the slice of pie bigger for the richest people is necessary to grow the economy.

whatshisface7• 2 months ago

Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.

What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people. The reason behind that is communication overhead - the more context an individual carries in their heads, the less likely their role will exist on an hourly basis in the industry.

So, if anyone wants AI to give us another day off, we need to think about how it can reduce the cost of "context switching" a whole person on and off a task, without simultaneously formalizing our roles so much that it gives us all five. ;-)

majormajor7• 2 months ago

Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.

This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place.

If everyone sufficiently "flips out" about it being 5 then the problem of "reduce the context switching problem" is something the owner can try to figure out.

Cause otherwise, you could find a perfect solution to that problem, and still not have leverage to make ownership actually change anything vs just raise expectations that much higher.

(Meanwhile, some companies are trying to import 996 and push it past 5 for white-collar work anyway, so any sort of non-political, non-disruptive action seems doomed to fail since the status quo is moving the wrong direction.)

qazxcvbnmlp• 2 months ago

I think this is where one of the biggest gains in productivity from AI will come from. Even if it levels off at current levels of “intelligence” a 30% reduction in team size will save alot of communication overhead.

We think of productivity as linear to the number of employees, but it’s more of Log(N) for knowledge work because of the communication overhead. If your AI spend and employee productivity improvement ends up being proportional to headcount thats a linear gain that used to be Log(N).

ikr678• 2 months ago

Its not a communication overhead, it's that business owners want to maximise their returns on their fixed operating costs subject to the 5 day limit. One extra staff member in a traditional office is extra software license, extra seating, extra hardware, extra HR/payroll/insurance, extra risk, extra training etc etc.

Remember to thank your unions for the weekend.

cm113• 2 months ago

This analysis makes sense to me. I'll add that the little bit of research that's come out suggests individual people are as productive in four day work weeks as five, which doesn't contradict your point.

The other thing is that if leadership is better—they have stronger vision and coordinate the silos (of people or teams) themselves—the communication overhead is less. The more each level needs to communicate, sync, and align with each other, the more it reflects the top not doing it. This is so thoroughly normalized today that it's hard to see otherwise. As you move down the hierarchy, the theory embedded in the chosen org structure that most tech companies have, is that less communicating should be necessary. This is what middle managers (and product managers) are supposed to be for—coordinating and communicating to take that off the plate of their subordinates. The lack of leadership above is why the managers below get hired. Those managers then do the same and eventually ICs need to coordinate amongst themselves.

thaumasiotes2• 2 months ago

What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people.

Why make that assumption? The company has a lot of per-employee fixed costs, which means that it's much more expensive to have 5 employees than 4 employees under the assumption that total productivity is exactly equal in both cases. (And the further assumption that you pay more productive workers more than you pay less productive workers.)

If you want flexibility on the work week, get rid of the concept of "full-time employee" status and make everyone contractors.

duskdozer2• 2 months ago

It is also incentivized because a demand for 25% more employees (assuming constant person-days) shifts power to labor from employers.

apt-apt-apt-apt3• 2 months ago

Same answer as for most hope-filled employee questions sadly:

You get to keep your job. You agreed to accept X pay for 40 hours, do it or we'll find someone else who will.

bruhFaaahNo• 2 months ago

Except all the people who drilled such mandates into our heads are dying off. These things persist over time only so long as we keep discussing them.

We're really failing to meet the moment before us by merely repeating the propaganda of elders that glaze over on live TV trying to act authoritative and useful to humanity.

Exploitation of youth is no less ageist than telling gramps look in the mirror.

slg2• 2 months ago

That's why it has to be collective. That's why OP mentioned saying it in an all hands. That's why there's always discussion of tech worker unions despite our high pay. Any one of us try to push too hard on this sort of thing on our own and they'll "just find someone else" who would happily take our place.

giancarlostoro• 2 months ago

Meanwhile my employer still has not given us any AI tooling. I build more things for personal use and for niche hobbies that are more refined, polished and documented than most employers have ever given me in terms of project requirements. Everyone keeps saying the bottleneck was not how fast you can write the code. I believe the bottleneck is two-fold: coding without architecting and no solid business requirements.

I do agree though, give me AI tooling, and I will build you cities, but pay me to match it.

trinsic2• 2 months ago

I think people should use AI to start their own business instead of working for someone else's vision. I mean if you're working for someone else your choices are limited. And I'm not saying that you should be mistreated. I'm just saying you have more control of your life when you're working for yourself.

111010100100012• 2 months ago

just don't call it organized labor.

winterbourne• 2 months ago

It's a modern version of: "we're firing you, but your last task will be to train your lower-cost replacement".

vanuatu3• 2 months ago

I think equity compensation should be normalized (or ideally allow employees to choose the % of their compensation is equity vs. cash) so every employee can partake in the upside of the company.

pseudosavant• 2 months ago

While I agree with the playful sentiment of the post, this isn't what happened for factory workers as their work has been augmented by automation. Ford makes twice as many vehicles per worker in 2025 than they did in 1960. Did the auto workers get 20-hour work weeks? Nope.

I have to ask myself why we think us white collar knowledge workers are so special? Even if I do dream of a time where automation leads all of us to a 3-4 day work week.

ikjasdlk2234• 2 months ago

I think the feeling is if we want to even keep our current footing in the market we have to increase productivity by 10x because everyone else is as well.

And if everyone else is, the productivity floor is raised but every other competitor has done the same so we don't have 10x the economic output, maybe only a marginal increase. If that is true, then there will be no days off because we have just reset the status quo.

edit: spelling

paulhebert5• 2 months ago

Exactly. All the employers are still sharing the same sized market. There’s not more money going around for them to earn.

But they’re also paying hefty AI bills so there’s less money for salaries.

The AI companies just swoop in and take some of the money that was going to the working man

xena• 2 months ago

Chinese youth have a term for this, neijuan: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=neijuan

moduspol5• 2 months ago

Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result, it's tough to argue society isn't better off.

I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry. People are having their livelihoods threatened while their utility bills go up because of datacenters, and the only substantive impact in their personal lives is that now they have to deal with chatbots and low effort automated customer service agents even more.

I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.

Ancalagon3• 2 months ago

Is society better off? Honest question, you used to be able to support a family of four with a single 9-5.

shimman4• 2 months ago

Is this a joke? Income inequality is at it's highest (even worse than the gilded age), deaths of despair are at their highest as well, people can't afford childcare (a years worth of childcare costs more than college), people are losing access to health insurance en masse; but we're suppose to think society is truly better off?

What brand of edibles do you have there 'bud? I'd like to fly into that realm of alternate reality for a bit.

Also when have any efficiencies gained by employers benefited workers? Being honest here because the only time workers have truly gained anything was due to solidarity between workers in the forms of strikes + workplace sabotage.

esikich3• 2 months ago

I think it's impossible to argue we are better off. This comment is so detached from reality it's almost offensive. Education is unaffordable, health care is unaffordable, homes are unaffordable, the rich have gotten massively richer, the middle class has been gutted, suicides are up, birth rates are down... I could go on and on. It's gotten better for the 1% but the rest of us are being boiled like frogs. To the point where we've (you've) literally forgotten we used to be able to raise a family on a single income. But I guess we have video games and door dash, so sure, we're better off.

throw0101a6• 2 months ago

Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains.

“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” — Robert Solow

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...

Connectivity/the Internet gave a bit of a boost during the 1990s, but the numbers pearked around 2004:

* https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-a...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...

* https://www.csls.ca/ipm/31/gordon.pdf

danny_codes• 2 months ago

I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance

Well, you won't be living in abundance. All productivity gains will go to the oligarchs. You will have slightly less than you had before. Instead of cleaning the floor yourself you'll work the extra hour for the oligarchs doing whatever the robots cant.

That's the path America is on at present.

glitchc• 2 months ago

I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry.

Do you though? You might be hallucinating those robots. And no, a Roomba doesn't mop the floor, wipe the countertops or clean the toilets.

I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.

Will it though? Your biggest cost is lodging, either rent or own, and both have consistently increased over the past millenia.

throwaway20372• 2 months ago

    > Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result

I disagree. I did some light research on the topic. Most economic studies that I found disagree with your conclusion.

denkmoon• 2 months ago

Tech workers _are_ a bunch of chumps. Temporarily embarrassed billionaire startup founders. The vehicle for this is a union, and tech workers abjectly refuse to unionise.

stego-tech• 2 months ago

If workers got time off relative to the productivity gains achieved of the past fifty years and considering the comparatively stagnant wages over that time period, we’d only be working 2 to 3 days a week, tops.

The author might be being playful, but an increasing amount of folks at or past their breaking points definitely aren’t.

paulhebert5• 2 months ago

Right, the AI companies don’t even try to pretend it’s good for the average person.

The message could be “we’ll all do more by working less.” Instead it’s, “some people will lose their jobs while everyone else works the same amount or more”

arkh• 2 months ago

What's crazy is the glee when saying that. It's like "fuck those uppity low class people who managed to move up socially thanks to an in-demand job requiring some skill". Now we're back to only who you know, skills are for the AI.

Nasrudith• 2 months ago

To play devil's advocate: Why exactly would you expect to get paid more just because there was a big investment in more expensive tools? You're not working any harder, the machine is. Getting paid more is always nice of course.

Any pay rises have been more of a side effect in the past of complexity and therefore needing more skilled labor to say operate a bulldozer or backhoe than it does for any individual with a shovel. Productivity may boost the economic ceiling of 'how much they can pay before they literally start losing money' but more assembly lines didn't mean big pay raises. A backhoe didn't mean that ditch diggers suddenly got paid 50 to 100 times what they were previously from other's expenditures because they could dig that much more. And that is before the back-and-forth of induced demand and supply vs demand causing the price of the labor to drop with more efficiency.

AI's whole thing is to provide for easier operation and trying to deskill the operations. (Key word: trying, currently knowing what the hell you are doing is essential for filtering good outputs from bad).

JimDabell• 2 months ago

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.

How much money do you think the average developer would be making if we all were using punchcards instead of typing? Inputting machine code instead of using a compiler?

Every time we increase our productivity, we can build bigger and better things for the same amount of effort. This makes us more valuable than before. Our output grows and the world’s appetite for software grows with it.

This has been true for the entire history of the software industry and it’s the reason why developers are very well paid. You may not see it at the individual level, but we are reaping the rewards of increased productivity at the macro level.

theptip2• 2 months ago

I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off. As experienced by companies, the market is more competitive than ever. Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch. It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The only way to get this outcome is to coordinate at a level higher than individual market participants.

In other words, get your government to implement UBI - tax all companies (or if AI really takes off, just compute) and redistribute to the people.

lazide• 2 months ago

lol, this government is going to just throw anyone trying into the meat grinder.

The only way to do this is to bypass the authorities.

mastazi3• 2 months ago

I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off.

Someone said the same before 1938, probably [1]

I think it's possible that AI will bring as much of a shift to our lives as the industrial revolution did, so it might be necessary to make some adjustments, just like we did back then.

[1] https://www.history.com/articles/five-day-work-week-labor-mo...

ixtli3• 2 months ago

UBI without many other anti-capitalist reforms is just a subsidy paid directly to your landlord.

EliRivers• 2 months ago

Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch.

Is this true? There are a lot of low-productivity and zombie companies trudging through year after year.

soco• 2 months ago

By the amount of money thrown out the AI window nowadays, a day off, or hiring a few more folks to cover for those days off and more, seems like the much cheaper option. But that's only my naive impression right?

63stack• 2 months ago

"the market" is literally the arena of competition, it's not a surprise it's more competitive than ever

ForHackernews• 2 months ago

Unions unions unions unions unions unions unions unions unions.

naveen99• 2 months ago

The world is decentralized. People and produce can cross borders. People don’t vote for sending ubi to outside borders.

godelski3• 2 months ago

  > Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch.

I hear this a lot but it seems another old saying is still true today: why is there always time to do it twice but never enough time to do it right?.

If you were right then there wouldn't be so much busy work, especially at big companies. They would have become more efficient, not less.

ipaddr• 2 months ago

You are not the 10x factor and can't use it to increase your wage. If you leave the next person is a 10x factor because of ai. Now if AI providers all increased prices they could get a raise.

jrflowers• 2 months ago

Benefits from productivity gains only go to shareholders gp, it’s the foundational principle that underpins the whole world economy :-D

bix6• 2 months ago

I will be automating the things that annoy me so I can spend time on the things I like.

thewebguyd• 2 months ago

Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.

And when/if it doesn't, unionize. I know the HN crowd historically hasn't looked favorably on Unions, but times are changing. It's long past time for unions in tech. We've fared well individually for a long time, but that time is coming to an end.

Eridrus2• 2 months ago

I think it's a fair question to ask ourselves.

But it's worth noting how leisure hours have been allocated after the invention of the 5 hour work week: we've reduced working hours at the end of life (longer retirements), start of life (longer education), and some amount of people simply do not work.

There hasn't been a reduction in hours during peak earning potential because many jobs are competitive, because firms are in competition with each other.

Maybe some companies will start doing 4 day work weeks because they find that productivity doesn't actually increase from 4 to 5 days and then start outcompeting other companies for talent. But unless 5 days is actually not more productive than 4 days, we're going to have the most competitive organizations continue to be 5 days a week.

omnimus• 2 months ago

It's strange to put it like “we invented 40hour workweek”. It was extremely hard fight won by cooperation of many levels of the working class. The business owners absolutely didn't want it.

This would have to happen again. But there is none of that worker unity so it's unlikely to happen. The productivity gains will go solely to the bussiness owners.

Buttons840• 2 months ago

One possibility is once AI becomes profitable and wildly successful, and we all lose our jobs, we vote to nationalize the AI companies, and send some good vibes (but no money) to the VCs who paid for it, and remember that the AI was only built by breaking copyright law at an industrial scale and so it's fair to nationalize it.

Aurornis10• 2 months ago

Good thing all of the AI companies in the world operate only inside one country. I'm sure all of the other technology companies, AI ventures, and investors will continue putting their headquarters in a country that did this and gave the investors $0.

Nothing bad would happen, of course.

sharts• 2 months ago

10x productivity with layoffs to compensate. throw in more AI slop causing more outages and you’re working more than before

dolebirchwood• 2 months ago

10x’ing our productivity

Normalizing this "10x" language (well before AI) is a factor in this problem.

It's been so loosely and casually thrown about in this industry. 10x engineer... 10x mindset... 10x growth... 10x this... 10x that...

All paraded around by people who fancied themselves to be their own version of 10x whatever.

Well, keep parroting this long enough, and it's just a matter of time before people not only believe it to be commonplace, but they start to expect and demand it.

So now we have AI as the next thing foisted upon us to force everyone to be 10x or die trying.

Should've just settled for being 3.14x engineers like reasonable people.

win311fwg• 2 months ago

productivity can get us some days off.

Days off might be a challenging ask as the AI needs feedback more often than that. Working sporadically throughout the day, able to do what you please between the AI asking questions, is realistic. We're already there, frankly.

resonious• 2 months ago

It won't get you days off because you (rather, your employer) will fall behind those who didn't opt to take days off.

You'd only get days off if it was only you who got a 10x increase. But it's everybody. So it's status quo: technology advances, and you have to keep up if you want to stay in the industry.

dd8601fn• 2 months ago

It won't get you days off because you (rather, your employer) will fall behind those who didn't opt to take days off.

I don’t believe this is true. Or that more hours worked reliably translates to serious competitive advantage, in general.

But your point stands, because many (or most) employers think it does, and employees are usually incentivized to support that notion.

tumdum_• 2 months ago

40 hours work week wasn’t always the case and yet here we are.

palmotea• 2 months ago

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.

And we shouldn't. Workers should only get the wages they can command in the marketplace and not a penny more, and the smaller the better.

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.

Morally, all benefits of any technology or productivity gain must flow up to the owners, who deserve it all.

But this should be comforting to all of you. I'm sure everyone here owns at least a few thousand dollars in shares. You'll get some dividends and/or capital gains!

mathattack• 2 months ago

The question is are we more like farm workers who will be unemployed because of the farm or accountants who become much more valuable and high paid because of the spreadsheet?

And I am grateful for not working on a farm, it’s hard work!

throw262672• 2 months ago

You got into a contract. This contract specified what you will do and usually for how long. Unless this contract specified you need to get X done, I don’t see any way you can argue for this in any way that makes sense.

_Nothing_ I do that benefits my employer directly benefits me. AI or not. That was the whole idea of the relationship: I show up, perform some type of labor and am shielded from the bullshit of doing business (to some tolerable extend). The employer in turn forks over hard cash. The exact, same F amount every month and on time, no discussions about it.

If your actions directly or indirectly caused a loss to the business do you give up free days or pay? I don’t think you should. This works both ways.

However, that’s on the level of the individual. If you’re saying we should unionize, then, hell yes.

jessetemp• 2 months ago

Creating a throwaway for this comment is telling

xnx• 2 months ago

But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off.

Pretty sure if you ask this that they'll give you all your days off.

bbor• 2 months ago

Standing up for yourself and your peers is a virtue, not a weakness. Yes, it’s easy to crack down on individual dissent — but only if you stay quiet.

Cthulhu_2• 2 months ago

Depends on whether you or your ancestors demanded some worker protection rights so they can't just fire you.

danaris3• 2 months ago

This is why we need to be unionizing en masse.

There have been movements toward this in the US, but particularly in the tech sector, far too many people are still stuffed full of decades of anti-union propaganda (like the idea that the union is a "third party" rather than being the workers themselves, or that it would bring down their salary because they're such a special awesome 10x developer and 10x negotiator).

The executive class has taken roughly all the productivity increases since 1980 and slid them straight into their bulging pockets, at our expense. The only way we get any of that back, or prevent them from taking this new increase from us too, is to stand together against them.

throwaway634672• 2 months ago

It’s been like that for a while, economic gains went to a small fraction of people, before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side. Think about how much the US economy is growing right now and who really profits from that growth. My guess is that 90 % of the growth goes to 10 % of people, with AI maybe 99 % might go to the 1 %. Or who do you think will gain from the tokenization of development? You’re just supposed to be more productive and the gains the company achieves will just go to the owners as they are in a great position right now and developers are scared shitless to get fired, so no one is increasing salaries or time off, instead most companies hang the threat of layoffs over people’s head to keep them in line. And the funny thing is we developers did this to ourselves, by doing free open source work for the greater good, which now feeds AI models that are replacing many of us. But I guess most people didn’t care as they made good money while it lasted.

abletonlive2• 2 months ago

before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side.

are you sure about that? i'm a software engineer and i feel like i'm on the wining side now, even more than before. I'm considering quitting my 500K a year job to go compete against the employers. they seem like dinosaurs to me.

Tade0• 2 months ago

And the funny thing is we developers did this to ourselves, by doing free open source work for the greater good, which now feeds AI models that are replacing many of us.

Open source is not to blame here. AI companies used the code, in some cases against the license, to train their models.

Nobody is actually getting replaced - it's just that layoffs are in vogue now. If there was productivity to gain here, it would be used to do more and capture more of the market.

jgilias• 2 months ago

We’re going to be fine. I see daily what non-engineers that build stuff with AI come up with.

dannersy5• 2 months ago

It is honestly offensive to me that this isn't plainly obvious to everyone. AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control. Does anyone think it is coincidence that now local models are more useful the market has suddenly made it massively more expensive to buy your own hardware? Companies are just giving up making consumer hardware because they can can just focus on hyper-scalers. They want to control compute as well, there is no liberating aspect to any of this.

Businesses, especially tech ones, are not altruistic. The idea that tech companies are out to make anyone's life better is a joke and a sentiment that should have died decades ago. The evidence is of predatory business practices and leveraging the worst aspects of our brain chemistry to keep us hooked on apps that make us less happy, keep us stupid and less informed, and buying more.

Even more confusing are the people who are welcoming AI with open arms as just another skill to learn, _surely_ they'll be the ones who come out on top, right? It has all the stink of the countless Americans believing they too will become billionaires and everyone else are just suckers as they are all one healthcare problem away from bankruptcy.

We don't learn.

munksbeer5• 2 months ago

AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human.

You don't know that. And this same line could be said about any technology that results in accruing of capital, but actually does end up making life better for the average human.

What if AI at AlphaFold finds a cure for Alzheimer's disease? What if it finds a way to actually perfect fusion?

You can't tell me we don't live better lives than people 100 years ago right now, and that is because of technology.

danaris3• 2 months ago

AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control.

I think here it's useful to separate "AI" as sold and marketed today from "AI" as a CS discipline, a field of study, and a category of tools and techniques.

The field of Artificial Intelligence has always been, at least for the majority of people in it, about improving things for real people.

The LLMs that have garnered huge valuations and an outsized share of everyone's attention in recent years started as part of that field, and grew out of its research and technological advances.

But once companies started seeing how they could monetise it, that's when it started being about wealth consolidation and control.

Cthulhu_2• 2 months ago

The only ones getting a paycheck off of this is those that work for the hardware manufacturers, unfortunately.

Mainly because in software development (at least for what I do), productivity does not translate into significant company gains. I work for an energy company, nothing is super revolutionary, and a new feature or capability takes a long time to translate into measurable revenue, if at all.

The energy crisis had a much bigger (positive) impact on the numbers than AI or anything I personally did. (although I have to add, they also did a major re-architecture of their back-end after the '22 energy crisis and did some smart buy-in, so as the other energy companies' websites struggled, ours churned along just fine and we got a lot of new customers/contracts)

keybored2• 2 months ago

The top comment explains the point of the article in plain terms. I’m not sure how many levels of jokes we are on.

LoveMortuus• 2 months ago

I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now.

I've lost my job in February... Still trying to find a new job... any job...

itsdavesanders• 2 months ago

This is exactly why unions are needed. To negotiate for extra benefits and share of the effort for their labor.

bitwize• 2 months ago

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?

Remember the banner hanging over Initech offices with their internal motto: "Is this good for the COMPANY?"

Ultimately, that is the question that matters.

Arthurian• 2 months ago

A thought I’ve been chewing on regarding this…. What if “what do we get out of this?” was built into the tool that we use? Something like a personal agent that you carry with you from job to job and that accumulates capabilities along with you? Getting exposure to more and different work could become something that you get a real, tangible benefit from.

packetlost• 2 months ago

That would require technology that hasn't yet been created to be created. Tbh I'm happy with just having enough token spend to use on side projects for now.

freeopinion• 2 months ago

If you take a 1x dev and a 2x dev and apply an AI force multiplier, do you get a 10x dev and a 20x dev? Or do you get two 10x devs?

If a human element is required to get value from AI, but any human will do, then devs should get minimum wage. If different humans have a different multiplier when you apply them to AI, they should be compensated accordingly. So if the 1x dev can get 5x out of AI, and the 2x dev can get 2x out of AI, you can fire the 2x2 dev, double the salary of the 1x5 dev, and be more productive for less money[1]. Or you can keep both devs, but pay the 1x5 dev slightly better than the 2x2 dev.

This is all assuming you have some valid way of measuring 1x, 2x, 1x5, and 2x2.

[1] Double salary doesn't have to include double insurance, vacation, etc. But there is also the cost of the AI, so...

Edit: markup

Scroll_Swe• 2 months ago

I have 25 vacation days per year and so does everyone else in Sweden. And we all use them for real it is not like your PTOs. During summer, we make it work but it is a clear standby mode. The upside is we have to staff up too, with regulars and interns.

This is not a tech problem.

This is a you problem.

*Yes salary is way way way way lower. BUT where in the USA could I take a 10min bus (normal people take the bus here not bums) or walk 30-40min to work feeling totally safe even at night? Nevermind I spent 0 on my education in terms of tuition. And live in a city centre, walking to a grocery store with a 60k studio condo? With high speed 5g and fibre. And I hear in the US you have to worry about water or power cuts? Not here lmao.

I mean that simply you make society what you make it.

Over and out, o7, waiting for [flagged]

jdougan• 2 months ago

I was always partial to the “make Wednesday a second weekend” plan. No more hump day and 2 “Fridays”. Of course that is also 2 “Mondays”

hx83• 2 months ago

I have a similar wacky plan I like to call "Delete Thursday". Four day work week, and more weekends a year just by having six days a week instead of seven.

cmuguythrow4• 2 months ago

Relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

the concern would be that this new ability will actually increase competition and give us less than we had before

this is not something that can just be blamed on the "CEOs/execs/shareholders" of the world. it is evolutionary competition - unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to "just work less", because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others. even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.

I wish I knew what to do to fix it, doesn't seem sustainable but I don't know how to make all of humanity cooperate without doing something even worse

chipsrafferty5• 2 months ago

Did you just link to a rat website as if that is a good source?

cmuguythrow4• 2 months ago

Good source for what? I'm just trying to point to a concept, an idea. There's no "facts" here, just speculation. If you disagree with the point there, why don't you just say what you think is true instead, I'm happy to discuss the ways in which the article is wrong

satvikpendem2• 2 months ago

A rat website? What does this mean, I'm out of the loop with SSC?

refactor_master• 2 months ago

If anything, China proves that 996 is not sustainable as it simply leads to involution and attrition. At best the populace benefits in a few hyper-focused industries such as take-out and e-commerce, but average life quality is still far behind "lazy countries".

cmuguythrow4• 2 months ago

sadly life quality is not the thing that the competitive system is maximizing for, and thats one of the article's points. we compete to our own detriment, but to not compete is to become extinct

alexpotato2• 2 months ago

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. "

paulddraper2• 2 months ago

Because human nature it to want more, more than wanting idleness.

engineer_223• 2 months ago

Weird to be downvoted for obviously correct analysis...

xiaoyu2006• 2 months ago

Human had all the industrialization and stuff, yet we work 5 days / week now.

krapp2• 2 months ago

People work 5 days a week because of protracted violent strikes by unions and socialist revolutionaries forcing governments to recognize labor rights. Prior to that the norm was working 7 days a week, sunup to sundown, with only Christmas off, from adolescence until you died.

dyauspitr3• 2 months ago

People waited around a lot before, and since the baseline speed for everything was slower, no one had an edge. Now everything is fast and instantaneous and that’s available to everyone. It’s part of the reason why our lives are so stressful now. I remember my parents working and their work had significantly less stress on a day-to-day basis. Everything was at a nice relaxed human pace. They would be responsible for one excel sheet’s worth of work per week, which we can now do in an hour or two.

polisaez• 2 months ago

I was looking for facts to disprove your point, but it seems we actually work more than our ancestors.

Medieval folks and hunter-gatherers had plenty of time off. It wasn't until the industrial revolution that we started extending our workweek.

Here's a nice summary of how the workweek looked like, from the AskHistorians subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rf0lb/comme...

hellojeanpierre• 2 months ago

We worked 6 days a week before, Germany got to 5 days only in 1967 after years of strikes.

throw0101a6• 2 months ago

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. "

From about one hundred years ago:

Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.

[…]

For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)

* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):

* https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure

manmal3• 2 months ago

In some European countries, you can actually go on welfare and never work again. It takes some tricks because the state doesn’t like it; and maybe you‘ll want to do some undeclared side jobs for 15h a week and you’ll be comfortable.

I don’t know how such people can live with themselves. But apparently, if you’re immune to the second factor, it is possible, nowadays, to work 15h or less, without any wealth, and lead a good life.

The only thing threatening this status quo is corporations and rich people pulling their wealth into other states; and related, being net importers. I don’t understand why the EU is allowing this to happen. They should grow some teeth finally.

sharpshadow• 2 months ago

It is the fundamental requirement of capitalism to convert every increase in productivity into profit rather than into time.

In a communist society where the people own the means of production collectively the measure of wealth would not be money but disposable free time.

redrove• 2 months ago

So the theory goes. Can you point out one place where this is working out?

Willish42• 2 months ago

Computers feel like a pretty good analogy for how AI will affect the workforce.

I suspect productivity will massively increase, the complexity and cognitive load of our work will similarly multiply, and yet we'll still being doing the now-more-complex work in some capacity for a similar number of hours.

m4632• 2 months ago

sounds like the promise of nuclear power...

"Too cheap to meter"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter

alexpotato2• 2 months ago

This became true for long distance phone calls.

They used to charge you by the minute but now it's easier to just charge you a flat charge per month.

9999000009992• 2 months ago

Best the powers that be can do is increase outsourcing since a 15$ an hour engineer + ai is most of the way to a 70$ an hour engineer + ai.

If I was smarter I’d have 200k in my 401k now. Assuming I live cheap in Vietnam and a good yield I’d just live off 10k usd per year

hx83• 2 months ago

Where are you finding these $15/hr engineers that can pump out good PRs with Claude Code? I've taken a peak at a couple of firms and I am disappointed by their output.

9999000009992• 2 months ago

Who said anything about good?

The overall code quality probably drops a bit, but as long as it still works the C level can call it a win.

avodonosov• 2 months ago

And not be off completely...

terminalgravity• 2 months ago

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...

Aurornis10• 2 months ago

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.

I’m seeing this talking point circulated a lot recently but it’s not really the whole story. Luddites weren’t on a selfless crusade to steal from the rich and give to the poor. They wanted to fight off competition for their specific jobs. They didn’t want anyone having access to cheaper fabrics and clothes and other things because that was their golden goose. They wanted to be in control and force you to go through the inefficient methods to get those things because it benefited themselves.

A closer modern day analog would be something like the dock workers striking to keep automation out of ports. They have a sweet gig and they don’t want machines doing anything to jeopardize their stranglehold on ports, even if it would benefit literally everyone else in the entire country if we could modernize our ports like the rest of the world.

GeoAtreides• 2 months ago

It is you that is spreading misinformation. I suggest everyone thinking Aurornis is right, to read the article below, from the smithsonian.

But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices.
“They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”[1]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...

madrox13• 2 months ago

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.

ranyume• 2 months ago

What do you mean? You just need to ban companies from doing 5 days work.

madrox13• 2 months ago

Amusingly, there is literally not even a 7 day work week ban for companies in the US. You can require employees work every day. Employers are just required to pay employees overtime under various conditions beyond 40 hours / five days a week, which is why you don't see it.

And what's more, software engineers are exempt from these rules because of their pay grades. If you're a SWE making a salary the odds are your employer could require you work on Saturdays without running afowl of labor laws.

This is all powered by norms.

dwg• 2 months ago

Same logic applies internationally.

lII1lIlI11ll2• 2 months ago

You would also need to ban them from employing people in other countries that allow 5 days work.

zanecodes• 2 months ago

If only there were some kind of third party we could all collectively agree to delegate enforcement of cooperation to...

madrox13• 2 months ago

Interestingly, software engineers are usually considered exempt in the US, meaning they can be required to work more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay if employers choose to.

Unless you're imagining congress do something. I want to shoot fireballs from my fingers, but unfortunately we don't live in a world of magic.

sneak3• 2 months ago

If only. The only way to delegate enforcement is to give them a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Unfortunately all such potential organizations are run by human beings, who, when given violence as a tool, will use that violence as a tool.

pluralmonad2• 2 months ago

enforcement of cooperation

That is an oxymoron. I think you probably meant coercion.

hx83• 2 months ago

By this logic you could get promoted if you worked six day work weeks.

madrox13• 2 months ago

Have you not seen people who work longer and harder get more promotions? That has been my experience.

satvikpendem2• 2 months ago

There's a reason 996 culture is seeping into American startups. Whether it actually makes them more productive in the market remains to be seen.

dozerly2• 2 months ago

And this is true… employees who work and produce more, better things often get promoted. Spending more time doing things leads to producing more and better things

lII1lIlI11ll2• 2 months ago

I did get promoted for working seven days work weeks. Twice, in fact.

apt-apt-apt-apt3• 2 months ago

Alright guys, I'm running for president. 4 day work weeks (8 hours each) for employees or prison.

toomuchtodo2• 2 months ago

You have my vote. Work to live, don’t live to work.

~90% of Iceland is on a 35-36 hours work week, seems to work fine.

Remote work was also skeptically thought of up until a global pandemic forced it, and while there has been some retreat, 20% of Americans work remotely in some capacity still. Just need a catalyst to challenge norms and rigid mental models.

https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ICELAND_4DW...

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/25/business/iceland-shorter-work...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/21/icelan...

BirAdam• 2 months ago

You could likely get some funding for a PAC based around this. You just have to get Altman, Musk, and the other to realize that it’s a good marketing move.

“Our AI is so awesome and boosts productivity so much that no one has to work another 5 day week, ever again.”

madrox13• 2 months ago

You have my vote. Clearly anyone can do it.

spixy• 2 months ago

Maybe don't force how many days people should work. Force number of hours (32) and let people decide, how many days...

sneak3• 2 months ago

Why isn’t this the case for a six day workweek?

jedimastert• 2 months ago

It was, the 40 hour work week was hard fought for.

Also, 996 is apparently a thing

madrox13• 2 months ago

This is a great question and I encourage you to learn the history of it, because it's fascinating. It’s rooted in labor movements and industrialization.

engineer_223• 2 months ago

A lot of people work less than full time....

Like...

You can actually work 4 x 8 if you want to. Or 5x5... No gun to your head

Yeah, agreed, you'll have a hard time finding a job with full benis and vacation yada yada, but like,.... Every CEO loves to negotiate

So stop being a bitch

If 4x8 is important to you:

Negotiate

***************

Reply to madrox:

"Demands" is a loaded term. In negotiations you enter with "must haves" and "like to haves"...

Through the course of negotiations you learn new information and reveal your own information....

At the end, whether you take the job or not: you end up with what you deserve. Not what you want.

By my assessment, a lot of people are learning that "deserve" is not a character trait, it's market driven.

madrox13• 2 months ago

This is true, and there is usually a tradeoff you make for it. To your point, it's a negotiation. You usually give something up to get something or be so good you simply cannot be replaced. Such people do not represent the bulk of the workforce, and we're talking about norms here.

Because to that CEO you're talking about, you have to convince them your demands are better than the next candidate who doesn't mind working more hours.

burnto2• 2 months ago

My thinking tends to be that our standard work week is an equilibrium among a few different forces. We’re motivated by social norms, capital markets, and biological needs and wants. In places like the U.S. the market forces have been powerful enough to really shift social norms. In tandem they’re probably slowly altering our biology too.

madrox13• 2 months ago

I think you are right. It is practically baked into the American Dream.

kelnos5• 2 months ago

Yes, it's just norms. 15 years ago, I worked for a small startup. For a good 8 or 9 months, we were working 6 and sometimes 7 days a week. We weren't contractually required to, but everyone "wanted" to. I use scare quotes there, but I think a lot of people (myself included, for part of it), really did want to.

But ultimately the unsaid thing was: you either work 6/7 days a week, or you get marginalized or fired. And it's not like we weren't putting in the hours on the weekdays; most of us were working 12-hour days, or more. (And wow, we got to drop down to 8-10 on the weekends! So generous!)

Dumb. I'll never do something like that again. Not worth it, and certainly not for someone else's company.

NothingAboutAny• 2 months ago

I went through a big back and forth with a small startup where I initially negotiated in at 3 days a week. Eventually they said "we really need you the full 5 days" and I explained that I'm gonna do the same amount of work regardless and they could pay me 40% less by agreeing to 3 days. they still wanted me 5 days, so I took the job and just coasted those 2 days from home, they were still very happy with my performance, I ended up quitting in 6 months because I wanted my hours in the day back.

I really think management still doesn't get it.

madrox13• 2 months ago

I personally believe in rolling company shutdowns. Give engineering a week off every quarter. Give product the following week off.

gabrieledarrigo• 2 months ago

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.

A four-day-a-week worker here.

I don't know what you exactly mean, but my personal experience is exactly the opposite. I worked for a startup as a founding engineer, just 4d/w (the CTO was crazily open-minded), and I was never so productive. Doesn't matter that the others were working 5 days, pushing more; it was my responsibility to keep up, and it worked pretty well.

Same now, working for a company with the same arrangement.

And no one is or was "losing."

maleldil• 2 months ago

Out of curiosity, how many hours per day did you work? Was it the same overall time as a 5-day week, just distributed over 4 days, or did you work a whole day less than others?

intronic• 2 months ago

Four day work week for same pay is entirely possible - change how the work happens

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40691306/

kakacik3• 2 months ago

My wife effectively works 3-4 days a week. For mums with young kids its pretty common here in western Europe to have 60% deal, most I know have 80% deal. It means 3-4 days a week just to be sure, not say 6 work hour days.

Made up self-pressure is among the worst things smart folks can do in their lives.

Taronar• 2 months ago

Cynical take because why arent we working 6 days a week then

km144• 2 months ago

Because, as the OP said, working hours are powered by norms. There are salaried positions and companies and teams that certainly will make you work 6 days a week, or make you feel like a bad worker if you don't do anything on a Saturday. But the vast majority of companies (and employees within those companies) would consider the expectation of working a 6th day to be completely unacceptable.

bean4692• 2 months ago

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.

If that is the case, then the same would apply to those who work overtime and on weekends.

bean4692• 2 months ago

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.

If that is the case, wouldn't the same would apply to those who work overtime and on weekends?

pickleglitch• 2 months ago

This is why labor laws and unions exist. It's unfortunate that in the US both have diminished under a withering assault from the ruling class over the past several decades.

thiagowfx• 2 months ago

I feel these vibes whilst living in Munich (or Bavaria, for that matter). Most stores / shops are forbidden to operate on Sundays or past 8pm, that is enshrined in an ancient law. If you want to open a new store and you are willing to operate Sundays, or perhaps until 10pm, and your employees are also willing to work then...nope, can't do it. Would get ahead of the competition. Not fair, blablabla.

nrlucas2• 2 months ago

This is why it needs to be done top down. Pareto optimizations can only happen that way.

erelong• 2 months ago

4 day work weeks have a lot of potential benefits

Instead of asking for the day off, some startups should just implement the practice and popularize it

tap-snap-or-nap• 2 months ago

Did anyone ask for the 8 hour work day?

marcus_holmes3• 2 months ago

Yes, activists fought and people died to achieve it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day_movement

johnea• 2 months ago

The whole thing is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but sarcasm is a potent mode of communication.

The joke, of course, being that every increase in productivity has ALWAYS gone straight to ownership.

Economists have been predicting a boom in human leisure time since the dawn of economics. It has NEVER happened...

pdonis• 2 months ago

every increase in productivity has ALWAYS gone straight to ownership.

Which of course means that if you want to capture that upside for yourself, you need to be an owner.

The real problem with AI is that it breaks that for programmers. Before AI, you actually could be an owner. Of course big tech companies tried to get you to centralize, to depend on their tools, but you didn't have to. You could always run your own open source tooling on your own hardware, and freelance if you absolutely couldn't accept the loss of upside in being an employee.

But now AI has centralized a key tool, and that changes the game, at least if you think the game requires you to use AI to stay competitive.

runako• 2 months ago

lmao Corporate had a hissy fit from people working full weeks at home. The 4-day work week will never* come to the US.

* - not while any of us reading this are under 65.

Finnucane• 2 months ago

1 And afterward Moses and Aaron came, and said unto Pharaoh: 'Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel: Let My people go, that they may hold a feast unto Me in the wilderness.'2 And Pharaoh said: 'Who is the LORD, that I should hearken unto His voice to let Israel go? I know not the LORD, and moreover I will not let Israel go.'

3 And they said: 'The God of the Hebrews hath met with us. Let us go, we pray thee, three days' journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice unto the LORD our God; lest He fall upon us with pestilence, or with the sword.'4 And the king of Egypt said unto them: 'Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, cause the people to break loose from their work? get you unto your burdens.'5 And Pharaoh said: 'Behold, the people of the land are now many, and will ye make them rest from their burdens?'6 And the same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, and their officers, saying:7 'Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore. Let them go and gather straw for themselves.8 And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish aught thereof; for they are idle; therefore they cry, saying: Let us go and sacrifice to our God.9 Let heavier work be laid upon the men, that they may labour therein; and let them not regard lying words.'

10 And the taskmasters of the people went out, and their officers, and they spoke to the people, saying: 'Thus saith Pharaoh: I will not give you straw.11 Go yourselves, get you straw where ye can find it; for nought of your work shall be diminished.'12 So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw.13 And the taskmasters were urgent, saying: 'Fulfil your work, your daily task, as when there was straw.'14 And the officers of the children of Israel, whom Pharaoh's taskmasters had set over them, were beaten, saying: 'Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your appointed task in making brick both yesterday and today as heretofore?'

mlsu3• 2 months ago

The plagues come later, I suppose.

zephraph• 2 months ago

here, here.

zackify• 2 months ago

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.

esafak• 2 months ago

Workers need to have more leverage for them to be able to independently assert their working hours. People with such luxury become contractors or proprietors. The rest need collective bargaining.

eulgro• 2 months ago

Unfortunately that's not how it works. Productivity gains have already increased tenfold in the past, yet still all work full time.

It used to be that 80+% of the population worked in agriculture. In developed countries that number is now around 1-2%. Some of the freed labour was funneled into improving living standards, some of it was funneled into new jobs created by the increasingly complex society (the "intermediate economy").

With AI, the same is true: labour is freed by the productivity gains (which I doubt are 10x sustainably but whatever), more labour is needed for power generation, mineral extraction, maintaining this new extra layer of complexity in the intermediate economy, etc. In the end we might see, say, a net 3% increase in global productivity per year over the next 10 years, which will be funneled into increasing living standards and increasing economic inequalities, but not in reducing working hours.

If you accept living below average standards, you could easily work a single day of the week for the rest of your life. But why would an employer hire 5 people working one day a week, instead of one working 5 days a week? They won't, hence we don't see a reduction in working hours.

The alternative is to work full time but retire earlier, much earlier, than you would otherwise, which in the end is the equivalent of having worked one day a week for your whole life.

I highly recommend reading Lean Logic by David Fleming, it explores several of these concepts in a very interesting way.

bdcs• 2 months ago

"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!

drsalt2• 2 months ago

i really dislike lazy bums. you are in a position to use great tools for productivity and you're not inspired to work harder? you should be fired on the spot.

vlunkr• 2 months ago

Fired on the spot? The hyperbole doesn't help your argument.

What inspires me to work harder is getting to work on things that I enjoy.

drsalt2• 2 months ago

not an argument m8 it's an opinion

thin_carapace• 2 months ago

indeed those who engage in the capitalistic system without devoting the entirety of their soul to generation of profit, they are subhuman and therefore deserve to be subservient. true humanity is found in embodying our animal nature and maximizing the influence of individual genetics - money is a mere vehicle to express the totality of the human spirit. those lacking money clearly lack spirit and should be considered beneath humanity, effectively equivalent to livestock. baa baa black sheep, give me every last thread of your wool or be exiled

al_borland• 2 months ago

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.

Aurornis10• 2 months ago

During those 3 days all I really did was work and sleep.

This is why 3x12 is not workable for average families. If you have kids and want to see them, 3x12 only works if you start really really early, then get to bed early when the kids do too.

I enjoyed 4x10 when I did it, but there were some real problems with some employees trying to adapt. Anecdotally we were seeing a lot of people who would barely work until the 8 hour mark and then just zone out or socialize while they waited the clock out at the end of the day.

Which is all too bad for those of us who work well with longer days.

chrisweekly2• 2 months ago

IME most people don't have more than 4 (maybe 5) hours of effective heavy cognitive / creative energy in a given day. Of course YMMV, and it's common to have periods of sustained output when deeply committed to and energized by something, but over the long haul, week in, week out, splitting the workday into roughly 8h sleep, 8h work, 8h everything else, with 2/7 days off plus many holidays and some weeks of paid vacation seems like a reasonable default to me -- for the traditional salaried role. If your preferences deviate much from that baseline, the entrepreneurial / consulting / fractional approach would probably be better aligned.

arjvik2• 2 months ago

in tech, we (frequently are expected to) work 5x12!

throw0101a6• 2 months ago

996 FTW!

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

markus_zhang• 2 months ago

I think that’s more about what you do than how you do it. And sometimes when to do it.

You could try a data engineer’s life which is full of meetings, ad-hoc tasks and other BS —- everything that screams that this is not a real engineer job.

tamimio2• 2 months ago

I worked a job before that did require some heavy thinking, design, solving problems, etc., and for some reason I only get creative from 1am to 4am, and I did an amazing job in that period for whatever work was required, only later that my boss didn’t like it and wanted to force me to do normal schedule, in the office, my outcome degraded significantly and eventually had to leave the work, it’s just I couldn’t handle the mornings besides replying to some emails.

ogundipeore• 2 months ago

I agree with the premise of time away being easier. I don’t think the models/harnesses are there yet. There’s still a good amount of human input required to generate quality work.

So yes, take the day off but the models still need you to steer them when you’re back

dwd• 2 months ago

Maynard Keynes posited a future 15 hour work week in 1930 based on the productivity gains after WW1, nearly 100 years ago now.

http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

abyssin4• 2 months ago

The average work time in European societies is probably that. The majority of citizens don’t work (too young, studying, sick, unemployed, retired). But it’s changing fast, the rich are no longer accepting this situation. The ones working get happily manipulated into believing others should suffer as much as they do, instead of organizing lifestyles into a more frugal fashion for the benefit of all.

randusername• 2 months ago

For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-- how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

luxuryballs• 2 months ago

Instead they are going to say “oh you’re 10Xing?” sweet we can get rid of 9 people and you can keep working all week long qq

hnthrowaway03152• 2 months ago

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.

vanuatu3• 2 months ago

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

hnthrowaway03152• 2 months ago

How can one move horizontally and then vertically? I have been thinking about getting into a more technical position. I work as a data engineer but essentially just a data modeller while manager and staff engineer took all the fun jobs -- it is even very hard to know what they are working on, so it is impossible to even ask for certain tickets.

And now with AI coming out in hot, and companies only hiring seniors, I found it very hard to move horizontally. It is not like I can't take a pay cut, but people simply won't hire someone who takes some time to learn the rope.

I might as well figure out how to increase my Charisma to 18 and sleep with someone at the top /s

paulhebert5• 2 months ago

Do you know people who have gotten 10x raises due to increased output since AI came out? The one group I can think of is workers at AI companies but that seems more like a gold rush situation than anything

vanuatu3• 2 months ago

AI companies have reaped the most benefit out of AI, so naturally most 10xers come from people who have equity in those companies that grow really fast

I don't think the average person has even close to a 10x output increase due to AI.

artursapek• 2 months ago

Salaried people think they get paid for their output. No silly, you get paid for your time. Just like an hourly worker.

bwhiting23568• 2 months ago

What's preventing you from advertising your services as a contractor for 4 days a week?

mandevil• 2 months ago

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.

_HMCB_• 2 months ago

It’s all roses. AI is what exactly what the world needed. How can we not be grateful.

philip1209• 2 months ago

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.

mordae• 2 months ago

Foraging was so good we only had to work like 2h a day. We had to start farming simply because the population growth from foraging was exponential and we have ran out of easy-to-forage ecosystems.

We've also ran out of freedom at that point. We used to simply walk away from bullies, but that was no longer possible, with the farm and all.

At some point bullies stopped charging for racket. They stole the land and told us we are now working under them, for them.

ray_v• 2 months ago

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.

laughing_man• 2 months ago

Oh, don't worry. The way things are going with AI you're going to get a lot of days off.

dyauspitr3• 2 months ago

On a tangent if you’re paying $6000 a month for your three children for childcare you are better off getting a Nanny for significantly lesser than that

bparsons• 2 months ago

Different countries are going to distribute the benefits of automation in different ways. Northern European states will pursue shortened work weeks and lavish social services. China will reinvest the productivity gains into its industrial capacity. The United States will have five trillionaires.

rjbwork• 2 months ago

No, gains of productivity exclusively accrue to the owners of capital. Learn your place, human capital.

_moof2• 2 months ago

Whenever a new way is found to improve efficiency, choices have to be made about how to distribute the new surplus.

Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.

The people with power under current systems don't care about the people who do the work. They care about getting rich. So if there's an efficiency gain to be had, all of that new efficiency is going to be put towards increasing output or reallocating work. None of it - under current power structures - will ever go towards allowing workers to work less, because workers aren't the ones deciding where it will go.

d4mi3n• 2 months ago

Unless one choses to bargain. Perhaps collectively.

Avicebron• 2 months ago

[flagged]

TheWrongGuy• 2 months ago

"Hence too the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer's time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital." - some crazy radical economist, nearly 200 years ago

jlebar5• 2 months ago

Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.

In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand.

In a world where there's a positive supply shock (in this case, there's a lot more programming available for purchase today than there was a year ago), supply goes up. We therefore expect the price for the good to decrease.

This has nothing to do with power or whether people care about xyz. It's a consequence of the economic system we live under.

You can desire to live under a different economic system! That's logically coherent. But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.

Honestly I'm getting tired of this narrative. People take the benefits of capitalism for granted (indeed most of us on this forum do very well for ourselves relative to the average person in our country and around the world), but we blame all of its downsides on "bad people".

ncallaway2• 2 months ago

Right, but a day off would reduce supply.

And 2 days off was not a system dictated by God, which we are obligated to keep in perpetuity (in fact, most religions dictate 1 day off, not 2).

So, we could, as a society, just choose to make a 32 hour workweek “full time”, and mandate overtime pay after that.

There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.

In fact, I think if we choose to do that as a society, it will end horrifically.

skew-aberration• 2 months ago

From where do you get your understanding of the terms supply and demand? They are primarily from classical economics - have you read any? e.g Adam Smith?

porknubbins• 2 months ago

My employers who are introducing AI are not laughing evil supervillains hoovering up all the excess profits, they are normal people who wanted long careers and are as nervous as anyone about competition amd what AI will do to organizations if people become truly redundant.

hilariously• 2 months ago

Cool well my employers fired me for an AI psychosis trip so I am glad you are working for those ones who "wanted long careers" and "are nervous as anyone" because hoboy is that not what we are seeing in the ownership class right now.

macintux• 2 months ago

How many of those employers are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to feed their kids?

I have less sympathy for decision-makers who are stressed than the people who’ll be fired first, and have less mobility. Or safety net.

komali27• 2 months ago

Right, exactly, there's no good guys under capitalism, that's why you need industry wide labor unions moreso than within a single company.

You could have a straight up communist for a boss that completely shares all profits, but if the business doesn't extract labor value and expand as aggressively as other businesses do, it'll eventually get eaten or lawfared to death, or priced out, or closed out of deals (e.g. small player in chips related business).

So the only way to prevent industry wide redundancy at everywhere except the 1% largest companies that survive (which will also be laying off people but not completely closing down), is through organized labor. Or, I suppose, completely restructuring the economic system, which I'm very down to chat about as well, but the labor organizing feels more achievable for now.

musicale4• 2 months ago

My employers who are introducing AI are not laughing evil supervillains hoovering up all the excess profits

I care less about the motivation rather than the action.

_moof2• 2 months ago

So, are you getting your share of the surplus or not?

And what exactly does it mean to "compete"?

llbeansandrice4• 2 months ago

They are absolutely hoovering up the excess profits are you fucking stupid? That’s literally how capitalism works.

When have you ever saved the company money and been given a bonus that was even 1/10th of that money?

mcmcmc2• 2 months ago

Yeah I thought my employers were good normal people too, just found out they sold to PE firm that wants to “supercharge” our operations with AI. This of course is after swearing they had no interest in M&A to get me to join. “Nothing is changing, no one is getting laid off. Things will just get more efficient so you can do more ‘strategic’ work.” Heard that one before.

chanux• 2 months ago

Someone up in the food chain must have big investments in AI though. The great shove down didn't just appear.

jvanderbot• 2 months ago

This narrative is clean, matches expectations and history.

But let's be clear - we all probably own a decent part of our companies (collectively). Productivity gains mean winning the race to market, profits, glory. And that means ownership is valuable.

At the _very least_, you can push your company stock higher and buy it with your 10% IRA contributions or through a similar investment program and make 16x your investment over your 40 year career.

It's easy to look tactically at productivity gains being "captured" by high CEO bonuses, and that's legitimate, but we have so sufficiently seized the means of wealth production if we have stock options and market access that I'm not sure it's really valid to say we get, paraphrasing, "nothing if not a day off work".

jonstewart2• 2 months ago

"The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must." — Thucydides

tsunamifury2• 2 months ago

It’s a stupid statement by a stupid philosopher. Years later we learned collective development and incentive produced a society he could have never imagined.

It’s simply being looted now by the idiots this moron worshiped.

lubujackson• 2 months ago

It is almost reassuring to think that rich and powerful people all know what they are doing every step of the way. A handful may, but most certainly do not. Most are also terrified of AI. Stable profits are always better than transformative change, if you already have power and riches. Look at how insane companies are acting right now with token quotas for employees and mandates AI usage - the goal is not to milk profits but to not fall behind every other company in case this becomes table stakes. They are trying not to be devoured by a beast they don't understand.

When the AI bubble pops, large companies will be extremely relieved to stop throwing money into the wind playing this game. For most companies, the AI arms race is a huge hassle. They are fine with losing money in the short term and even in the long term as long as they can find a stable path forward.

This is the exact same trajectory as when the internet came out and every insurance company and toothpick manufacturer spent gobs of money to have a brochure website built because everyone else had one. This will play out differently, but recognize most companies are acting entirely from a place of fear right now.

whiplash451• 2 months ago

Companies don’t care about it but governments certainly do.

Over the past 150 years, the work week dropped from 70+ to 35h in France.

Granted that’s a long time horizon but still.

Grosvenor• 2 months ago

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.

zetalyrae• 2 months ago

Arguably this is what retirement is, no? Productivity gains did create extra leisure time. It's just we save all the leisure for retirement.

abyssin4• 2 months ago

They mainly created extra value for shareholders

sneak3• 2 months ago

You can have any days off you wish when you run the company. If you’re an employee then you work the days you were contracted to work. Employees definitionally don’t get to choose their hours.

rramadass• 2 months ago

My best experience of a good working-hours week comes from a school i studied at when a boy. The hours were 11:30AM to 4:30PM; i.e. 5 hours with only a 20/30min break in-between. We slept well, had a good brunch and went to school fresh and energetic. Played outside after school (i.e. exercise), came home at nightfall, did some study (i.e. work), had some entertainment and dinner before hitting the bed.

In today's parlance, this was excellent "work-life balance". If you can, talk to your boss and see whether you can adopt such a work schedule (with slight shifting of the time window as needed).

mrcwinn• 2 months ago

Capitalists moralize a lot about people becoming “lazy” or not having “direction” if society subsidizes not working - and yet their entire mission is centered around deploying money, letting money “work.”

If capital is doing the work, why on earth are they getting paid?

fg1372• 2 months ago

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.

afro88• 2 months ago

Is the end goal to not work? Are we supposed to not enjoy what we work on? Do we not believe in what the company we work for is trying to achieve?

Jgrubb• 2 months ago

I don't know what's gonna happen man, but I'm gonna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

- Jim Morrison

Chinjut3• 2 months ago

Many of us do not particularly enjoy the work our employer has us do, nor believe in what the company we work for is trying to achieve. It's not like we get to choose its aims, and it's not like we have alternatives where we get to do so either. Our lives are spent working on someone else's goals.

OneOffAsk• 2 months ago

There’s a natural desire for people to want to make things. Most of the time it’s physical: homes, crafts, woodworking. But for a few of us it’s ok for it to be non physical. Actually, that’s part of the allure of programming: you don’t need much more than a computer and some thinking to build incredibly intricate… things. AI is like a brand new power tool. It’s fun to use because you can build faster. I felt a sense of giddiness the first time I used a table saw after using a push saw my whole life.

dalyons4• 2 months ago

I think you’re missing the op’s point. Yes it’s fun but you don’t personally get any of the gains. Just more work

ericol• 2 months ago

I'm not excited about producing more, and all that jazz.

But, work IS exciting now - not sure for how long - because AI allows me to work almost at the speed of thought.

Nothing more, nothing less. It's FUN to be able to _just_ think.

burnto2• 2 months ago

I think a lot of us aren’t rational about it. I tend to feel excited about changes for which productivity is a side effect, even if it’s not my motivation. It’s hard to say no to extending my capabilities and insulating myself from the more boring repetitive tasks.

If your job was 80-90% shoveling and one day you were offered use of an excavator, wouldn’t you find that exciting even while realizing the shoveling part of your career is probably dead?

radu_floricica• 2 months ago

Those who are excited are a lot less likely to be out of a job in a year.

I'm not saying that's _why_ they're excited. But it's a great time to be a builder, and a terrible time to be a worker ant.

Thanemate• 2 months ago

I never understand why software engineers are so excited about AI as a whole.

Dictating what to exist and what not to to the machine is a power fantasy that's not going to stick around for long, because we'll inevitably reach the point where no human is needed in the loop (or at least not as often as they needed today).

Most people finally feel how they would've felt like if they actually put deliberate practice for hours to work on something. That's why you see comments going "wow, I rewrote this in Rust, and I don't even know Rust". You get to feel like someone who outputs Rust.

ares623• 2 months ago

rewriting something in Rust used to be "cool" because it was hard. What's the point in it now? How robust are the safety guarantees of something you didn't even write?

sph• 2 months ago

I never understand why software engineers are so excited about AI as a whole.

I think it's mostly young graduates that have not been ground down by the wheel of labour just yet, and old/ex engineers that are able to build something after years of being out of practice.

Hard for me to be excited about being asked to do more for the same pay, to be measured on idiotic metrics, to compete with overconfident but inept people, when I'm reaching my 40s. I am at the peak of my engineering skills and the bottom of my patience.

NietTim2• 2 months ago

I've never had this much fun at work. There was nothing more that I disliked in my job than months long projects with everything already planned out in advance. It made work extremely predictable and boring, the project was already fully thought out, all that needed to be done was the boring bit of writing all the code that you already know how to write, all the fun of exploring different ideas and implementation directions was already done.

maplethorpe2• 2 months ago

I'm not really following. Why is the problem you mentioned no longer a problem? Did your workplace change the way it plans projects now that AI is here?

tasuki5• 2 months ago

People sometimes mention this, but I have a hard time relating.

The amount of code you produce in months of just typing must be enormous, no?

To me it seems no matter the plan there's many unplanned things that I need to handle, and that's where the time is spent. I never had a day in my career where I knew exactly what had to be done and just spent it typing...

tasuki5• 2 months ago

Some things are just exciting, you know? Not everything is about maximizing one's employment opportunities...

quadrifoliate4• 2 months ago

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.

__loam• 2 months ago

Also start a union at your company and sue them if they retaliate.

quadrifoliate4• 2 months ago

Depending on your workplace and professional circle, influencing political opinions may be easier than unionizing. But both can be done.

MinimalAction• 2 months ago

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.

thefuture2023• 2 months ago

if layoffs begin

In the horrible, distant future known as 2023.

jmward01• 2 months ago

We need to get creative in ways that help. I am personally for: - sabbaticals - flat out taking 2 years off every 5 to go back to school full time - the mid weekend (don't give me Friday. Give me Wednesday!) - Massive increases to new baby time off programs - early retirement -but- with the encouragement to start fresh in a new field after a transition break. - Of course, just more time off. But -require- it. If you don't take your yearly vacation time you miss out on the 'vacation bonus check'.

You want to create jobs? Find ways to get people legitimately out of the workforce. By that I mean out of the workforce but still spending money and improving their skills for when they come back in.

mil224• 2 months ago

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.

hiAndrewQuinn• 2 months ago

First sensible take I've seen in this thread. People especially seem to forget the consequences of #1: The company where everyone is working 0.5 days a week will almost certainly get outcompeted, very quickly, by the company where everyone is working 5 days a week. In fact company #2 can probably precompute company #1 even if they have much lower quality staff on average.

lorepieri• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

movpasd• 2 months ago

Attraction towards equilibrium is real, but that equilibrium is not a given. It comes from intrinsic biological constraints, individual preferences, cultural norms, ideology, habits and expectations. Even fixing individual preference, the aggregate preferences is structurally mediated (collective or individual bargaining, labour laws). Through all those factors there's path dependency and friction towards equilibrium.

The point is: "a society's willingness" is doing a _huge_ amount of work in that framing. This willingness is precisely what is up for debate when we discuss work days.

The whole of humanity is one big system of self-feedbacks. Equilibria are only reached with respect to constraints (otherwise there is only one equilibrium, which is heat death!). The more you zoom out, the more "givens" come up for their own analysis.

danans• 2 months ago

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

Who is "we all"? To me, it sounds like the relative few who happen to have those jobs that have the 10x productivity boost but also receive the monetary upside (via ownership).

The rest of the hard-to-automate jobs will likely see their wages crater as the workers whose jobs got automated flood those labor markets - i.e. office worker turned skilled physical laborer.

This will further enrich the previous small group relative to the masses, as they will pay lower prices and receive higher quality goods and services due to competition between everyone else. Prices will fall not by miraculous AI robots but by squeezing labor.

This is the scenario - neofeudalism - that may await us absent strong mechanisms to replace the broad productivity redistribution the social technology known as "jobs" provided. Hardly a good thing.

therealdrag0• 2 months ago

You’re speculating about the effects of AI specifically but responding to a comment is about productivity generally. Historically we’ve seen massive productivity gains, and yet we’re all still here working.

AngryData3• 2 months ago

I think expecting worker rights to go up or working time to go down without laws/general strikes and more unions is naive. We have had massive productivity gains in every field since the 20th century, and in half of fields throughout the 19th century, and do we work any less or get paid better? No. In fact the entire goal of the last labor movement we had was to reduce working hours back to what peoples parents and grandparents worked. The 40 hour work week was merely a return to historical norms so the people didn't rise up and start hanging capitalists and politicians.

Tractors didn't making farming more lucrative, it just meant less farmers. Automated loom technology didn't make textile workers wealthier, it made capitalists richer, and then still ultimately shipped the work to poorer countries. Powered drills and tools didn't make miners or construction workers wealthier or work less. Forklifts didn't make dock workers wealthier or work less. Women entering the workforce and nearly doubling the available labor didn't make us work any less.

I don't see AI doing anything to help the working class in any way, just funneling more money into capitalists hands while the productivity demands increase.

Even in programming, where AI is being shown to be the most useful, did any of you have your work demands decrease or wages go up? No, at best they just fired junior engineers and told them to go pound sand.

tamimio2• 2 months ago

Silly you, the 9-5 5days a week schedule was introduced by ford in his factories, did they change that when automation was introduced later? Internet? Nope. And this 9-5 is actually 7-6 if you count the commute.

Speaking of AI, it’s been what, 3 years since it became mainstream? Did the employees wellbeing’s become better? Are the codes better? Do we have a breakthrough innovations that changed fundamentally in how we use/deal with xyz? All I hear is more work, more anxiety, more cost for some tokens, so I am not entirely sure about the “productivity increase” claim.

spl757• 2 months ago

Channeling my inner-masteroftheworld, No.

smashah• 2 months ago

No because the Epsteinist Class in charge have decided to make it zero sum. Therefore it's a fight to the death. Which is why with Ai we're 10x more productive and either 10x more busy or fired and on our way to food stamps

nancyminusone• 2 months ago

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.

auggierose• 2 months ago

Brilliant. This is exactly what is needed. AI day, Saturday, Sunday. Across the work force, even those not directly impacted by AI. And obviously, those 3 days can be flexibly arranged, so that we can shop all week long.

nelsonfigueroa2• 2 months ago

Historically, when a new technology enables workers to be more productive the baseline expectation goes up. We don't get time back.

alnwlsn• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin

This inadvertently led to an increase in the use of slaves. Whitney had hoped his invention would do the opposite by reducing the amount of labor needed to process cotton, but he never invented a machine to harvest cotton. That job still had to be done by hand. Cotton harvesting machines did not show up until the 1930s. So as cotton farmers expanded their plantations, they bought more slaves to pick the cotton.

nelsonfigueroa2• 2 months ago

Yeah this is exactly what comes to mind when I think about new tech and productivity increases. I remember learning about this as a kid in history class and it's still relevant today.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 months ago

https://4dayweek.io, a Show HN: project

ixtli3• 2 months ago

Marx showed this was an expression of one the central contradictions more than a century ago. Seriously it’s never too late to read about why our conditions only ever deteriorate under capitalism.

sterlind• 2 months ago

Scott Alexander's 2014 essay, Meditations on Moloch, explains why we ended up in this rat king of human misery rather than a utopia. I recommend it:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

basically, we can blame greedy corporate overlords, and that's cathartic, and somewhat correct, but we can (and have) ended up in a hell of our own making even with every individual wanting to do better. the boss that wants to let workers have the day off can't afford to, because the competition makes workers do 8x5. the competition lays off workers to pay for more tokens, because their competitors are. it's a bad game equilibrium.

labor laws are the reason we have the five day work week. we needed overtime to dissuade employers from defecting from the policy. we need coordination to keep AI from turning out like children working the bobbins in old-timey textile factories.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 months ago

Meanwhile, a trend in the last year:

AI Startup Founders Tout a Winning Formula–No Booze, No Sleep, No Fun

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45221423

996

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149049

New trend: extreme hours at AI startups

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45156674

SV AI Startups Are Embracing China's Controversial '996' Work Schedule

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44657480

noduerme• 2 months ago

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.

sibeliuss2• 2 months ago

Maybe a lot of this comes down to people are having fun building stuff in a way they weren't before? But i imagine this will all die down.

Ifkaluva3• 2 months ago

I like vibe coding for personal projects where the code is a throwaway, but I hate vibecoding at work when I later have to stake my reputation in validity of results, as well as maintain the resulting implementation.

sibeliuss2• 2 months ago

Well the answer is easy, don't vibe code then?

nacozarina• 2 months ago

Read up on the Ten Hour Movement or the Bread & Roses strike.

You are never going to get relief by asking politely.

engineer_223• 2 months ago

Be happy if you can be 10x more productive and charge 1/10 per unit of productivity.

There's no guarantee society needs 10x the productivity.

Yesterday I built a bespoke time keeping and billing tool in my browser for my boutique consulting gig. I got exactly what I needed and I paid about $1.

I think this piece of software could power my business for 2-3 years... If my business is very successful maybe I'll invest $2 to develop a GUI.

No SaaS needed. Software demand was actually surpressed by AI.

I don't need 10x more software. I need simple software at 1/100th the cost, on demand. And AI promises to give it to me. The most beautiful part is there's multiple market entrants competing for my bid.

Imagine OpenAI invented ICE engines and the world was dotted with lakes of crude oil, all we needed was refineries. That's the world we're in.

Now that should make you think.

NiceWayToDoIT• 2 months ago

I am kind of late to comment, but let me try anyway.

Can we have a day off? Yes and no, or yes, but at your expense.

The problem is system design. If a company earned money for its contributors/workers, then each gain would be shared across the company, from the board to its employees. But a company earns money for its shareholders, and you, as an employee, are in the expense column.

Therefore, a day off is either a mandatory legal right meant to help you rest so you can be more productive, or it is just additional unproductive time that does not create more value or maximize profit.

Therefore, this is where the argument for a 4-day working week collapses. To get a 4-day working week would mean yes, but with less "expense", or a lower salary.

For the same reason, taxing the rich would not help "the people" much, as it goes to the wrong pocket.

Is there are fix, yes.

barumrho• 2 months ago

If we all 10x our productivity, then we also 10x the cost of taking a day off and theoretically progress is compounding, so it's even costlier...oh no.

mbgerring• 2 months ago

Here’s your occasional reminder that US software engineers should unionize.

xyzal• 2 months ago

Everyone laments how everyone will get "a lot" of days off in the end, but regulation is still a dirty word in here.

analog31• 2 months ago

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.

d--b• 2 months ago

That’s an idea that’s been around since 1883.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy

But that has never stuck enough for masses to fight for it. It’s a shame.

Personally, the way I cracked it is by freelancing for an american company and living in France. I can totally take the day off.

ms_menardi• 2 months ago

This is the most brilliant thing I've read all year. That note at the bottom... Amazing.

jppope2• 2 months ago

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."

Chinjut3• 2 months ago

There's always a comment saying "Don't ask for better, because someone else had worse". Fuck that. I want better and I want everyone else to have it too.

jppope2• 2 months ago

Ask for better. Find a way to make things better. Find a way to make things better for others.

... but appreciate what you have too

kelnos5• 2 months ago

Just because someone else has it worse, it doesn't mean we can't want for something better for ourselves.

And I personally would like that something better for the people who have it worse, too.

kelnos5• 2 months ago

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.

culebron21• 2 months ago

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182425

pjmlp3• 2 months ago

The C suit would rather that everyone takes all days off.

What they haven't yet explained is how everyone is supposed to earn money to buy AI produced goods.

zx80802• 2 months ago

No. Because profit, and it's not yours one.

agnishom• 2 months ago

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?

kombookcha3• 2 months ago

The AI companies and their investors. Full stop.

liendolucas• 2 months ago

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.

eterevsky• 2 months ago

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.

dmje• 2 months ago

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…?

demaga• 2 months ago

Sure, they're just less likely to comment about it.

hackertyper69• 2 months ago

Yes, many. People just don't complain about their lobster being too buttery or their steak too juicy.

WesolyKubeczek• 2 months ago

As AI gets more successful in taking away bullshit makework, instead of having days off or doing something else meaningful for the company, the bullshit makework just multiplies to keep everyone and everything just as busy as before, like kipple.

And then this phenomenon is being called 10x productivity and celebrated.

This is why we cannot have nice things.

/me is off to rewatch They Live

josh-sematic2• 2 months ago

You should not be asking Elon if you can work 4 days a week; he believes you should already be working 7.

josh-sematic2• 2 months ago

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.

0xbadcafebee• 2 months ago

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.

bob1029• 2 months ago

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.

abyssin4• 2 months ago

In a capitalist system, the owners don’t owe you anything but your salary. And if they fire you, they no longer owe you a salary.

wcfrobert• 2 months ago

This entire thread is drenched in class consciousness and I am here for it.

charles_f• 2 months ago

But, have you thought of the shareholders?

aiisahik• 2 months ago

Imagine only 10% of the white collar labor force were allowed to use AI. In that case, those 10% would be given 2 or 3 days off a week. Easy.

Now imagine if only 10% of companies were allowed to use AI. Those companies would easily be willing to give 2-3 days off per week to their workers. Makes sense since those companies would easily outcompete the others and so they would have enough economic surplus to provide lavish benefits to their workers.

However, because 100% of companies and 100% of workers have access to AI, the competitive pressure on the deployment of capital means that no days off can be given.

New perks are only given to you if you, your company or your country has some sustainable systemic advantage over other employees, companies or countries.

In the absence of those sustainable systemic advantage, any perk given would put you, your company or your country at a competitive disadvantage against some other employee, company or country who are willing to work without such perk.

The only way to sustain such a perk in those situations is with anti-competitive practices: Labor Unions, protectionism, corruption, etc.

jojobas• 2 months ago

Childcare for 3 small children is six thousand dollars a month here in California.

Maybe we could afford for women to not leave their kids with strangers for most of their waking hours? Crazy talk I know.

Galaxeblaffer• 2 months ago

From experience, take Monday off instead of Friday and optimally also Wednesday.

fullstackchris• 2 months ago

Its wild to me that the concept of working 80% (1 day off a week) or even 60% (2 days off a week) isn't even a concept in the US, while in europe such part time situations make up a huge share of the work force.

In short, people have been having the day off for decades now. It's called part-time work.

gib444• 2 months ago

People with more time on their hands start looking around their communities wondering what happened, start questioning politics, start reading statistics instead of headlines and so forth. Oh no, we can't have that

Political disengagement is often "too damn tired"

Dig1t• 2 months ago

This will never happen, the power dynamic between workers and employers is so skewed in favor of employers and it is only getting worse.

Don't like your job? Fine leave, there are tens of millions of H1B's who will do your job for less money and they won't complain because they can't easily leave.

swiftcoder• 2 months ago

The 4 day work week was already proven to improve productivity before LLMs. We could probably do a 3 day workweek with Claude Code!

eeixlk• 2 months ago

Elon cares.

sevenzero• 2 months ago

The AI ultralords dream is a world with a few billion less humans. We will work till we die and we wont own anything.

jameslk• 2 months ago

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

apt-apt-apt-apt3• 2 months ago

Salary positions at most companies will have a nice laugh, then move on to the next candidate. I think being able to do this is exceedingly rare.

penguin_booze• 2 months ago

<sarcasm should_be="obvious"> When your employer lays you off, you can take as many days off as you want! </sarcasm>

npw55036• 2 months ago

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.

mbf1• 2 months ago

No. You can't have the day off. AI might make you and everyone else more productive, but that just means we need 10% as many employees, and 1 to 8 of your 10 closest peers are producing more slop than you, and so we're going to let you go. Security is going to show you out in 3, 2, 1...

unglaublich• 2 months ago

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?

poulpy123• 2 months ago

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

CalRobert4• 2 months ago

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.

coolThingsFirst• 2 months ago

Yes, the next year off as well because they will fire you.

irundebian• 2 months ago

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.

amelius• 2 months ago

Can we have the day off?

Yeah, like when the steam engine was invented?

atoav• 2 months ago

Well. It all boils down to one simple truth:

Any gains in productivity are extracted by the rich. Any losses of productivity shall be covered by the poor. It is a one-way rachet.

triceratops• 2 months ago

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.

skelo• 2 months ago

Yeah, no kidding. I want AI work for me during I'm traveling

aarjaneiro• 2 months ago

No, you'll need to be on call to fix all the slop falling apart

tracker1• 2 months ago

First, I don't think the productivity gains are nearly what they are claimed to be, and shouldn't be... I think way to many people are getting really lazy and letting a lot of slop through that they shouldn't. Human review takes time and mental overhead.

I've mentioned a few times, that I actually appreciate an aspect of Claude's 5 hr API window... I generally watch, stop, re-prompt and review what comes out. I'm not running a bunch of separate prompts and instances all at once. I'm using AI to plan and do a lot of work... I am getting a lot more output and a lot more value for that time than I could without it. It takes a toll... and the few times I've hit the window on API usage actually aligns with that toll in when I need a break.

I also assume I'm not going to be productive all day... I'll review mail, checkout articles on HN, comment, etc. I'm generally actively in a productive flow about 5 hours a day... with AI, I can be a lot more productive. That said, my current job is pretty locked down and I'm unable to leverage AI for most things... I've been able to use my own computer to write a few libraries/utils that I can then leverage in-job... but that's about it.

Mental work can be more tiresome than physical work, depending on the individual jobs. You aren't "on" all the time. This isn't a statement against or for a 4 day work week, only countering part of the narrative.

Right now the job market is a mess... developer wages are severely suppressed and almost everything is "contract" based and lacking basic benefits like good medical insurance, vacation time, etc. It pretty much sucks. AI is not a panacea, and it's not a replacement for skilled developers. Not only that, but a junior developer + AI can literally be several steps backward compared to a skilled developer without AI or with.

I'm seeing a lot of cool things happen on GitHub projects I follow, a lot of it allowed by leveraging AI... most of the best stuff not left to AI alone. It's a tool. On the flip side, I do think a lot of major employers need to return to actual employees with actual, meaningful benefits and even start implementing profit sharing... There are a lot of people pushing for outright Communism, and they're winning elections in some places. Just from a CYA point of view, it's time to treat the workforce a little better. I'd rather not have communism become prominent in the US... it won't be pretty.

tkel• 2 months ago

This is a problem fundamental to capitalism. Capitalist organizations are organized as dictatorships, with capitalists as the dictators. Captialists have their own class interests that is opposed to the workers'. And they also are the ones who unilaterally decide how increased productivity gains (revenue/profit) are distributed. They are not going to decide to give you another day off. They are going to maximize profit.

ALL technological progress under capitalism goes through this same conflict. It's why workers are sometimes pressed into reactionary positions like opposing self-checkout lanes. Capitalists decide to deploy the technology in a way that is worse for the workers. Technological progress could be liberatory. Technology could be used to make workers' lives better, like working less, if workers were in charge of the organizations in which they worked.

m4632• 2 months ago

I think there is a paradox here - more time off makes you "dispose" of more of your "disposable cash"

sambuccid• 2 months ago

I read some time ago about the idea of "redistribution of work", which given the current low level of employment(at least for young people here in UK) and the introduction of AI, it seems to me probably a better strategy than "universal income". I'm worried the absolute absence of a job would have a big impact on the mental health of the average person (we need to feel useful somehow).

nrlucas2• 2 months ago

(Yo, Elon: I’m trying to increase the fertility rate. Childcare for 3 small children is six thousand dollars a month here in California. Do I have to go into the office all five days this week? Why not four?)

This is just ripe for a response "leave California". Which Elon likes to bite on. But it's expensive everywhere and not just that, fundamentally time with your child is important and cannot be fixed by throwing money at it.

I know this isn't about Elon's hypocritical stance on fertility, sorry.

damirkotoric• 2 months ago

No we can't because that's not how capitalism works.

Marx called it exploitation for a reason.

mikeyrayvon• 2 months ago

Woah slow down! These are the kind of dangerous ideas that won us the 8-hour work day and the 5-day week.

Can we have the day off?

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