I'm not sure "average hours worked" is really a useful stat. At least I have trouble deriving any insight from it, it just mashes too many things into the same value. How much of the change is from the length of the typical work week (40h, 38h and 36h are all somewhat common work weeks for fulltime workers), how much is from part time work, and how much is from the mismatch between official work week and actual time worked (goes in either direction, some have 60h jobs on 40h pay)
What I'd really want to see is a histogram of weekly hours worked per worker for each country
I know, I'm Spanish and was just joking. But anyway, part time working is more common in Germany, which counts in this statistic, but a lot of Spanish people that don't (retirees, unemployed), so I won't be so sure.
This particular data doesn't show this. Just in case: I'm neither German nor Southern European, and I declare my neutrality.
For starters, it shows time spent at work. Meanwhile employees can do varying amount of work in the same amount of time. And I suppose that's what those Germans you referring to mean.
Second as the document notes: "The results are affected by the varying proportions of part-time workers across countries, in addition to differences in legal frameworks and in country-specific usual length of the workweek".
I read an article many years ago, by a man who was working 80 hour weeks. He analyzed his work and tried to optimize it.
Eventually he cut his working hours in half, while actually doubling his output, because the shorter work hours required him to actually focus.
He was, of course, self-employed, and could design his work week how he liked.
I guess that's important for another reason: if someone else had been paying him by the hour, he would have experienced a 50% pay cut. Instead, his income doubled, because it was based on the actual results.
I would like to strike a better balance between charging by the hour and complete fix price, especially where the work is hardly predictable up front. The problem here is a mix of trust, respect and discipline. If both parties share these values and an hour really represents useful AND needed output than the actual time spent would always be larger than the billed amount. We do have such understanding with some clients and consultants/ contractors. This works well if the work is on-off, shorter projects with people that have a long-term professional relationship. Of course, such an approach will never go down with people who have a stubborn accounting mindset.
Within the tech industry, we rely on people to think things through well. Because like with other engineered systems actually changing things later has a real cost, even though it's all an artificial, massless construct and even though we do have AI to do some of the grunt work. The problem is, we are building understanding, predictability and bigger changes tend to make some assumptions obsolete. Sometimes you don't even know which exactly, unless you have precisely engineered the change - costing thinking time that is mostly invisible, e.g. people only write down the result of the thinking or the gist of the straightened path to that result if you are lucky. Almost nobody writes down the paths not taken and the reasoning for those decisions along the way. All of this is the proof of work that's missing or that's hard to verify, if it was created honestly and not inflated artificially.
So yes, measuring work, efficiency of spending time doing work and agreeing on compensation are the hard parts, especially if we cut trust out of the equation.
Is it? Couldn't it be a bug in our society/economy instead? What if nature wanted us to take some naps through the day and not just one period of sleep in the night? Waking up multiple times at night wouldn't hurt too much then.
It's also a fairly recent phenomenon that we expect small children to sleep all alone in a big room without anyone else around them. Nature tells them they are small and the world (and the dark) is full of danger. Our biology doesn't give a damn if that is no longer true.
There's not much difference between the keyboard of the X13 Gen 6 and the keyboard of the MacBook Pro M1. I own both devices. The keyboard of my T14s Gen 1 on the other hand is noticeably better.
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