> I can do that because I work remotely for a software company. How's someone who's working the drive-through going to do that? How's the manager of a Walmart going to do that? A pharmacist, a bank teller, a delivery driver?
No solution can serve 100% of the people 100% of the time. I would say that American society is already unbalanced enough in this regard that most people who can tell their bosses no for a 4pm meeting (e.g. the administrator participating in a meeting for some committee) are not doing so.
For example, in your example, a bank teller would tell their boss, who would arrange for a replacement. Maybe the bank would have to hire a few more workers, but normalizing this would help a lot. What happens now is that people get punished for it, implicitly as well as explicitly in a fashion that seems to be a holdover from the days of the 1950s. Addressing this as a society rather than shifting that responsibility on to teachers would, in my opinion, be more equitable and sustainable.
> Taking your kids to the playground in the evening does not address the fact that most people have to work during the day.
Yes, the cherry-picked suggestion that you mentioned does not. How ever, the other suggestion that I had in the same paragraph of having them stay with their grandparents or cousins would address this problem. Treating “normal social interactions“ and “watching over kids when their parents are not around“ is exactly what I am recommending against.
> Give a firm "no" to your boss for that 4pm meeting!
I can do that because I work remotely for a software company. How's someone who's working the drive-through going to do that? How's the manager of a Walmart going to do that? A pharmacist, a bank teller, a delivery driver?
Taking your kids to the playground in the evening does not address the fact that most people have to work during the day.
> Unfortunately teenager and adult hours are forced to be synchronised,
No, they aren’t. Even with the progressive infantilization of children over the last several decades, its still generally widely accepted that children over 12 can be left alone for a few hours at a time.
Though shifting the standard workweek to 30 hours and adjusting to that by moving the standard start time forward by two hours wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.
>It's when people are working till 11pm and someone says "I need to leave at 6 to make food for my kids" that the resentment happens. If everyone got off at 6, there wouldn't be any resentment.
What would you propose then? The parents starve their children? What an absurd thing to have resentment over. Do you believe the parents don't feel guilt over having to duck out early while others without children continue to work? I know when I have to do it I do.
It's a pretty terrible place to be stuck between letting your kids down and letting your coworkers down.
> I dislike the lack of separation between home and work, and how it makes my children feel like I’m “always working.”
I’ve never really understood this “lack of separation” argument. Are your children at home all day long? If not, the only way it would seem like you’re “always working” is if you were working outside of normal business hours. Which is something that would still happen if you were at an office all day, wouldn’t it? If not, why not? Because your day ends when you leave the office? Why not just make your WFH day end at some similar cutoff point? Why does working at home make that less possible?
If your kids do stay home all day, one way to look at it is that yeah, it seems like you’re always working, but that beats “always at the office” doesn’t it?
> Then is it cool if I skip a few meetings to volunteer to help the homeless?
You don't have to help the homeless during the work day; that's a choice. But parents don't get to decide not to care for their children during the work day, when school/daycare/etc. is not available.
> It just seems completely unfair to make childless employees subsidise this adventure
How is that happening, though? As a non-parent who chose to work from home most of the time pre-COVID (despite HQ being a 30-minute walk from home), my work life is nearly unchanged due to COVID. I get up, work 8-10 hours, and then go and do whatever I want (obviously "whatever I want" has been curtailed due to COVID, but that's not my employer's or parent-coworkers' fault). I'm not "subsidizing" anything when a parent gets more flexibility during their work day due to child care obligations. The thing that changes for the company as a whole is that projects take longer to complete because many employees have taken a productivity hit, but that's no skin off my back.
> Besides, let's not pretend that people choose to have kids as a service to humanity. I've never, ever heard anyone claim that. People have kids because they're fun, and because making them is fun.
Agreed, and as a non-parent I can't help but roll my eyes whenever a parent tries to tell me what a grand service to humanity their child-rearing is. But, at the end of the day, humanity would cease to exist without people having kids, so regardless of their actual motivation, they are providing a valuable service to humanity.
> It seems to go completely against everything I've learned about people in my life.
Have you ever met people with children?
Generally, strict hours enable simple, well-defined coordination with others. You often _need_ that kind of agreement when others are taking care of your children in your behalf, e. g. schoolteachers, partners, grandparents.
> One problem with this is people as a group tend to be stupid. What stops the workforce from voting to reduce their work hours to 30 hours per week?
Seems reasonable to me. How much work (both input and output) is required of humans in a society is that society's choice. Many people think that, e.g., American society has a cultural expectation of working longer and harder than is necessary or appropriate. Especially when you could possibly have rebalancing schemes to employ more people for fewer hours each. shrug
> I often wonder why there isn’t a great movement toward a reduction in working days/hours in the modern workplace.
There are voices saying that. You can find some on almost every HN thread about work. This is a tricky topic, though, because our society has a deeply ingrained sense of deriving one's self-worth and status from the job they perform. A sentiment that was once critical to our survival - now, arguably, less so.
> Modern society should be solving for this.
There are attempts. 4-hour workweek. People (like myself) switching to remote work to reclaim time spent commuting. Individuals seeking FU money. Proposals of UBI. Regulations around paid vacations and parental leave. It's messy and slow-going, and things probably won't change until there is a cultural shift in our relationship with work we do.
> It's like there's some sort of shame in working a normal workday, eating dinner at a normal hour and having your own life.
Agree 100%.
At my company I'm constantly being told I must work overtime, weekends, be on-call with a company cell phone etc. When I say no, people all over the company start directly telling me I'm not committed enough to the company, and I'm not "opening doors" for myself.
I work my butt off for 35-40 hours per week, and get tons done. That's more than enough.
> And just to top it off, you'll be forcing a lot of kids to walk to school in the dark.
That sounds like a problem of school starting too early.
Honestly, I like having sunlight after work, so I can do things out of doors like bouldering. I don't need sunlight in the morning when I'm commuting to an office with no windows, or even if I'm working from my home office.
> My view is that we already start our workdays too early, particularly when you take commute times into account.
Again, this just sounds like some people need to be accommodated for time shifting their work days. There are those of us who naturally wake up with the sunrise, even when we don't have to, and getting up when it's dark to get to work early is routine for us. Offsetting working shifts by an hour (or more) would also help reduce traffic congestion.
ETA: You sound like those people who insist that everyone has to work in an office building because otherwise they will be goofing off at home, neatly ignoring all the water cooler time wasters distracting everyone in the open office by talking about celebrities and sports.
Not everyone has children. Not everyone is the same.
> Only fair way to do this is just start during the last hour of the work day.
Why is that the only way?
> Does everyone here despise casual time with their coworkers or what?
What’s with the trend to hypernormalize human agency and preferences?
Why are alternative approaches to life forbidden? There seems to be a religious like statefulness in people where we see a typical human and assume “they must be like me, and they’re being negative if that’s not true.”
> Smart people will always gravitate to something like this to justify all the abuse. It was inevitable, reading this, I figured it was coming up in the first sentence.
No. The justifications come in around making employees also work a 9-5 shift. If they just hired night-quants it would be fine.
It's simply a fact that some work needs to be done by the next morning like stocking shelves. Or 24/7 like tech support.
> IMHO: The modern work environment (or possibly any work environment) is simply not appealing to certain types of people.
> The 9-5 with 2 weeks vacation work thing is a relatively new invention for humans.
I don't think it could be that though, because conditions have generally gotten better, and there was less resistance to work at time where working conditions were worse. Say 1950's or so.
I mean the environment where we work from home and have very flexible hours, retirement, healthcare, generous vacation policies, etc. is pretty new an spectacular in relation to past work environments. These sorts of things used to be the privilege of some business owners who weren't critical to daily business.
> If you have kids, or a wife or anyone else that you might like to spend daylight time with in the evening then it starts to get harder to manage.
People always say this like it's a compelling argument. But guess what? People lready work different hours; schools and business ar already open for different lengths of time; different businesses and industries already have different norms. People live different distances from work. I've worked 7-4, 8-5, 9-6 and more, and have had commutes as short as ten minutes and as long as two hours.
And you know what? Things work out alright anyway. A world in which individual organizations determine their working hours is the world we already have.
>This is time off specifically to take care of children
I think this is the crux of the problem that some people have. I am happy to work for a company that allows flexible schedules to help parents. I have no qualms about shouldering additional burdens to help. However, there is a certain percentage of opportunists who take advantage of the situation and confuse this generosity with entitlement. I have some suspicions that some of this time is being used for side projects rather taking care of kids. I have multiple coworkers who have installed new pools/patios during this flex period and will occasionally even cut online meetings short to oversee some of the work being done at their house. It does cause me to raise my eyebrows when they can't get their workload done because of they feel entitled to a certain amount of extra benefits.
I think people need to feel like everyone is pulling for the same mission and part of the same team. I'm grateful to be in a position to help ease other people's stress but leaders need to make sure everyone is still accountable and not taking advantage of the situation.
> I work probably 40-50hrs a week coding/architecting and 10-20hrs a week managing a farm [cows, hay, honey] (plus 2-3 weeks out of the year doing 12 hr day harvesting).
So this isn't a 6 days a week x 10 hours in a job working through a promotion path. I'm unsure why you brought that up as a point before, it doesn't align to what you further exposed here.
Another point:
> You can try to regulate day(s), but if there’s people willing to work more they’ll set the standard.
Society will set the standard, not the ones who work more, society as a whole sets that. I'm originally from a society where working grueling 10-12 hours/day in an office is expected, the society I live now sees that as a major issue.
> You think it's unfair for people who have young children to not be expected to also be on call 24/7?
That's dicey and depends on if you consider folks having children as them doing something they wanted for themselves, vs them doing society a favor.
If the former, it's like reducing work responsibilities of someone because they're also taking piano lessons on the side and its cutting in their free time. It's their choice and they are doing it for themselves.
If the later, then yeah, you'd have to cut them a break, in the same way we often do for folks with jury duty.
But having young children isn't, like, a health condition someone's born with.
The sleep disorder one is a bit trickier, since no one willing has sleep disorders. At the same time, it's not really your team mate's problems. I have some health issues that make me less productive at work. I don't get the roles, promotions, and compensation of the folks who can do more than I can. It sucks, but at the end of the day, companies hire you to do something. It's not a social service.
If you are stating this seriously, I often wonder why there isn’t a great movement toward a reduction in working days/hours in the modern workplace.
It’s kind of mind boggling to me why we have to trade most of our waking hours for the majority of the prime of our life to make a living wage. Modern society should be solving for this.
No solution can serve 100% of the people 100% of the time. I would say that American society is already unbalanced enough in this regard that most people who can tell their bosses no for a 4pm meeting (e.g. the administrator participating in a meeting for some committee) are not doing so.
For example, in your example, a bank teller would tell their boss, who would arrange for a replacement. Maybe the bank would have to hire a few more workers, but normalizing this would help a lot. What happens now is that people get punished for it, implicitly as well as explicitly in a fashion that seems to be a holdover from the days of the 1950s. Addressing this as a society rather than shifting that responsibility on to teachers would, in my opinion, be more equitable and sustainable.
> Taking your kids to the playground in the evening does not address the fact that most people have to work during the day.
Yes, the cherry-picked suggestion that you mentioned does not. How ever, the other suggestion that I had in the same paragraph of having them stay with their grandparents or cousins would address this problem. Treating “normal social interactions“ and “watching over kids when their parents are not around“ is exactly what I am recommending against.
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