Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has called for Indian youth to voluntarily work 70-hour weeks. Speaking in an interview hosted by Indian venture capital firm 3one4 Capital, Murthy opined that India has enormous economic potential but that its productivity rates remain low. “My request is that our youngsters must say ‘This …
Isn't it "output" per "time unit"?
It's actually output per unit of cost. So if you work twice as long and I pay you the same as before (which I suspect is the implication) then productivity would indeed rise but I would get the benefit at your cost. I don't see the downside. You may have no alternative and be easily replaced if you do.
"So if you work twice as long and I pay you the same as before (which I suspect is the implication) then productivity would indeed rise"
That's a huge assumption. Past a certain point, productivity becomes negative as tired people make mistakes. Those mistakes could lead to injury which will cost the company money or wasted materials. It could be a mistake setting up a spreadsheet used to calculate product costs that leads to a product configuration that loses money on every sale. When somebody checks to see what the gross margin on the product is, the spreadsheet tells them it's all unicorns and fairies.
Injuries are free in India. They just throw the injured workers onto the street so they can work as beggers or rummage through the garbage for something that can be sold. If you make a mistake, the boss take it out of your wages, maybe you also have to sell a few kids into prostitution to cover it though, anyway, this is happening because something you did in your past life. If your a good boi and suck it all up, your next cycle might be better.
>for doing that we need to work very hard; we need to be disciplined and improve our work productivity
Working hard doesn't improve productivity. Having a mindset and education system that encourages thought and critical thinking improves productivity. And with the current model, why work hard and be productive when you can make small improvements, and in 6 months get offered a dollar or two more an hour at another place and jump ship?
>Working those extreme hours, he added, will define a culture that ultimately improves India’s government by setting an example.
No, it won't. Working hard doesn't teach the corrupt that there's a better way. And divisions based upon your caste system, which is still widely used, despite being "officially" outlawed. First your country needs to do a big purge of the corruption and form a culture shift. Lying, cheating, and stealing need to be abhorred completely, not a point of shame when you get caught because of your ineptitude.
>“Performance leads to recognition, recognition leads to respect and respect leads to power,” he said, citing China as a “great example” of that progression.
Ah yes, let's look at the fantastic example of China, a country even more corrupt, where recognition...wait, what recognition? Oh right, the country where having the wrong opinion means you get sent to a labor camp. No matter your performance in either direction. A country where you can fleece consumers quite easily and the law won't do anything to protect the consumer, because 一分钱一分货 -- you get what you pay for.
>> Working hard doesn't improve productivity.
You get better at what you're doing.
If I work 70h a week, not only do I produce more than if I were working 40h a week, but on the standard-no-overtime 40h period, I'm better and faster at what I'm doing than if I were working only these 40h a week. Maybe you should try and test it.
When i was much younger i was stupid enough to try and test that approach. At the start my output per hour was about the same in the first 70hr week as it was in previous 38.5hr weeks. Instead of getting better at what i was doing by working more hours my output per hour went down until i got less done in those 70 hours than i used to in 38.5 hours.
After a while external influence to the project forced me to take a break. After that break i was able to fix an issue in 2.5 hours that i could not make any progress on in two 12 hour days before taking that break. I learned from that expierience and cut down the hours per week.
Getting tired and thus stopping to pay attention and think about what you are doing isn't going to improve productivity.
For those of a certain age in tech our incomes will have increased by a large multiple over the last couple of decades, however that has nothing to do with long hours, and a lot to do with education, training and realising the benefits of working well with others.
Over a long enough period of time long hours achieve nothing in and of themselves. And billionaires bring precisely zero insights to the discussion: their experience is as divorced from the argument as that of the low-caste "manual scavengers" that die in their sewers.
... will not change that truth you don't want to hear: working 40h a week will not make you more productive than the Indian folks who work 70h a week. In 10 years time, they will earn a multiple of your paycheck. It's already happening. Look around: in the bay area and elsewhere. The IT workforce market is open. Down-voting and waiting for retirement is a fallback strategy for future job-seekers. Carry on down-voting while I'm laughing my way to the bank.
Productivity is measured by the output per unit of input. So, for example, if a worker can produce 40 widgets in a 40 hour week, then to achieve the same productivity working 70 hours, they would have to produce 70 widgets. If they produce 50, then their productivity is much less, even though they have produced more.
There are studies that show that, after a certain point, increased hours don't increase productivity - even a Stanford study (that I can't find a link to at present*) indicating that productivity may approach zero after 55 hours (i.e. you may not actually produce anything extra working 70 hours as opposed to 55).
If you work 70 hours and get paid a lot more, then good for you. I would be doubtful, though, whether your productivity is higher.
*Apologies, I'm typing this in breaks between overs (AUS v NZ), so I'm skimping a bit on research. And, as an aside, looking at the crowd in Dharamsala, I estimate that there are quite a number of Indians who aren't working a 70 hour week :)
Correction: Per unit of cost => You're paid for a month of work. Not per hour. It's up to you, to do what it takes to keep your job in these times and days of cost-cuttings.
The widget example is OK on an Taylorian Ford T Assembly line. In the 2023 IT world, it's all about whether you get that 10 Million USD contract and whether you can really reach acceptance in 8 months as committed in the contract and avoid delay penalties. That, in turn, depends partly on how smart, adaptable and collaborative your delivery unit is, and how much reuse you can bring in from similar projects. In my experience, delivery teams don't work 40h a week. Nor do pre-sales teams. But, too many failures and you have to lay off and divest.
There's a reason why progress is so fast: people are working hard. But like in every competition there are winners and losers. Losers can always flock together in forums and whine about competition. However, people complaining here don't seem to be willing to admit that they are not fighting against their own company management but that they are, instead, fighting against other low-cost companies where staff do work 70h a week and are increasing their market share accordingly.
In addition, working 70h a week allows you to broaden your capabilities. Don't just be a Smithian needle maker, because sooner or later needles will be made by machines for 1¢ a hundred. Companies need multi-disciplinary profiles. Yes being a front-end developer, can fill up your days and pay the bills today, but for how long will they be needed? What other skill can you sell when FE developers are so plentiful that they are paid less than taxi drivers? You can't be a FE developer untill you retire in 30 years from now. How do you keep running on that treadmill?
Sorry for cynically stating the inconvenient truth.
"Correction: Per unit of cost => You're paid for a month of work. Not per hour.
Well, I'm retired and any work I do is voluntary (unpaid), so the unit cost is zero. Therefore, my productivity is infinitely higher than yours, even if I work only a couple of hours a week.
I didn't downvote you, but I think there is quite a bit of confusion here. I'm not sure I understand what point you're trying to make, and some interpretations of your posts can be taken as going against the grain here.
At first, I thought you were implying that you were self-employed. In that scenario, your main cost is your time, therefore the distinction between output per unit of cost and output per unit of time is not really relevant. The point, then, is that output per hour will fall sharply as the number of hours per week increases. If this is not true for you, fine, but you're an extreme outlier, and a lot of that is probably due to factors that cannot be generalized (i.e. not everybody can work in software). Because of that, you can't use your example as proof that long weeks are a good way to organize work at a societal level. Also, in any case, a self-employed person can simply be okay with the productivity loss, because it's still worth for them; I myself work very long weeks some times.
From the last couple of posts, though, it looks like you are talking about an employer/employee situation. This is drastically different, because the cost to the employee is their time, but the cost to the employer is the employee's wage. Which means that the definition of productivity can look quite different depending on which point of view we're taking, hence the confusion.
Most of the discussion here revolves around the fact that nearly everyone knows and accepts that output-per-hour falls as hours-per-week increase, and therefore when the Infosys CEO calls for people to voluntarily work long weeks to "increase productivity", the implication is that he's essentially calling for raising employer-productivity (get more work for the same wage) by hurting employee-productivity (work more hours for the same wage or only marginally more). The main thing that everyone here is opposing is the idea that this can be truthfully called "increasing productivity" for society, as the Infosys CEO is trying to claim. It is not; it's merely a net transfer of value from employee to employer. Worse, it's an inefficient transfer, which means that it's a net loss for society.
In the last post, you seem to be appealing to the notion of competition to claim that this situation is necessary, that companies where staff doesn't work 70 hours will be outcompeted. This is problematic at several levels. First of all, even if it was necessary, it still would not be good; attempting to present this phenomenon as ethical is likely to attract downvotes. Secondly, but most importantly, it is not necessary at all. Nations can and do enact legislation to prevent extreme employee squeezing, in fact most Western nations do, and have done so for a long time, and they are some of the richest nations in the world. Arguably, not in spite of this, but because of this: because, as I mention above, increased productivity by squeezing is not increased productivity for the nation; it's a productivity loss for the nation; it's just increased productivity for the employers. A free market that allows this is bugged and needs fixing. It doesn't need calling the bug a feature.
Denying this is not "an inconvenient truth"; it's just a different opinion - which, however, really ought to confront the fact that nations with high labor standards are really rather successful, good places for people to live, compared to places like India. Obviously, it's not just that, not by far, but you can't not face this, appear to tell everyone they're deluded if they don't agree, and then be surprised at downvotes.
I'd also note that, as a freelance, I've worked with a sizeable number of companies, and, anecdotally, the ones that routinely squeeze employees the most are usually the ones that have very serious process problems, which they are masking by squeezing employees - for example, having crunches that could be totally avoided by being better organized, or big dead weight somewhere. That situation is unsustainable long-term, not because you can't squeeze employees forever; sadly, you can, just get more employees when yours break. But because it's brittle. As soon as something unexpected happens, you're dead, because you're already squeezing and you can't fix process in a month (well, you can always cry for government subsidies, because it's true that everyone is a socialist with other people's money, but it's also true that everyone is a capitalist with other people's money). Around here, a lot of firms that worked like that were wiped out by COVID, for example.
The ones where people usually work more or less what their contract say, they are the ones I'd deem most likely to survive long term, because their process works. If something horrible happens, they can squeeze employees for a while. That can be done easily and immediately. But if you rely on it, you have a problem. I would call that the real "inconvenient truth".
>>> Most of the discussion here revolves around the fact that nearly everyone knows and accepts that output-per-hour falls as hours-per-week increase,
I disputed that. The more you run, the faster you run. The faster you run, the more competitions you win. Works the same for the brain.
Look, you have your ideas. I have mine. I dare say my employer recognizes my contribution financially. I don't know if folks here just don't want to admit that the world is a competition. Or if they are lucky enough to be on a non competitive market. Or with a very powerful trade union. Or if they are so smart that they don't need to learn new stuff or if they learn very fast. Or if they are in the grey zone of "still-needed-so-far". Or if after they have worked 40h then they are so exhausted that working more results in a drop of productivity. This is irrelevant.
Your theory assumes an isolated system where employees don't move in or out of the organisation. In the real world, people who can't sustain the rhythm are laid off or leave from their own decision and new employees, possibly more fit, are joining in. You want the high pay? Earn it! You can't prove you do? Thank you very much! This is how it works when trade unions are not adding viscosity. And it goes both ways. You don't like the bakery? Find another one. You think you're exploited? Surely, there must be another company that shall reward your talents better.
Enough said.
>>> Most of the discussion here revolves around the fact that nearly everyone knows and accepts that output-per-hour falls as hours-per-week increase
The question is: at what number of hours does your productivity plateaus (or peaks) and start decreasing? For some people, it seems to be 40h, for others it seems to be later. Regardless, the question is not about productivity (which is a "derivative" in calculus terms) but total output produced per week (which is an integral in calculus terms). Given enough time, Nature always manages to find the optimal goldilocks point. Our recent artificial economic universe mirrors nature ecosystems: so, you can trust the market: whatever works better will become the mainstream model.
>>> however that has nothing to do with long hours, and a lot to do with education, training
Oh and you manage to do your work + education and training in 40 hours??
In my experience, useful people get solicited all day long and all week long - especially in global companies with presence in all countries and territories listed in the UN. So, your training and education comes on top of that during the non working hours. If you're useful and deserve your paycheck, you will be solicited even during official training hours.
I’ve a genuine question - why? Is your job your passion, is it your company - that I can understand.
Genuinely interested and not judging - what motivates you to do 70hrs/week at work, what more satisfaction/fulfilment do you get from 70hrs that you wouldn’t from doing 40hrs and using the other time to explore other interests and develop other skills?
I hope you can earn what you need in 40hrs per week and are not trapped in a life on the treadmill. Kindest regards.
Short answer: Like what you do. Do what you like.
Long answer: Maybe this is just an endocrinal situation. My non-professional life is full of slow people, who achieve very little in their life and are just fine with that. In my professional environment, instead, I keep meeting tech leaders, working a lot more than their contractual 40h/week, and we keep enriching each others (intellectually and otherwise). This is a multi-disciplinary global company, leader on its markets. I don't think C-level people count their hours. I don't think you can be a CTO/CIO/CTIO if you don't have that passion inside you. Even if you're not a C-level profile, tech is incredibly sexy. So, file me as a sexy-tech addict if you need to. Meanwhile, try to avoid pitying me, and I will endeavour to reciprocate.
"...Oh sorry... I forgot the rule. Let me correct my post.
"We're all equal"
Here you corrected..."
I never said that. It would be absurd. I am demonstrably better than many people at many things. Others are demonstrably better than I am at things.
What I, and others here understand is that you don't need to wave your dick around shouting how much better you think you are because you look stupidly arrogant and misinformed.
You have one perspective on work that is, from other points of view, warped. It works for you and for that I am happy for you. Some of us though have interests, friends, things - i.e. a life, that doesn't revolve around work. Nor does our work define us.
Shouting people down because their perspective is different is just...well immature.
You want to work yourself to an early grave, be my guest. You're supposedly an adult and frankly I couldn't give one flying fuck about you. You're some macho-bollocks-stranger on the internet. I hope you get to the end of it all, look back, and think it was worth it but the funny thing is, I don't ever recall anyone at the end of their lives, when asked about regrets, saying "Shit...I wish I'd worked longer hours!"
You're just coming over a a bell end. And when you're challenged, you double down. Yawn. It's Friday. I have plans, and, because I'm efficient enough to have everything sorted by 5.30pm I will thoroughly enjoy my weekend and return refreshed and ready to enjoy the working week ahead, come Monday.
What's immature is to feel offended (and to attempt to offend them back with "dick waving" stories) when someone puts you in front of the hard fact that life is inherently about competition and achievement. The narrative that working a lot leads to an early grave is just rubbish too. You seem to be obsessed with your longevity, BTW.
The story that you can't work and have friends, family or other interests is another cliché. You can work from home. Working 70h a week of *real* work is much easier from home. Working from home is result oriented whereas working from the office is, for quite a few, presence oriented. Not to mention the implicit split personality issue.
Every moment of your life, you can decide what's the most enriching thing to do (it's called "cost of opportunity" BTW). It's OK if you think you're going to live longer by having ale and BBQ weekends with friends and family. Others will maybe just take yet another training, prepare yet another talk, improve yet another white paper. Nothing forbids to also share your passions and interests with your friends and family. They might even like it.
>>> "I don't ever recall anyone at the end of their lives, when asked about regrets, saying "Shit...I wish I'd worked longer hours!
You must have known zero scientist, and zero interesting people.
>>> "because I'm efficient enough to have everything sorted by 5.30pm LOL. What a coincidence. 5:30 sharp!
Good for you. I have plans for the week end that would need a full one-month-weekend. Such is the amount of topics I promised myself I'd go through "later" from all the interesting knowledge share sessions I came across during these last 5 days. Have another bier on your couch, I'll watch another video on my treadmill. See who's going to live longer.
Treadmills. Good for winter. Not so much in the warmer months. I do triathlons, so, probably fitter than you as well as brighter and better organised. In the summer months I love open water swimming but when I can't I also enjoy the countercurrent in the pool in my back garden.
I also SCUBA dive - I am a technical diver and use a CCR which takes a LOT of training to get to and is really interesting. It also takes me away to lovely parts of the world.
Don't know many scientists? Let's see now... my uncle has a PHd in biochemistry, one of my aunts was, until retiring, a pharmacist with a research background. My sister has a medical degree and works with geriatrics. My partner was a nurse prescriber, also with a degree and coincidentally, despite hailing from the other end of the country also specialised in geriatric mental decline. That's one of the reasons I actually know that no one says they wished the worked harder rather than making spurious, I know more than everyone, types of claims.
I personally didn't follow a research path but stopped at MSc level. My BSc was in electrical and electronics engineering. My dad worked in the food industry in research and development.
I can't think of any other immediate relatives that worked in the sciences but I bet if I dug into cousins etc, I'd find a few. I was just sticking with the ones I actually know and interact with.
And seeing as you seem to know me so well - let me explain. I rarely watch TV (it's a running joke between my friends and I that if someones asks "have any of you watched...?" it usually ends "except Tony, of course". I do love to read. I am not a huge fan of biographical works but I enjoy most other topics. I usually find the time to read at least a book a week.
I'm a single parent as well. One of my passions is cooking. I love to prepare and cook home made food and am trying to teach my youngest to learn the basics so he's self-sufficient.
I help my partner run her own mobile catering business. She is a regular at some fairly large festivals now (such as CarFest).
Due to geography and some of them having small kids, I don't get to see my friends face-to-face as often as I'd like but we manage a few times a year. One has started and sold many multi-million businesses, one is involved in politics. Two work in highly secure sites. One lives abroad. The conversations are usually heated, fun and very interesting.
So...to recap your points, I am fit, I am educated and well read, I have friends and a life, I know quite a few actual scientists and people who work with the elderly. I am surrounded by interesting people and my life doesn't revolve around work or telling the world how "alpha" I am.
Anyway. I am done giving you oxygen. Time to get back under your bridge.
"...Depends on how fast you "get tired". I've managed to cram 1.5 to 2 weeks in all weeks for the last 35 years (and multiplied my salary by >25 in the process). Your call..."
My very first job paid peanuts. But I was happy to do it because it was the first rung on the ladder and I gained hugely useful experience from it.
Fast forwards to now - some 30+ years later and I earn 30x what I did back then.
In between then and now, I did the whole burning the candle at both ends as well. I would do customer visits for pre-sales work or installation work for 10 hours a day then spend 6-8 more doing documentation for e.g. the sites I'd done the pre-sales visits for.
It was tough but because I enjoyed it, I didn't mind so much.
Until that time came when I asked to be paid the going rate for the role and there was no money available... bearing in mind between my small team and me we were generating net profit of c£3m a year for the company.
I wasn't even paid market rate for an architect role, let alone a principal architect role.
So I decided right at that point in time that a) I wouldn't be taken for mug again. You pay me for the hours I am contracted for and you get the hours I am contracted for, and b) it was clearly time to move on. Which I did.
So now, years on from that, I find myself earning more than ever, with the ability to say no to people that want extra hours for nothing and have a wonderful work-life balance. And now I am back in charge of people again, it's an ethos I try to instil into them too.
And for those of you out there working all those crazy hours, consider this: if you work yourself to death, the company you work for will have your job advertised hours after you're gone. Your family will have that loss and grief forever.
I upvoted.
Not because I agree with you on the "meaning of life". But because I acknowledge that, as one ages, one secretes less testosterone and becomes less efficient. In most social primates species, this is actually an evolutionary advantage because it allows younger leaders to emerge and lead the tribe as a surviving entity in a competitive environment. In so-called "evolved" human societies however, where social ranking is less dependent on physical strength, older individuals tend to cling to power by other means. If they can't maintain their grip on power, they tend to develop grumpy moods and rehash their glorious past as well as the decadence of the youth. It's there in the literature of all civilisations for as far back as we can tell. In Sophocles' Oedipus, or Cato the Elder's speeches on many more. So no offense meant. Let's just dutifully follow our own destiny.
You have to learn how to pace yourself. Do almost nothing until you hit overtime, then start working normally. This is one reason why overtime is rarely offered in Scandiavia. "Here" you get a fixed number of hours at a fixed salary. If you are not done by the deadline, then it sucks to be you, if you are done, then you relax and do bare minimum. If your a bin-man, you go home!
>You get better at what you're doing.
Maybe. It depends. Not everyone can efficiently improve their skill by that method beyond a certain point; the learning process is complicated, and not the same for everyone. Even if you wanted to go full misanthrope and state that people who work really hard but don't improve in productivity can be discounted as somehow inferior, not all jobs work like that. Software developer - yes. It's a job where there's always something more to learn, where you learn while working, and and where skill can boost productivity by enormous factors. But software developer is an extreme outlier in that sense.
For most manual labors, there's a limit to how much your skill can improve your productivity, and for quite a bit of them, that limit is actually comparatively low. Improving productivity beyond that strictly requires management to intervene on the process itself.
For many other jobs, fatigue has a disproportionate effect on productivity, so that working more hours gets more job done per worker, but less job done per hour. This is only a good idea if your workers are doing unpaid overtime, or if there's a serious skill shortage in the job market. Both of these can and do happen, but they are bugs, not features, of a job market.
I'm better and faster at what I'm doing than if I were working only these 40h a week. Maybe you should try and test it.
Sure, you do bub, suure you do. But, only because you follow the UK "way of working": Do the absolute minimim possible for the first 40 hours, then proceed to work normally once the overtime pay is approved! On average you are just wasting your own time and other peoples money.
I have seen that particular song & dance for 10 years in contruction. Whenever overtime is possible, nothing happens onsite until conditions for overtime is reached! One might as well cut the performative crap and start there, except, its a sacred tradition.
Of course we should have child slavery! Make them work 70 hour weeks for no, to little pay. Seriously, the only time I've ever seen people get rich from overworking is when they own and run the business, like some tradespeople or CEO's. For everyone else, it's just exploitation.
What a selfish, greedy, animal.
Bear it in mind when next you're asked for feedback on the outsourcers. The teams I had were routinely exhausted, training and time off not planned in to sprints, all working US hours. Unsustainable madness that resulted in poor engagement and poor quality work.
Yeah I've worked with project managers from these outsourcers who weren't allowed to have MS Project because it cost the equivalent of €80 per month.
One particular chap was amazed that he got a whole desk to himself. In India he had to share one with two other people. Three if it was an end-of-row desk. He was terrified of a bad review from me because it would end with him being sacked and replaced. An unscrupulous person could have literally blackmailed the poor guy.
Oh and then there's the fact he spent just under a year in the UK but was given no expenses to help make that move.
And this greedy bastard wants to exploit people even more.
Having dealt with some onshore ones - I think you can remove the "overseas" part and still be true. The larger the outsourcer organisation the higher the probability they are useless, that is not to say the staff are all useless as I've seen a few that have lots of potential and most have potential, but no large outsource organisation seems to want to develop them, even though that would mean they could do more with less staff to extent of paying less overall for same work
Won't matter. Management will balance your feedback against the cost "savings" of outsourcing, and call the outsourcing the better plan. It doesn't even matter if you have to shitcan the whole project and redo it from scratch to make it work, because the fixit money is not in the same budget as the project money. Gonna take both feedback plus hard failure of the project to wake them up, and even then you will get the blame if you don't fix it.
Exactly what I was thinking! Let's see: old as dirt, filthy fscking rich man states that [workers underneath his control] employees should believe in working 70-hour weeks, because working harder for him will simply increase his personal wealth "We need greater productivity!!".
"The former Infosys CEO also called for governments to “remove all restrictions to the entrepreneur, to create more and more jobs for the people to create some wealth for themselves and some wealth for investors.”
Hands-off governments, he said, will be able to raise more taxes.
We TRIED that before scumbag. It was called "free enterprise" from between 1860-1918 and it destroyed families, practically made indentured servants of huge groups of workers such as miners, and only succeeded in making the capital class wealthy and everyone else...not.
OH, I'm sorry, did I just identify your ulterior motives out loud??!! My bad.
"This is my country I want to work 70 hours a week’,” he said, adding “this is exactly what Germans and Japanese did after the Second World War."
He is, of course, talking bullshit. Working hours, at least in Germany, declined after the war - in fact at a faster rate than the US, UK, or Australia. Hours did increase during the war* -but even then, I don't believe it the average worker did 70 hours per week.
* And on a personal note, since both my grandfathers died young after health problems from wartime induced overwork, Narayana can stick his 70-hour week up his bum.
There were many people working 70hrs+ a week in post war germany but none of them did it for their country. They did it because they had to rebuild from scratch after the war destroyed their livelihood and they had a direct benefit for their daily live from it. They would not have done it to make the likes of Narayana Murthy rich.
He is also overlooking post war Germany; the reconstruction was largely in the hands of the (Allied) military who got paid a salary and so did not benefit from the success or otherwise of the business and thus all monies went back into the business and workers pockets.
The (German) workers by pulling together regained community, sense of worth, improved living conditions, etc., so why wouldn’t they work above and beyond? Plus the non-work related aid did ensure they did get food etc.
One of my mates, who is a genius[*] (and a nice guy), once told his boss during a similar discussion:
"Look, I can be a genius not more than eight hours a day."
I think that for me the limit is about six hours, but I start at a way lower level of intell-uh-djence. So working only part time (young kids & stuff, and stupid "back to the office at least 50%, no matter if the colleagues you are working with are in the same city, or even state") actually is a pretty good deal for my company. I'm pretty sure I achieve pretty much the same as when I was working full hours. Except when reading ElReg[+]. Ok, back to work, slouch.
[*] not the fruity tat merchant type, but a guy who actually has both a high IQ[#] and can actually apply his genius-ness (I'm not a genius, so I'm allowed to make up words) to real world problems - yeah, he is a genius (or at least quite a bite more intelligent than I am).
[#] he kept quite stumm about it, but we found out, his wife (who is a physics professor) mocked him about it in front of his mates (many do have a PhD in a real science, so not humanities or arts, so I guess it is pretty ok to mock him about it in that group - it is not bragging, that's what I mean)
[+] I am keeping abreast of recent internet technology, as the PFY once put it... and if reading ElReg is not part of your job you got the wrong job.
Old people telling young people to work more to save the country seems to be some kind of viral trend right now. In Germany those idiots demanded a mandatory "year for society" (for lack of a translation) for everybody turning 18.
At least they demanded only a single year and not 20 to 50.
The Tories are already planning mechanisms to get people to work more hours by cutting benefits (if they get them).
Sunak also seemed to blame the entire UK people for the country being in a mess due to people not having A-level maths.
Don't worry, crime is down 50% as per Sunak at PMQ's (caveat - they took out all the fraud crimes from the figures)
Like almost all politicians, he completely fails to understand that the *worker* does not have the agency here, it's the *EMPLOYER* that has the control over how many hours the worker works. If an employer employs you for one hour, absolutely NOTHING you do to the benefits system will change what the EMPLOYER does. You could electricute the worker, that won't change the action of the employer, because you're targetting the wrong party. You have to impose control on the party with the agency in the transaction, which is the employers, *NOT* the workers.
You would be surpised but hey, we know Tories are cnuts.
Yes, they are planning to remove the EU Working Time Directive. The UK already had an opt out which is widely abused in the IT sector, and now they are planning to scratch it completely.
As far as these people are concerned, it's not real work if it's not 80h/week in a workhouse with no real earnings.
I have to agree. If I ask myself what challenges India faces, the top two by a very long margin are corruption, and low quality output*. I'd imagine working hours comes somewhere about number 2,723 on the list of major problems facing either India or its businesses. Sadly, India's politicians will listen to this twerp.
* Whether that's manufactured goods, software, offshored services, planning, infrastructure, law and governance.
Totally out of touch with reality. Just look at their choice of footware
£490 Prada suede shoes on visit to a building site
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/rishi-sunak-wears-490-prada-27501958
£570 pair of slippers for the school run.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/oct/07/photographer-behind-hs2-expose-steve-back
Trouble is, when you look at the effort required to make a pair of shoes, it becomes amazing how cheap shoes are in the shops.
I remember a few years back a piece on a hand knitted jumper which was being sold for some seemingly high price, where it was pointed out, if granny was actually paid minimum wage etc. the resulting price would not be that different.
You jest - but slave owners tended to take care* of their "property", feeding and housing them so as not to waste their "investment".
Contrast that with free workers - Free to starve, live on the streets, be fired etc. as employers push down real wages.
* Obviously I'm not endorsing slavery or making a serious comparison, just pointing out that free workers can be cheaper to employ.
Customer support from sleep deprived call centre staff is going is going to be hallucinatory.
You might get away with these hours with process work but I cannot see even cost/unit productivity improving assuming there is any semblance of quality control. QC is arguably what tranformed Japanese post-war manufacturing rather than longer working hours.
As for knowledge based tasks the hours are irrelevant. Taking as long as you need to properly understanding the task/problem followed by a long think about all the interactions and ramifications implicit in the task/problem *before* applying your experience, knowledge and wisdom to initiate any action might take days or weeks. Also goes without saying that consultation and documentation at each stage is implicit.
Jumping to "initiating action" is almost certainly going to need fewer hours but almost certain to end in tears. Indeed el Reg's are a weekly chronicle of cockups that could be attributed to such "productivity gains."
Anyway its reassuring that the Anglosphere, or the West generally, hasn't cornered the market in arseholes
telling me you don't know what left is, isn't the win you were looking for, NONE of the fucking usa political parties are on the left.
and bosses tend to hunt down left leaning people, so anon is better to protect yourself from bosses retaliation .
(for reference, please see present day retaliation on employees in USA trying to unionise.)
"The 70-hour work week plan has another problem: it's illegal.
India’s Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code [PDF] limits working days to eight hours.
Aren’t billionaires and their opinions just great? "
That's easily solved. You define a few 21 hour days. Day one starts at 00:00ends at 21:00 and a new one then starts. That ends at what everyone else is claiming is 18:00 but is, on your redefinition, 21:00. That way you can have a 9 day week and can squeeze in 70 hours without even using up the full 8 hours per day. Anything is possible when you're a billionaire.
I’ll bite…
Suspect the only time he actually worked 70 hours per week for next to nought pay, was when he was a youth starting his business career.
However, I expect he soon wised up and stopped working for 70 hours for someone else for a pittance and started working for himself, employing others at a pittance to do the work.
Personally, if he really believed in what he is saying about India’s future, he would be providing opportunities to Indian youth to develop their IT ideas and (for them) to reap the benefits of their labours. That would however,require him to dip into his pocket…
The work output from Indian s/w devs is not brilliant - it's pretty shite but given how much they get paid, I'm not surprised. Any of them with any real skills shift around for a few year in India and then leave.
Maybe paying a reasonable salary and incentivising the poor b**tards might help get their productivity up. And maybe sharing out some of the huge profits the likes of Infosys make might also help increase productivity....Or maybe training more staff?
Another problem: Who TF is going to actually EMPLOY them for 70 hours? India is modernising, that means employers will adopt modern practices of only employing people for the bare minimum time possible. "We need three people to do six hours work on Friday. Yerwot? You want us to pay you to do nothing on Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu? FO."
"India is modernising, that means employers will adopt modern practices of only employing people for the bare minimum time possible."
The reason for that would be to make sure that nobody gets enough hours in a week to qualify for mandatory benefits as a full time employee.
Yup. In the US the Democrats passed ACA which required full time benefits for 30 hours or more. Industry immediately cut hours to 25 or less, hired more part timers, and the Democrats took credit for job growth from splitting all those jobs. If people were lucky enough to get two coordinating jobs, they were working over 50 hours a week with no overtime and extra commuting time.
DON'T DO IT.
Been there.
Lost all sense of delayed gratification.
Lost all ability to tolerate stress.
Got sick and couldn't work.
DO NOT BELIEVE THE Boss-Of-You when they ask you to kill yourself for the sake of whatever. Value your life and make your life have value. Personal responsibility means taking care of yourself as well as family as well as your work life. Work well and work diligently, WITHIN REASON. You are #1.
"Stop
If you value your life...
DON'T DO IT.
Been there.
Lost all sense of delayed gratification."
I'd do it again, but only very particular circumstances. They can be summed up by saying I'd have to believe in the product/service and have a whole bunch of skin in the game. If there's the chance that you'll be one of the early founders/employees and would be able to retire the day after the IPO, could be worth investing some time for lower than normal wages. The moment it starts looking wahoony shaped, I'd bail. I've interviewed at companies that seemed to have based their business plan on putting all of the engineers on salary and insisting on 50-60 hour weeks for 40hour money. That tells me they don't have a good business plan and also have no margin for the inevitable last minute push to get a product out the door.
You don't pay me for what I do, you pay me for what I know................
And, if you are to stupid to already know this, I'm way happy to walk right NOW!
My favorite saying is "BYE BYE".
And India should worry about fixing their failed infrastructure, Clean up the nasty mess(pollution) shit hole they live in.
And stop trying to emulate China.
Working smart, not hard is the objective.
Regular 70 hour weeks will just lead to unhappy and ineffective workers, burnout, and high turnover. Loss of familiarity with product. But, there's always another one to recruit... (Until there isn't - or people say no).
If India culturally accepts getting shat on (as it has done from its caste system for centuries) one supposes this is just another example of that.
Why shouldn't QoL be a goal for how companies and staff develop? If you're caught in the trap, and have the ability, tell Infosys to get bent. Form unions if you have to.
Fun fact:
Both, Germany and Japan had to loose a World War before engaging heavily in the way described.
I am not aware that India is making the same mistake, so what‘s the point then?
Also, isn‘t InfoSys heavily involved into AI which will replace white collar workforce in droves very soon?
So, the idea is to work one‘s ass of and then get the boot for good?
Not extremely compelling this perspective.
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