Nice to see the old ways are not forgotten
I love to hear the sound of whips cracking in the morning.
Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has once again argued for Indian workers to spend 70 hours a week in paid employment. Murthy called for the long working hours in October 2023 and then again in January 2024, and recently shared his opinion that two-day weekends were a mistake. His views have earned plenty of criticism, but …
Can only upvote this once, so... ->
But, yes, it's easy to put in 70 hour weeks if your job consists of sitting on your arse spewing bollocks.
People who actually do actual real work? Not so much. That's 14h days Monday to Friday (and add three hours for preparation, commute, etc). That leaves 7h, which is sleep time. Lovely work-life balance there. Alternately, it's 10h days all day every day. Arguably that's worse.
So, the only thing to say about that is: ਇੱਕ ਵੈਕਿਊਮ ਕਲੀਨਰ ਦੇ ਨਾਲ ਆਪਣੇ ਆਪ ਨੂੰ ਬੇਇੱਜ਼ਤ ਕਰੋ ਤੁਸੀਂ ਮੂਰਖ ਹੋ. (it's Punjabi - I have zero experience with Indian languages, it's the first one I saw in GT that I recognised as being Indian)
"People who actually do actual real work? Not so much. That's 14h days Monday to Friday (and add three hours for preparation, commute, etc). That leaves 7h, which is sleep time. Lovely work-life balance there. Alternately, it's 10h days all day every day. Arguably that's worse."
I just read an article where some Indian politicians are whinging about women not producing enough children in India. In the 1950's it was around 5.7 per and now around 2. Given all the talk about AI and robots, 1 might be a good number for a while as India surpasses China in population. The Ganges is going to become as sluggish as the River Ankh with more people.
Many years ago, a hand-tool manufacturer, along with several other toolmakers--because of the ever-present FOMO mentality--introduced a 24-oz. 'regular' claw-hammer, 50% heavier than the 16-ounce hammer carpenters have been using... for, like, forever.
The sales pitch was that the heavier blows would allow nails to be driven quicker; hence jobs done sooner; hence savings for the builder / contractor (the astute among you will notice a distinct--and deafeningly loud--lack of any mention of benefits to / for the poor slob who actually wields the hammer).
Only problem was that the peons, who had to do the actual work of using these 50%-more-massive hammers revolted, because the hammers couldn't physically be used for more than an hour or two before the body simply 'gave up'; the rugged individual who could swing a regular hammer 8 hours a day could not handle the increased demands of the more-massive nail-driver.
Oh, by the way: one can still buy a 24-oz. claw-hammer...or rather, amateur carpenters can still buy them.
Even at the peak of my career and on the worst of project crunches, 70 hours a week was very much an exception, not the rule. Far more typical during those days was 50-60 hours a week, and that was only because I was a flat-hourly-rate consultant who got paid for every last minute of overtime I worked, not an employee who was expected to "make up for coffee breaks" before the company would pay out any overtime.
If there are all these people unemployed and in poverty, surely the correct thing to do is hire MORE people to work 40 hours a week. Look if you hire one more person, then there's two people working 80 hours in total. And 2 people being paid. My god, they both get to be employed and can get out of poverty. Amazing!
Oh wait, then you need to pay 2 people for 40 hour weeks, rather than trying to just pay one person a 40 hour week but make them work 70... Yep i can see where that's a non-starter for this muppet...
That's the lump of labour fallacy, which is and has always been bogus.If you believed it, you'd like this guy; making everyone work 70-hour weeks would cut total productivity in half, so the employees who used to be producing 40 hours of output are now producing (if we're generous) 20, thus requiring double the FTEs to produce the same results. But can his margins survive a doubling of personnel costs, never mind what happens when quality takes a nosedive?
"millions of Indian citizens remain in poverty" this is true, but you don't see the top 1% in Indian spending the billions they have hidden away to help their country.
No they prefer to get overseas aid to do that for them, then waste that money or syphon it off to hidden bank accounts to make them richer or let their government waste billions having a space programme.
I've watched a team of good engineers get beyond 50 hours/week for a prolonged period. Sure, they did it. Sure the thing eventually shipped, But efficiency and the quality of the work suffered in measurable ways.
Though if a company is billing by the butt-hour, and the quality is crap, it is the client who pays. So why not advocate a 70 hour week? Sure it will improve employment - half the workers will be screwing up bug fixes for the mistakes made by the other half. And the company gets to bill for all of it.
Advocacy of a 70 hour work week is like a bright shining billboard advertising the magnitude of a commitment to quality.
Kwaledee is job won.
"I've watched a team of good engineers get beyond 50 hours/week for a prolonged period. Sure, they did it. Sure the thing eventually shipped, But efficiency and the quality of the work suffered in measurable ways."
The cost of mistakes from tired people can wind up costing more than any time "improvements". People also wind up crammed in with people they didn't choose to associate with and don't get very much time to "associate" with people they have picked. That's until that selected person finds somebody else that has more time to spend with them. 70+ hours per week can become the new birth control since there's no time to meet somebody and no time/energy to make babies.
"If he thinks we're so stupid as to not see this for the self-serving twaddle it is then he must be really stupid."
It's not so much stupidity as being out of touch. I've noticed that Hollywood elites, popular musicians and so forth are often very liberal. They get behind programs to provide people coming the US to live without asking food, shelter, lawyers, phones, etc. They don't flinch when a city (cough, Los Angeles, cough) doesn't see why spending $600,000 per housing unit for homeless people is a wee bit on the high side. Those people are several tiers up on Maslow's pyramid so food, shelter and entertainment are not any sort of concern. "Oh look, the latest round of royalty checks just deposited in my account, time to break out the caviar and champers." My mom was in Nightmare on Elm Street Pt3 and the last check she got was for $.38. You need more than one line to make it big. The people I know that have wealth come from more humble beginnings and aren't as out of touch since they live upper middle class and well within their means. I've met a few that are way out of touch and most of them live past their means for as long as their credit scores hold out. Lots of "keeping up with the Jones'".
1. His argument that a 70 hour workweek would increase employment is as logical as claiming, "India needs larger-diameter in-house plumbing, because sometimes it's dark outside."
2. I'd happily work 70-hour weeks were I paid time-and-a-half for hours over 8/day during M-F, and double-time on Saturdays. But that's not what he's planning on doing.
timing is interesting, conjures up a picture of some indian equivalent of ebenezer scrooge waiting for the three ghosts of christmas to sort it all out! Wait some bollywood producer might pick this up.
I think for some it's never enough what you do for them, if you put them in charge of a country they would probably prefer to be a dictator/ruler or similar.
Work is generally meant to be enjoyable , meeting , socialising, spining off ideas, learning and also some hard work. Working in a sweat shop for a bunch of hard batting scrooges is definately not enjoyable, just a hard lesson in life not to go there again.
Everyone works 70hrs a week. Birthday rate collapses, healthcare tanks, children grow up never seeing their parents, there’s no art, no travel. Sounds like a horrible society. One assumes this fella is capable of extrapolating the likely out working of his ideas. I can only assume he hates (other) people.
Most people do work 70h weeks.
You might think the average person works 40Hours a week, but you forgot to factor in commuting. Many people are investing 2+ hours a day commuting, that adds at least 10-15 extra hours taken from them and lost to being forced to travel without payment aka commuting.