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Salemicus comments on question: the 40 hour work week vs Silicon Valley? - Less Wrong
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The problem is that during the industrial revolution it also took a long time because people caught on that 40 hours per week were more effective. It is really hard to reliably measure performance in the long term. Managers are discouraged from advocating a 40 hour work week since this flies in the face of the prevailing attitude. If they fail, they will almost definitely be fired since 'more work'->'more productivity' is the common sense answer, whether or not it is true. It would not be worth the risk for any individual manager to try this unless the order came from the top. Of course, this is not an argument in favor of the 40 hour week, it just shows that this could just as well be explained by a viral meme as by reasonable decisions.
This is part of the reason why I find it so hard to find any objective information on this.
But that's why I emphasised that Silicon Valley is full of startups, where there aren't risk-averse middle-managers trying to signal conformance to the prevailing attitude. Note too that there have been a wide variety of idiosyncratic founders. And because of the high turnover and survivorship bias, the startups we see today are biased towards the most long-term productive compared to all of those set up. Yet those companies behave in the exact opposite way to what your theory would predict.
If shorter work-weeks really are more productive, why don't we see successful companies using them? Your explanation makes sense in terms of a government bureaucracy; much less so in a startup hub.
A few ideas that occurred to me offhand:
-- long hours could be legitimately beneficial to startups, without being beneficial to companies in general
-- willingness to work long hours could be correlated with other traits that make the worker do well for he company, such as enthusiasm
-- related, willingness to work long hours may simply be correlated with other traits that lead the worker to work for a startup at all. For instance, young people without families are more willing to work long hours, and also more willing to take risky jobs such as at starups.
-- long hours could be part of a race towards the bottom, where any individual company that has its workers working longer hours does better, but if all the competing companies do it, they're all worse off than if nobody does it. This could happen if working long hours lets the company get a larger share of a finite resource (such as market share) without increasing the size of that resource
-- signalling competitions between individual workers could lead to the workers all working longer. The absence of middle managers only eliminates certain types of signalling, not all signalling
That's what I'm asking you!
This isn't my theory. This is a theory that has been around for a hundred years and that practically every industry follows, apparently with great success. From what I have read, the 40 hour work week was not invented by the workers, but by the companies themselves, who realized that working people too hard drives down their output and that 40 hours per week is the sweet spot, according to productivity studies.
Then along comes silicon valley, with a completely different philosophy, and somehow that also works. I have no idea why, and that's what I made this thread to ask.
Do note that a hundred years ago workers performed mostly physical labor and estimates of physical endurance do not have to be similar to estimates of mental endurance.
But Silicon Valley doesn't have a completely different philosophy from similar professions. Do doctors, lawyers, financiers, small businessmen, etc, typically work only 40 hours? To suggest it is to laugh. If anything, they work longer hours than software engineers. The 40-hour week you're talking about is a norm among factory workers, which is an entirely different type of labour.
Silicon Valley also provides the opportunity for frequent fun breaks -- google Google (that is, search on the 'net for images of Google offices :-D).
Ok, I think it's becoming increasingly obvious you don't know how the 40 hour work week came to be, country by country. There were huge worker movements for decreasing the work hours. Many countries achieved these working conditions only eventually and by getting an appropriate labor reform law passed. And the stories behind such laws differed vastly depending on the country.
So I am forced to ask -- what is it that you have been reading? Can you link it?
So why is industrial production being relocated to countries without 40 hour work week laws?
Because those countries also have lower labor costs, so executives can report that they're saving money on labor costs and their company's stock will go up. More cynically, international operations require more management (to keep on top of shipping issues and deal with different government circumstances in the different countries where operations are going on), and the managers who make such decisions may approve of an outcome where more is spent on management and less on labor. Most of the research I've heard of suggests that it is not because such relocations are overall more profitable; that's very rarely the case.
Except that the products made in these countries are in fact cheaper.