When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier? (opens in new tab)

Also, exercising will actually do very little for your weight because calories have became too cheap and readily available to burn them off. You can eat more by accident than you will use in a fairly vigorous workout.

Basically, everybody here is not thinking with their science hats. They are thinking with their social engineering/political hats, where a government action to forcibly reduce working hours simply must have positive benefits, essentially axiomatically, and if we're not seeing them yet we must simply not be trying hard enough yet, a classic social engineering mindset. But that's not a scientific mindset. There's no guarantee this intervention must have positive results. There's no guarantee the axiom is actually true.

Now, might be that the priors for A were very large, and A is still the most likely hypothesis. But the evidence just received reduced those priors

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(I know that the case in point does not fit the rather strict requirements of the first paragraph. But I think the affirmation "the hypothesis that reducing the workload improves the life of the worker, while still very likely, is now a bit less likely" is true in this case.)

(The phrase in " " sounds odd to me. If I knew numbers, it would be much better to say P(A) was 95% and now is 90%)

Wrong direction. We are not entitled to take a result that a minor change had no effect on the target variable and treat that as evidence that a major change must do the thing we expect it to do. We must accept this as evidence that in fact the major version of our change will, at the very least, do something other than what we expected; our theory made predictions and our theory predicted wrong. This is not a thing to be glossed over lightly! Forcing further reductions in hours may very well have some other net-negative benefit, for instance.

You are all, frankly, making exactly the mistake I'm talking about, and doubling down on it.

However I understand that other people may feel pressure to do the same even thought they value family life more. Some employers probably don't do a great job in encouraging the family life and set out goals that require extra hours to complete (over 40 hr work week), which is what such a regulation may aim to alleviate. In practice I think it will cause more harm by dabbling in company culture.

It sucks if your employer owns whatever you do offsite, though. Specially if they do not pay overtime.

You see... do not attribute to sloth that which can be explained by envy.

I have a baseball bat. I can make you bleed innovation.

And when you can't take it literally, you're missing something significant in the claim.

I'll have dreams about it tonight ;)

As I said, you start by creating a culture where rules are enforced, then work from there.

It is often connected to food or another word necessity's. That was the case during the "arab spring" and was also the case in 1917 Russia, the main slogan for the Russian revolution being "bread and peace". The Russian people had nothing left to lose and the ruling class had nothing left to give(to sustain their power) thus fulfilling the two conditions.

All you need then is a catalyst. Which in the case of the "arab spring" was when Mohamed Bouazizi set him self on fire.

When it concerns America and mass-surveillance I would see that as a possible catalyst that lacked a revolutionary situation.

There are 1000 tickets in your JIRA queue. They then ask you, what can you do in the 2 week (or 1 week) sprint?

What do you say? Is it the 10 hour or 40 hour timeframe? That happens all the time in development, and people do a few things. They underestimate a lot or they write code that is 90%, where when bad things happen, it's ugly to clean up.

So the results are what you say you can do in your week of work. And of course, they will put the pressure of "but that's easy." Yada yada.

As a results oriented place, some companies pack in what you think is 80 in your 40 hour work week (a lot of companies will try to do this). So what happens then? You switch jobs?

As for improving the process, most engineers don't know exactly how. They speculate and guess, hoping to hit it right. It's really up to the people driving it to affect the company culture. Doing it as an individual within an organization is quite difficult.

That's what I've experienced at certain companies anyways, generally with management with less experience, tbh.

True. But since "results" aren't exactly quantifiable, how can they get steady value for their money?

Is result A equal to result B or result Q? If results M, N, and O are all equal, how many M/N/O results does it take to earn one week's worth of paycheck?

What if they decide that they're paying too much for M/N/O results, and want at least 11 of those per week instead of the current 4?

What if you wait an entire week for the dumb assholes in the other department to deliver the specifications? Do you not get paid that week?

You're paid by the hour not because hours are the best way to measure accomplishments, but because it's easy to measure hours and difficult to measure anything else.

For example, hourly pay is quite reasonable in jobs that just need a competent body to fill a shift—i.e., where the only “result” you want is “the shift gets filled”. When I was working in a kitchen, I put in the same four-hour shift every time I went into work—prep, serve, clean. If I worked n shifts a week, I got kn dollars that week, fair and square.