Is it the end of the 9 to 5 working day?
Traditional workplace hours of 9am to 5pm are now only the norm for a minority of workers, research suggests. Just 6% of people in the UK now work such hours, a YouGov survey found. Almost half of people worked flexibly with arrangements such as job sharing or compressed hours, allowing them to juggle other commitments, it found.
Anna Whitehouse, a campaigner whose own flexible working request was refused by her employer, said there were still misconceptions about such arrangements. In her case, her employer refused her request for 15 minutes flexibility at the start and end of each day to enable her to drop off and pick up her children from nursery. "They denied it because they said it would open the floodgates for other people to request the same thing." [...] Since then she has started the Flex Appeal, aimed at convincing firms to trial flexible working and also to make people aware of their right to request flexible working.
[...] Polling firm YouGov surveyed over 4,000 adults for the survey, which was commissioned by fast-food chain McDonald's.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday August 21 2018, @08:23PM (14 children)
It many cases, it wouldn't matter much if employees' start time varied by an hour from each other. And as the PHBs keep chanting "productivity and deadlines not activity and hours."
Working environments with the flexibility tend to be less stressful and more productive. I really can't understand why some places are still so strict about it.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @08:35PM (8 children)
They don't understand why you're so fucking inept.
Take your kids to work 15 minutes earlier in the morning, so that you show up at work at the time to which you already agreed.
Life sucks; that's not your employer's fault.
(Score: 2, Touché) by turgid on Tuesday August 21 2018, @09:25PM (2 children)
Ha ha!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:40AM (1 child)
Ha ha!
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:38PM
Anonymous Coward does not know that children start classes at a specified time.
Anonymous Coward will argue that then children should also be able to have flexible time. Anonymous Coward does not understand child/adult autonomy.
Anonymous Coward is perfect
There AC, you win!
(Score: 5, Touché) by arslan on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:31PM (4 children)
Lol, so if you agreed to a pay rate at the onset of employment, that's set in stone for life yea? Excellent, where can I send you the employment contract?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @11:10PM (2 children)
Why are you content with your vapid analysis of this discussion?
No wonder you proles struggle so much in life; you can't think straight. That makes democracy all the more terrifying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @11:41PM (1 child)
You do realize that AC stands for Anonymous Coward and not Annoying Cowpie, right? At least it used to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @11:56PM
Your situational insult doesn't work when you're the one who sets up the situation.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:31AM
No matter what you agreed to in the beginning a healthy business can't pay its employees collectively more than they provide in value to the business. There are natural constraints to what conditions a business can provide, in pay, schedule, etc.
Thus, there are certain things that make for more rigid working days. For example, my current accounting job has several accounting deadlines during the course of the day that both I (and the downstream people) have to work with. I can't shift my working hours by a couple of hours here and there unpredictably because the company can't work around that - a two hour delay on my part means a two hour delay of several more employees waiting on my work to finish. Work needs to get done at particular times of the day in order for the accountants to get the job done efficiently.
Similarly, my employer is a tourist business. It needs to have people working at particular times because that's when the tourists are there. A waiter can't decide to show up half way through a meal period because that would mean that half the shift isn't covered (including a lot of prep work before the shift even starts).
Just like it's foolish to treat people as if they're interchangeable plugs, it's similarly foolish to treat employers and jobs as if they're fully equivalent. I see the same mistake happen with demands for universal shorter work weeks. Not all jobs are the same. Some have rigid time constraints that don't change just because the worker changes their mind.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:07PM (4 children)
9-5 is garbage anyway. It should probably be closer to 30 hours a week.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:22PM (3 children)
Capitalism. Where you choose your own adventure.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:46PM (2 children)
You can work two back-breaking jobs or die in the gutter. Your choice.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:56PM
It depends on how (including where) you choose to live your life.
Quit blaming other people for your problems.
(Score: 0, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @12:41AM
It depends on how (including where) you choose to live your life.
Quit blaming other people for your problems.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday August 21 2018, @08:25PM (17 children)
Does anyone actually work 9 to 5?
As long as I can remember it was 8 to 5. Except, in the 1980's it actually was 8:30 to 5:30 because we were all young and there were four of us. There were no official vacation days or hours. We would go on vacation when we wanted, and nobody put the company in a bind. My how things have to change as you grow and eventually get acquired.
Even now, it is 8 to 5 as it's been for a couple decades.
But 9 to 5? Is this a myth?
I can actually have reasonably flexible hours. I am salaried. I have some latitude to manage my time along with certain goals I am expected to achieve. There are core hours (10 to 2) that I should be here any time that meetings might be scheduled across time zones.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @08:40PM
The more of your comments I read, the more I realize what a shallow, unthinking, Borg-like collectivist lefty you really are.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday August 21 2018, @08:55PM (3 children)
(Score: 3, Funny) by arslan on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:34PM (2 children)
uhh.. I learned Dolly lied earlier than that when I found out she was enhanced, talk about shattering a boy's dream..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:14AM (1 child)
Who is Dolly? The musical hello dolly? Please explain
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 22 2018, @12:49PM
Go to IMDB. Look up movie called "9 to 5". Look at leading stars in that movie.
It is a bit dated now. No cell phones. Typewriters. Obvious gender roles. But otherwise the same executives walking over the worker's backs that you would recognize today. And its very funny. Especially the Skinny & Sweet coffee sweetener.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @09:17PM
I do 8:00 to 12:00 and 12:30 to 15:30. Working 35hr (32.5 in the summer) a week and being paid more than my peers who work 40h that is wonderful. Unions are not only there to collect membership fees you know.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday August 21 2018, @09:25PM (2 children)
I've NEVER worked 9 to 5. That's only 8 hours, including lunch and breaks.
All my employers have always read "40 hours work week" as meaning 8 hours plus breaks, so 8 to 5, or 9 to 6.
My current company has "anytime before 9:30 to don't-expect-to-leave-until-well-after 6:30", plus the occasional early morning intercontinental call, and regular stints past 8PM (or 11PM, recently). It's flexible, for sure, on the fattening side.
Help, I need a less shitty job!
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:02PM (1 child)
While I've had nominal contractual hours based around some variation of 9-5 or a minimum of x hours per week, every job I've had in almost three decades has either had some flexibility on start/finish times, or has essentially been "as long as the work gets done, we really don't care how long you spend on it". Not sure if it's just my work ethic or not, but I also tend to find that the employers that give me the most flexibility actually get the most back. It's not at all uncommon for me to do 70-80 hour weeks if I think that's what's required; the most I've booked is 96 to successfully hit a particularly important (bonus paying) project milestone, or spend the time I would otherwise have spent commuting doing working when I'm at home, etc.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:57AM
I got paid twenty-three grand for it. I mean I really did. How cool can that be?
My client said he was down with it because I sent him "daily" progress reports at all hours of the day and night, as well as having flawlessly implemented lots of features and killed lots of bugs dead but good.
Too bad the dot-com crash hit my client as its very first victim with me second: all his investors disappeared a couple weeks before I billed him for $21k.
I discussed it with quite a reputable commercial collection agency. They advised me that to have enforced collection would have driven them into bankrupty.
In the end my client sold the website, all the trademarks and the like to some guy I don't know anything about. That has been... let me check... yeah it's still there EIGHTEEN YEARS LATER!!!! That's like Millenia in our line of work. Whoever they sold their site to must be quite the Cool Frood.
It happens that they abandoned the original trademark name as well as its trademarked logo quite a long time ago.
I have not the advice of any actual attorney but the advice of several experienced industry pros who have reason to assert that I own the code now. This is from Y2K - my original clients either offed themselves, blended into the burbs or struck it rich in some entirely unrelated way. Knowing my client I'm quite certain it's that unrelated way.
I'm planning to ship this product but only after extensive revision. I _might_ register their trademarked name but would not use their logo. Even so that would be asking for trouble. The trademark I actually use would be based on availability of the domain name as well as defensive domain name registration - not just the .com but the .net, the .org, the .co and so on as well as a USPTO (R) trademark search and Googling for unregistered (TM) trademark search.
How many of you think to consult the USPTO _before_ you register a domain? Yeah I thought so.
In other news, I was puzzling over paying two grand to a "domainer" for a truly valuable name but after screwing around with "$ dig tarfu.org" stumbled across a whole whack of even more valuable domains so fuck 'em if he can't take a joke.
It is only in the last few months that I've come to regard all the bazillions of new TLDs as being a wise decision: it totally _destroys_ the domainers, many of whom paid thousands or even tens of thousands for once-valuable Internet Real Estate that now no one at all gives a damn about.
"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." -- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @09:45PM (1 child)
The more of your comments I read, the more I realize what a shallow, unthinking, Borg-like collectivist lefty you really are.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @09:55PM
Why must we suffer such trolls? Go boil your own head if you like it so much, the rest of us like the idea of labor laws and work-life balance.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:16PM
The more of your comments I read, the more I realize what a shallow, unthinking, Borg-like collectivist lefty you really are.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @11:07PM
The more of your comments I read, the more I realize what a shallow, unthinking, Borg-like collectivist lefty you really are.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @12:44AM
The more of your comments I read, the more I realize what a shallow, unthinking, Borg-like collectivist lefty you really are.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:24AM
The more of your comments I read, the more I realize what a shallow, unthinking, Borg-like collectivist lefty you really are.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:18AM
The more of your comments I read, the more I realize what a shallow, unthinking, Borg-like collectivist lefty you really are.
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Wednesday August 22 2018, @11:09AM
I think it's only Dolly Parton that worked 9 to 5, the rest of us normally did 8 to 5 since the company wasn't giving us an hour for lunch for free.
That said I have not worked a job like that in over a decade, now it's more like come and work when you want/need as long as the work you are supposed to do gets done.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MostCynical on Tuesday August 21 2018, @08:47PM (2 children)
i'd never have put the Australian Governemnt down as "progressive"
Australian Public Servants, even 25 years ago, have been able to work "flexible hours". I used to try and get to work by 7:30am so I could leave by 3. Some in the office arrived at 10, and worked til 6. Anything over 7:35 was "banked" and you could bnk enough to take days off (with approval, but managers were easy to please..)
My current contract says "9 to 5". Pay is better, though..
Unless you have a shop or a phone support line or similar, it shouldn't matter *when* in a a day the work is doene, just that it is done in a timely manner (deadlines are often made up, and no manager has ever read a report handed to them on a Friday afternoon)
"Trust" is often written in a companies "values statement", and painted on walls, but rarely actually practiced.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday August 22 2018, @12:50AM (1 child)
The place I'm working now requires me to punch a timeclock. I always considered the practice rather insulting in the past, but here I work basically whatever hours I want, and the timeclock does make it easy to make sure neither side is getting screwed on the number of hours I'm being paid for, so I've actually acquired an appreciation for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:16AM
This is why I always punch in before I take my morning constitutional.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @08:57PM (3 children)
One place I worked told me when I started about the flexible hours, with just a requirement that everyone was present for a shorter block of hours in the middle of every day and worked the same total hours. It was quite clearly bullshit though because I was soon berated by the boss for arriving at 9:05 am! Clearly "flexible hours" means you work whatever hours your boss thinks are necessary, which may not be the hours *you* want to work!
It was quite a shit place to work though.
(Score: 3, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday August 21 2018, @09:41PM (2 children)
I have worked for some self-centred arseholes like that too.
If fact I worked for one guy who, when I told him I was going home said "Home? You are home".
He also couldn't understand why he couldn't keep staff, which was funny.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:49PM
I think he posted in this thread somewhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:51PM
Those types usually can't, can they? If someone tries to tell them why, that's because they're "not a team player".
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday August 21 2018, @11:16PM
I work 7:30-3:00/3:30
Wake up at 6, get ready for work/help get my son ready for school and off in the afternoon so I can still enjoy the day.
Hope that doesn't change, but life always changes.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by snufu on Tuesday August 21 2018, @11:40PM
stealth layoffs nowadays?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 22 2018, @12:04AM
When I interviewed with Carbon Black I think last Summer they told me an employee survey found that the remote folks were both happier, with their productivity as measured by such things as bugs fixed and features implemented being higher.
But I was _not_ looking forward to working from home. Had I done so I would have spiraled into a pit of depression so I was going to ask them to spring for a desk at NedSpace, which I'm pretty sure they would have been down with. But in the end I resurrected my consultancy [soggywizards.com] and I leased that desk _myself_ which I'm very, very happy with.
$375 for a one-year lease on a "Permanent Desk" that is, a desk just for me. It's _not_ in a private room, these days I share it with one other. When school starts up some right chap whose business model works so well that he took the entire summer off to hang with his kids will be back. This same guy has a $500 reely-reely _wide_ monitor that curves. It really caught my eye but in the end for the work I'm actually doing - coding and marking up web pages - I'd rather have a 19" monitor. I've got a 17" now; I'll buy the 19" when I get paid Real Soon Now.
A "Hot Desk" is $175 with a one year lease, $275 month-to-month. While the hot desks are first-come first-served there aren't many in use so anyone who wants to be more sociable can work in the hot desk area.
I really _must_ have my own desk so I can leave my shit strewn all over everywhere. I bought a locking cabinet to secure my clients' gadgetry.
If you're around Portland drop me a dime - (971) 386-3996, mike@soggywizards.com and we'll do coffee or lunch or something. I'm in the Union Bank Tower at 11th and Broadway downtown. That particular location totally rocks when I want to go to lunch at three in the morning - 7-Eleven is just the right distance away to stretch my legs and to eat that food which is not meant to be eaten.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:42AM
This is Soggy Jobs' most-popular page. I was trying to sell the uneducated, inexperienced folks in about a bazillion Facebook Work At Home groups that they could do entry level QA or tech support without any experience but no one ever responded, they were far, far too busy with pyramid schemes as well as handing over their online banking credentials to their new... uh... "employers" so as to enable direct deposit.
FB's and Reddit's employment newsgroups are as some Slashbot once said about using the Windows hosts file to block malware "Like discussing which salve to apply when you're on fire".
In other news, I'll be launching Soggy Jobs' crowdfunding campaign [soggy.jobs] on Wednesday, January 16, 2019. Considerations that went into this specific date were the home delivery schedule of The Oregonian, the time required to script, storyboard, shoot end edit my pitch video - a friend in LA who is an experienced actor with some directing experience will help me with all that - holidays, vacations, sales Black Friday and otherwise and last but not least the Q4 2018 Earnings Reports Seasons.
Most of all, I've been wanting to crowdfund for over three years ago but have come up with all manner of reasons to put it off. I recently realized that all the good reasons I've had for not launching it weren't really that big a deal, rather that unless I picked a _specific_ date then _stuck_ to it, it was just never going to happen.
My reasons for putting it off were mostly not having a clue what kind of swag to offer. I've got some help from SN - USB sticks are said to be good. I'll get them massed produced with the URL on one side and "The Global Employer Index" on the other.
I'll preload these sticks with the entire site as well as installers for Windows and Mac OS X to configure a local webserver. OS X comes with Apache preinstalled so there's just the config files. I don't know what Win10 has in the way of a personal webserver but that stick _could_ have Win64 Apache 2.4 on it. There would also be a script for setting it up with Linux and BSD.
This way you could look for jobs while offline.
I have three T-Shirts in mind, one with the new logo that I'm going to pay a Branding Consultant to design, the second with the Soggy Wizards Logo Bug [warplife.com], the third with my Eyeball Tree [warplife.com] which for reasons I don't fully understand turns out to be the single most-popular document out of all the web pages I've ever had other than my article on legal music downloading [warplife.com]
The Remote Work Page's Tiger Striping Javascript [soggy.jobs] doesn't work for any but the first table on the page. I'll fix it Real Soon Now. Doubtlessly the problem is that I'd been doing hookers and blow for a week before I wrote tiger-stripe.js. And yes: "Tiger Striping" is the correct term for it.
Each remote work listing names a city where your manager would work. Sometimes remote employers require you to be in the same country, sometimes they don't. I don't attempt to keep track of that nor whether the jobs are truly remote or only telecommuting. You'll have to find out from the job descriptions on each company's own site, most you'll likely have to ask for clarification after they've responded to your application.
I distinguish the two in that remote work is _truly_ remote. The employer commonly wants you to be in within a few hours of their time zone. It's common for remote employers to require their employee be in North America.
By contrast, Telecommuting requires you to show up at the office at least once a week for meetings. Sometimes you're required to work on-site one or two days each week.
When I was at Apple in the mid-nineties they were going through some rough times. This led Apple to display some really nice desks just inside the secure area in 1 Infinite Loop as well as to tell all their sales staff they were going to have to work at home but hey, that's cool cause we're going to supply you with these really cool, hip and trendy desks despite that you'll take your own life as a result of forced social isolation.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:46AM (2 children)
If you can't take regimented hours, and don't like petty office politics, you may have the option of starting your own company or consultancy. But, be forewarned, the ability to set your own hours sounds great until you do it, then you find that you are actually working all the time. From many conversations with other self-employed people over the years, this is nearly the universal experience. After the first ~5 years, your company might be well enough established that you can start to think about taking some time off.
For me, the fact that I don't have to report directly to any boss makes it all worth it. Instead, I report to whoever is managing my current projects. By now I have a lot of cred in my industry and reporting often amounts to a short report and conference calls every week or two. There have been a bunch of great project managers over the years, and only one real jerk. I had the last laugh on him since he was reassigned by his company to another job...in a different country. There have also been a few competitors that fought dirty, but in the end I came out OK by just keeping my head down and doing the very best job I could do.
(Score: 1) by MindEscapes on Wednesday August 22 2018, @01:37PM (1 child)
Yeah, I have not attempted the self employment route myself but I have heard the same thing you are talking about.
Forget 40 hour work weeks, you'll likely be doing 60-80 hours easily on your own business but being your own boss is often worth it I hear. Also, many times the extra time is spent on something your heart is in anyway so is more pleasant for that reason too.
Need a break? mindescapes.net may be for you!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @06:02PM
My family is in my heart. Not some coding job. Just out of curiosity, are you single?
I know I might sound like a dick by stating my preference like that, but do ANY of these workaholics have children?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:04AM (1 child)
Mare Island Naval Shipyard had one gate on the freeway, the other at the other end of a bridge from a city street. I remain flummoxed as to how even Flex Time enabled all the Civil Service staff to get to work every day.
My father was quite the opposite of me: very much a Lark. Out of bed every single day at Oh Five Hundred Hours without so much as an alarm clock his entire adult life until he was too old and too sick to get out of bed at all anymore.
So he'd get to work at seven every morning and have the office mostly to himself so he could get real work done, then he'd arrive home at four at first on his Yamaha 360 because he told Mom that he needed to conserve gasoline - in a Pig's Eye, Dad just liked bikes - then later a Yamaha 750.
I'm not sure I can ever figure out why I never asked him to teach how to ride a bike. He would have been into it. Dad was always a very cautious, patient and thoughtful kind of guy, not at all your biker stereotype.
Even so when the rains came he'd bike twenty miles each way two and from Mare Island wearing a snowmobile suit and fleece-lined leather gauntlets.
It happens that last week a Neurologist cleared me to drive. I haven't had a brain seizure since 2014 when I started taking Trileptal. While I'm going to buy a beater wagon at first then fix it up, later I'll buy a bike brand-new, most likely a 250. I really don't want to deal with picking up a dropped heavy bike. I'm not at all into speed rather I like touring the countryside. I was once lent a 75 cc motor scooter for a Summer while it's owner was away from Santa Cruz for his job. I rode it all along the coast on highway one, through the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was glorious.
I want to do that again
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:29PM
> ..lent a 75 cc motor scooter for a Summer ...
So you were the slow poke I was stuck behind on CA Rt 1 for all those frustrating miles(grin).