- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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What a tone deaf image representing the four day work week.
Moving to 32 hrs on paper and really expecting 60, instead of 40 on paper and really expecting 60.That’s a bold move, Cotton.
Let’s just make it 0 already, get it over with.
Yeah, not gonna happen where I work. The top brass is already pushing for “moving fast” every single day. “Use AI to be x10 more productive”, “Use vibe coding in your work to reduce time taken” are the common things that we hear. There’s no way they’ll do a 4 day work week.
Vibe… what now? Is that like coding in all caps when you’re pissed off or in a bastardised flavour of “CaMel CaSe” for those moments you want some spice things up with some sarcasm?
Vibe coding means the human is working with an AI Agent which is trained to be a software engineer. The responsibility of the human is only to write detailed prompts and the AI will write most or all of the code.
Thanks, I hadn’t come across the term, TIL.
As much as I hate the concept, it works. However:
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It only works with generalized programming. (E.g. write a python script that passes csv files) For any specialized fields this would NOT work (e.g. write a DPDK program that identifies RoCEv2 packets and rewrite the IP address)
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It requires the human supervising the AI agent to know how to write the expected code themselves, so they can prompt the agent to use specific techniques (e.g. use python’s csv library instead of string.split). This is not a problem now since even programmers out of college generally know what they are doing.
If companies try to use this to avoid hiring/training skilled programmers, they will have a very bad time in the future when the skilled talent pool runs dry and nobody knows how to identify correct vs incorrectly written code.
It has gone way beyond that. Where I work, we have access to GitHub Copilot experimental SWE Agent. It’s ridiculously smart at looking at your current codebase and implementing a solution. The other day, I used it to build a page in our web app in 3 hours with prompts and minimal code changes myself. If I had done it myself, it would have taken me at least couple of days. But the SWE agent looked at the tech stack, patterns, structures etc of our web app and implemented based on that. Asked if it should add unit test cases for the new files and update the existing ones. Out of curiosity, I said yes. It kept iterating and running the tests until it had 100% coverage. To say I was impressed would be an understatement. To make things even interesting, it said it noticed that we use storybook testing so it went ahead and added couple of storybook tests as well.
I keep hearing good things however I have not yet seen any meaningful results for the stuff I would use such a tool for.
I’ve been working on network function optimization at hundreds of gigabit per second for the past couple of years. Even with MTU-sized packets you are only given approximately 200 ns for processing (this assumes without batching). Optimizations generally involve manual prefetching and using/abusing NIC offload features to minimize atomic instructions (this is also running on arm, where atomic fetch and add in gcc is compiled into a function that does lw, ll, sc and takes approximately 8 times the regular memory access time for a write). Current AI assisted agents cannot generate efficient code that runs at line rate. There are no textbooks or blogs that give a detailed explanation of how these things work. There are no resources for it to be trained on.
You’ll find a similar problem if you try to prompt them to generate good RDMA code. At best you’ll find something that barely works, and almost always of the code cannot efficiently utilize the latency reduction RDMA provides over traditional transport protocols. The generated code usually looks like how a graduate CS student may think RDMA works, but is usually completely unusable, either requiring additional PCIe round-trips or has severe thrashing issues with main memory.
My guess is that these tools are ridiculously good at stuff it can find examples of online. However for stuff that have no examples, it is woefully under prepared and you still need a programmer to manually do the work line by line.
Never let the develper test his own code!
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The modern world needs to change. Humans are getting more and more depressed, broken, struggling and mentally ill just to get more and more exposed to ads, social pressure and the lot.
Humans are creative family based animals, not machines that need to be forced into doing the same stuff over and over again all their lives.
A 4 day work week is a good start, but what’s really needed is a rather more drastic change to enable humanity as a whole and individually.
Long term view: Basic universal income with robots and AI doing most of the work is in theory doable and such similar ideas.
It’s just that the existing system is not only rusted tight, but also being held alive by those who benefit from the rusted thing and those who fear change.
The modern world needs to change. Humans are getting more and more depressed, broken, struggling and mentally ill just to get more and more exposed to ads, social pressure and the lot.
This is by design. People are rightfully criticizing the US for barely protesting our fascist regime. But everyone is either living paycheck to paycheck or well aware how quickly their savings will burn away if they get fired. So protests in the middle of the week, when politicians MIGHT see it, are a no go. And weekend protests mostly are ineffectual and just antagonize people who “just want some peace and quiet on their day off”
UBI is definitely something we have needed for decades now. I personally come down on the side of UBI for basic living expenses but encourage people to work for luxuries and advancement (and if that sounds like the dystopia of Mars in The Expanse…). But we need something so that people can actually live without a job as we put more and more work into automating those jobs away.
As for the topic at hand: I was fortunate enough to have a 9/80 job for a number of years (basically every other Friday off) and loved the schedule. And it is why I am so skeptical of the 4/40 movement and am increasingly suspicious it is a poison pill.
Because it isn’t like the workload is going to drop. So people are going to be expected to get a full week’s work done in four days. For some that is going to be trivial because they have such a small workload (that they are super eager to find ways to use AI to automate…). For others? That means early mornings and late nights and even faster burnout where they have to fit every single errand and the like into that Friday off and have even less energy to do anything on the weekend.
Like I said, I loved my 9/80 and it was really nice for making me value that every other Friday off and try to do something with it. But the number of times I had to swap a Friday last minute because of meetings or just come in for a half day to get a deliverable done…
And the logical reality is that companies will decide 4/40 is good for productivity… and pay people 90% of their former salaries because “We respect the work you are doing but you also only work four days a week…”. 90% of already stagnating salaries during a time of global inflation.
The root issue is that all of the additional productivity is captured at the top, and none of it is dispersed among the greater company. Even reinvestment is now gone, replaced with stock buybacks, which were illegal for a number of years.
In short, there’s no rising tide that lifts all boats, so debating work schedules and optimal hours is still a wasted endeavor. Labor needs an entire overhaul, or we will see a return to more drastic measures, which is the cycle that history has repeated time and again. Work, without prosperity, has no intrinsic value. Particularly when workers produce more than ever, and their efforts unmeritoriously enrich a few.
Imo, 4 10s is a great schedule. The talks about 4 day work weeks focus all on salary workers, and leaves how the hourly working stiffs who deserve it just as much. Everyone I know thinks 4 10s are the dream. Since with manufacturing and warehouse work, it needs to get done. And there’s barely any downtime to cut out. 4 10s are a great compromise.
I agree with you. Regardless of the state of the world, we should stay optimistic and work toward that goal, instead of surrendering to defeatism.
If it’s not a 32hr workweek, I don’t wanna hear about it. There are some jobs in tech on indeed that are advertising 4x10s, fuck that shit.
This article specifically states 4x32. So that’s good. Should be in the title but I’m a pedant.
Everyone should, every job should be able to take advantage of this. Hire more people to compensate.
Billionaires don’t want this, so I’m super pessimistic. But if we keep talking about it and pushing for it, maybe someday…
Edit: 4x8 not 4x32…
4x10 is tough, I don’t wanna imagine doing 4x32… scnr
Oops lol
I actually find a 4x10 shift to be a great option but that’s the key, it’s an option where I work. Not mandatory and not for everyone. I really enjoyed the three day weekend. I think 4x10 as an option is a great choice if companies insist on 40 hour work weeks but moving to 4x8 (32 hour) weeks is a much better standard without a doubt.
I guess it depends on the kind of job but at least with focus heavy tasks like programming I can already notice my error rate increase significantly by hour 7 or so. I can’t imagine working 10 hours a day without spending half of the next day fixing stupid mistakes from being overly tired.
I find that I’m pretty much useless after 4 hours. I usually do a 4 hour stretch during the day and then hop back on for another 2 hours when the kids are down and that seems to be the most productive for me.
You get to actually work on your code?
Instead of 6 hours of meetings it’ll just be 8 hours of meetings
Would love to see how this affects trades type jobs(please let me do the short week too)
Great concept, now to find out how they sabatoge it, or ignore the results or just squash it. Just like all the work from home results from work from home after covid, with report after report of productivity going up, only for then every major tech company to decide to roll it all back.
CEO will come out and say employees are more productive when forced to work 5 days a week. When asked to see the data, they will say trust me, I’ve seen the internal studies from a Big Tech company. Same exact playbook as work from home.
Or, “now you work 4 days a week, who wants to earn more working day 5?!!”
It’s like if ever there were a 3 day week, asholes would get two jobs and eventually forcing everyone to do that too to just survive.
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4 day workweek is probably the best we can get, lower it and some morherfucker will take two jobs and screw up the economy.
