Hyperbole like this makes it difficult to take his arguments seriously, even if he makes some good points about the changing nature of work.<p>Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation?<p>It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, working long hours in the fields, barely achieving subsistence, sharecropping for feudal lords or tyrannical landlords.<p>Sure, work is changing, and many people are lucky to be able to detach from such schedules with exciting and unknown results for the future workplace. But those of us fortunate enough to have had access to 9-to-5 jobs would be tone deaf to act like it's such a traumatic experience, when so many people in the world would be so grateful to have such an opportunity.
What a load of shit. All the more clear as I'm traveling in a 3rd world country where people actually have to deal with difficult working conditions. I see people in their mid 70's doing long days of physical labor on a farm for dollars a day. Ask them how barbaric the 9-5 desk job is.<p>As the other commenter mentioned, hyperbole like this only ever damages a cause.<p>I think there are probably better ways to do work and as we move towards the connected future I think many of them will increase in popularity, but that's due to an increase in options from our already very open ended lives, not some struggle against imagined barbarity.
If nine to five is barbaric, what does that make jobs requiring you to wake up early and stay late? This guy seems to have a chip on his shoulder because of some bad workplace experiences and now seems to think every job sucks.<p>Jobs with regular, stable work hours are not simply there by corporate decree. People actually like having that predictability in their lives. It makes it a lot easier to budget your time when you have that block of time carved out where you're making money.<p>Now, this guy would say hey, you could work half the time if you quit your job and started your own business. Well, that doesn't match up with the experience of any of the business owners I know (they regularly work 12-16 hour days), but even it was true...now I have to run and operate my own business. I can't just show up and do good work and take home a paycheck. I have to deal with insurance, I have to deal with payroll, or I have to pay someone to deal with all of that. If the only benefit I get from that is saying, "but at least I don't have a boss," it's not even close to worth it.
Rather than going down the barbaric tone. When it comes to 9-5 jobs, I keep going back to city infrastructures.<p>Where I live in Toronto, all the highways and subways get clogged as everyone needs to make it to the office for 9-5. Everyone then complains about poor infrastructure, but then all cities keep building for a short burst peak traffic. Infrastructure is overbuilt for other times.<p>I can understand a lot of it is due to having kids (schools let out around 4pm) so everyone tries to streamline dropping kids off and picking them up from work.<p>I really wish everyone can try for a staggered approach to deal with congestion. I don't have a hard sync like picking up kids or anything like that yet so I avoid the normal envelopes around 9-5.<p>Many initiatives like Smart Cities are being rolled out but yea... I'm not a huge fan of the common 9-5 pattern.
At first blush, I was aghast at the idea of no weekends. Then I realized I am essentially on-call 24/7, even on vacations, as I'm the primary infrastructure person at my company. Yet, because it's well designed and managed, I do tend to have that free time.<p>The problem becomes when you don't have that free time because of constant work issues. I can't say a future without 100% free time is such a great place.
Look, we all know there are much harder jobs than a 9-5 office job. However, I think an interesting question is:<p>How <i>necessary</i> is the job? How much does the job satisfy human needs, or contribute to human well-being? If it simply doesn't, if its <i>only</i> function is institutional, why <i>should</i> we consider it anything less than barbaric, or even perverse? Institutions such as businesses exist to serve people, after all, and doing things the other way around has been at the heart of some of the 20th century's major atrocities.<p><a href="http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/" rel="nofollow">http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/</a><p>>Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.
First, I was a big Douglas Coupland fan when I was young. Especially because I was working at Microsoft shortly after Microserfs came out, and his writing resonated with my then 24-year-old male brain.<p>However, I just don't think his idea will ever scale to the general populace, though. He says, "people with internet brains are capable of doing huge amounts of work, quickly and from anywhere. " Yeah, probably a few. I think his opinion might be biased because he's an artist who has commercial success (he's essentially made it as a business owner/entrepreneur, which we know not everyone is capable of).<p>Anecdotal evidence: I'm currently working in an office where there's no way people around here could function without the same daily routine, without micro-management, without hard deadlines, etc. Yet, the company still manages to exist and be profitable.<p>He does make some other good points, if you can look past the flamboyant/hyperbolic sound bites:
* “Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.”
* More part-time jobs/partial employment
I personally disagree with premise (though a few points I must agree with),
I think the real problem is the lack of satisfaction in general. Because
some capitalistic societies are obessed with growth, we've created problems
for ourselves that are not only pointless, but exist in part, to employ
drones of people, who due to their own life circumstances, cannot say "no."<p>Once all jobs serve a visible, real purpose and those working said jobs
can feel the satisfaction of being a part of the "cause", this problem will
continue. 9-5 or not.<p>One example of this may be flipping burgers at McDonalds, versus stocking
planes that ship food rations to war-torn nations. Funny how similar
the jobs are, yet the purpose differs.
Perhaps the word "barbaric" is a bit much, but there is certainly an element of truth to what he's saying about the office being obsolete; at least in some professions.<p>For example, I am a software engineer, and there is literally no reason whatsoever for me to go into an office everyday. None. I am more productive when I'm remote, and working where, how, and when works best for me. I also have no emotional need for social camaraderie in the workplace, which some people do. My family meets my emotional needs, so I don't need social constructs foisted upon me by my employer. Being social for the sake of being social drains the life out of me and makes me less productive. I've worked in offices and I've worked remotely for almost 30 years, and remote work, at least for me, has proven time and again to work best.<p>While "barbaric" may be a hyperbolic choice of words, when describing the 9-to-5 grind, I do have to say that the reasons typically given for forcing engineers to work in a modern, open-office environments (e.g. "We need to collaborate") are shallow at best. These environments have been proven to cause more problems than they solve, so in this case, I'll have to side with Coupland, in spite of his embellishments. The collaboration excuse is especially annoying when we still use Slack to communicate, even when we are sitting two feet from each other.
He's been a successful author for over 25 years. I wonder if he really has much experience in a 9-5 career. When he was in that career, was he unhappy because it's an objectively bad experience? Or had he not found good jobs? Or was he never committed to that career because he dreamed of being a writer?<p>I enjoy my 9-5 career. I realize I'm lucky because I have a better experience than most, but I'm not singularly lucky or gifted to be in my position. I don't think I'm one of the few who doesn't consider it "barbaric."<p>I don't think it's necessarily universal to place a high value on "freeform scheduling" like he says and having structure to the day does have benefits.<p>> "Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing"<p>My work boils down to the difference between someone seeing one ad vs. another. I need money to live and this is what I'm good at. I don't pretend I'm making the world a better place but it's equally overdramatic to say the implications make the world worse. For better or worse or society is about the freedom to sell things and all the propserity and inequality that comes along with that. For all their flaws, a shift away from those fundamentals would take generations and people don't agree what they should be replaced with and there's no guarantee the replacement would be better.
This piece reeks of entitlement. If you love programming or speaking at conferences, sure you don't mind meshing it all together or follow necessary irregular schedule. But there are many people who just want to sell their labour and skills for money and go to their favorite hobbies - whatever they are - without money attached to them, be that woodworking or playing with your dog. Free scheduling should be an option, many people would like that, but calling the other option "barbaric" is tone deaf
I totally understand the people who think barbaric is too strong a term, but I'm not sure why they believe physical labor is such a terrible job. I've had physically harsh jobs before, construction, military, and they could also be 9 to 5, or sometimes they were more seasonal, it wasn't any worse. It was better in some ways, since the physicality of them made me stronger and probably had good mental effects on me. It was great to actually be out during the sunny hours of the day.<p>The 3rd world countries have it worse argument is a fallacy, the existence of a worse condition does not negate the negatives of another and we should be smart enough to address issues with both and improve issues with both simultaneously.<p>Having said that, I'm not sure the structure he describes sounds any better to me. At this point, I just wonder why work is still at the center of our lives. It seems possible to me with today's technology to organize a society in a way where we finally redistribute back the gains of automation and optimisation made in the last 200 years. I would love a society where you're free to work as little or as much as you want. Or where everyone is a part time worker. You can get two jobs if you want to work more. I don't have the answer to how it would all work, but I'd love to see a discourse about the possibility.
> Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing. They just want to hit their milestones and that’s it.<p>That's a hell of a strange line.<p>As far as I can see, people in tech spend way more time looking at the implications of tech work than anyone else does. (Except, perhaps, people like Coupland who are make their money from doing so.) Tech workers are responsible for much of the endless conversation on web privacy and AI risk and automation and gamification and all the rest. Which is how it should be, presumably - I assume architects spend more time looking at the implications of building design than the rest of us.<p>The best justification I can see is that he's just restricting a general, Stugeon's Law observation (90% of everyone don't look at implications) to one specific field.<p>There ought to be a name for making a true observation, but singling out one instance of it for no particular reason. It happens damned often.
I 'm sure there are plenty of people in HN who don't work 9-5 or work independently. It's an upgrade; for me its a kind of upgrade that one does not want to reverse (like moving from a small town to a city). 'Barbaric' is obviously hyperbole, but quitting the 9-5 lifestyle is a change promised by technology that hasn't yet been realized. Sectors like IT could have pioneered this shift, but for some reasons it did not happen (much like most IT workers do not work remotely, even if it's technically possible). I do think that work schedules deeply affect the structure of cities, and it would be nice to see some alternative arrangements, even as an experiment.
Highlights:<p><i>while most people like the notion of free time, actually having to deal with it is horrible. It’s a deal with the devil. At least when they’re employed they don’t have to deal with the freefall; the nothingness of free time.</i> (Sounds Heiddegerian - the dread that comes with freedom)<p><i>...This constant influx of news and data means we’ve come to perceive time differently. The future used to be a far-off thing, but now we experience it at the same time as the present, he contends...</i><p>Obvious: <i>“The winners in this labour force will be the people who have an actual skill,” he says. “Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.”</i>
> Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.<p>This advice from Coupland is the best part of the article, because it uncovers the intended audience: telephone sanitizers. [1]<p>> Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing. They just want to hit their milestones and that’s it.<p>This statement actually works for about every profession.<p>[1] If you don't get the reference: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgafrincham" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgafrincham</a>
Interesting read.<p>I was born 1980 so I straddle the web when it hit mass market adoption.<p>The differences are indeed marked, my father did the same job for 20 years, I can't imagine that now.
This article was a difficult read for me due to all the hand waving and "in the future so and so will happen." That said, I have a lot of respect for Mr. Coupland. Microserfs is still one of the best books I've ever read, and really hits home in so many ways.
What would be his answer when I tell him that a nine-to-five hour job would mean more free-time and vonsiderably less stress to me while being at least as productive as now, constantly sheduling things for latency instead of throughput?
Different strokes for different folks. I imagine some people enjoy the structure. Other people don't. That's why some people enjoy life in the office while others enjoy writing objectively crappy novels like "JPod."
Not that I'm one to disagree, because day jobs are fucking bullshit, but...<p>I worry that as advanced technology continues to unfurl evermore convenience into our lives, how spoiled will we become?