IT's future--how about 20-hour work weeks?

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It's about selfishness

If I were to walk into a company and say "I have 30 tools that will allow me to work only 20 hours per week yet be as productive as 2 full-time employees, will you hire me?", I think that would work out well.

Experience may only help a little bit. The whole reason that IT can move offshore is because that is why IT exists, to make it easier to perform the tasks that typically took someone who was very knowledgable, etc. Now all you need is a tool to do mosts tasks and then you can automate that tool and voila, now you've just put yourself out of a job.

Will a 20 hour week come to pass? Probably not, however, I would rather hire someone who could adapt new technology faster than someone else and if they can do this then the math works out. For example:

If Person A wanted to work 20 hours per week and they could build tools to convert human process time into an automated solution say 100 hours of tool time for every 1000 hours human time to an automated time of say 10 hours (support, etc.) then you have a factor of 100 to 1 meaning that one worker effectively replaced 100 people and had a capacity of replacing (2000 hours / year (avg work year 40 hours * 50 weeks) / 100 hours / tool) = (20 tools / year * 1000 hours / humans tool) / 2000 hours / year) = 10 humans - support which ~ 1 person for every 200 tools...

Dimensions:
Tools / year * Tool hours / human = tool hours / human year
(tool hours / human tool year) / hours / year = human

Suffice to say this is the way the math works. If you want to be more vital and work a 20 hour week you need to demonstrate that you can replace the work of multiple people for the same price...heck if someone had enough talent to work 1 hour and be as productive as 10 highly productive people in a given week then why wouldn't I pay a premium for that?

Posted by: THEE WOLF   Posted on: 06/26/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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