This is classic antisocial engineer thinking. The principal benefits of synchronicity are all social: it enables human contact, live conversations and shared context.
No one cares that a million toilets have to flush at the same time. We invent bigger and better sewage pipes, some people get paid to build them, and everything's fine. Lots of people like to watch the new Game of Thrones episode at the same time and then talk about it with their coworkers at the office the next day.
It really is a minority of people who think otherwise. I run a heavily asynchronous, remote company, with fully remote customers, and mostly remote employees. I bias toward hiring locally just so I have someone to talk to.
> No one cares that a million toilets have to flush at the same time.
People care that they sit in two hours of rush hour traffic per day. There is zero synchronicity when you're staring at the license plates in front of you.
This is a problem of a car centric society. I’ve been in places where public transport is the norm and travel was a lot easier and more efficient, regardless the time of the day. Yes, obviously during “rush hour”, the public transport would be a lot more full, but often frequency is increased to compensate.
(Sure, there’s places where even that isn’t enough and the public transport pipe is congested. We’ve all seen those videos of trains in some places in asia, for example)
> Yes, obviously during “rush hour”, the public transport would be a lot more full, but often frequency is increased to compensate.
And during rush hour, the highways are a lot more full, and often capacity (number of lanes) is increased to compensate. If people didn't typically commute at the same time, then busses, trains, and car transport would all benefit from a reduction in required peak capacity. This is not in any way specific to cars.
The difference is that those extra lanes take up physical space, which goes unused outside of rush hour, while increasing frequency of eg trains or trams does not. For example, I was recently in the US and during the day the 6-lane-each-way highways were completely empty, almost like a ghost town, but during rush hour, they were at a complete standstill.
> If people didn't typically commute at the same time...
> The difference is that those extra lanes take up physical space, which goes unused outside of rush hour, while increasing frequency of eg trains or trams does not.
To increase the capacity of trains and busses, you need more trains/busses, larger trains/busses, more train/bus operators, more electricity/gas usage, more storage, more maintenance, and so on. And those same huge trains and busses also become near-empty late at night.
Yes, the baseline efficiency of a train or bus is potentially better, making all the standard tradeoffs. But everyone commuting at the same time causes similar problems with both. I'm not arguing against public transit, here, I'm arguing against the claim upthread that "This is a problem of a car centric society", which is orthogonal to a staggered commute.
But walking with thousands of other people is nice, except in places where large sidewalks were turned over to cars. Old photos of ranhattan show shockingly large walkways which were later turned in to asphalt.
> This is classic antisocial engineer thinking. The principal benefits of synchronicity are all social: it enables human contact, live conversations and shared context.
That's post hoc reasoning. Individuals don't globally optimize to synchronize everything. In fact, most individuals have good reasons for things to be desynced socially - so that they e.g. don't have to take a day off to visit a doctor or submit paperwork to a bank.
I suspect though that there is a process through which society tends to keep itself in sync. Not sure what it was, though.
> Lots of people like to watch the new Game of Thrones episode at the same time and then talk about it with their coworkers at the office the next day.
Does this still happen, given the rise of the torrents, on-demand streaming, and the way TV shows distribution tend to be spread out over time? (Maybe it does, I'm an antisocial engineer, so I might have missed it.)
Lots of people still watch regular TV. I can't imagine it either, but apparently it's true.
For super popular stuff like GoT our big sporting events like Superbowl or even bigger like World Cup finale you'll always have it. So maybe we will always need that max toilet fishing capacity of we don't want to not be able to flush once every year or so?
I suppose you're right; for super-popular, nation-scale things like Superbowl or World Cup, for which there is a strong value in seeing it live, there's no going around peak flushing :).
Given we have things like Twitter it would matter a lot. I also vividly texting with friends and family on different continents during the last world cup's Germany-Brazil game. A friend actually did have a slight delay and he received my text saying that it's 5-0 before he saw the goal. That was without intentional delay and already was a spoiler although it didn't matter much on that case.
> Does this still happen, given the rise of the torrents, on-demand streaming, and the way TV shows distribution tend to be spread out over time?
Those are all near instant. They compete with cable TV.
One reason it happens is that right after the broadcast, Facebook will be full with jokes and spoilers. Whether you see that depends on your bubble, and whether you use/visit Facebook. Same could be true with school & work.
If there were no set hours how would you be able to depend on the weekday being when you could go to the bank or the doctor? What you're talking about is being the beneficiary of the very thing you're decrying.
I would expect that one of the hundred thousand of local bank branches (I have no idea why banks keep opening on every other street these days) would have opening hours that would align with my time off. As it is now, they all are perfectly synchronized to be open during regular working ours, i.e. when most people are at work.
I guess you live in a denser area than I do. If I wanted to go talk to the guys who have my auto loan, for instance, and the closest office is closed, it's a pretty significant difference if I have to go to the next-closest one.
I live in Kraków, Poland. It's a major city of this country, with population around 1M. Maybe it's a Polish phenomenon, but literally every major street has multiple bank branches on it. Of the bank I'm a customer of, I have 3 branches within 10 minutes from my home, on foot. I keep wondering what's the point in having so many branches everywhere, all of which have synced opening hours anyway.
One suspects you've never lived in a place where all the grocery stores have bankers' hours. This arrangement makes it difficult for a working single person to obtain groceries.
I never understood that. It drove me especially nuts when I lived in Germany where opening house were much more limited.
I'd love to see what happens if certain stores radically change their hours. Opening hours from 6am-9am & 5am-11am always seemed much more sensible to me. Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?
If I had enough money to an experiment like this not endangering my future, I'd own a store just to see what would happen.
When I was in Berlin I was surprised grocery stores were open so short on Sunday. However, regardless of religion, it has a side effect that horeca workers (which -I kid you not- is tough labour) can have a guaranteed half day off on that one day. That's a disadvantage of the 24/7 economy: workers who do certain tough labour jobs who are replaceable (a relatively non-unique skillset) have less rights.
> Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?
What happens at say grocery stores is they have less workers at the non-peak times, and workers do different tasks at different times of the day. Instead of being clerk, they for example replenish from the warehouse or throw away items which are past their due date. You'd have only 1 or even 0 clerks, but there's also hardly any customers. Meantime, all these workers can still be productive elsewhere.
In your specific example I can imagine a clerk doing inventory or online orders during downtime. Though it depends also on the size of the store.
As for who buys that, grandpa & grandma, the guy who took a day off to buy a new TV (tho nowadays one can buy TVs online just as well, and why not [1]), or the mom who's a housewife or has a part-time job (latter being very common for females here in The Netherlands).
[1] I'm getting on a tangent here geez but if I'd buy the TV online here in the Netherlands I'd also have 2 weeks to send it back for whatever reason other than warranty. I don't have that right if I buy it in brick & mortar store other than warranty. A good reason to shop online indeed!
That's true as far as it goes but I don't see the relevancy. For one thing, I think most of us buy groceries more than we need to interact with a bank clerk or a doctor. But beyond that, if we waved a wand and declared grocery stores were now open between 5:00 and 10:00 PM, we'd just be replacing one tyranny with another (and it would after all be dependent on most customers keeping 9-5 hours). If we just started randomly distributing working days and hours there's no particular guarantee my day off doesn't align with the supermarket's (and anyway the idea that a supermarket isn't time-dependent seems questionable since the whole thing revolves around somewhat time-sensitive deliveries).
Relevance? You appeared to be in favor of "synchronicity"? I'm against it, because for me it meant going grocery shopping on my lunch break, which was inconvenient. I expect most humans would also find that inconvenient.
Exactly my thinking. Who care's if Friday is a social construction. It allows people to meet up, talk, and relax before they all have two days off together. How beautiful is that? If people were all working at different times and on different schedules, how would friends and family ever meet up in groups larger than two on any regular basis?
I think you can look a bit beyond just that though.
Think about tourist locations. Intense seasonality means we have to build up huge infrastructure for a peak ... Month? Per year. Mainly because kids are off at a certain time of year. Hotels are emptier during the week. Dentist appointments are impossible to get on lunch breaks.
I agree that synchronicity is valuable because a phone call is 10x more information dense than an email sent 3 hours ago. But wouldn't it be interesting to add a bit of flexibility to everyone's work schedule and see what happens?
Aside: lots of industries are shift workers, and most low-income people work off of the Mon-Fri 9-5. It's oddly a pretty solved problem but we decided against adopting that for office work in most cases. I bet kids and school don't help things
> Aside: lots of industries are shift workers, and most low-income people work off of the Mon-Fri 9-5. It's oddly a pretty solved problem but we decided against adopting that for office work in most cases. I bet kids and school don't help things
But I mean, really, if you're obligated to keep a schedule anyway, don't you want to keep one that allows you to be awake during the day and sleep at night, and to generally be available for other commitments? I've done both and I'd take the 9:00-5:00 over the irregular schedule every time. Convenience scheduling a doctor's appointment or job interview doesn't make up for all the inconveniences.
This article describes exactly why the NS (Dutch Railways) provide a cheap card (which is even on sale like half the year) allowing one to get 40% off the fare provided they travel during off hours. The off hours are: mo - fr between 9 AM and 4 PM & from 6.30 PM till 6.30 AM, weekends, and holidays. If you check in, it counts from that time (even if you swap trains or travel for 3 hrs straight into peak hours).
There's a few more versions of the card which are essentially trying to achieve the same, just assume you travel in higher volume. For example, there's a more expensive version of the card which makes travel completely free in the weekends.
Thing is, people who work get the travel costs reimbursed from their employer so they generally don't care. Its up to the employer to adapt. And given you can game the logging in time I am not sure how effective it is to decrease congestion/pressure.
I've also noticed the effect on my partner's job. She works 4 days a week, and wants one day off. Well, the most popular days to take off are Wednesday (because it is in the middle of the week) and Friday. Same with taking days off. Some days and dates are popular, for social reasons. Someone who is antisocial won't have much understanding for that, just like you put.
The power system is another example. At times, the German electricity grid is operating on a surplus!
Yet another example is getting paid 150% of 200% during holidays such as Christmas (which is how it works in horeca).
Fascinating discussion, but just being against social behaviour won't change these situations. There needs to be incentive. Being antisocial or being OK with that with the benefit of receiving a discount seems like a great way to achieve this in situations where it makes sense. Does anyone know examples where it'd make sense, but where it isn't currently applied? Or where it has been tried locally, but isn't implemented world-wide? If you take the toilet flush example: we're not paying for toilet usage in our households (right..?) but we are paying for water. If the price of water would be dynamic based on current demand, and the current demand is transparent, that could decrease demand during peak times just like the other examples do. At the very least, those who cause the congestion pay for it, and pay for the extra costs attached to the peak's effect. On a side note, the thought of highly fluctuating water prices sends shills down my spine.
As a fully remote employee, I bias toward avoiding employers that have a bias toward hiring local.
Why? Because it tells me that something isn't right. That the company does not fully embrace remote work to it's logical end.
The company I work for has about 40 employees.... no office, many time zones and what appears to be no geographical bias. I fucking love it and would shudder if they started concentrating more employees near each other.
Intriguing blog post, but the analysis appears overly simplistic.
I'm going to go with the assumption with that individuals and private companies are rational. Therefore, they do what's best for them. Then the question becomes why a majority of individuals and private companies pick the synchronized schedule?
I believe that should be the angle of investigation, rather than creating theories about the grand mistakes the society makes. Everybody has more or less a brain you know :) And they can choose what's best for them. The question is why does the majority of people and firms choose the synchronized schedule?
There can be many reasons. I don't claim to know the answers. We can posit some theories, then test them through reasoning.
Number one reason might be: society needs a clock so that families can sync up. Drive kids to work. Help them with their homeworks. Cook. Eat family dinner. Both mom and dad go to work at the same time, so that they can be at home at the same time. You cannot delegate your interactions with your spouse or the kids :)
Single people and childless people do have more freedom. I remember the days where I used to go to work between 10-12am. Then leave around 7pm. Many of my single and childless friends are on a similar, shifted schedule.
So there you go. You can posit many other theories: E.g. market prices may not be dynamic enough for efficient allocation. That too might have a good reason (dynamic prices incur communication costs & may create confusion). So lack of incentives, too, must be a playing a role.
Weekday-weekday synchronicity too must have good reasons. Work gets done a lot better when your colleagues are around, you know :) Remote working hasn't caught up with the quality of face to face interaction.
Etc etc. The article misses many obvious things, imo.
That's a huge assumption, people frequently pick irrational solutions due to biases. Frequently people value simple solutions over complex ones, even when that complexity is valuable and necessary. I think the best thing we can say about this is "We haven't tried it, and we haven't thought about the ways it could go wrong".
We force children to wake up and go to school at a time that is not best for them.
And lots of people have less choice than you imply. They are working the job that they have and work the hours that they get. This is their "rational, best choice", but it isn't likely the one they would make if better options were particularly available.
Do rational self maximizing actors always produce globally rational maximized results? This is a type of efficient market hypothesis. If your in CS, its equivalent to saying that localized greedy elementwise optimizers are globally optimum. There exist games like the prisoners dilemma that produce the worst outcome given rational maximizes. If the original problem in question is that type of game then your comment is actually the overly simplistic analysis.
The work day is mostly set by companies, not workers, and often the people owning the company aren't even showing up to the office, so why would they care about congestion? The fact that many software engineers can waltz in at 10:00 is a sign of the relatively strong market for their work; many workers do not enjoy flexible hours. This seems like a hole in your analysis (though also in the article).
Have you read "Micromotive and Macrobehavior"? The entire book is about this phenomenon. It's a great read! Out national political debate could be hugely elevated by everyone having read this.
For the same reason that children go to school in classes based on their age rather than based on their progress.
Cost and complexity reduction.
These can come down in many areas and probably should to give people their own time back to do other things.
It's going to change slowly but surely. Already now many of the new generations are used to asynchronous structures it will only increase in the future as new generations appear.
Depending on your job you can hack the holiday mechanism to your advantage.
We were immigrants and little reason to care about the US holidays Thanksgiving and Independence Day. My mum, a physician always offered to cover those days and every other doctor in the (small) hospital took her up on it. Which meant whenever she wanted someone to be on call for her, she always had a huge number of people who owed her a favor.
This hack worked for Christmas too even though we did celebrate it (though just pressies and a meal — no family on the continent): people don’t like to get sick at Xmas so she never got called before the end of the day (and as a bonus she left us with all the washing up)
It might. I want to be at work as the same time as my team mates. My wife wants to be at work as the same time as hers. We both want to be home at the same time. Now my team mates have to be at work as the same time as my wife's...
That's not even taking vendors or customers into account we might be doing business with. Schooling for children currently primarily happening with all children in the same room doing the same thing at the same time also furthers this. Just these few examples already cover huge parts of society.
I have neither kids, nor did my wife actually have fixed working hours somewhere and yet my job is best done if I work the same hours as all the people who have those constraints. So any one of these can have a huge impact.
There is an assumption that most work environments are not like factories anymore.
I wonder how true is that, even in "modern" fields such as corporate software development or maybe accounting. It seems these are still overwhelmingly often series of short 2-3 hour tasks that depend on immediate input from others - for task definition, or details needed for implementation.
Also, as other comments mention, work is used for socializing. I know many people for whom work today is one of the major forms of social interaction. As a society, we just do not sit on benches in front of the houses, talking to neighbors as they pass by, anymore. That maybe for better of for worse, but it would be good to construct some alternatives, before we remove the synchronous workplace.
The fastest growing sectors are service and healthcare, where I think it actually does matter what time someone is in. The idea that "most" jobs are white-collar office jobs signals to me some lack of awareness on the part of the author here.
Not only that: there is a growing trend of requiring workers in low-wage jobs to show up and they'll only find out at the time they show up whether they're needed or just need to go home. Certainly a pretty convenient setup for employers.
Markets have better liquidity when all players are at the same time & place. It's possible that asynchronicity will come at the cost of liquidity - raising transaction costs.
That's a valid concern, but it is solely founded in a capitalistic point of view. For some people there is no more to life than raising their personal net worth, others have other aspects.
I don't think the point is capitalistic - others (above) have made similar points to this one. Many business and social activities are enriched when most participants are present.
This wasn't about money. Markets, in general, refer to exchange of things that we humans value. Since exchange is voluntary, both parties benefit. Liquidity means having someone around to have that exchange with.
Economics is much more than simple allocation of money. It's fundamentally about human wants and how to satisfy them.
There are a few aspects in which society continues to expect synchronicity. For instance, on average, more people wish to be awake when the sun is up, and asleep in the middle of the night, than vice versa. People expect to be able to reach services on the phone, or occasionally go to a shop in person. And, some services can only be provided in-person with both the service provider and customer present.
But yes, many things can and should be done in a far more staggered fashion.
Interestingly, and it's something I don't recall seeing a good explanation for, most services tend to be offered precisely at the same time majority of people are working - thus making them unavailable (or barely available) to the working population. See e.g. barbers, banks, etc.
In a mostly-synchronous society, “standard” working hours become somewhat desirable. Working 9-5ish typically maximises opportunities to see friends and family, and for parents it means they get to take advantage of free government-provided childcare (aka schools).
Plenty of places are open outside those hours, but they tend to be shops and services provided by relatively low status workers. Higher-status service workers (dentists, bankers, ...) generally seem to do better at resisting “unsociable” hours.
It’s an annoying situation, but can’t see it drastically improving without a widespread move away from synchrony.
It looks as a feature of culture. When there is a demand, no legal obstructions and cultural acceptance, then barbers, banks, shops work late into evening.
> In the case of the Underground network, there are times on some lines where trains arrive more frequently than every two minutes (pretty much as often as they can, given that the trains have to maintain a safe distance between each other and spend some time on the platform) and yet they still are packed between 8am and 9am. Any incident, however small, like someone holding up the doors, can result in a knock-on effect, delaying the whole line massively.
> Why are people doing this to themselves?
It is not as though they have any choice in the matter. However, if you've ever worked a job with irregular weekends you'll know that one thing that stinks about it is you can rarely coordinate stuff with friends and family on your days off. Also hard to do stuff like attend church.
In case the author sees this thread: the time labels for the weekday graph are wrong. The morning peak shows at about 0400, when it should be around 0800.
The weekend graph might have the same problem, since it ramps up before 0600, which is unlikely.
I would make a different argument about over-provisioning. Using infrastructure at maximum capacity means there's less of a safety margin and it's often unpleasant due to traffic or crowding. Reducing capacity in the name of efficiency doesn't seem like a good thing.
Instead I'd argue that using infrastructure at maximum capacity isn't something we necessarily need to do ten times a week. It needs to be tested, but maybe not that often?
What if I want to play recreational soccer or attend church services in fellowship with a few hundred fellow believers? This proposal completely discounts a whole range of non-work mass activities.
I haven't read the full article but my immediate criticism is that systems need the spikes and peaks that synchrony provides. If they didn't exist we'd have to simulate them to keep systems from being overly fragile. Yes, there's a power spike when everyone goes to the fridge during a commercial, but the need to handle that variation makes systems more robust.
On the other hand, many commuter systems run at a much lower frequency outside of peak hours. It seems like having them running at the same frequency day-round would not necessarily be a win in the environmental impact department. If that is your concern trains should be as close to capacity as possible at all times.
No one cares that a million toilets have to flush at the same time. We invent bigger and better sewage pipes, some people get paid to build them, and everything's fine. Lots of people like to watch the new Game of Thrones episode at the same time and then talk about it with their coworkers at the office the next day.
It really is a minority of people who think otherwise. I run a heavily asynchronous, remote company, with fully remote customers, and mostly remote employees. I bias toward hiring locally just so I have someone to talk to.