'We may see a dazzling array of products and services spawned by AI, but few of us will be able to buy them.' 'We may see a dazzling array of products and services spawned by AI, but few of us will be able to buy them.' The bogus four-day workweek that AI supposedly'frees up' Business leaders tout AI as a path to shorter weeks and better balance. The front-page headline in a recent Washington Post was breathless: "These companies say AI is key to their four-day workweeks. " The subhead was euphoric: "Some companies are giving workers back more time as artificial intelligence takes over more tasks." As the explained: "more companies may move toward a shortened workweek, several You may have come across similar articles in Fortune magazine and the New York Times. The AI spin brigade is in full force. Business leaders are rhapsodizing about how AI will free their employees to take more time off. Zoom's Eric Yuan told the Times that "A.I. can make all of our lives better, why do we need to work for five days a week?

Time Warp: The Gap Between Developers' Ideal vs Actual Workweeks in an AI-Driven Era Sukrit Kumar, Drishti Goel, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, B. Ashok, Chetan Bansal Georgia Institute of T echnology, Microsoft, Microsoft Research, University of California, Irvine Abstract --Software developers balance a variety of different tasks in a workweek, yet the allocation of time often differs from what they consider ideal. Identifying and addressing these deviations is crucial for organizations aiming to enhance the productivity and well-being of the developers. In this paper, we present the findings from a survey of 484 software developers at Microsoft, which aims to identify the key differences between how developers would like to allocate their time during an ideal workweek versus their actual workweek. Our analysis reveals significant deviations between a developer's ideal workweek and their actual workweek, with a clear correlation: as the gap between these two workweeks widens, we observe a decline in both productivity and satisfaction. By examining these deviations in specific activities, we assess their direct impact on the developers' satisfaction and productivity. Additionally, given the growing adoption of AI tools in software engineering, both in the industry and academia, we identify specific tasks and areas that could be strong candidates for automation. In this paper, we make three key contributions: 1) We quantify the impact of workweek deviations on developer productivity and satisfaction 2) We identify individual tasks that disproportionately affect satisfaction and productivity 3) We provide actual data-driven insights to guide future AI automation efforts in software engineering, aligning them with the developers' requirements and ideal workflows for maximizing their productivity and satisfaction. I NTRODUCTION In software engineering, the productivity and satisfaction of developers are pivotal factors that influence both individual performance, customer experience and ultimately, organizational success [1], [2]. The day-to-day activities which define a developer's workweek encompass a broad spectrum of tasks; from coding and designing new systems, to preparing documents, attending meetings, on-boarding new employees, adhering to security and compliance tasks, etc [3]. Each of these tasks is integral to the software development life cycle. Ideally, developers would prefer to allocate their time across these tasks in a way that optimizes both productivity and satisfaction-- this can be referred to as their'ideal workweek'. However, in practice, their'actual workweek', can vary significantly from their'ideal' due to fluctuating workloads, shifting organizational priorities, dependencies on other teams, technical challenges, the influence of the work environment, etc [4], [5], [6].

Despite outstanding processes in many tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) still lack accuracy when dealing with highly technical domains. Especially, telecommunications (telco) is a particularly challenging domain due the large amount of lexical, semantic and conceptual peculiarities. Yet, this domain holds many valuable use cases, directly linked to industrial needs. Hence, this paper studies how LLMs can be adapted to the telco domain. It reports our effort to (i) collect a massive corpus of domain-specific data (800M tokens, 80K instructions), (ii) perform adaptation using various methodologies, and (iii) benchmark them against larger generalist models in downstream tasks that require extensive knowledge of telecommunications. Our experiments on Llama-2-7b show that domain-adapted models can challenge the large generalist models. They also suggest that adaptation can be restricted to a unique instruction-tuning step, dicarding the need for any fine-tuning on raw texts beforehand.

Artificial intelligence (AI) signals the beginning of a revolutionary period where technological advancement and social change interact to completely reshape economies, work paradigms, and industries worldwide. This essay addresses the opportunities and problems brought about by the AI-driven economy as it examines the effects of AI disruption on the IT sector and information technology education. By comparing the current AI revolution to previous industrial revolutions, we investigate the significant effects of AI technologies on workforce dynamics, employment, and organizational procedures. Human-centered design principles and ethical considerations become crucial requirements for the responsible development and implementation of AI systems in the face of the field's rapid advancements. IT education programs must change to meet the changing demands of the AI era and give students the skills and competencies they need to succeed in a digital world that is changing quickly. In light of AI-driven automation, we also examine the possible advantages and difficulties of moving to a shorter workweek, emphasizing chances to improve worker productivity, well-being, and work-life balance. We can build a more incslusive and sustainable future for the IT industry and beyond, enhancing human capabilities, advancing collective well-being, and fostering a society where AI serves as a force for good by embracing the opportunities presented by AI while proactively addressing its challenges.

It seems that it was only yesterday that the media was filled with stories about workers calling the shots. There were the work-from-homers who refused to come back to the office after the pandemic was long over. There were the "quiet quitters" who proudly – and publicly – admitted that, even though they were collecting a paycheck from their employer they weren't doing much at all during the day except looking for another job. And then there's the group of workers who were advocating for "bare minimum Mondays" because apparently, a five-day workweek was just too much to bear. During the past few years, we've heard employees publicly demand unlimited paid time off, four-day workweeks, wellness sabbaticals, gigantic bonuses to switch jobs and even "pawternity leave" – getting time off when you adopt a puppy. Facing labor shortages, customer demands and supply chain headaches, most employers caved.

The idea of the four-week workweek is not new. Louis Hyman, a historian of work and business at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, explained that the current five-day workweek composed of eight-hour days was born of factory worker strikes in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as nationwide union strength in the years following World War I. After workers pressured the likes of Henry Ford and eventually the United States government to adopt the five-day workweek, there were widespread calls for a four-day workweek. Recently, the concept has resurfaced. Companies as large as Panasonic have implemented versions of it, as have video game studios like "Guardians of the Galaxy" developer Eidos-Montreal and indie studios Vodeo Games and KO_OP.

The 89 people who work at Buffer, a company that makes social-media management tools, are used to having an unconventional employer. Everyone's salary, including the CEO's, is public. All employees work remotely; their only office closed down six years ago. And as a perk, Buffer pays for any books employees want to buy for themselves. So perhaps it is unsurprising that last year, when the pandemic obliterated countless workers' work-life balance and mental health, Buffer responded in a way that few other companies did: It gave employees an extra day off each week, without reducing pay--an experiment that's still running a year later. "It has been such a godsend," Essence Muhammad, a customer-support agent at Buffer, told me. Miraculously--or predictably, if you ask proponents of the four-day workweek--the company seemed to be getting the same amount of work done in less time. It had scaled back on meetings and social events, and employees increased the pace of their day. Nicole Miller, who works in human resources at Buffer, also cited "the principle of work expanding to the time you give it": When we have 40 hours of work a week, we find ways to work for 40 hours.

Although a project 16 years in the past, the aftermath of "Battle for Middle-earth" made overt what happened behind-the-scenes as the video game industry grew from small teams to major productions involving hundreds. Lasting fallout from the game's creation made long hours and developer treatment an issue warranting attention. "Battle for Middle-earth" became the catalyst for studios to begin rethinking their approach, in part due to widespread public outcry and young developers realizing their workweeks were anything but normal. Even a decade and a half later, crunch is still prevalent in the industry. Earlier this year, CD Projekt Red's extended development of "Cyberpunk 2077" raised ire after the studio reneged on an earlier promise to avoid crunch, forcing six day workweeks on its employees.

Are four-day workweeks the future? Several businesses have already made the switch, citing improved productivity, happier employees, better retention, and faster hiring. To attain a true four-day (32-hour) workweek, many organizations would have to (A) hire more talent to pick up the slack or (B) accept a less productive year. Neither choice would be useful, but there is a third option coming down the pike: artificial intelligence. AI will be able to improve productivity to the point where working hours can be feasibly reduced for any business, writes Jonathan Crane, Chief Operating Officer at IPsoft.

Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma thinks that artificial intelligence (A.I.) will allow humans to work 12-hour workweeks. Ma made that statement while sharing a stage with Tesla CEO Elon Musk at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. "I think people should work three days a week, four hours a day," Ma said, adding: "I think that because of artificial intelligence, people will have more time to enjoy being human beings. I don't think we'll need a lot of jobs." Musk, who helped co-found OpenAI, a semi-non-profit dedicated to mitigating any existential risk from A.I., also offered that computers will surpass humans "in every single way" (per CNBC).