They give you 20℅ 'off' to do stuff they need?!
Either they want me to solve their problems and plan this with me to do it like normal work, which IT IS or they want me to do my own thing and don't bother me if they can't use this......
Sounds like all this crap loke pingpong, Snacks and billiard tables to me :D
It's 20% of the time you're paid to work on things that aren't necessarily part of your core responsibilities but still have a plausible positive impact to the company, even if it's just goodwill and team building.
It was never claimed to be a 4 day work week.
Unfortunately we didn't have 20% time. It's one of those perks that actually sounds great to me (free food, meh).
How's the conversation going to go?
"Can I spend every Friday learning this new web framework? No, we don't use it, but I think you should be supporting me increasing my skill set. Yes I still expect to be paid."
Really?
I have the feeling most great ideas in our field get bastardized by people who know nothing about it.
Either way, it's still fucked that working and living isn't an even 50% split. It should be.
Hours of living on weekdays per week, exclude sleep: 6 * 5 = 30.
Hours of living on weekends per week, exclude sleep: 32.
Total hours living per week: 62
Total hours working per week: 50
You're right, it's not an even 50% split.
There's 6 hours of free time a day, plus 32 hours on the weekend.
Three nights a week I watch a movie or a couple of episodes on netflix (90 minutes), I play an hour or two of games (90 minutes), I write code for another hour or two (90 minutes), and the rest of the time is spent eating dinner.
Two nights a week, I forgo gaming and netflix to hangout with family and friends. I still manage to code. It may be on the train, but I do it.
And there's the weekend.
You know what? I have a good life, and fucked or not, I am grateful for it.
If a company is paying you for your time, what do you expect to be doing, if not to do what the company wants you to do?
If you want to not do what others want you to do, and still receive a regular pay check, that's called taking on welfare.
An even 50/50 split would be working no more days than you live--taking the day itself as the unit of measure. By the week, that means recognizing there's something inherently off with the notion that it's at all balanced to exchange 5 days to an employer so you can get 2 days to yourself in return.
If you want to make yourself feel better by counting how many hours you can squeeze out of a day for yourself, that's fine. I doubt I'm the only person who thinks that is no way to live.
In contrast to your example that, to me, seems insanely driven by the tyranny of the clock, a different take:
There are 365 days per year. When I decided years ago I wanted to achieve work-life balance, that left 182 days for working. By the typical American work week, if I was working a job, I'd be expected to surrender 251 days (for 2016). That's 70 days too many.
So, there are 183 days of free time per year.
Some of those days, I binge-watch Netflix. I don't even know how much time that totals.
Some days, I play games all night until the sun comes up.
Some days, I dabble with some code related to something I want to play around with, experiment, learn, rebuild, whatever.
Some days, I see the computer and say, "Fuck you, computer. It's gorgeous outside."
I wake up whenever by body wakes up. I shower. Grab some food or a meal shake. Head to the gym for a couple hours. Maybe take a nap, read, or just sit and breathe.
Some days I'm just sick of being at home, so I leave. I'm not counting any hours here, so I call up some friends out of town and say I'm coming their way for a couple days. I head out of state. I leave the country. I think of who I haven't seen in a while and get together with them.
> If a company is paying you for your time, what do you expect to be doing, if not to do what the company wants you to do? If you want to not do what others want you to do, and still receive a regular pay check, that's called taking on welfare.
That's an oddly binary and ideologically ridiculous notion you have there. As if there are no other ways to exist and subsist besides welfare and doing what others want you to do to receive a paycheck. I mean, come on. This is HN. This place exists for people who don't want to do what others want them to do in exchange for a paycheck.
P.S. I never said you shouldn't be grateful for having a good life. I think it's great when people recognize how good they have things, and are genuinely grateful for it. I was picking on a very subtle but important nuance in your original statement that I felt important to highlight. It's fine if you don't get the nuance, or don't care for it. For me, I like to remember where the agency and empowerment lies in my life. I'd never be able to stand a situation in which I actually had to think that an employer gave me a couple days of my life on the weekends before coming back to work.
Main point aside, I think it's important to realise our entire lives are given to us by the circumstances and fate of the universe itself. My job is one part of the universe.