The common sentiment in articles like these is to try to appease to the owner; "look, the productivity!". We seem so subjugated by this state of affairs that worker happiness and health is not allowed to be an end in itself.
"Appeasing the owner" with promises of higher productivity might be the best strategy for passing these changes.
When given a choice between more money and more free time everyone around me chooses money and prestige.
You can certainly choose to work for a 40h company instead of a 60h company but the latter type of company doesn't seem to have any problems recruiting.
Given that's the distribution, you can't say people won't don't want to elect for <40 for less pay, it's not a really a choice in the current environment.
Oh god. America is even worse than I thought.
>It's typically not an accepted proposition to offer to work 4 days for proportionally less pay
I currently have a 40 hour work where I can set my own hours and earn "flex time" (future PTO) for any hours over 40.
I am paid well now, but I could certainly earn more by switching to company that would expect me to work more than 40 hours.
The people complaining about working extra are absolutely choosing more time and more money.
It's a company wide thing, so that helps.
Partly I think that's an efficiency thing - if you're critical path on a task, having you available when everyone else is becomes worth a large multiple of your salary. Partly I suspect it's just about not opening the floodgates, where people either resent you or take the same deal.
I wonder what the real cut would be, though? For work like software where adding shifts can't be done cleanly, you risk all kinds of major benefit, payroll-tax, and hardware/facilities costs. Still, there have to be programmers willing to take a 50% pay cut for a 33% hour cut.
(There's an essay somewhere for programmers about how to ask a manager for this, which is full of notes on how they'll be confused and try to reject it without considering it.)
If you're in the right places, you'll definitely see people who value free time over money and prestige.
I had to stop because of how lonely and isolating it was and how I couldn't maintain any relationships with my girlfriends and the 99% of my peers that were back home working 60h a week.
Look around you and count how many people are working overtime on their own, sacrificing their life for free food, a fuzzball table, the expectations of 0.1% equity down the road, the hope of giving a good impression to their manager, the expectations of a raise later for hard work, or the pressure to work night and week-end unpaid on-call.
When not thinking about it, people choose neither money not free time :D
I suppose I can understand the conspiracy theory of "they want you to only have work friends", but I really don't understand "they're replacing a good raise with a $100 ping-pong table". It's just not a sane model of what's happening, keeping employees in the building is not inherently profitable.
1) Keeping tech employees in the building is profitable.
2) In tech companies in particular, you don't have to be at work behind a computer to be productive.
Once you both understand that these things are true and correct, you can begin to understand the business of the SV and why these perks come to be.
While people are in the office, they are with co-worker, thinking about work, talking about work, progressing on their work. And the magic thing is you don't have to pay them for it, because they ain't working officially.
A bad thing happen in production late? Fine, they're already there and they won't even think that fixing it is doing actual work because they are already there. That foosball table was way cheaper than paying overtime.
How about serving breakfast at 9 am and dinner at 19? Then people who wants both will stay. Most likely, people who are a bit close to one or the other might extend their schedule slightly just to grab it. But no way they think of it as extra work.
What universe do you live in? In my universe, this is simply not true. No tech company is going to allow you to work, say, 30 hours a week for 75% of your salary, plus full health benefits. And taking a months-long sabbatical means you don't keep your job, and you have a hard time getting a new one because of a resume gap, which employers absolutely hate.
I did it myself for years modulo the health insurance part (we have universal healthcare in my country).
Previously I've worked every 4th week off.
These days I do contracts which provides some nice gaps if you don't try and line something up before the current one finished.
It's been possible to take a year off - I was using that to work on my own projects, so that went on my c.v.
Early retirement is just something I don't see happening for a salaried worker in Sweden. Comparatively low salaries (for developers), high real estate prices and high taxes makes that pretty impossible. But now I have the choice of either taking a day off or pay 61% of my salary for that day to the government.
That is the most exceptional thing about the trial: that it happened at all in a climate where collective bargaining is declining and the decline of the concept of a stable job.
Well, sounds like Swedish unions need to show what they're for and get more forward-thinking.
Furthermore, there's basically no historical basis for increased workers rights/benefits coming from business owners.
So the argument commonly takes the form of, "Well you're actually paying for something when an employee doesn't seem to be doing anything."