Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

This sounds awesome but it only works for time-insensitive service provision. Where there's a relatively fixed amount of work to do, but you don't have to constantly be in contact with your customer.

I'm a contractor. I have to pick up the phone any time of day or night or I lose a client. Most of my friends and family work at varying levels of healthcare provision. They can't just send everybody home on Friday. They can't even do that at the weekend. And retail faces similar issues. Plus they're still fighting online sales.

Estate planners are basically the slowest possible service. They could probably work a two day week and let the answerphone and inboxes pick up the grunt work. It's neat that this works for them, but —and this isn't just jealousy— I don't expect this to become widespread any time soon.

Not everyone would be off the same days. In one position I worked we did 12 hour shifts that included a paid lunch. The schedule was 3 days work 4 days off, then 4 days work 3 days off. In a two week period you actually worked 84 hours instead of the normal 80 hours in two week. The difference though was we accomplished a lot in the 3 or 4 days of work because there wasn't enough time in the week to procrastinate too much. Keep in mind this was a 24/7 team environment and it was organized so that your alternates (people on opposite schedule) would take over anything you didn't finish and vice versa.

They could hire enough people to where there would be enough people for every day, yet everyone still gets to work 4 days.

Hire more people to handle the same workload? How are you paying for that?

The NHS in the UK —where the employees would most benefit from something like this— is right at the other end of the spectrum in terms of capacity. They are s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d. Long rotas. Unsociable hours. Poor cover. Almost no redundancy.

Throwing more people at the problem would certainly help and there are other issues to do with training and retention, but even if you fix that, it'll eventually come down to money.

It's not just the employees who would benefit. There's a structural debt building up which will need to be paid and patients are suffering, too. It's false economy.

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