Simply unacceptable !!!
Now go back to work 5 days a week!
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150220083916.h...
"maybe we can just have the engineers work weekends or something? Well, I think most of us know that's a losing battle. First of all, even if we could get engineers to work, say, on Saturdays without any other losses (eg. burnout), that would only be a 20% improvement. 20%? Give me a break. If I said I was going to do a talk about how to improve your team's efficiency by 20%, you wouldn't even come. You can produce 20% more by hiring one more person for your 5-person team, and nobody even has to work overtime. Forget it.
Adding 20% more people doesn't make the software come out 20% faster because:
1) Multiple people need to work on the same critical section of the code, and then there are merge conflicts. (Or people disagree on the design, or refactoring becomes a higher priority than doing what users want, etc.)
2) People work sloppily and omit relevant tests, only for someone else to have to re-discover the bug, fix it, and write the tests (trading productivity from one person to another).
3) People work on the wrong tasks, adding 20% more technical debt but not fixing 20% of the highest-priority bugs.
4) People take 20% less responsibility so you end up with "someone else will handle that (where "that" is usually documentation, monitoring, deployment, or anything else not explicitly captured in your list of bugs/priorities).
It is very interesting to me how internal software development often fails (I'm sure I've been the point of failure before), but software development CAN scale. I use AWS, for example, and I'm sure their software engineering teams are messing with products/features that my team uses. But they don't make me 20% slower. Ultimately, overly-tight coupling gets you every time. But on the other hand, too much isolation can also be a problem (time spent overengineering). If you find that balance, you can scale your team infinitely ;)
How do you explain the "paradoxical magic" in the final third of the article where, in every historical case of shortening work hours, "management was surprised to discover that output actually increased — and that expensive mistakes and accidents decreased"? Or the recent example of the Boston firm that took a day off in the middle of every week, and whose clients "reported an improvement in service"?
Are there any examples of companies going to a 4-day-week and reporting decreased productivity?
What's the right amount of worked? You cannot keep cutting hours and expect productivity to go up indefinitely.
In addition, the right number of hours probably has some variability among the population. I'm very much against a one sized fits all amount work environment.
This seems like a good idea especially given more automation and more higher level jobs.
>This seems like a good idea especially given more automation and more higher level jobs.
Automation means fewer jobs and less flexibility, not the opposite. The more work machines do, the less value human labor has, the harder employers have to squeeze their employees to even make a profit from them. One just has to look at a company like Amazon to see how that trend leads.
I've certainly worked for companies where other companies contracted out their software development tasks to us. They did not care what hours we worked; they spent their money and expected a result X months later. Whether we worked on their project from 9-5 was something they would not even know, much less care about.
Sure M-F, 9-5, most work gets done, but there are times where nothing is happening at 4PM and there are times that I'm needed Saturday morning.
The future will be defined by roles at big companies rather than hours of attendance.
Very acceptable !!!
Stop slacking off by taking 2 days off out of every 5!
(On a serious note, I think you will find that productivity does not scale linearly over the number of days per week worked.)