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Comment by geniviOS | Hacker News Reader

22 years ago I worked for company that gave us Friday afternoons off. We worked 8-5pm and on Friday 8-1pm. That gave employees time to schedule doctors or dental appointments, leave early for the weekend, or run errands. Best job schedule I ever had. This kept employees at work and not taking time off mid week. Working with his schedule insured a very productive group of employees.

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My last job had this for several years (over a decade, I was only there for a couple years though) and then when the parent company was acquired 2 years ago, the perks slowly started to get scaled back. Eventually, they made Friday afternoons mandatory again.

Most of the devs with the luxury of moving and getting a different job started looking immediately. I changed jobs less than 6 months after the policy change. Productivity also went way down because morale was in the gutter.

I've seen this happen so many times. How is it that the higher-ups can't understand the effect of removing perks has on morale? Of if they do understand, do they really feel the effect on morale is worth money saved (or whatever else the rationale is)? Are they hoping the effect will be short-lived?

A lot of managers are only looking for short term "savings" that they can use to "prove" that they are doing a good job and to advance their careers. This is so common that they won't even think twice before doing something that hurts the company in the long term.

Taken to a logical extension, this is also why you shouldn't give most perks. No?

Joke I always have is that folks will get actively pissed if you take away free coffee/soda. To the point that they will look to leave. If you never even offer it, though, they'll just complain about it.

I've seen the same sort of thing happen with bonuses, much better to avoid them in the first place.

Just turned down a job offer over the management's behavior regarding quality of life factors. I consider it a strong tell - if they need to tighten the screws, the neither understand the work nor do their own jobs well.

If you believe that programmers are a cog in a wheel and that there are many more cogs on the market, cogs who are working 10% less hours are good candidates to replace with new ones. They probably understand that there will be a temporary instability as old people leave and new replacements come in.

Not that I believe this, but I can understand the logic of it.

A startling discussion I had mere days ago: "You're not productive enough! If you're doing work X in n hours per day then you can do work X * n+2/n in n+2 hours per day! BTW, screw your high quality, efficient† work, and you're not getting a raise."

Surprise surprise, that's not how it works. We're not doing cog work, and productivity cannot be measured by the time sitting in front of a bloody screen. Also, pro tip: morale wins battles.

† Efficiency is producing work with a given amount of power. A given efficiency does not mean it can be reliably sustained – if at all reached — at a higher power level.

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons companies are extremely resistant to providing these types of perks even if the benefits are clear: once provided, they can't be scaled back and/or taken away without making employees really, really unhappy.

I current work a 9/80 schedule, so every other Friday off. It definitely is convenient. I always schedule appointments on the off Fridays, otherwise I might use them to clean my apartment or hit up a diner that is only open weekday mornings.

my dentist also takes fridays off.... foiled my plan of using off fridays to schedule things.

I think that might be a big take away from this. To gain a lot of these benefits more schedule staggering might be needed. If you are done with work 2 hours earlier but every bank or doctors office now closes two hours earlier you won't get any more people.

I believe that most dentists are only open 32 hours a week so that they don't have to provide benefits for their employees. It's an efficient, if uncompassionate, way of running a small business.

It's ironic/diabolical that SOP for a benefits provider is to deny benefits to their employees due to the horrendous healthcare/health insurance system.

Fortunately, the claim is not true at all.

*not always true

So you have any evidence for that brazen accusation?

My dentist is open 43hrs/wk.

Legally, 30hrs is full time for benefits, so it's hard to see any truth at all to anything you wrote.

Its hardly a brazen accusation. He said "I believe" and then made a fairly innocuous statement. Relax. Even still, just because your dentist is open 43 hours it does not disqualify his statement.

Accusing people of being ‘uncompassionate’ on zero evidence is not exactly innocuous - it’s sadly common on the internet, but it’s still a pretty jerk move.

I think dentists often keep short hours because they like them.

Plenty of other businesses do hire lots of part time people and manage their hours in order to avoid obligations. If you don't think that is true, well, I don't even know where to start.

Don't know if it applies to dentists, but I know surgeon's offices are open only 3-4 days a week because the other days they are doing surgery. When I saw my dentist office was only open 4 days a week, I figured it was similar- they weren't actually closed, but they didn't schedule standard procedures at that time.

Short term: Pro-rated jobs should have pro-rated benefits. There shouldn't be any advantage (in fact a skill drain hit) for breaking up jobs.

Medium/long term: Benefits really need to be a function of the government that taxes cover for all workers.

Here's a better idea: no benefits allowed. Cash only. Then employment would have lower barriers to entry. Two employees working 20 hours each should cost exactly the same as one working 40.

Health Care should be handled by a single payer.

Too bad he's the only dentist in the universe so you're really behind the eight ball there.

Dentists seem to have really inconvenient hours for whatever reason. Which makes you wonder how many people have poor dental care not because of costs, but because the dentist surgery's hours are simply too inconvenient for them with their current working arrangement...

We do this in the summer at my work. We also release plenty of features in the summer. I don’t know if productivity drops at all - curious if anyone higher up in my organization would have any data that says otherwise.

per https://www.grammarly.com/blog/assure-ensure-insure/:

To ensure something is to make sure it happens—to guarantee it.

To insure something or someone is to cover it with an insurance policy.

From Merriam-Webster:

ensure - to make sure, certain, or safe

insure - to make certain especially by taking necessary measures and precautions

MW gets a bit further nit-picky here:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/how-to-use-ins...

Like Checked vs Unchecked exceptions

But if you understood what GP meant well enough to correct him, is there a sense in which GP hadn't misspelled?

Yis, butt taht sence isnt verry interstating.

or you could work with this company, https://werk.co, to help institute flexible arrangements that actually make sense for each employee.

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