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Comment by NewsAware | Hacker News Reader

I am VP engineering in a 100 person company with 30 engineers. Noone is asked to work more than 40 hours and <5% do actually work more. I will happily have someone work 4 days 8 hours and 30% of our devs are in such a model. But I would not go below this (especially not less than 4 days in the office). Devs aren't working in total isolation, but are heavily involved in their cross functional product teams. Reducing availability further has an above linear hit on team productivity as colleagues become more and more blocked in their own tasks.

So: just saying this is more complex than looking at increased per-hour productivity of a single person

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> especially not less than 4 days in the office

Why? Remote work is a thing. If your processes demand having people on premises all the time, your processes may need improving. If a programmer want to work one day from home to cut down on their commute and be able to focus on a task, why would you want them in the office unless they aren't trustworthy? For colleagues to break his concentration when they need him?

Meetings can be scheduled, work coordination can be done electronically, and you surely have something like Mattermost or Slack set up?

I am in a not too dissimilar position to yourself (role/team size). I am working 4 days one week, 5 days the next (90% hours). It work out to be a nice compromise. The cross functional does not take too much of a hit, but the boost in productivity (IMHO) is still present.

I have some push back about the arrangement from people two or three links away from me and my team output and I have not got metrics to prove that this is effective.

Do you have any push back about your devs - 4 days 8 hours and 30% ? Do you have any other evidence/metrics for the benefits ?

Sure, though a solution is simple: just have everyone work the same shorter hours :)

I've actually worked in primarily remote company, and the challenges there are even greater: no offices, hand-offs and hand-overs have to be well documented or you are wasting time, timezone differences, discussing architectural documents over video and voice calls...

Basically, I wasn't asking for full flexibility in choosing one's hours: I think that's harder (for all the reasons you bring up) than just shortening the hours.

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