Hacker News Reader

Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

Two questions

Are many companies offering 4 day weeks? I’d guess yes.

Can people afford to live off a 4 day week salary? I’d guess no in general.

Offering 4-day weeks: Do you see this often? Just curious -- I feel like it's rare, so my guess would be the opposite. (I do know several people that work 4 10hr days as machinists or window installers).

My intuition is also the opposite of yours on affordability :), at least in tech...

I live in a country I where yeah it’s common enough (let assume for good workers not borderline ones) but we’re not paid as highly as the US, so supporting a family on a 4 day senior dev salary is a push unless you end got a paid off house.

The US system's structure penalizes companies for hiring workers between 20-40 hours. Any company that doesn't rely on flexible <20 hour employees or salary + forced-overtime is basically throwing money away.

edit oops- <20..

Can you elaborate on why? Is this a tax related thing? Or benefits related?

Tax code relating to benefits and labor laws (which kind of assume the environment encouraged by the tax code.)

As an example, benefits have fairness tests between highest and lowest paid employees. Fail those tests and the benefits are taxed, possibly as normal income. Companies find tricks to get people out of the group of normal employees under the IRS rules to beat these tests.

The possibility to work part time with pro-rata pay is mandated by law in some countries under certain conditions (15+ employees,...) (i.e. Germany).

I would be more than happy to work 1 day per week and live with 20% of my current salary.

I believe a lot of people can accept 80% salary for 4 days per week.

My previous company allowed people to work 4 days for 80% pay. Out of 60 people, 3 people took advantage of that.

Probably because opportunity for advancement becomes nil when you're not "all in."

I'm curious. Could you by any chance know some reason behind this? Is the salary not sufficient for the zone, or people do enjoy working, or they just simply think they would be bored as they take it?

Which company? Whenever I offered to work 60% of the time for 50% of the money I was flat out rejected.

Mandate 4 day weeks and see if salaries go down. I would guess not as companies still need to keep their workforce.

What about those of us who want to work more than four days?

Some people work 6-7 days a week already. So if they're working under that arrangement now, it will probably be fine for them to work more than mandatory hours in the future also.

Personal anecdota: it definitely seems like a huge part of the people in my city (Zurich) are working 80% (4-day week for 80% pay).

>>Are many companies offering 4 day weeks? I’d guess yes.

Uh, probably not. Unless you mean part-time work. Or 10 hour days.

i guess the idea is, considering how much worker productivity has improved over the decades, even working 4 days a week, one should still be able to survive just fine (at least that is my interpretation)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com