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Comment by tc7 | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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).

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