More bosses give four-day workweek a try
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All of these things wind up on the back burner when I'm in the middle of high stress projects and forced to sit at a desk for 8-10 hours a day.
All that does is lead to more stress because now I'm falling behind on my life tasks and have to burn a weekend catching up when I should be able to spend that weekend de-stressing.
I know not everyone is as sapped for energy as I am after work, I hate that I'm this way. But after leaving work and siting in an hour of traffic my energy is just sapped from me by the time I make it home. I have enough energy to feed myself and sometimes work out to maintain my health..
I know that some people just dont have the privilege of living close to their jobs, but after spending one internship getting up at 5;45am to drive with my dad to work to beat the traffic for 1hr, and then spending 1.5-2 hours driving back in heavy traffic in NYC, I vowed to never ever live in a place where I have to drive that far to get to work. 2 months of that and I was already losing my will to live. My dad did it for 15 years and I can see why towards the last leg of that job, he was bitter and angry on a daily basis. That is not a way to live.
Of course I can't speak for anyone else, but I find that taking a train to work is a lot less stressful than driving every day. At least on the train, I can read, or pull out my laptop, or just play a video game.
I mostly agree with you...but...I found the past several years of subway outages worse and started driving/ridesharing more and more. I’ve had times where subways constantly get rerouted, suddenly go express, skip stops, run on different lines, etc. it became so maddening.
But I agree. For all that New Yorkers complain about the subway, it's my favorite thing about New York.
I used to take the Path trail from Jersey City and then transfer to the F trail to Queens. I let my boss think I love my job so much that I arrive at work pretty early on most days when in fact, I was just trying to account for the inevitable delays on some days.
I understand worker safety is important. Even if we didn't care about the workers, accidents can get very expensive and budget is tight. However, there has to be a better way than slowing ALL tracks to a crawl every time there is track work on ANY of the tracks.
I don't ever recall feeling comfortable pulling out a laptop on the train though. Not even for fear of someone stealing it. I'd be worried about a subway monkey doing some spinning dance move and destroying the screen, or some hipster spilling coffee on it when the train slows down. Fond memories...
I recently got a GPD Win 2 as well though, so I've been able to do more computerey stuff lately, even when it is crowded.
DisplayPort output via USB-C is another plus (monitor/mouse/keyboard/charging with one cable!) though the Win 2 may have had that as well, I’m not sure. The original Win did not.
Now I take the bus, and I never have space at least not for my work laptop. I should have gotten the 13" instead of the 15".
What I’m experimenting with now is taking Uber Pool most mornings. It’s usually about $20 but you can pay for it with tax free commuter benefits, and I’m saving $2.75 in subway fare, so it’s like ~$10 for almost an hour of time to catch up on administrative junk for my side biz. Seems worth it so far, although still a little frustrating.
Until today, I've typically gotten on the subway between 9:45am and 10am for my 30 minute commute to work (that's bed to desk travel time). The train usually wasn't packed, but I was certainly squeezed up against people. Perfectly tolerable, but certainly not comfortable.
Today I did an hour's worth of work from 9:30am to 10:30am and then I commuted to my office arriving just before my 11am standup. The 10:30am train was wonderfully empty in comparison to the 9:45am train. I got a seat for the first time in months! Furthermore, that hour of work was wonderfully productive since my apt is dead silent and no one was around to disturb me. I got most of my "heads-down, high-concentration" work done for the day in that hour.
My work place is about an hour and a half commute and the trains are incredibly packed starting from around 7am all the way till 9.15am.
What I've done was wake up and started working from home sometime between 7-8am till around 9.15am, then leave for the 9.30am train and I'll be in the office by 11.
Work gets done and I don't get stressed from silly crowds. I also do the reverse and leave work around 4pm to avoid the return rush.
It's a small change but it's an incredible quality of live improvement. This is literal pareto, 20% effort with 80% effect. Do it.
Spent a lot of money on REALLY good rain gear and averaged almost 8K mi a year for the four of the five years we were up there. As long as I wasn’t stopped in traffic I felt even more relaxed getting a good motorcycle ride in every morning and being actively zoned out (focused on now instead of life) vs taking the train and being passively zones out with media.
Now that I’m 4mi from my office, come home a few times a week and say hi to the wife at lunch, etc. I will also never go back to anything resembling a commute.
Living in a city with approximately 100,000 people has its advantages!
Unfortunately I think I'd still need a few hours to unwind and get out of "work mode." I've worked jobs where I could actually walk to work and I still went home just drained. TBH, I'm an introvert and I'm not sure going in to the office will ever be really conducive to my personality.
I've worked jobs where I had an office to go to when I needed/wanted to be there but could work from home or at a clients office. That was wonderful. I actually showed up to it much, much more often than I expected - by pure choice. If I was having an off day or felt especially introverted and just needed a break from people I could just knock things out at home!
These days, it's likely semi-remote work, where you commute 1-3 days a week or in off hours (part of day at home, part at work). For me, I've been lucky enough to always find something that I found interesting and that pays well enough while not having to commute more than 10-20 minutes in the local area, and that's having been born, raised, and lived my entire life 45 minutes North of SF.
There's not guaranteed to be something good in the borderlands, but I think people might be surprised what they could find if they can resist the call of the behemoths (and those that congregate in the same area) while being within throwing range of them.
Crazy question but why not invest some of that higher salary into quality of life improvements like moving closer to work?
But as for why people don't do that, I think it's often because "quality of life" means different things to different people at different times in their lives.
For a single 20-something, moving closer to work, and the much higher cost of living that usually entails can be worthwhile.
For a 30-something or 40-something with a family, what kind of worth the spouse does (and whether it benefits from that move monetarily or in quality of live) and what it entails for the children can be much more important.
For a single (or mostly single) income household, shaving 2 hours off your commute in exchange for double the cost of living is very hard to justify. There's often a reason they live far enough away to need to commute.
For me, as I said, I've never had that commute. I've been very happy working in the tech industry an hour or so away from SF and its surrounding area. What I advocated is not moving closer to work, but working closer to where you moved. If you move to a suburb of SF, if you start looking for work in that area instead of focusing on SF, you might be surprised what's there. It won't pay as much, but theoretically cost of living is already drastically reduced by moving to the suburb, so maybe re-examining what's a good job to look is called for if that commute isn't to your liking.
Driving is the price you pay for a nice home.
One could of course argue that more time with their parents is crucial for the child as well and that is absolutely correct. My main concern though is that my kids are safe and well looked after during the time they are away from me though.
Now if I was a young single person, I would absolutely choose living in a studio a block from work over commuting an hour each way to a larger house in the suburbs. With kids other factors take precedence.
Now I am lucky enough to work remotely and it is indeed the 'bees knees'.
I'll take the commute for the luxury of living in the countryside away from the noise, overpopulation and dirt.
I could easily get a nice place walking distance from work but my 30 minute commute (pretty much against traffic so not stressful) allows me to enjoy my time after work and the weekends much more than I would from the extra time from a short commute. I also enjoy driving and listening to music in my car so maybe thats part of it too
Now, if you're DRIVING that same hour, then yeah, you're nuts.
It's insane to waste that much of your daily life shuttling to your job (if you have an option, which I hope to remain lucky enough to have).
I used to ebike for an hour each way, and it was torture. Now it's a ~20min drive and 30mins of the commuter train. Still pretty miserable, but at least it's not raining directly into my eyes anymore.
I have some of the infrastructure where I live in Norway, but I'm not brave enough to bike on the snow and ice in the winter. Walking is perilous enough.
When I lived in the states, biking was often dangerous and the fastest routes weren't always available to me. I lived in the countryside for years, close enough to bike by main roads, but it not only wasn't allowed on the best path, but it would have been dangerous. No shoulder, curvy road, and cars going over 55mph (over 80kph). It was illegal to ride on sidewalks, where there were sidewalks, and few cities had bike lanes outside of downtown areas (if that).
One job literally had no entrance other than off of a 4-lane divided highway: No biking or walking to that job.
Even if I got over those hurdles, there was often no where to safely put my bike while I was at work. Heck, some of these places didn't have anywhere to store cold things for lunch.
It's almost as if they designed cities to only be driven too without any thought given on how to place living spaces closer to working spaces.
Since I lived and NYC and London, living near work often meant living in busy and noisy city areas, but it's a compromise I've generally been happy with.
Additionally, every company should provide at least one work from home day. Having a day at home where you can do laundry while working and other minor chores are such a huge win. Not to mention sleep-in to 830 if I want. Even while doing these mini chores I am WAY more productive at home. It also breaks up your week. My WFH day is Tuesday. So I deal with Monday, then have that cushy WFH day, then when I come back on Wednesday it feels like just a 3 day work week. Friday is casual and most employees take Friday to WFH. Its a ghost town and I love it.
I need to begin looking for one of these dank jobs that are truly a four-day work week though.
I had a ~1h commute for years, which meant 10 hours gone a week, but I commuted via public transport (train+metro/subway/underground) which meant I had 10 hours a week for reading or conversation with friends on the same route. I worked from home for 10 years after, and I swear I read less!
If I had been driving those would have felt like completely wasted time.
Or, a friend of mine in Sweden had an even longer commute by train, but his company counted the time as office time, since he'd just work on the train, which meant no loss of free time.
(I still agree all companies should encourage WFH as much as possible)
With that said I commuted for just over an hour+ each way in a sports car pre kids for 3 years and I never want a low car again. Give me a comfortable SUV / sedan any day now.
Even though it's a small studio apartment, saving two hours of stress per day is heaven-sent for someone with low energy and chronic depression like me. It's like life switched to easy mode all of a sudden. The only downside is, I can't manage to schedule a time to read books – subways and trains were ideal for it.
As far as work schedule goes, my company/team is fairly flexible when it comes to WFH. However, I still operate in "work mode" while at home, which makes it difficult to take of chores, etc.
If everyone had a 4-week, it would be just like the current weekend. You can't go to the bank or dentist, because they would also be off.
Perhaps you could get the same effect and quality of life by taking Sunday and Monday as your days off and working Saturday.
I have a friend who once had M-W off, and worked the four remaining days. He hated it because his time off was completely misaligned with his peers, so he had no social life.
Edit - I don't have any fundamental problem with working fewer hours or fewer days. But, I think I'd prefer 5x7 hour days instead of 4x8.
Rotate who gets which days off each week.
I can imagine there are plenty of other people that prefer the same thing.
Having tried both, 4x8 is far better. I don't do much during 5x7 evenings anyway because I'm drained after 7 hours at work, so I'd much rather just cram that into 4 days and have an extra day of rest.
My dad is a letter carrier. He's off Sunday and then has a floating day off that changes each week. (Scheduled far in advance.)
This seems to conflate working from home with having time off. Is your employer paying you to work on that day or not?
I work four days a week (30 hours). On my days off, I do not work at all. On my days on, I do not do random house chores during office hours. That's what my employer and I agreed to, and I think it describes what most people understand as a four day workweek.
What I do is that I work five days a week and around June-July I take ten weeks off. I have the same amount of working days per year with the same income but it feels like a godsend to have a yearly sabbatical of over 2 months during the best weather of the year. It reminds me of being in school again with the long summer holidays.
If I ever have children that means being with them for six weeks fully dedicated to them.
If I had children, taking the summer off with them seems great - it's a shame their vacation policy isn't flexible...
I expected that lots of useful or interesting things will be made during that time, which is true. But for me, the most beneficial effect is that my enjoyment of my work (which previously wasn't bad - I really liked my work) increased a lot.
So this can be another way how to boost your job enjoyment.
It was one of the best decisions I've ever made - it feels like I have so much more time for family, side projects and hobbies than I ever did before. And for reference, I work around 90% from home.
TBH, the company I work for has got a pretty good deal out of this, as I'm sure my productivity hasn't dropped at all. (it's a mega corp, so there is zero chance of negotiating back to equivalent of a 5-day salary)
Are you in the US? If so, you can't save money on taxes by making less; it's a progressive system.
If you actually paid less in taxes on _every_ dollar by dropping a bracket, then you'd have been making more all along in a progressive system. Are you certain that was the case? Just curious.
I do the same thing (Australia). Worked 9 months last year and made about ~82-85% of what I would have working the full year, rather than 75%.
Incidentally this is why progressive tax is so important for a good startup culture (and thus overall tech scene). It's a negative tax on risk. The steeper your progressive ramp, the less of your geniuses are working in shit jobs creating UI form widgets with 40 managers telling them to redo it every other day.
In the UK, employers have to give consideration to reasonable requests for flexible working. But it also helped a lot that I work for a huge corporation, so they are better setup to deal with and permit such requests.
Something similar happened at my company. For once a project was ahead of schedule. So instead of thinking that the system worked well and keep working in relaxed manner management decided to “pull in” the deadline and suddenly the project was a death march again.
For some people it’s hard to accept that relaxed people are productive. They want to see stress and overtime or they will think that people are underperforming.
I've been on both sides of this equation and yes employees have a responsibility to speak up, but given the dynamic of the relationship it's easy to see why they wouldn't. If managers aren't interested in listening then speaking up can just get you on their bad side.
If you’re afraid of management, why are you working there if you’re not attempting to level the playing field?
I don't blame them either; I feel like the image of overly-caffeinated, stressed-out people is embedded in our collective consciousness as representative of High Productivity and our lizard brains can't seem to be able to reconcile that with the data that is saying "relaxed people who make enough money, are treated well, and have the freedom to live satisfactory lives outside the office will most probably be more productive, focused, and effective at work."
Don't forget about the over prescription of amphetamines. I knew I was in a bad place when all the "high performers" (according to management) all had darting eye, chewed gum all day, and were underweight/never ate during the work day.
Happy workers lay nicer eggs!
Usually 4 days a week means 4 ten hour days, not 4 eight hour days. Hence the phrase "four tens".
It looks like some people go either way, though. Quote from the article:
> Many employers aren't just moving to 10-hour shifts, four days a week, as companies like Shake Shack are doing; they're going to a 32-hour week — without cutting pay.
The Japanese are type A++ (at least, in Tokyo). They are masters at applying stress across the Pacific.
As a manager, it was my job to insulate my team from the stress, and I often took the hit for telling my bosses that I wasn't going to push my people harder than they already were working.
It seemed to work out in the end. When they finally rolled up my team, I had been managing it for 25 years, and the person with the least seniority in my team had a decade with the company.
It's a whole different world, out there, now. I had a manager at a startup tell me that conventional management assumes that engineers will only stay at a company for 18 months, so they really pile on the stress.
I can't even imagine that. There were a lot of downsides to working with the corporation that I worked for, but they treated us all with a great deal of respect, and made it possible for me to keep valuable, senior-level C++ developers for decades; despite rather sub-optimal pay, and a not-so-thrilling work environment.
which is ironic, because isn’t that why people stay less and less longer at a company (can’t stand the slog)?
If the job is focused on smashing rocks with a hammer to make smaller rocks, that's probably true.
18 months is barely a blip on the radar.
Also, there is a great deal of emphasis placed on process. If you will have new people taking over the code all the time, you should have a fairly strict requirement for patterns like MVVM and VIPER, and require new hires to be able to adapt to these quickly.
The Japanese had a similar structure, because they rotate engineers around every couple of years. The engineers stay with the company forever, but they change jobs frequently.
That means that it's very important to have a strict policy of heavily-documented, inflexible process, and you can have vast legacy codebases that people are afraid to change. If you can farm a lot of that out to a dependency framework, then it becomes S.E.P. (Somebody Else's Problem).
I'm not a huge fan of this approach, but many companies seem to feel it works.
There was a company called Taligent that took this to extremes. I read their style guide (I spent a great deal of time researching how other people did development -it made me quite the cynic). They had the strictest, most convoluted structure I've ever encountered.
Taligent eventually collapsed under its own weight. The idea was to only have Architects be creative, making line programmers little more than data entry. Programmers couldn't do stuff like create new classes without getting permission from an Architect.
It's the kind of approach that you might use for space launch software, but even that can be iterated (as SpaceX is showing).
Small companies are similar to capitalistic free market. They have no plan, but everything flows from the engineering. They value innovation over anything else. So it makes sense to run everything like a lab where nobody knows what they are supposed to do but cannot be easily replaced. Only a few elite people get to work on their own pace without turning on their brain. Personally I like it but I'll admit that it never works. As a result, they always strive to deliver tomorrow's technology yesterday.
I work in Vancouver, Canada, and a large portion of its industry is due to Canadians commanding lower wages. Combined with a weaker dollar, higher education availability, and single-payer healthcare, outsourcing to a Canadian studio can save a lot of money. FIFA, for example, is made in Vancouver and the franchise commands a large revenue stream. Provinces such as British Columbia and Quebec also provide tax incentives too, since it's high-skill work.
Point being, I think there’s something to be said for company culture in making this work
Yes, I imagine in the first type of company people would continue to slack, but just do it fewer days a week.
Just look at how U.S. culture treats service workers. We best be seated on time for our dinner reservation. No one should wait 15 minutes for their hotel check-in because housekeeping isn't done yet. Oh, and that coffee was ordered nearly 5 minutes ago. And the plumber was supposed to be here at 8.
Your concerns about greed extend well beyond worker productivity. It appears to be the logical extension of believing the individual is sacrosanct.
If I make a dinner reservation, my expectation is that the restaurant knows what the crowd will be like at that time and has scheduled enough staff to handle it.
Similarly, if the plumbing company says the plumber will be here at 8, it is totally reasonable to expect him to be here by 8, or they shouldn't say he'll be here at 8. If there's too much uncertainty in his schedule to give a specific time, the company's scheduler should instead be giving blocks of time.
One example of treatment of service workers that actually does reflect their own performance rather than resource allocation / scheduling issues is expecting them to always be doing _something_. I used to work in retail, and if there were no customers in our department, heaven help us if our managers caught us just standing around chit-chatting. We needed to be wiping windows, no matter if we'd just wiped them an hour ago, or tidying stock, no matter if it was already in pristine condition. I see the same thing with restaurant waitstaff. Both management and customers expect to see them always on the move, even if their tables don't necessarily need anything at the moment.
Something to keep in mind, as it’s counterintuitive and the instinct is to say, “that can never happen here”, or, “it’ll never work.”
1: Robert Gordon, “The Rise and Fall is American Growth”
Not that long ago, it was unquestioned that four days meant 4x10. It was simply unthinkable that we would consider less than forty hours "full time." I even skipped this article initially, expecting it to have the same assumptions! And yet, they specifically report that Shake Shack cut back to 32 hours without cutting pay.
I would have expected service-sector jobs to be the last to see something like this. And if a burger chain can do it, an office where we spend 40 hours in a combination of productivity and reading HN can absolutely do it.
So there's my anecdata for you :)
Your Fridays "on" you work 8 hours instead of 9. And you get every other Friday off.
At my company, we have the option between the standard 5x8, the 9/80, and the 4x10 schedules. Surprisingly (at least to me), the 9/80 is by far the most popular (the 4x10 being the 2nd most popular and the standard schedule being the rarest option).
And most would be profoundly happier people.
I would like one day a week when I'm not working OR looking after the kids, however. That would be amazing. It would be great to give it a try and see how it worked out. Unfortunately my employer is a hardass and doesn't even allow work from home, let alone fewer days a week.
I don't know any parents that do that - literally never interact with their kids 4 days out of the week. What actually happens is parents sacrifice their kids' sleep schedule.
There are large differences between people regarding their strength, physical endurance and intelligence. Why not mental endurance?
I understand working like crazy for things like starting a company/grad school/career change, but those things all last a limited time and come to an end.
Then you have others who are more used to billable time or flex work or similar where they view that 5-6 hours (+ breaks and food) as an '8 hour' day and the two can't understand how the other manages.
Lucky is the person who can throw themselves at problems 10+ hours a day and look forward to going back to it the next day, I guess. I can easily and happily do that in the 6-8 range and feel proud of the previous day's work and be ready to do it again the next day.
On the other hand, if you look at the FRED website it shows that average annual hours worked has massively decreased in the last 50 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG
1951, for example, shows 2,030 hours worked on average. That's the equivalent of more than six additional weeks of full time work.
I would say that Keynes's prediction that economic growth could get to the point where we would only need to work 15 hours a week (750 hours per year, assuming 2 weeks vacation) is ... trending towards becoming true? At current trends, it will take another ~280 years.
(Obviously this is a silly prediction but, an interesting thought experiment.)
But I suspect the number of hours a non-union knowledge worker works per year has gone up in the same time frame.
I think so. The way these sources gather data is somewhat opaque to me but there's nothing to suggest that it's filtered out by industry.
> I suspect the number of hours a non-union knowledge worker works per year has gone up in the same time frame
Huh... I don't see that data anywhere on FRED but it would be interesting to know. You can search for yourself here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/searchresults/?st=hours%20worked
Anecdotally, I have swapped stories with my father in law who started his career as a finance worker for a large corporation in the 1980s and he worked significantly more hours than I have at any of my current or previous jobs. 10+ hours 5 days a week was the expectation, plus an hour commute both ways... hard to say if that generalizes in any meaningful way though.
Actually even if it's only considering full-time employees, it could still be related to unemployment, since a tighter labor market would leave more positions unfilled, which would mean more overtime.
The point of all this is simply that it is difficult to make conclusions about labor market trends from average annual hours worked.
[0] An average of 4.6 hours per week in Australia across all industries according to this https://www.tai.org.au/sites/default/files/GHOTD%202019%20Fi...
This is a classic case of statistics being used to prove a different point. Perhaps the average annual hours worked is pretty much the same, but the way work happens has changed and it may be harder to quantify. For example, what if there are more part time jobs and people have 2-3 part time jobs? Or how are the hours worked by the flexible hours folks at Starbucks (flexible to be picked by someone else I mean, usually only at peak times). Anecdotally, there's a guy I know who holds a full time job selling insurance, then works afternoons for UPS for the health benefits. How is that reported in 'average annual hours worked' thing?
It's the same as saying that unemployment went down and being happy about it. Because there are so many jobs, some people have 3 in order to pay rent.
Now, especially for developers and office workers, work is almost indistinguishable from life.
For example there is barely any time while I am awake that I am not thinking about work. (sometimes even my dreams are about work related tech topics)
Not to mention that modern management techniques are deeply psychological, and sophisticated propaganda.
TBH I dont think more work is being done, I just think the corporation organism consumes as much as it can.
I would muse that employees usually aren't motivated because they hate their working conditions, usually imposed by shitty managers / company cultures. Managers & companies may complain about "unproductive" or "motivated" employees as if its some personal failing of their employees, but news flash people aren't going to care unless they have a reason to care. If you want employees to enjoy their work and actually be motivated to some degree greater than the bare minimum, give them working conditions that they enjoy. Give them retirement benefits, less working hours, less micromanagement, more pay, remote working options, etc.
This is a problem that stems from crappy notions of how work cultures "ought to be" in America, and can only be solved by destroying those notions and getting rid of the idea "productivity above all else" in companies.
-- Bertrand Russell
I believe most people would watch TV, play cards, play video games. This is what they already do with their spare time, there's no reason to believe there wouldn't be more of it.
It's amazing what a 'schedule' and 'working with others' and 'requirements' and 'deadlines' can do - it brings people to life and is probably the only way hard things get done.
For a certain kind of person, some free time would lead to a lot of exploration but for most people it would not.
I can see one reason: the benefit that you get from an activity is a nonlinear function of how much time you invest in it. This is why people tend to specialize in certain domains. If you barely have any time to practice painting for example, maybe it's not worth learning to paint in the first place. Conversely, if you have more free time, it could be worthwhile to find more creative things to do with it.
This is especially true if you consider frame-switching overhead. The amount you can get done in 6 hours of some demanding creative activity is probably more than 3 times the amount you could get done in 2 hours. And obviously people would have more long uninterrupted blocks of free time if they had to work less overall.
Also, with most schools being the way they are, I think children in general get very little opportunity to pursue their creative impulses; it's always about following the teacher's instructions. Maybe adults would have more curiosity and creativity if these traits weren't snuffed out in their formative years.
Finally, even in our current society, being just a lazy consumer in your free time is far from universal, for example: https://www.namm.org/news/press-releases/gallup-organization...
From the same essay
"The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part."
I'd rather have a 4x10 than a 5x8.
If my side hustle ever graduates into a startup and I start hiring other people, we're doing 4x10 or 4x9.
9 hours maybe, but 10 hours? I'm a software engineer, I can't produce quality work for 10 straight hours. Most good, solid work gets done in a 4-5 hour period. 10 hours in front of a computer isn't good for anyone.
Waking up at 6am takes getting used to but isn't unreasonable in my opinion.
Obviously very specific to my scenario, but it works for me.
They’re only concerned with results and it’s a slow growing business, I am however extremely underpaid.
Getting ready to take the jump to a new job with a 70% pay increase, but the last few years my life has been sweet (besides living in a very shitty apartment).
On 32 hours now and I can handle it financially. As long as that stays the way it is I'm not changing anything.
They're all down to 50-80%
This is even regulated by the law, your employer has to allow you to reduce your work time, only in some extreme cases they can deny it.
Works like a charm.
Germany: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-growth US: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
Owners demand perpetual growth. People demand comfortable lives and occasional vacations. Most achieve that in Germany. There probably isn't a single better "poster child" of a prosperous society with anywhere near the same population.
If I grow my own food and play board games with my family, it doesn't boost the GDP. However, if I go to MacDonald's and then send my kids to daycare while I go to the movies (3 economic transactions), it increases the GDP since those services are now commoditized.
Increasing the GDP might boost the standard of living in really poor countries, but there's a healthy ceiling until it becomes growth for the sake of growth.
Whoa there, GDP is absolutely correlated to the standard of living, this is not contentious. That it's not a direct measure, true, but it's definitely 'a' measure. Moreover, growth or contraction in per-capita GDP in a nation is definitely correlated with increasing/reduced economic prosperity even in 'rich' countries. Yes, many things are 'not measured' particularly leisure, but most things of material value are. The GDP is one of the 'least bad' measures we have.
Employees are generally not expected to work beyond that amount, and when they do, it's with the understanding that they can go around and reduce their working hours the following week (or whenever works for them & their manager) to cover the delta.
Some of my friends even got an indirect raise out of it, because employers couldn't pay more, so they worked less for the same pay.
Either you get free time when you're young or you have to work longer.
In other words, going part-time is a commitment to the job-level you're in, in my experience. It signals to management you're good, reliable, ready to stay in that position perpetually and do a decent job, but not up for anything ambitious. Whether this is true is a different story, but it's how in my experience it gets interpreted.
That works fine if you're a 45 year old parent making 2x the median wage in a mid-level manager position working 36 hours (one week 5 days one week 4 days), 32 hours (4 days a week) etc, because your salary doesn't need to grow, plus even at parttime its sufficient. But at the start of your career making 70% of the median wage, going parttime both hurts career growth and isn't always financially feasible.
Always remember that interviews are mutual.
On tuesdays I'm "hungry" when I go back to work. I think this is the perfect balance for me and I feel I'm more productive than ever.
It may not be for everyone, and it's definitely a privilege, but if you can, I really encourage you to try it out.
> Natalie Nagele, co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, has heard from other leaders who say it didn't work for them. She says it fails when employees aren't motivated and where managers don't trust employees.
Also it would be good to keep in mind the Hawthorne Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#History
I'd counter that _anything_ (including the standard 5x8 schedule) will fail in those conditions.
Wouldn't we be better off with several shifts, 4 days a week, covering Monday through Saturday or even the entire week?
Not so mature places put 9-5ers on call with a tiny bump in pay.
My boss describes this as everyone's turn in the barrel, and part of working in IT. There's nothing more demoralizing for my coworkers than being on call. Well, maybe having our tickets be the metric we're evaluated by.
I always wondered why this wasn't more popular.
I don't know actually; presumably one defense company started doing it any then the rest just followed.
When I was at LM a few years ago, some teams were on a different 9/80 pattern (different Fridays off), and some still on the regular 10/80 schedule. So on Fridays you basically had significantly less people in the office and it was never the person you needed to get work done. Basically made Monday to Thursday the regular working week with Friday being there if you really needed to get work done.
Think the different schedules was a combination of LM employees, employees that were in the union, and external contractors having different contract requirements.
Jokes aside, I would love this. Right now in tech asking for this sort of thing feels like a 'career limiting move', and definitely in a hiring situation could label you as 'not a hard worker' despite your emphasis on efficiency and productive hours.
edit: or is it 25%?!
There's only so much development that can be done in a day before I'm in a haze from all the abstract thought, and that productivity asymptote comes well under 8 hours.
32h week is about productivity.
I remember going to an interview somewhere and during the summers they came in at 8:30am each day (instead of 9) so they could get off at 2:30pm on a Friday. That sounded like hell for no big gain.
We need to go down to 20 hours.
Fortunately, I was paid hourly both times, so I was compensated, and the project did get completed.
Ok. Honestly? The first time I was quite young, working with other employees on a fun project with an insane deadline, and it was a blast. But having 4 hours to drive home, eat, sleep, shower, return? Not the greatest.
These days, I'd love to have a 4x8 (or even a 4x10, since I'm pulling 5x10 to 5x12s already).
For me personally more time working = more output. What am I missing?
I should note that I have no family, no commute, and my gym is in my home so I'm able to save some hours on those things. I could see how in those cases one would have less time for work.
Health is my first priority so I make sure I'm getting enough sleep and regular exercise. When I'm feeling particularly stressed I'll go to Banya. This helps prevent burnout.
I've also reduced the time it takes to do most everything. No commute, gym in home, no time for grocery shopping (Amazon Prime Now), no drinking, and I'm single.
But I'm reading the book [peak performance](https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Performance-Elevate-Burnout-Scie...) (Highly recommended) and I generally think that companies should really encourage those employees to work at a schedule that works best for them (This is obviously harder for shift work where the value comes from having a person in a chair at certain times)
We have all these norms about 8 hour days, and 5 day weeks and not sleeping at work, and I think people should be given the freedom to work in the way that works best for them.
One norm I'm trying to get used to breaking right now is the norm about "sleeping at work". I would be much more productive if I napped for 15 or so minutes twice a day. I know that when it comes to coding or writing I could get a ton done in a 3-4 1-hour-sessions day if those 3-4 hours were clear, well defined and rested. I could get much more done in "3-4 hours" than an "8 hour day" with meetings and other administrivia thrown in. I'd guess my optimal work week is somewhere around 26 hours, assuming that the space between those 26 hours is spent resting and focusing and getting ready to work hard those 26 hours.
Amen to this! I pushed for, and saw implemented, a dual nap room for our studio. It was used around the clock by people stretching, meditating, and napping. I found a huge productivity spike taking out 20 minutes a day.
Then, we hired a bunch more people for the upcoming launch, and it was re-purposed into a storage room for old rack hardware (I pushed against this, but was told it was a temporarily unavoidable allocation for the space... meanwhile, the dedicated Lego room sits unused 38 hours a week). So we lost the nap room right as we enter our year of crunch.
Boggles the mind.
Ah well. Have an interesting read on recent research into the commonality of four (rather than two) chronotypes (which I'd used in laying out my position): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...
Maybe there's a deeper problem at your job if people need a nap room. Just get more sleep at home, you're not being paid to sleep.
btw, a 'dedicated lego room' sounds like another symptom of a toxic infantilizing culture that eats confidence and breeds reliance.
Unclear why people seem to think there needs to be some kind of 'one size fits all' approach. If a job is such that 32 hours works fine. If it's not fine. And the media saying things like 'a move toward' and 'more companies are' when clearly there is no significant push in this area appears to be just some kind of evergreen story to sell advertising. Media does this frequently. Keys are statements not backed up by anything but anecdotes such as 'and questions are being raised' and so on. That one 'questions are being asked' is literally a nightly occurrence on network news broadcasts (says me using the same technique but it is happening).
Guess what? Some people don't mind working 5 days. Some people like working 7 days. Some people would rather sit and not work at all. Everyone is different.
I've previously done a 9/80 schedule with every other Friday off. The 9 hour days made my personal life harder, harder to meet family obligations like pickup/dropoff. I'm cool with 5 shorter days, I would be happier and probably more productive.
Others probably less so, depending on how well the economy is and general attitude towards workers rights. Eastern Europe much less so, in some cases (Romania, Bulgaria) conditions are still terrible.
And of course outside of the IT world in Germany, there's a lot of part-time work going on...
Our finance minister recently had a hissy fit over the idea of shortening the work week, arguing that if we got rid of 3.5 hours a week (i.e down to 34 hr. weeks) we'd lose out on tens of billions in tax revenue.
Well, almost. If you are willing to be paid less that helps. But how many people are rich enough to be able make that choice? Enough to change the cultural and mores?
We need UBI or laws to break that. There is no distributed / individual way to escape the baton of the market here.
I was a pretty high earner before and have given up 60% of pay to do this. The premium I place on my time is huge. It'd be lovely to see more companies who understand this and offer the same kind of arrangement.
I think most people like this arrangement, especially those with long commutes. A full free day for appointments, errands, or just relaxing can be a big help.
I'm sure there are a lot of loopholes or rules that companies can't wait to exploit to pay people less money or fork over less money overall.
At a previous job I was furloughed one day a week for a while, and it was definitely time I enjoyed having available, I just wasn't fond of the 20% pay cut that went with it.
It’s more balanced, people get an extra hour in their day to spend on themselves, and it seems that for many people, the extra hour from 4-5 is relatively low productivity compared to the rest of the day anyway.
Personally, I'm reluctant to the 4x10, but doing 4x9 and 1x4 was simply awesome, plus you could get a 3 day weekend by just spending half day of vacation.
4-day work weeks have been completely normal for lots of people in Europe for decades. In the Netherlands it's almost the norm to chose whether you want to work 4 or 5 days. 4 day work weeks are not always accepted everywhere, but usually they are in most places.
In France the standard work week has been 35 hours for the past 2 decades, which may or may not equate to a 4 day work week depending on how you organize your work days.
The Netherlands and France are still alive and kicking. They have plenty of successful businesses.
Conclusion: no, 4 day work weeks will not destroy your country, economy, business or lifestyle. The one and only reason to have 5 day or longer work weeks is: greed. IMHO.
Having said that IMO a more important factor in time savings would be remote working or not. Assuming a commute of an hour a day to and from work (2 hours total per day, reality for lots of people) you waste 10 hours per week of your life commuting. Unpaid.
5 days a week without commute = -10 unpaid hours spent on work related things (vs with commute)
4 days a week with commute = -2 unpaid hours spent on work related things.
Are they? I can't think of a single technology company coming out of either.
Source: I'm from The Netherlands.
I hear of new companies from China all the time.
Also, French productivity can be overstated in statistics. They have relatively high unemployment amongst youth and the low-skilled. This essentially removes the least productive from the stats, making it look higher.
Not to say that a 4 day week would be bad, but careful what you base it on.
While mentioned as an aside late in the article, I wonder how much this contributed to overall productivity. The author may be undervaluing this change in the work environment.
Then I found this really works for me: don't spend vacation all at once, instead, spend it on every Wednesday. It's not just one day off, it actually changes the workdays from 5 days to 2 days.
The hardest part was coming back after the 3 day weekend, it always felt like coming back from vacation.
Can I demand a 4-day work week in my future contracts?
In a lot of ways, working an 8 hour day as a software developer is more stressful, because it's so disordered and interrupt-driven. Meetings are strewn around all over the calendar, wherever they can best fit the constraints of people in disparate locations. Emails or pings come in with problems you've got to handle right away - and it seems to be easier for people to rationalize making you switch tasks rather than finish what you're doing when you have a piece of software in pieces in your IDE than when you have a bulldozer in pieces with the tracks off...
Edit: 25%.
I'm close to financial independence and would rather have my time than more money.
I'm not close, but I'd still take time over money. I need enough money to live healthy and have a bit of fun sometimes. After that, I just need time and energy to actually live my life.
[0] same commuting, same people, same updates, same stand-ups, same gossiping, same negativity, same office politics
Where can I find such four-day workweek jobs?