Ask HN: Why don't companies want to employ people on 4 day per week contracts?

Great question. I run a productivity software startup, and my cofounder brought up the 4-day week idea. We opted not to pursue it. It came down to a few things:

- Onboarding / Collaboration overhead (this compounds) An additional dev is one more to manage, one more to onboard, one more to keep happy, buy hardware and software licenses for, and all that for the same number of man-hours.

- Work compounds. A programmer working on a system or feature for 10 days does the deepest learning in days 7-10. The internals, nitty-gritty stuff. For a 3 day a week employee, the same insights are gained in week 4 (10 days) instead of week 2 (10 days). Of course, I used 10 days as an example, but true expertise is built and compounded over months. It doesn’t matter how many 3-day-a-week hires we have, this process won’t be sped up.

- Compensation / Performance - how do we do this in an equitable way? Again, comes down to compounding impact. If 5 day a week employee makes 5/8 of the impact at the same productivity rate as 3 day a week employee - does that mean they get promoted / rewarded at a different rate?

- Availability / Scheduling - 30 hours is about 3.5 work days a week. It’s an added pain to manage and track who is going to be working when. If your company uses a system for taxes, payroll, vacation accrual, insurance, etc, chances are it is built for 8 by 5 employees first and foremost.

- Various laws around part time and full time workers, based on hours in some jurisdictions. I think 28 hours is the cutoff here in Ontario?

I took a look at your website. It’s quite clear, and I think a lot of people would love such an arrangement, but a word of warning:

BusinessInsider is not a reliable citation - I would try to dig up the original study. Similarly for Forbes - it has lost a lot of the allure since their website hosts a lot of low-quality content now.

Try to find more reputable sources, starting with the studies themselves, NYT, Time, etc

Thanks, Ill look for a better citation

Thanks, very interesting points!

Maybe I need to target companies who have just raised money and don't currently have policies in place i.e. companies who are more flexible. On the downside, these early stage companies usually look for employees who are willing to pour blood sweat and 60hr weeks into the company i.e. less likely to want to employ people on 30hr contracts

A tricky balancing act trying to identify the best market to target!

I would say a good path for it is to first prove yourself and then ask to work less hours. I’ve seen that work a couple of times.

although I would argue 4 developers @ 80hrs/week are better than 4 developers @ 100hrs/week. Both output will increase and cost will reduce. My humble opinion.

Why not ask people to work 6 days a week then? /s

I'd disagree about your work compounds part. A fresher mind, due to more leisure time, will solve problems faster and reach insights quicker.

I've seen friends ramp up their work time and the thing I notice that goes downhill the fastest is their decision making ability. When you work longer hours, you have less time to think about harder problems so you push off making those decisions which may take 30 or 60 minutes of focused thinking about. With more free time, employees can have more energy to make decisions faster and better [1]

We already know that working overtime leads to poorer results [2]. The companies I know of that have tried 4 day work weeks have found that total productivity has improved - not just productivity per hour.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2004-143/pdfs/2004-143.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20090824001133/http://www.curt.or...

Boundaries are messy. Even in startups it's hard to say "this is my time" and this is "company time" especially with remote work becoming more common.

I've always taken the approach of not apologizing when I'm "not available" on days I requested off or when it's late at night. If I have significant equity, I'll care. But if I'm just salaried or at a BigCorp you can fuck off if it's after 10pm. I never understood why I knew co-workers at Amazon who would pull all nighters on weekends to "fix issues". Basically, I don't want to work for a company that rewards that kind of thing - time is worth too much. Hustle is worth it when you know how much skin you have in the game and can benefit from it more than your employer.

Do you consider people bothering you at 9pm, instead of 10pm, ok instead? I ask because I found your threshold quite odd. I would have set it at ~7pm.

5pm. If emergency once in a while, it should be okay for anytime, personally. (I am not in such a position to be contacted for anyway).

Covid has completely warped my window of "productive" work. Generally, I now get most of my work done between 2pm and 10pm. Fortunately, the rest of my team has a similar cadence which is why I pinned 9pm as my boundary :)

I previously thought it was complete and utter pseudo science but I've recently started using a near infrared LED light in the morning and evenings and it's immensely helped reinforce a healthy circadian rythm.

> Isn't 5 software developers @ $80k / 30hrs just the same as 4 @ $100k / 38hrs?

No, there's overhead that comes with just having someone as an employee. That overhead doesn't scale linearly with the employee's working hours. I don't think that this is the primary reason for not getting responses though. Why would a company do it? And why would they listen to a random person who contacted them? Did you just sent out an email to random contact@company.com address? Do you understand how this looks to anyone who receives that kind of communication? I suspect that you're missing a lot of knowledge about the internal power structure in each company which is necessary to make a real change. And there need to be a lot of strong incentives for any big change to happen.

If a year ago, you sent every software company in the world an email asking them to move to remote work, I suspect that you would change 0 minds too. The incentive from the pandemic had to be "work remotely or not at all" for many companies' power structures to open up to the idea.

Definitely - I realise I am missing a lot of knowledge on the internal power structure of companies. I still think it has value given than 57% of people would prefer to work a 4 day work week, coupled with how difficult it is to hire devs

Do you have any recommendations / how would you try to get companies interested? Do you think its merely a case of "changing the pitch", or the idea has no value?

When some people work 32 hours per week and others work 40 hours per week and some are working extra time on salary, things may get political.

In the Netherlands, by law, you can request to reduce your working hours to 32/week. Since you are still considered a full-time employee, you can even do so on a work visa. Unless the company has a valid reason to refuse, they have to accept your request.

It's pretty common in Switzerland as well, though I do not know whether a similar law exists.

Same in Germany. You need to be with the company for six months and the company needs to have 15 employees or more.

From what I've been reading online, Netherlands sounds like a bit of a utopia(!)

I don't know why and it would be awesome to investigate it. However I have some random ideas :

- there is a lot of work to be done, and balanced coder can be considered as taking a place of a full-time coder

- companies when cooperating talk about full time equivalent. So it may be hard for some of such companies to change contracts with their clients to include balanced time equivalent

- some cultures promote quantity over quality. It means the aim is to onboard as many devs as possible to gain more profits. Because they earn per hour of work not per project

- some projects are poorly managed, so every dev has to be available all the time to be able to get all info needed and also share info with other devs

So this is my guess. But I think the idea is great and in many ways beneficial. I'd market it as a way to hire 10x developers who do more in 4 days than others in a month. That it is a great platform to seek for such developers who care deeply about their life balance. Also, maybe startups would be better to adopt to the concept.

We at croit.io do let the employee decide how much time a day, week, and on what days of the week he will work. Of course the employee can change the decision when ever it pleases.

Never had an issue, got lots of positiv Feedback and will continue to do so.

Agree with almost everything you are doing/saying, except 4 devs @ 38 hrs/week =\= 5 devs @ 30 hrs per week.

Development is one of those weird things where often adding more resources does not translate into less project time (in fact some time it increases it).

System/solution entanglement and complexity are the root cause. I’d suggest reading The Mythical Man Month if you’re interested in the topic.

Try pitching to founders that just raised a round and have yet to build a team. They could start with just 28hr workers.

Integrating 1x 28hr worker in an existing environment of 38hr+ workers seems just a mess to me, definitely not worth the 20% discount.

Another recommendation is to ask them "why not". Change your pitch so that most of the call it's them talking vs you.

+1 to changing the pitch.

-1 for early stage startups. The time just after raising money consists of a lot of long weeks. Things break during your release, customers report bugs and want more features. Adhoc support for your big customers because there is no full-fledged support team. That’s the worst fit for a 3-day-a-week employee IMO.

It would be interesting if someone could disrupt this thinking though. What would a company look like if staffed entirely by part-time devs? Could you get more experienced people than you could otherwise attract and win that way? Just thinking out loud.

Ye, I had thought this too. The downside is that often these companies are startups, looking for people to pour blood sweat and tears (i.e. 60hr weeks) into the company

Maybe I just need to be more persistent with this though, start ups should be at least open to this idea

Thanks for all the feedback, it's been really useful.

I'm now thinking of 4 potential ways forward:

1. Contacting companies and asking them if they would consider compressing their 5 day role into 4 longer days (e.g. 4 x 10 hours) - certainly not my ideal but a slight improvement

2. Flipping the problem on its head: A website which (anonymously) lists developers who are looking for 4 day / week positions (e.g. A dev is searching for remote Java backend roles @ $50k for 30hrs per week)

3. Continuing on the path I'm already on but changing my pitch slightly

4. Giving up and trying something completely different

Thoughts?

If you prefer to contact privately, feel free to add me on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phil-mcparlane-80606727/

I’d target startups <20 people. They’re both desperate enough for devs and willing to try different working styles. Large companies with recruiting and HR functions will not be able to even consider this arrangement unless they have existing policies in place.

A major expense for employers are benefits. So your 80% number is reasonable strictly from a salary standpoint. You may need to take a further 10% cut to cover the benefits so that your total compensation or cost to the company is 80% overall.

From your website:

    Do these jobs pay less?
    Yes and no. You'll be working less, so you can maybe expect to get paid slightly less than a 40hr salary. On the other hand, you'll pay less tax, meaning your effective hourly salary will increase.

    Maybe instead you should ask yourself: "do I want to work more, or live more?"

This is a bad pitch. Just tell people that it's less and by how much and why. The last thing that people want is for someone to talk down to them, to give ambiguous non-answers or to suggest that they ask themselves different questions, especially when it comes to salary.

Fair enough, I struggled for a long time on this question as its a touchy subject. I was trying to please both the company and the employee, but it looks as though I failed on both counts.

I'll update this to make it clearer / honest

I worked part-time (32 hours a week) for 7 years. What I discovered is that most larger companies simply don’t do this schedule because the larger a company is the higher the competition. That’s why I only use CL for applying to jobs because I have more leverage to negotiate my hours.

Also, even though you may be able to start part-time, as the company grows, you will become a more integral employee, and your responsibilities will grow which materially implies you’ll be expected to go full time eventually. The best way to get around this is to work 5 days a week but fewer hours each day.

CL?

Craig’s List.

Risk of being stereotyped as "lazy" by people who've invested in your company or use your product.

The internal benefits are honestly great, but as soon as folks external hear about this (and they will), they may have a different reaction, especially if your product isn't stable yet.

Alternatively, what if you could make it easier for folks to live a sustainable lifestyle through consulting? What's preventing talented folks from just taking consulting jobs?

Is anyone offering 8 extra hours for a 20% raise? I don't know if software salaries in the US have gotten so high that people will happily take these pay cuts, or whether those people are a small vocal minority, or just people in a later stage in life that have different priorities, but as a late 20s person outside of the US, the last thing on my mind is how to convince my employer to give me a 20% pay cut.

After 10 years of being a software developer, I'd be more than happy to give up 20% salary in exchange for a bit of my life back.

Does that extra $15k (taxed at a higher rate) really make that much of a difference when you're already getting paid $80k? Maybe if you have 2 kids and a mortgage but that's not me

That's the point that I'm trying to get across. Don't assume that your experience applies across the board and everyone can spare double digits of their salary. Depending on where you live and how much you make, 100% of your software salary might be just getting you to having an okay-ish standard of living with not much to spare. So giving up 20% of it doesn't sound appealing.

And that's on top of the question about life-sitation and priorities.

> Maybe if you have 2 kids and a mortgage but that's not me

Not you but many people are in that situation. And you're sending their companies emails about how they should reduce their pay by 20%.

Have you worked with accountants and HR professionals when putting this together? Your site says employees will work a maximum of 28 hours but will receive all the benefits of a full time employee. Most companies cannot do this as there are many contractual, legal, and regulatory requirements based on hours worked.

Honestly, no I haven't. Whenever I'm trying to build something, I want to get v0.1 out there as quick as possible.

I know there may be issues regarding what you've said, but from my research it varies from country to country (in the US I believe 30hrs is the minimum threshold for full benefits). In hind sight, the language I used on the website is misleading so I'll change that

Can you remarket the devs who want even less hours?

- Before: Software engineer (38hrs) $100k

- After: Software engineer (3hrs) $8k

I think upwork.com might help you there ;) Don't get me wrong, I'm all for positions to be advertised as dollars / minute tbh

Clickable link to side project: https://www.28hrworkweek.com/