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Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

Careful. Some cultures in Asia have a strong culture of appearing to work hard solely based on time spent in the office.

The Japanese salaryman comes to mind [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman

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Though not as extreme, this happens in the US as well, especially in Silicon Valley. My last few gigs in large enterprise software companies were like this.

I wonder if cutting official hours allows people to drop some of that pretense.

They have plans to try a 4 days working week here in Spain, and I believe the working culture is quite different. We will see how it works.

If one believes that less time spent working increases productivity, then by all means let's go down to 1 day a week. We'll see HUGE productivity gains there... right?

I don't think its that simple, but I do think 5 days of restless productivity is not ideal for a lot of people. That's enough time to start losing sleep for everyone who isn't serious about getting enough of it. Its also five continuous days of doing the same thing. It works for an assembly line, but it might not be ideal for more creative work.

After trying something similar I think it might be better for people like me to work really hard M-T, take a breather on W, then hit it hard R-F. Thats a very different rhythm than slugging M-T-W-R-F week after week.

like all things in life there is a point of diminishing returns and even negative returns. 4 days may be that for most "humans". Also culture is complex.

I've worked in Spain and they thought I was a workaholic because I didn't converse a whole lot in the office (I was there for probably 6 months at our Spanish branch) and I was just putting in the 40 hours I would do in the States. While I got good reports during reviews, my manager said some where that I was a bit intense. He got a good laugh out of that because I'm was one of the less intense people on our team (stateside) at the time.

I can see how that can happen, a workplace in Spain is also a place for socializing. In fact, I have seen the opposite happening with Spaniards working abroad. Some of them can't take very well that their colleagues just come, work and leave and sometimes they don't even say hello or goodbye.

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