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Comment by philmcp | Hacker News Reader

The best way to deal with burn out is to start offering a 4 day week imo.

I recently launched https://4dayweek.io to help normalise this - Software jobs with a better work / life balance

I would take 50% paycut to get 3 day week, but it is quite hard with constantly evolving SaaS devops.

Moreover teams and dev work are micromanaged these days so much with n-th incarnation of "Agile" and Slack 24/7 presence that it is nearly impossible to get a week of autonomy and hyperfocused deep cave work. I know communication is important, but frequent interruption and progress reporting is killing my productivity and creativity. I feel like drone gluing mudballs to bring some success to daily sprint standup confessional.

Anyway, I'm looking around for greener pastures.

I feel this. I feel even less autonomy with the advent of slack and always on communication tools, and it has hurt my productivity. And then when I try to say I'm going heads down to get things done I'll get pinged anyway with claims of a manufactured "emergency". We don't write medical software and hell we haven't even released yet, there is no such thing as an emergency! I work in consulting so the usual excuse is always, "But a client demo" which in my head just means management setting poor expectations.

This, and even when not pinged, only keeping Slack open 9-5 makes me stay constantly alert and anxious of some fallout from management meetings.

I had to reply to this because I’ve been feeling this very heavily the last few years. Not sure what to do about it either because it feels like it’s everywhere.

Specifically “Agile”, the lack of autonomy, and the standup confessional.

I can appreciate communicating and keeping everyone on the same page. At some point though, we’re going to have to realize we’re all professionals and we can trust people to do their jobs.

I literally would kill people if it meant I could spend a whole, single, uninterrupted day, just working on tickets.

You can if you just do it in reverse order?

Right? I know a couple people who have made a 3-day work week a requirement for them to take a role. It makes the job hunt a bit harder, but all I've heard back is "it's 100% worth it" in terms of pursuing this and holding your ground on it.

I find that about a 30-35 hour work week is ideal for me. I have kids, a house, a social life, juggling all of that is challenging and working straight 8-10 hour days just leaves everything else to fall out in the mix. Even though I didn’t like working from home all day every day, the pandemic added some slack to the 40 hour work week. I wish I could get that slack back while being in the office, because I do believe there is a productivity multiplier to being in person.

This is a great initiative. I hope the next phase of the website also has job openings for non-technical positions. All the best for this great initiative :)

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