Tech Companies with Four-Day Work Weeks

Should be fixed now. Hard refresh / cache clear may be required though

Added another node to the cluster :p wasn't expecting this to get so much traffic (!)

Meh. I mostly see it as a regression to the mean. Over the years, Silicon Valley has shown itself as being willing to bend over backwards to the young and childless, sponsoring conference tickets, corporate getaways to tropical islands, happy hours, etc. All of those things are a material benefit to a certain type of person in an earlier stage of life, but are of limited or negative value to a new parent.

It's funny if you think that paid time off for the new parent is "holiday", usually you come back of it way more tired (but you develop lot of new skills)

Think of it as a way to preserve the species. Or as a deep training session.

As others hinted https://wanna-joke.com/parents-after-a-long-weekend/ is what just about every single parent will confirm.

And to expand on also hinted growth of skills. Having kids - gives one abundance of opportunity to practice growing others.

Obviously you won't be around your kids all the time, nor be there for them forever. So after initial "micromanagement" phase with babies. With toddlers and older you start switching towards mentoring and coaching.

Which overlaps (not specific things, but concepts) with managers/leaders growing employees.

FWIW I agree with you.

This may be a controversial or unpopular opinion, but if you are expected to work more because a coworker is unavailable you are bad at managing expectations and controlling your career. When a coworker is suddenly unavailable, you may need to switch priorities but you should never allow a company to tell you to work more to cover for them. Shifting priorites can be an effort or morale drain but these things can happen for a multitude of reasons regardless of coworkers and should be managed the same way regardless. If jane got hit by a bus or joe left the company would your project survive? In any scenario you are expected to pick up the slack, you should be making it very clear the terms necessary for you to continue to be successful and especially clear what isn’t going to get done by changing priorities. This is especially true for things like increased on call rotation. Making it clear that that will effect other things and that your time is not free is crucial for managing expectations.

Well of course I can't know, and I'm also not saying that it DOES, just that it seems like a likely effect. By the design of how businesses operate in a capitalistic environment (with a profit motive), why wouldn't this cause a bias for companies hiring parents?

Whatever the exact form, I wish sabbaticals in industry were more common—probably at longer intervals than job-hopping folks would find interesting though.

I'm curious, do you have kids? I do, and I think that anyone who had kids in order to get the "free vacation" is in for a nasty surprise.

I haven't been a parent so I can't be positive, but I doubt time off for maternity or paternity acts as a "positive" incentive for having children, meaning people who didn't want children before would now want them. That time off is filled pretty well caring for the baby, which is extremely tiring and time-consuming; it doesn't really function as a break. I also don't know how many people would trade a several month absence from work for the at least 18-year (more like lifetime, really) commitment of raising a child; they have children for other reasons.

That said, I could see how having maternity/paternity leave would help people who want to put in the effort of raising children, but cannot/do not want to quit their job or keep working with a baby for the most demanding first few months. There is likely negative pressure on having children from not being able to take paid leave from work, and in aggregate people would probably have more children as a result if they do get paid leave.

Although this is an entirely different topic, such a policy seems like a good idea to combat the lack of births many developed countries are facing, which in the long term will cause an asymmetric demography. This could be a big problem, as countries with births under replacement and little net inward migration need to support an aging population with fewer active workers (see e.g. Japan). I imagine some would argue that we should move toward smaller and more sustainable societies in order to preserve the planet's resources and reduce our total consumption, in which case they would advocate for alternate solutions to deal with societal aging.

I don’t think anyone is incentivized to have a kid because they get a few weeks or months off. The only incentive i see is the opposite; if there is no parental leave, they may decide not to have children they were otherwise considering.

And the few weeks/months after a child is born can be much harder work than your day job in many aspects. So it would be unfair to parents, especially mothers, who tend to spend more time on child care, to force them to use their sabbatical/vacation time as parental leave. You’d effectively be controlling people’s reproductive timelines with this sabbatical schedule.

In terms of women being disadvantaged, I agree. But I think the answer is to make sure it’s illegal to discriminate based on current or future parental obligations and enforce that strongly, and to strongly incentivize both mothers and fathers to take their full allocated leave, and make it the same length for both parents.

>> this seems to perversely incentivize having kids for no real reason

In Canada mat/pat leave is unemployment insurance, which you pay for on every pay cheque. Even if it was "free money" nobody is having kids to get a few months off work.

As a parent (and former single person), the idea that society is tilted unfairly against single people really does not resonate. At a macro level, with birth rates declining the way they are, we should probably be doing even more to ease the lives of parents.

Except that’s never going to be the case anyway because customers need to be supported. Unless sort of you can get the whole world on a 4 day work week. And even then that’s only some people.

I’d take even a couple more weeks of vacation over a 4 day work week.