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Comment by pototo666 | Hacker News Reader

Coming out of one of those 996 companies, I would say that most of my working time are wasted.

I would do almost nothing in the moring. I did most of my work in the afternoon. In the evening I just pretended to be working.

Forcing a real 7.5h day would not hurt most companies. But it would hurt the ego of middle managers, who want to prove that their teams are trying their best by working long hours.

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I am working 40h in a Middle European country and think that a lot of my working time is wasted.

Somewhere between 20h and 30h and a 4 day working week would be best for performance imo

I agree, and I'm in Toronto, Canada.

I genuinely believe a 4-day work week is the way to go. It's Friday and I'm already burnt out at 11am.

My experience is that the burnout and wasted time comes from all the crap that distracts from real work -- the meetings, emails, bug boards, etc. When I don't have all these things getting between me and the IDE, I'm far more productive and get a lot more enjoyment from my work. Of course, if all the crap were cut out, I'd probably be looking at two days of work per week, never mind four.

In the past several years most of the burnout and wasted time I’ve experienced has come from libraries, frameworks, build/CI systems, architectural patterns, and so on that simply suck, or at the very least fail to properly work together. Unfortunately, they’re all mainstream technologies that people seem to think are perfectly okay, and that fighting against your tools simply in order to develop good solutions to the actual domain problems is just what coding is supposed to be.

I'm genuinely curious which of those items you consider as sucky and why. I am asking because I've recently been moved from a C++ to a JS team at my current workplace, and now I am exposed to this wide range of new tools which are all alien to me.

But moving to a 4 day week doesn’t eliminate any of that, it simply means you’d get less done.

If we adopted a four day work week do you think people would feel a burned out feeling at Thursday at 11am? I honestly _don’t know_ and think some long term experimentation is needed

I honestly don't think I would. I am exhausted by Friday and then the weekend is basically just Saturday so there's hardly any time to recharge during it.

I'm not burnt out on Thursdays. I feel empowered. That said, I've only been on a 4-day work week for a month and half now.

Not nearly enough time to adjust. Any job switch the first month is like the honeymoon phase.

Possibly, but at some point it has to stop, right? Take the extreme example of working 4 hours, one day a week. If you are even marginally interested in what you’re doing, I can’t imagine anyone feeling burned out by that. I just don’t know what the threshold is (and it’s certainly different for different people). A lot of it probably has to do with how busy people’s lives are outside of work, and if they feel like they’re able to manage their lives at least somewhat stress free.

Yeah it would have to stop obviously. But let’s take it the other way! Do you think working 20 hours a day 7 days a week is optional efficiency? We need to find the right balance!

Who cares. Even if I feel just as bad during the week, I have more weekend time. That's worth it.

We don't have a worldwide labor shortage (!). Productivity going up and work hours not going is a travesty.

There's a labor shortage in US right now. You can feel it everywhere: from having to book car mechanic appointment weeks in advance to construction projects going to standstill.

And there's also millions of people that could be working but aren't:

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/RI...

Further, low labor productivity and bad on the job training pipelines directly result from squashing uppity labor

https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/construction-labor-shor...

Everyone I've ever known has loved working 4 10's and honestly 4 8's would be even better. They never complain about burnout and a 3-day weekend every week leaves them energized and recharged for the next weeks' work. I only ever hear complaints from people working 4 12's which at that point you'd hear the usual complaints of anyone working 8 hours of overtime a week.

The fact I've never once heard a complaint about 4 10's from anyone I've ever known to work them says a lot compared to the usual 5 8's which I hear complaints from about everyone (including myself).

n = 19~21 people or so

I've recently negotiated a 4-day work week with my employer. It's been a huge quality of life improvement. Whether I make $80k/yr or $150k/yr, it doesn't matter as much to me as quality of life. Maybe I'm an outlier, but money isn't everything.

If smaller companies can't compete on the huge salaries and options that larger companies provide, they can certainly compete on flexible work schedules. A developer working 4 days a week is pretty much just as useful to me as the engineering manager as a developer who is working 5 days a week. Budget and schedule.

if everyone does it, labor will become more scarse, and wages should go back up too to recover the some or all of missing 1/5, so please everyone do this!

Only if total production goes down. If productivity increases enough to compensate (what really looks like the case), it should have no impact on wages.

> If smaller companies can't compete on the huge salaries and options that larger companies provide, they can certainly compete on flexible work schedules.

They certainly can compete. Just raise more or adopt a stock comp model.

Not all companies looking to hire devs have massive injections of VC money to play with.

Tech at this point is needed to some degree in lots of products.

Maybe they need better founders.

I’ll play devils advocate. Say you work 40 hour work week with 20 hours of “productive” time. If we moved to a 30 hour 4 day work week would you actually only have 15 hours of productive time per week? I say this because I don’t think all the non productive parts of working life would go away, instead we would just get less done.

I worked at a US company that wanted us to put in the extra effort and do work after hours. They tracked this with a summary report of work submitted after 5.

So I worked normally and then I'd sit on all my work and wait until just after 5:15 to submit it all and then leave immediately. I didn't get in until 9:30 or 10 anyway so there was literally no difference except my work was delayed.

They praised our team for all the extra work. They really had no clue.

This is a perfect example of "you get what you measure."

I worked in an Asian country that was notorious for it’s “always on” work culture.

What I realized is people just created their own down time during the work day. The attitude was “if you want me available from 9am to 9pm, then I’ll just just a 2hr lunch, a 1hr dinner and a bunch of 30 min coffee breaks”. They end up doing about 6-8 hrs of actual work. And on top of it end up with a really resentful attitude about their work and boss as well.

Far better to find competent, motivated (not rah-rah, but more like “lets just get it done”) people and tell them what you need done and leave it up to them how to do it.

So how do you spend those morning and evening times? It just seems depressing to have your butt in chair all those hours doing nothing...?

Same way people have been doing it for decades.

Chit chat with your friends online, have a cup of coffee, spend 30 min listening to an audiobook or reading. And hey, what do you know, it's lunch time already!

Yep. Your writing makes me miss the morning coffee. I used to have a lot intereting talks beside the coffee machine. Coffee was better. Now I have to drink cheap instant coffee alone.

I read Hacker News and Reddit, or read tech docs, or write some code, or talk with friends. Then I quit. I am making a Reddit for China now. I want to help all those boring souls like the old me :).

It is truly depressing. I would never go back. I earn 1/20 of my old salary as a solo developer. I can't make ends meet, yet. But I would never go back.

Paul Graham wrote somewhing like, if you fail, you would have to go back to those boring companies. This fact provides a lot of motivation. I can't remember the exact phrase. But yes, that's exactly how I feel.

Good luck, my satanic potato friend.

Maybe you know, but if you do not; 666 is a lucky number in China. I was surprised to see the number of beast everywhere when I first visited ShangHai & Suzhou, while it's very rare in the west.

From wikipedia: "In China the number is considered to be lucky and is often displayed in shop windows and neon signs".

> read tech docs, or write some code

How's that not work? I suppose you meant write some code not for your work, but reading tech docs is ABSOLUTELY part of your job...

yeah I am skeptical that people are putting in full 12 hour days

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