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Comment by adam_gyroscope | Hacker News Reader

We (bit.io) do a 4 day work week, and have since our founding. It's the 32-hours get paid for 40-hours kinda; our salaries are competitive with companies of the same stage & size who do a 40-hour work week.

I was skeptical at first (I'm the CEO), but my co-founder showed me the data and we've been doing it since the start with no regrets. Happy to answer any practical questions; we're about 10 full time folks right now, work monday-thursday, all remote.

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Can you tell us more about the data that convinced you?

Check out the links in our post on this: https://blog.bit.io/we-have-a-four-day-work-week-and-you-sho...

Had a chance to read it, but it doesn't really say how you decided that your company is just as productive with a 4-day workweek as before. How did you measure?

Who responds to customer issues on Fridays?

Great question. The sad fact of the 4 day work week is that the rest of the world doesn't do it, so external support is a challenge. Right now, my co-founder and I try to do any external customer _meetings_ that have to take place on a friday. But for support we have an on-call rotation (like we do for engineering), and that does cover fridays. So, the support on-call person handles friday support requests.

do they take a different day off in the week or do they have an occasional 5 day work week?

Not a comment out of the side of my mouth, I am legit curious. at any rate, an occasional 5 day week is better than an occasional 6 day week

It's oncall, like any engineering on-call rotation, so there's an SLA for responding to support requests; currently our oncall is 6am-6pm Pacific time (weekdays). So, it's as much as work day as any on-call rotation is.

The same people who respond on Saturdays presumably?

There is usually a decent difference in support volume between a customer weekday and a customer weekend. I would like to understand how they are thinking about this. It's especially perplexing since their site has no support info that I could find, so maybe they take the Google approach of not providing support.

We have a chat box that pops up for all support, and offer support@bit.io. Both get routed to our Intercom instance, and both generate opsgenie alerts for some cases. We do an on-call rotation for answering the support requests.

We don't _yet_ do support on-call on the weekends.

He didn't say that everyone works the same 4 days.

He did say that

At Lockheed when I worked there, everyone worked M-Th. Friday was the one flex day that was in play depending on which working arrangements an employee chose.

>work monday-thursday, all remote.

He did, but he mentioned later there was on-call. So it's a 4 day facade, similar to unlimited vacation.

I wouldn't call it a "facade". It's 4-day weeks where in some weeks you have to be on call on Friday. If there's enough people that means being on call every month or two.

As long as they're up front with us when hiring it seems fine to me. If you don't want to be on call, that's something you need to factor into your job search. I've always factored it in for my searches!

How do you manage the temptation to think you'd get more work done if you worked an extra day? Do your stats show an improved retention of staff?

Do employees take into account the reduced hours when comparing salaries or is it disregarded similar to benefits like pensions?

Does the company rely on a sneeky bit of work done on an off-day, or is it a true, tools-down, have fun, day?

As a founder, the temptation is real, but anecdotally (anecdataly?) I'm so much more motivated on the work days I don't think the extra day matters. But, my company is not big enough to have enough sample data to prove it one way or the other.

Employees do take the extra free time into consideration when comparing offers, since we make offers that are competitive to a 40-hour offer.

Re: sneaky bit of work on the off day. We don't rely on it, or ask for it. We do have an on-call rotation that covers support and site issues on Fridays, but you're in that rotation once every 5 weeks or so.

FWIW, I love places that actively prevent you from working too much, I over worked at a young age, it took two good bosses to teach me being effective limiting my work hours. This stopped me from hurting myself, never going back to forced 40 hour weeks. Thanks for being part of that.

Warning though, forced on call can be hell as an employee. We are an group of five and can handle on call every five weeks if there is more we would start to get attrition.

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