The 4-day week is flawed – workers still want it

Let's declare, say, trucking as non-real work. Trucks produce nothing but pollution; why do truckers work the long hours they work, and command the high salaries they get? All the while the "real work" is done by other people?

(Disclaimer: I never worked for financial, trading, or trucking industries; my grandfather was a truck driver.)

If your business is operating mainly on loans instead of revenue, it's because the lenders believe that you will provide value to someone in the future, and that you'll be able to capture some of that value and give it to the lenders. The lenders can be wrong, but it's still about giving people things they want.

There are some bad businesses, for sure, which are about tricking people into giving you money without giving them something in return. And a lot of business activity is about jostling for a good negotiation position (e.g. consolidation), so that you can capture more of the value you provide. But because people control their spending, you ultimately have to make something people want (or make them want what you have) if you want to make money.

Overall, you almost make it sound like the global trade of calories/textiles/etc is a bad thing, but it is an extremely good thing! It is one of the best things!!!

Also I don't have any actual friends.

Some people round that 4 days down to 30 hours, which is 7.5 hours a day, with a slight chance of missing the worst of rush hour in one direction.

It's a bit frustrating because I don't like the 4 day 40 hour work week. In the winter in many areas it would be absolutely soul crushing. But the 4 day 8 hour per day work week I think should absolutely be implemented into almost every job immediately.

On my contracts I've been taking lately I work 32 hours. It has done absolute wonders for my health. And I have no real proof, but I feel like I get just as much done. In some ways I may even get more done because having 3 days off every week makes me a lot fresher overall.

I did experiment last year when I was doing 32 hours a week so I was taking vacation days every Friday for a month. I felt a lot better, salary hit was not that bad.

I have a small loan to pay back, when I am done with it I am going for 36 hours - well it will be one week 40 and other 32. I expect it still will be huge improvement for my well being.

4x10, as in TFA, isn't progress but just shifting things around. It's not a revolution, it's not new, and it doesn't change things in any interesting ways, IMO. Maybe it's a baby-step to 4x8? I dunno.

However, rather than messing with any of this (right now) I'd prefer that we drastically cut back who counts as "exempt" for the purposes of overtime, and fake "contractors" (actually full time workers) that are widespread all over the economy, et c. That seems like a solid step 1. Whole sections of the economy aren't even doing what's nominally "full time" now, but more. More hours should be on the table, but only at a significant premium so companies aren't free to just demand it for nothing, and workers should be free to refuse it (so that they have to offer enough that the "yes" is an actual "yes"). That way they only use it when they need it—you know, leverage market forces to do something good.

Also, I'd call out fixing healthcare and broadening coverage of anti-noncompete and pro-moonlighting laws to the entire country as vital if we want these changes to reduced-full-time-work to be an economic benefit, not hindrance. That'll make entrepreneurship or side-hustles far more accessible to people who want something resembling a normal life (having a family, for instance) and also aren't trust-fund kids or otherwise damn lucky, but who want to sell something they are fully responsible for and are choosing to do.

Something would also need to be done about current part-time workers, who suffer from a different "working too many hours" problem than white-collar folks (i.e. multiple jobs out of necessity). Much higher minimum wages (or, if we want to go farther, UBI) might be on the table. In general I think enhancing the market signaling power of the large bulk of the populace that's not doing so great now, could only help make our economy healthier and more robust—much of the point of having a market economy is to efficiently provide things people want, right? That would also go hand-in-hand with opening up time & opportunity for entrepreneurship. There'd be some challenges involved (the effect on real estate prices is absolutely the #1 concern, but, like... that's already going poorly, so we already need to find a way to stop that) but I don't think they're insurmountable.

Very similar is the background mind vs not roles. Some people are great at completely separating their professional knowledge work time from the rest of their life. I am not. If a company pays for me to write software, they’re also getting my time in the bath tub thinking about software. This is different from when I was parking cars as a valet.

I would never, ever take a “reduced hours” software job for this reason. A job that had 25 hours on the books would occupy a similar amount of my headspace to a normal full time job but probably expect to pay less.

For how many employees seem to want it and what a deal it is under the right circumstances, I’m a little surprised more companies don’t offer reduced hours schedules for software. Maybe some adverse selection component.

Productivity per worker has been going up for decades. Real wages have been stagnant and we still work the same amount of hours even though we're a lot more productive now per hour worked than we used to be.

It's fine to lower productivity a bit in exchange for higher quality of life - it's been going up dramatically forever, but what's the point if we still all toil away just the same?

We are trying to run 24/7 operations and expect everyone to be in the office during the same 'core business hours' which means that wage theft is just one human error away from being a reality.

If I have to be there for anyone to make meaningful progress on deciphering an issue in my code, then we're writing the wrong code.

For about a year I did 20h weeks (independent contractor) as 4hour days. Compared to 40h+ weeks, it was awesome obviously.

But there is overhead to getting ready for it, expending certain kind of energy, more likely to close laptop on something incomplete.. I thought I would save the afternoons for personal projects but I rarely felt like it.