Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?
I'm pretty interested in finding a fully remote company, that hires for a 4-day workweek (as opposed to 5).
How can someone (in Europe) find such employers?
How can someone (in Europe) find such employers?
During Covid, many companies started doing rest/reset days every quarter that is basically a forced holiday for everyone together (no FOMO, no pressure to check emails, attend calls etc). Some companies have started to do rest/reset week every quarter! (because they think its necessary given their higher stress level work).
Getting time off isn't that hard. What is actually hard is getting high-quality work (where you get back as much as you give), satisfying work and a great team to do it with. Without great work and team, but have lot of PTO/perks etc it becomes very unsatisfying and not able to sustain interest.
I also see many companies screwing up by not investing in talent/skill development activities (not the typical corp L&D where they organise a workshop with some random person who seems very preachy and doesn't really practice). I wish they did this better and enabled people to manage their personal time better on their own.
What arbitrary KPI did they point to as a reason for that decision?
Where I've seen this be successful is when the person picks up time that overlaps with a remote team. This is viewed as adding additional value because it can be hard to get other people to get up early, or stay up late to collaborate with those teams. If it's part of their deal then it can end up being a more sustainable situation.
If you want a sabbatical, why not just ask for it? Use it as a filter for the organizations you want to work with. I suspect it'll be hard to negotiate because the company won't understand what value they'll get. You are a prospective hire and not a proven asset. It's only after a period that they can assess that they feel you are worthy of a sabbatical and aren't a flight risk. When it comes to academia, then sabbaticals are part of the deal. They aren't for tech companies, although some like Microsoft offer these for higher levels (people with proven value who have lots of options.)
In France (since the question was about Europe) sabbaticals are part of the Labour Law and companies must provide them.
I don't think most companies will let you. I tried to negotiate this many times in the past for engineers and it was never successful. Even for companies that otherwise were very flexible or knew that a 4 day work week was the only way to afford someone they wanted to hire.
Many tech companies will do this and its worth asking. But most is not really accurate.
Now no longer working through an agency, I was kindly asked if I could work for longer hours and accepted, so now working 36 instead of 32 hours a week.
I always feel more stressed those weeks.
Seriously underrated advise. If they magically find funding for you to go back to full time again they will not be so quick to return you to your original rate not because they don't like you or anything but because accounting witchcraft. Always make sure they never degrade your pay. If they want to pay you for less hours fine.
A 4-day workweek is a core part of our culture. It dramatically increased productivity, increased energy levels and reduced overall mental pressure. The way we make it work is to not have everyone be away during the same day.
It’s really surprising that not more companies have 4-day work weeks.
If you’re an employer and you read this, just give it a try. All your concerns are most likely just limiting beliefs.
(four day work week proponent, no other affiliation)
Let me know if you want to get added @krm01 :)
Or do some take Monday off, and others take Friday off?
I've done that. They don't lower the meeting load. The overhead is fixed.
Also they want to 'own' you. It's a question of power. They felt personally insulted
There are currently ~100 companies on the platform atm but I have a backlog of new companies to add and see more companies every day
And @HN, if your company is open to 4 days @ 80% salary, please get in touch :)
Added to my todo list
I'm going to prioritise an RSS feed :)
But at my internship long time ago, as a mechanical engineer, it was also possible.
None of them offer fully remote jobs though.
Might be different at Booking or fintech companies.
In my case I was able to start working 32 hours a week at my previous employer, even explicitly communicating that I was going to work (teaching CS in high school) on my day off. I initially requested 30 hours, for working 7.5 hours on the remaining days, but they figured they should set a company wide minimum of 32 hours for people in (more-or-less) managerial positions. If I had pushed it, they probably would have budged on that too.
I'm curios, isn't there anyone that would prefer a 5 day 6 hour work schedule instead?
At the high end of things you have folks in medical professions who not uncommonly work shifts like three 12 hour days and get paid as if they worked 40 hours.
At the low end you have things like hourly workers being forced into doing split shifts where they'll be asked to cover rush hours at a coffee shop or something (7-9am) and (11am - 1pm).
Basically instead of using your extra 2h a day to lie on the couch and swipe through tiktok or similar time wasting take a full day and do something useful.
That being said it sounded like the extra 2h at work were typically fairly quiet anyways so I don't think there was much value to the employer over an 8h day.
Tech interviews have become anything goes free for alls for companies, who think they can do as they please.
At this point if a company is asking me to do more than an hour more effort than they’re willing to spend with their own employees, it’s an automatic no.
This company wants me to answer these ridiculous questions for a privilege to interview with them( looks like they do wordpress themes and plugins, from what i gathered.)
> How do you use our products, or their competitors? How would you improve one of them?
> Tell us about an interesting app you’ve worked on. What made it interesting?
> Tell us about the hardest technical problem you had to solve. Any problem is okay – a compelling architectural decision, a hard-to-track bug, a performance or scaling issue, etc. Please outline the problem as you would describe it to a colleague
> Tell us about your production experience with two different technologies that are solving a similar problem. It could be two different programming languages, two different frameworks, two different databases, services, etc.
> Why Automattic and why now?
What kind of people are even coming up with this kind of stuff. They don't even have the minimum decency to put in the salary range if they are expecting people to write these essays even before interviewing them.
So tired of this nonsense. Just when you thought you've seen the worst. Someone figures out a way to make this even worse.
The two easiest ways to find companies already doing a 4 day week would likely be: 1. Dedicated 4 day week job boards, such as 4 Day Week (https://4dayweek.io/). 2. Looking for articles highlighting companies with 4 day weeks, such as this piece from Angel (https://angel.co/job-collections/20-startups-with-4-day-work...).
Today is the first day of my month long vacation in Italy on my new team
- an unlimited PTO (you'd have to explain going beyond, say, 4 weeks, but otherwise working)
- mandatory 2 payed weeks off (1 in December and 1 in Jun)
- mostly remote using the "office-hub" model, only requiring presence when necessary
- every 2 weeks there something we call a Focus Friday, when nobody can contact you and you are free to concentrate on things you want to work on.
This covers all offices, i.e. Texas, UK, Spain.
Pretty comfortable, I'd say. I don't feel I need more time to restore some energy.
> (you'd have to explain going beyond, say, 4 weeks, but otherwise working)
Unless "I'd like to take a 5-week vacation" isn't enough explanation in itself, it clearly isn't working. An employee shouldn't have to justify _why_ they want to go on vacation.
Me: I'd like to take a 5-week vacation
Manager: Why?
Me: I haven't taken a long vacation in about year.
Manager: Sure thing. Approved.
This is what happens and it's better than dealing with accrued PTO where I have to keep track of the days off. I'm sure companies are doing this because they've done the math and see that on average people take less time off with UTO. But if you have a good team and good managers then it isn't difficult to take time off.
Additionally, in the accrued PTO case, if you end up taking 5 weeks straight with absolutely no justification and your manager isn't good then there's probably a chance at retaliation. In either case, it depends on your relation with your manager.
I do agree that mandatory vacation is probably the best however, it's extremely rare in America which is where the unlimited vacation trend has started.
The US office had untracked PTO, and from the get-go he would let the Americans know that the French office had around 7 weeks time off, and that they'd use it, so they should as well.
He took essentially the month of August off, which did help establish that 4 week vacations were "normal".
I (an European) always took this as granter yet considered it crazy people have as little as just a single month of vacation a year. It's been just recently I found out this isn't even the case in the USA where people normally have just 2 weeks. This scared the heck out of me. Why even live at all if all you have to live is 2 weeks a year and you have to sell the remaining 50 weeks of your life time yearly? I would rather commit suicide.
In America, our government and media are all controlled by corporations, so there's a massive propaganda machine that tells the population they need to be workaholics if they want a chance to be wealthy.
Also, employees have no leverage. You can't decline a job because they only offer 2 weeks PTO when everyone else also only offers 2 weeks.
People that push for a culture shift for more PTO are shouted down as being lazy, and the propaganda machine screams about how bad small businesses would be hurt. The machine LOVES to talk about small businesses, and people fall for it.
This is less than the PTO mandated by law in many European countries. Hardly unlimited.
I had to double check this as it doesn't match my experience.
Yes, it is a minimum of 28 days, but that can include Bank Holidays (normally 6 days, though we have extra "Jubilee" Bank Holidays this year), so in practice it's 20 days plus Bank Holidays minimum.
In Spain 22 days + public holidays.
That's the minimum, many jobs give more, e.g. 28-32 days + public holidays. (On my last job in Britain it increased slowly, when I left I had 33 plus the public holidays.)
It would be informative to see if the people in Britain and Spain take more holiday than those in Texas.
In fact, this doesn’t really sound attractive at all. At my current employer I work 32h/week, get 6½ weeks off (+ bank holidays), am entirely remote, and every Wednesday is entirely free of meetings.
Mandatory PTO is the best. That way you don't have fomo, no pressure to work whole on vacation and no catching up to do when you're back.
I'd like to work somewhere with more mandatory vacation.
Overall I'd say in the US there is a LOT more appetite for "how I'd like to allocate my PTO" vs things like "how I'd like to divvy my working hours" at most places.
- 23 days off every year for everyone.
- 5 extra days off for COVID years (but doesn't accumulate between years)
- 18 days of (paid) sick leave (also for family)
- Lots of leaves for stuff like family sickness (1 month a year), bereavement (10 days), paternity (6 weeks), maternity (6 weeks) on top of the ones we get from the government (3.5 months parenting leave for example).
- 2 times a year where taking a holiday only costs half called roughly "office shushing" where you take 2 days but are away 5.
- Plenty of holidays etc, requirement to take at least of 5 days consecutive (so 10 days off with weekends) of vacation a year and it only accumulates up to one year's worth so you are required to use your PTO in practice.
After a long time, you also get a sabbatical which is pretty crazy to me in a tech company.
In practice you take few long vacations (e.g. 1 month off twice a year during the times of the hadmama where it "costs" half) and a bunch of short ones (long weekends).
This isn't based on level and you don't have to be a principal engineer to get these benefits it's just market competition - SW1s fresh out of college get the same amount of vacation.
- 25 days off every year for every one (5 days minimum can carry over). Most tech companies have 30 days off.
- No extra days for COVID
- Unlimited sick days
- 240 days of parental leave (so per parent. Increase if you have more than one child (twins, triplets). Plus 10 days for the non-birthing parent to be together the first weeks. 96 days per parent can be saved beyond the 4th year.
- 17 holidays but they are sometimes on weekends and thus give no extra days. The only day that gives you a spare day if it happens on a weekend is our "independance" day.
* 30 regular days off, that have to be used by year+1, and HR people usually argue with people to use their days off ( the labour inspection checks this kind of stuff)
* 10-12 ( depending on year because it also covers for public holidays that are on a weekend that year) "rest" days if you're not on the regular 35h/week contract ( so most people in IT and similar, because it's supposed that you work more). They have some caveats like not carrying over.
* Some rather limited parental leave ( non-birthing parent's leave was recently increased to like a month, and birthing parent's is somewhere around 3-4 months if i recall correctly? Far too little if you ask me, coming from an ex-communist country where it's 1-3 years)
* 11 public holidays (you don't get a compensation if they fall on a weekend, usually, unless the employer so choses)
240 days of parental leave sounds amazing and very generous!
I don't like the deal, to me it feels like a ripoff. But the government has conveniently put half our income tax on the employer as an "employer tax" that many people don't even know exists, so people think our tax is 30-ish percent since they don't see it on their payslip.
Income tax: 30% (of income)
Employer tax: 31% (on top of income)
VAT: 25% (When i spend money)
Petrol, Alcohol: Ω%
Back in the days there was a system called "Tjänstemannaansvar" which held our politicians accountable if they grossly mismanaged our money. It's sadly been taken out, since the politicians don't want any responsibility.
I like the nordic model, I just don't like that our politicians can spend money as they like without any repercussions, and since our government is big/fat it's worse than if it was a small/slim government.
If "decided by government" had a clearer, more transparent, less corrupt path from "elected by the people" that'd be great. But here we are buying "medical socks" for 100$ a pair rather than the identical 10$ one that is always out of stock.
We used to have great roads, great healthcare, great social security and all other things you'd expect to get for paying 50% of your income to it. We don't have either of these anymore, taxes haven't gone down significantly during this time, things have just become worse :(
I very much doubt that. In most EU countries sick days are limited to 90 days, after that a panel of doctors will examine your case and move you to disability pay for example, as you can't just be on sick leave "unlimited".
But overall we in NL are not familiar with the stress of losing our days off because of illness. This should be the norm for every decent country that cares about human well-being.
Isn't that illness called a sick day? Like I said, everyone calls it unlimited sick days, but in Austria, and I think in Poland, Germany too it's limited to 90 days per year. Sick longer than 90 days gets your cased evaluated by a doctor's committee and probably moved to disability pay. But I doubt there is such a thing as unlimited sick day. Sure, you can be sick for an unlimited time, but your employee and insurance status will change after a certain number of days.
Even if you get serious ill your employer has to pay, so from what I know, employers need to insure themselves against this. Only after 2 years are they off the hook and will people be transferred to disability pay if required.
In some sense, discussing about 90 days vs. 'unlimited' sick days is not really relevant. 90 days would feel like unlimited to me as a regular healthy employee anyway.
But to be very clear, in NL we don't have these 90 days of sick leave. We don't have a budget as an employee for sick leave.
Have you checked your national insurance conditions? In Austria this also isn't in any employment contract because it's ratified in the national health insurance agreement everyone working here must have, which limits everyone to 90 days sick leave but many people don't know this and think they have "unlimited" sick leave. IIRC, Poland and Germany also have 90 days of sick leave by law.
Maybe you're not fully aware of it but I'd assume your national health insurance will specify a similar threshold by law that's obviously not in your employment contract.
https://dutchreview.com/expat/sick-leave-netherlands/
The two years I mentioned are right.
>Some Dutch workplaces include “no-pay waiting days” (loonvrije wachtdagen) — these are the first one or two days of your sickness where the employer is not obliged to pay wages.
Here in the UK we can "self-certify" sickness for anything less than 5 days. If you're ill for less than a week then you just tell your boss you're ill and don't come to work. You're still paid. If you're ill for more than 5 days then you need to get sign off from a doctor. You're still paid for the time you're sick. If you're ill for several weeks or longer then you move to "statutory sick pay" which is usually less than your salary but some employers will still pay you your full salary. If you're off work for a really long time (6 months+) then most employers will negotiate with you to resign.
At no point are you ever really in danger of losing your job though, or being forced to return to work. Employers are mostly pretty good about it, especially in tech.
In theory I could be genuinely ill every other week for a full year and self-certify 26 individual weeks off without needing to visit a doctor or losing my job. In that sense, we absolutely do have "unlimited" sick days.
However, when it eventually came to negotiating after successfully interviewing it was still difficult and I had at least a few companies - to my huge frustration - try to push me into a full time role or even tell me they weren't setup to handle my request yet but would be in future! With the role I eventually accepted I still had to work full-time during my probation period before I could reduce my hours due to limitations with their processes (apparently.)
To help answer the originl question, at my former employer - The Financial Times - a 4 day week was fairly common amongst folks with young children.
It’s likely not as well compensated as „SV-company-moving-to-4-workdays“, but might be an option if 4 workdays is more important.
Here is a post about our adoption of the 4-day workweek: https://www.signifyd.com/blog/signifyd-adopts-four-day-workw...
Disclaimer: I've worked here for a little over three years, and I believe this is one of the few companies with the best work/life balance I've EVER worked at.
Our internal state should reflect the way we want developer's to feel about our products.
I see that there is only a vacancy as Full-stack React developer. I dont have the necessary experience for that probably. Do you think there are any positions closer to my area of expertise?
We are a cybersecurity scale-up and we are actually hiring: https://www.exeon.com/company/career
I had a job like this in the past and I loved the freedom of it the fact that I had plenty of energy left over to pursue other interests. So I wanted to recreate that for those that I hire.
EDIT: my role is part-time so it's not a fair comparison.
Your linked offer is a part-time position. It even states that you only get a cut of FTE and that there is the possibility to change to a full-time employment.
Is that what's being discussed here? My mind immediately went to a 4 10s situation (which, while not the norm, is fairly common in the US).
You go from a 5 day workweek to 4 days, and take a 20% paycut. Sometimes it's possible to work 4 days of 9 hours, but it always comes with a paycut.
See e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-day_workweek#Active_trial...
[1] In fact, if you work >= 6 months for a Dutch employer, you can request moving to a part-time schedule and they can only reject this request unless they have very good reasons:
https://www.intermediair.nl/werk-privebalans/rolverdeling/we...
I can’t think of any place where the expected schedule for one employee is 32 hours and another, otherwise identical, employee is 40 hours and those two are paid the same.
To me, a 4-day workweek just means you have scheduled/expected work on 4 days and none scheduled/expected on the other 3.
We are looking for:
* Backend (Python/Go/Postgres) * Frontend (React) * Infra/DevOps/Tooler (k8s/Docker/AWS/OpenSource-tools/CI-CD)
You can check our offers https://fr.getaround.com/careers.
Otherwise, my experience is that if you specify it during the 1st call or in your application there's a good chance it's accepted.
So I think finding a job in the Netherlands would be a good start.
For others: That extra day off means less income, but to me the value of that extra day off is almost incalculable.
But honestly ask about their policies regarding this and you'll get a sense of the possibilities.
Here at SumUp we're hiring fully remotely across the EU and most teams are very flexible regarding the working hours. A 4-day week should be easily doable and I've personally done that before.
Contact me via my email address in my profile and I'm happy to connect you with the best matching team.
Here's our post from this April's who's hiring thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30879344
https://dashdoc.welcomekit.co/companies/dashdoc/jobs/full-st...
If that sounds like something you might be interested in, let's have a conversation, my e-mail address is in my profile.
Obviously it would require that i can work on things without being able to contact my colleagues at times (like weekends).
Has anyone seen such an arrangement?
If you are open to that, let them pick one day a week off / fewer hours per day and it'll be even easier to convince folks
It's part of employment law. So long as you fulfill the criteria & there isn't a very compelling reason for your employer to say no, you're allowed to reduce hours.
The post is for junior but i need a medium/senior developer https://menelabs.com/Careers
What's that about?
However, I have seen plenty of my friends who does the same who are employed full time, even some who work in the offices physically.
EU/Remote
In the UK this would be required if you're only offered the statutory minimum (which is also prorated) leave, since you don't have to be offered the bank holidays but have to then have as many days extra (just not on guaranteed dates).
You would need huge margins to cover the employment costs of the fifth day.
I know what the job is (no job) but have to get there.
I've been or still am self-employed and what I like about that is that I can work when I have the brainjuice to work and not work when I have no brain for it.
I do Go on the backend, Vue mostly on the front. Angular in the past. Some experiments with React and Svelte. Sometimes I do classic websites (in Go). Self-employed in Germany, but willing to give it up for the right employer, however I'm scared to do so. I value my freedom. I'm also 7 months in Germany 5 elsewhere, so 100% remote is required. I don't really know what an employed work life looks like nowadays, tbh.
Isn't it time for a "who's hiring" on HN? Or when does that usually happen? It's the 2nd of May, beginning of the month.
I stopped working for other people about 9 years ago.
Things went well, 2 years ago my main source of income went away. So I've been trying to rebuild - or - find a job with similar freedom. But the job part isn't working for me. I can't seem to bear authority.
Just thought it was interesting because odds are pretty high that any 4-day work week option is going to pay less and when given the option, a lot of people would rather just have the extra 52 paid days per year.
EDIT: I don't usually comment on down voting...but I'm really curious about this one.