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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

In some places in Europe, after some period of employment, you can demand of your employer to let you work 80% of hours for 80% of pay. I have team members in Europe on this schedule and it works out well for everyone.

Based on that experience, I'd also be open to such an arrangement for employees based in geographies where that's not legally required, but is legally and practically permitted. My guess is that most people are working a 5-day workweek because they're most comfortable doing that, from both a "well, all of my friends are doing that anyway, so I wouldn't have anyone to hang out with" as well as from a "I'm working for my financial future and working only X hours per week is unlikely to give me the same career trajectory as working 25% more hours per week" perspective.

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> My guess is that most people are working a 5-day workweek because they're most comfortable doing that

People are always surprised when I tell them I work 4 days a week; asking if I have kids or a sick mother to attend to. Recruiters are especially weird with questions like: "why do you only want to work 4 days a week?"

I usually just reply "Why do you want to work 5 days a week?", most of the time they don't know what to answer

"And why don't you want to work 6? What are you, a slacker?"

I think you’ll find recruiters expect things from you that they can’t or won’t do themselves.

It's not a legal right in my part of Europe but it's super common here for couples that both work and have young kids. The kids go to daycare 3 days per week and each parent takes a day off to cover the rest.

Having done that now for a while, I would probably keep my 4 days even when the kids get older and aren't at home.

The total output in knowledge work doesn't decrease much (if at all) working 4 instead of 5 days. It's much more about what you output then about how much time you spend on it. And working less hours for me meant being more focused in those hours. My targets and bonus remained the same.

Knowledge work output would probably increase significantly for most knowledge workers. Time is the resource but really it's just energy management

Me and another colleague on a team of 6 have the same arrangement. Works well enough but if i worked even less then the limited exposure to the flow of relevant information would start to show. I might make up for that by declaring that i will only focus on some parts of our domain but that would make me less flexible than the rest of the team and i would feel more like a burden.

So there are parts of the world where you could reasonably go to a the day weekend if you wanted enough.

A nice side effect is that if you live in a country with progressive tax you end up getting a higher net per-hour wage than if you worked 5 days because of the lower income and thus lower tax rate.

IIUC the US has this perma-work culture where if you don't want to always be working and earning the most you can earn then something must be wrong with you, maybe you're a commie or a hippie or sth. I hear that Japan had the same but this is radically changing as a result of the pandemic. Maybe the US will change a bit too?

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