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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people are productive WFH, but loads are taking it easy. Often in my team Fridays people barely dial in, maybe are connected a few hours max. Thursday afternoons now are dead as people get ready for the weekend... Job market is still strong so no one really cares that much as we know we're difficult to replace.

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Excellent, this provides productive evidence for a 4 day work week if everything still runs with folks checked out on Fridays and they’re not in the office performing work theater.

https://www.4dayweek.com/

Labor power in the face of a recession comes from dwindling labor supply. 360k boomers retire each month in the US. 1.8 million people over the age of 55 die every year. Not enough folks to backfill.

https://archive.ph/2022.10.27-015740/https://www.businessins...

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/09/the-pace-of...

https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/rising-number-of-baby-...

I'd like to agree but the article literally says employee output fell.

"Everything still runs" could be applied in a lot of situations, but it's not necessarily a desirable state.

Everything still runs at McDonalds if there are half as many cashiers, but it will take a lot longer to get your Big Mac.

Everything still runs at the hospital if there are half as many nurses, but the level of care is much worse.

You get the idea.

The data looks good so far.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-we...

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/01/four-day-workweek-pilot-...

https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/10/07/the-four-day-week-w...

>Everything still runs at McDonalds if there are half as many cashiers, but it will take a lot longer to get your Big Mac.

With the McDs i've went into recently it appears everything still runs even if there are zero cashiers being that you can click your order in a big touchscreen.

Turns out that cooks seem more important that cashiers. Course we'll see see how much of that can be replaced by robots in the next few decades.

i don’t think anyone doubts that certain jobs can be automated away, but what concerns me is how many people point at “lowly cashiers” and gloat “look at how stupidly greedy you’re being by asking for a livable wage you lowly cashier.”

the reality is, companies absolutely will save significantly _more_ money by automating office jobs that cost significantly more than a cashier.

i’m not a luddite. i live, breathe, play in and firmly believe technology has _potential_ to liberate us, but anyone who celebrates that job automation will harm “the poors” but fails to see that obviously companies will automate their expensive mid/high tier employees asap is allowing their class snobbishness to blind them.

everyone in tech is familiar with the joke, “don’t screw with me or i’ll write a bash script that can replace you.”

I’m a programmer and honestly really hope that this job gets automated away. Obviously I also hope we figure out how to support people who lose their jobs to automation, but sitting at a computer for 8 hours a day is not how humans were meant to spend their lives.

If this were to happen, then wouldn't people just start "checking out" on Thursdays?

>this provides productive evidence for a 4 day work week if everything still runs with folks checked out on Fridays and they’re not in the office performing work theater.

Not exactly. Unless 100% of workers are only working 4 day work weeks, it's impossible to account for the confounding variable of other workers picking up the slack when analyzing these trends from a macro view.

My remote employers have - and continue to - effectively subsidized a lot of my personal ventures in the last decade.

Personal projects (software and art), learning skills (programming, instruments, video editing), improving at video games and sports. Not to mention leisure. All done "on the clock." To be honest, maybe the majority of the 40hrs I get "paid" for is actually used for this instead of company output?

Just one guy's opinion, but to me it sounds like you're making intelligent, healthy, and entirely logical choices about your life and how you choose to spend your limited time.

absolutely - your consciousness is your most precious resource!

the hardest part is the tension with the external guilt - but that is the point of the guilt after all

My in office employer (prior to covid) was subsidizing these things for me. Your tax dollars hard at work.

I switched jobs at the beginning of the year, and still haven't figured out if people here just don't work on Fridays or did that start with WFH?

Anecdote of one, but as someone whose job involves a lot of "pinging" and "chasing" people for approvals, code reviews, sign-offs and so on, I have found during the last couple of years, it's nearly impossible to get a reply out of people on Fridays, so I've learned that if I need someone's response by end-of-week on some topic, I need to do my heavy-chasing on Thursdays or I'm not going to get it.

This is very different from pre-WFH where I could physically find the person on Friday and stand there until they did whatever needed to be done.

I'm also a huge proponent of our new WFH world, but even I notice and can admit this disappearance of Fridays.

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