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Comment by mattkevan | Hacker News Reader

At a place I used to work for, the four day week question was put to the CEO at an all-hands company town hall.

Not a fan of the idea, he scoffed and said something like, ‘I pay you to be at your desk from 9am-5.30pm Monday-Friday. Why should I pay you the same for a day less?’

I don’t think he realised it at the time, but that answer was devastating to company productivity and morale. He’d just demonstrated to everyone that he didn’t value results and all that was important was bums on seats.

People stopped putting in extra effort, waited out their hours as that was all that was required and started brushing up their CVs. I left not long after and so did many others.

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The problem is he didn't put enough corporate wank on it. Should have said "Thanks for the suggestion, we are always looking in to the best way forward for the company and we will keep this in consideration and keep you updated with any changes."

Even if he did only care about results, it's a likely scenario that 4 day weeks reduce results or at the least introduce a risk that isn't worth taking. I think the average worker actually prefers just being required to work a certain amount and as long as you aren't extremely bad at your job, you'll be fine even if you have a slow week/month. Rather than being frequently being audited for results and pressured to work longer hours to keep your output up with everyone else.

Some people might think of it as corporate wank, but realistically it gives a boss or organisation time to poll employees/owners/managers, stay flexible, slowly work towards a change like this, etc. Less wankery than the path he took, from the sounds of things.

You just demonstrated that there's a good reason corporate types speak the way they do, even if it sounds phony.

What mattkevan quoted was brutally honest, but did not go over well.

Frankness without hostility is possible. It is a hallmark of really great leadership.

Sadly, it is also rare.

So true. That combination is rare but indeed very powerful. Combine that with the ability to pave the way forward and you got a recipe for success.

Yes. So the safe and reproducible course of action is to use euphemisms.

> I think the average worker actually prefers just being required to work a certain amount and as long as you aren't extremely bad at your job, you'll be fine even if you have a slow week/month. Rather than being frequently being audited for results and pressured to work longer hours to keep your output up with everyone else.

I agree. It seems like this is another new trend that's coming up because we still haven't found the solution to high-stress IT work. I don't think this is it.

The director for the org I work in says something along those lines after every release cycle. He thanks everyone for working long hours and on burning the midnight oil on weekends, and that’s it. I personally never work long hours or work on weekends and those speeches feel alienating. I think hard during the day, strive to be creative and then go back to my life outside work without donating my free hours to a company that would be just fine without them.

I’ve heard that what we appreciate in people also tells a lot about us and when I hear my director only acknowledge the long hours, I realize that only the long hours are appreciated.

Luckily my immediate management chain knows better and understand the importance of creativity, meaningful output and WLB that I stick around.

I've had a series of CEOs who've said unnecessary, polarising things. The kind of thing that 10-50% of the employees would really object to - examples like yours or politics. It seems like an uncharacteristic risk with negligible payoff (he's a real person just like me!) but considerable downsides (he thinks my vote was stupid) that I don't see from middle management.

Maybe it's survivorship bias? The kind of people who manage to become CEOs are the ones who have strong opinions but haven't suffered backlash for them. If they had experienced half their orgchart hating them, they wouldn't have made the cut?

>I left not long after and so did many others.

The question from me is, did you manage to move to a company where you got paid the same or more, but for "a day less hours"?

Employers can make that claim if the job market is in their favor, i.e. if most other companies agree with them and decide that they need staff available Mo-Fr 9-5 or for less hours but also for proportionally less salary, which to my experience is most employers.

To normalize this, we need the majority of employers (>51% of them) to switch to paying market rate for less hours, putting pressure on the rest that this is the new norm, but I haven't seen that yet in my EU country, except for a notable couple of companies that made headlines, out of which one recently filed for bankruptcy. So as long as only a tiny minority of companies are doing this, the norm will not change. All businesses here think like your ex-boss: 'Why should I pay you the same for a day less?’ and the market favors their approach as they have seen no mass resignations since they all can afford to act like this.

Therefore, the only solution would be the same as the one that lead to the 8 hour workweek being normalized almost 100 years ago: mass strikes and labor movements followed by government regulations that makes the 4 day workweek the new norm for everyone.

I don’t think you need 51% to affect things at the margins. At one company, we were early to the “remote is OK” and “remote is good” camps. It helped a lot with recruiting and retention, and let us hire a better talent pool. Post-COVID with everyone offering remote the benefit has dwindled for companies early to accept remote work. I think someone offering 4 day work weeks would be able to hire talent they wouldn’t normally be able to. If the promise of “same productivity, less hours, same pay” is true, then they’ll outperform and out recruit.

Mass strikes are certainly quicker though.

this is a real good point, pre covid being remote was a good perk. something i didn't even know i wanted. now its a basic requirement for me to consider a job. now if someone offered me same pay, but a 4day work week, my interest would be peeked.

not only that people who've had time off to destress/etc do better work. 2 days for a weekend doesn't really do that. 3 days is almost like a mini vacation and everyone is in high spirits after a 3 day weekend

I would take Wednesdays off.

No more than 1 day away from a day off. Need to schedule an appointment for anything: Wednesday.

Conflicts are often about signals and what is being said between the lines, rather than factually outcomes. My interpretation of the above comment is that the employer could have had made the same decision, but phrased in such a way that employees still felt valued for their work beyond that just sitting at the desk from 9am-5.30pm.

A few years ago in Sweden one of the top businesses leaders scoffed at tax evasion and basically said that why should he pay taxes if he can afford to avoid it. The statement annoyed people, and did so much more than just the fact of tax evasion. It actually resulted in him being forced to step down from several of his position.

Employers are rarely rewarded for scoffing and treating employees like they are not worth anything.

The funny thing is that executives usually justify their giant salaries with the value and results they bring to the company.

Great point. I wonder if any Board of Directors has ever asked a company CEO "Did you log at least 40 hours last week?"

He stopped paying people who wanted to be paid 5 days for 4 days of work? How is this different from 99.9% of companies?

It's how most companies think they work, but really very few companies actually track output. They track time. They're not measuring how much work you do, but instead how much time you're available for. The idea of a 4 day week is that people stop procrastinating, wasting time, daydreaming, sitting in meetings doing nothing, etc, and that saves a day a week. The employer gets the same amount of work for the money, and the employee doesn't have to pretend to work any more. Everyone wins.

I switched to 3 days weeks almost 2 years ago. (Mostly, I remain in a company chatroom on other days for people to ask me questions, and if there's a massive disaster I'll help if I'm available).

What I've found is that I spend the 4 days I'm not "working" organizing my thoughts and plans as a background task and this means most of my 3 days is spent executing. Whereas at my previous job I would spend several days a week on thinking and organizing and another couple on being blocked or bored.

Do you get 60% salary for 3 days/week? I’m thinking of doing the same thing.

I'm in a unique position there where I currently don't take a salary because I'm an investor in the company. But no, if I were drawing a salary I don't see any reason it would be 60%

As an investor in the company, you would seemingly be in a position to push leadership to allow what you do for other employees.

Have you, and how did it go over, if so?

How does switching to a 4-day week stop procrastination, time wasting, daydreaming, pointless meetings, etc.?

If that's so easy, why not stop doing those things and keep the 5-day week?

If only some companies make the switch, you could bring an argument from 'efficiency wages': ie by offering a perk to your workers that they can't (currently) get elsewhere, you make them work harder and avoid wasting time, because the outside options are worse so they want to impress to keep their cushy job secure.

I don't know whether that's true, but it's a plausible argument for why people would do less of the unproductive things you mentioned.

Try thinking about it with the limit not being the hours per week on average you're at work, but the total number of hours per week on average that most people are capable of being fully productive.

In other words: If people at work 40 hours a week on average, but only have the mental stamina for 32 hours of work a week on average, why stay in the office 40 hours on average? Those 8 extra hours will not account for extra productivity. Switching to 5 day weeks, in this model, won't increase productivity, nor 6 day weeks.

I've said "on average" a lot, and that's very deliberate. Most people I've ever worked with across 20 years in tech are largely unable to keep up a fully-mentally-engaged 40 hour work week every week, and even fewer are able to sustain longer average weeks than that for very long at all.

The problem with folks in America is they’ve lost their entrepreneurial spirit. If people are given a shorter work week—great—they’re nice and relaxed. But I’ve witnessed folks getting more-and-more lazy these days.

There needs to be a better method of incentives put in place that coincides with an extra day off.

I would propose not an extra day off, but perhaps an extra day of personal development instead? Something relaxing but related to work maybe?

People are simply too distracted with all the crack social media and Netflix’s auto-play algorithm. So I’d wager that sometimes people will use that day productively, but maybe 7/10 it’ll be wasted down some rabbit hole.

In fact, you could probably argue that people are so distracted these days that they’re productivity and happiness would both go up if they were no longer wasting time online and you ADDED another work day.

> the problem with the most productive civilization in history is that it’s lazy

To add to that beautiful quote:

https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e...

Alternative thesis: most people are getting tired of working hard only for the lion's share of the reward to go to a small handful of people at the top.

I recently did a qualification in leadership and management, and I think it had the exact opposite effect from the one intended. It made me realise how much of management is about finding ways to squeeze more work from people without extra compensation - motivation theory, time management, mentoring, coaching etc. Very little is for the employee’s benefit.

Yep it's 100% then. I lost my "entrepreneurial spirit" after being burned more than once by management that wanted me to work my ass off for just a salary and the promise of something nice someday.

Granted I got mine in the end of the last job like that, but it came through pure leverage and nobody's happy about it, myself included.

It’s really this all the way down. Even if your a top worker, manager, or sometimes even a founder. The next rung up the ladder is taking so much more of the pie that it just doesn’t feel worth it. I know of a major tech co that will only give out 10% if you work your but off and get promoted. You’ll never see a raise otherwise.

Ironically, with the advent of leaf code as the sole yardstick for measuring incoming engineers we’ve also removed any incentive for “working for the next job”.

Have you a source for that criticism? Any ‘these days’ criticism seems to favour a past that never existed.

Productivity in the US is up as far as I can tell.

https://www.bls.gov/productivity/

Well, to be honest, consider the following:

Windows 11 is designed to suck peoples attention away from productivity by gamifying the operating system with rewards for useless mind-drifting, monitizing people’s attention.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Netflix, etc are designed to distract people and keep them similarly hooked.

If the majority of the population is using those platforms, then the majority of the population is more distracted today than ever. How is that trend not tending toward reduced productivity?

> How is that trend not tending toward reduced productivity?

Because every study of productivity shows this to not be the case.

I agree with the idea that Windows 11 is worse than what came before it, but people appear to be more productive when you look at sources like the one I provided. So despite the distractions (or maybe because they aren’t actual distractions), productivity is going up.

This isn’t something you can assess by feeling, intuition or one’s personal observation. It requires truely massive data sets.

Here’s a brief history on how people don’t want to work anymore

1894-2002

https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1549527748950892544

Kind of generalizing an entire workforce I think. How are you measuring lazy? You say that people are nice and relaxed with a shorter work week. But it seems you expect that a team that isn't as relaxed will be more effective?

Who are you to decide if people use their days off "productively?" And most orgs that have a day in the office scheduled for personal development/training, inevitably end up pushing other responsibilities into those hours, eventually making them useless. If someone is in the office, it's just too easy for them to be pestered for "real work."

The idea isn't that to get more work out of people, it's to provide them with a healthy WLB; so they don't get burned out, so they're more productive when they're "nice and relaxed" from their time off.

>So I’d wager that sometimes people will use that day productively, but maybe 7/10 it’ll be wasted down some rabbit hole.

Judge not lest ye...

I love the idea that people’s leisure time should be judged on its productivity. Netflix? Okay but only educational stuff, otherwise it’s back to the mine with you. I mean almost literally with your last paragraph. “We’re making you work more for your own good” is a capitalist/fascist dream.

Arbeit macht frei.

Exactly

Employers used to train employees. They don't anymore. Employers used to offer pensions. They don't anymore. Maybe people have become lazier. I could see such an argument. But maybe people are also tired of getting treated as nothing more than a line item on a balance sheet and exchangeable pawns. At a lot of companies, a lot of managers (people, project, product) are basically unneeded, and people are tired of these managers doing nothing and providing friction for the actual work going on.

If I had stayed at my first company, I guaranteed would be making less than 50% of what I make now. There's plenty more I would have missed out on, especially relating to career growth. And that first company was often in the top 100 places to work.

The young people I work with now are the laziest I've ever seen. I think the job market has been so strong for so long they dont know what the real world is like. If/when we get a proper recession these people will all start working properly or get fired.

Young people should be lazy considering how fucked they are with inflation, the rising costs of housing, the looming climate disaster, stagnating wages, and they get to watch as the wealthiest people and corporations gobble up more of the world around them with every passing year.

20 years of essentially no inflation and zero percent interest rates, with nothing like stagnating wages for this HN crowd and you trot out how bad things are based on the last 6 months?

Based on the last 6 months, the hell are you on about? Literally no part of my earlier comment said the last 6 months. Gotta also love that you mention the last 20 years as if nothing happened in those 20 years that completely fucked over young people.

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