Who will lead the charge to a four-day work week?
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I've been doing it for almost 8 years now, and at this point, it's simply a non-negotiable in any sort of employment discussions (that, and not carrying a pager). I work Mon-Thu, 8h/day, and I'm generally unreachable Fri/Sat/Sun (doesn't mean I won't put in a long week on rare occasions, but think "once a year or less" sort of frequency). The work/life balance is far better, and it aligns better with my family (the local public school is only Mon-Thu as well).
Just ask about it. I know some people who've managed full pay for 80% hours, but generally "80% pay for 80% hours" is entirely reasonable too, and I've found (as a rather extreme DIY sort) that the extra money isn't missed, because I have more time to do things myself on the weekend. I can practically spend quite a few Fridays a year doing major DIY work, and come out ahead.
I genuinely cannot say enough good things about it. Try it. You won't miss 40s.
This is interesting and makes me think the answer to the title's question is public schools. Most Americans are not in a position to individually ask their employer for a 4-day week, but if the local school system does it, suddenly there's a unified block of thousands of people who really need Friday off to take care of their kids.
I had actually never heard of this but according to NPR it's fairly common already:
> Seven percent of school districts in the U.S. are now just four days long. In Missouri, it's 30% of districts. In Colorado, it's 67%.
> The four-day work week is an attractive work perk in rural America that may lure better teachers.
This makes sense but obviously would disappear if the four-day week became widespread.
The simple fact of the matter for many students (In America at least) is that it's not a lack of time in class that's leading to a lack of education. One of if not THE primary function of primary school in America today is to be a place for kids to go while the worker bees go to work now that its no longer socially acceptable for kids to run free.
I remember when I was in school we missed a few extra days from snowstorms, so they added several minutes onto the school day to "make up for the missed time". It was so obviously stupid then, but no school administrator listened to me, because what does a high school kid know?
To be fair, most people think this is how productivity works in any domain. It's certainly true if your job is to turn a hand crank all day producing widgets and under the assumption that you have equal energy throughout the day (but even accounting for that you still get the effect that more time = more widgets). But that most certainly is not true in the modern world and definitely not with any task that requires creativity. I'm actually more shocked at how many developers believe this considering I think we've all been in plenty of situations where more time debugging creates more bugs and the solution is to walk away, go do something else, and come back later. Maybe the problem is simply momentum and the coefficient of status stubbornness.
We use proxies like standardized testing to avoid each school self-assessing as excellent. But tests can be gamed through cheating. States distribute funding on a literal per capita per day formula. It’s much harder to commit time tracking fraud. Incentives that encourage butts in seats of course can be gamed. Snow days are avoided through half days and NYC once had a “school day” that was just a video call long enough to take attendance.
Attendance maximizing limits flexibility and greatness in pedagogy. However it guarantees a bare minimum service level. It also aligns with schools’ secondary function as daycare.
I am not a libertarian, but it is startling to me how many offensive facets of modern life came about due to perverse funding incentives from the state. I've been reading "Deschooling Society" by Ivan Ilich, which I think only thinly supports its own premise, but the pattern he describes in which formerly citizen-led components of society are institutionalized by the government and then experience a massive decades-long degradation of quality seems to ring true for everything.
Expect various other mitigation strategies to creep their way into nicer and nicer school districts, as the crisis worsens. That, or we’re gonna have to increase teacher pay a ton (good luck). I expect private tutoring services to positively boom over the next decade or two, as lower-than-usual SES families turn to them just to get back to the level of education they used to get “for free”.
I definitely didn’t mean to, like, blame teachers for this situation, though, so I apologize if I gave that impression. It’s definitely a matter of pay and work conditions. But, it’s gonna take a while to fix even if we throw money at it immediately, and I’m not seeing much of that yet :-/
My personal belief is that this is due to different factors and that it is quite a complex problem that is worsened by oversimplification. Notably that all measurements are quite fuzzy and there's incentives to advocate the metric that suits ones bias rather than account for the fuzziness of the metrics.
I think what's good about the American education system is that we aren't test focused and that we don't have a singular exam that is critical to one's future success. I think this encourages creativity, which is necessary especially in STEM fields and especially as we move into the modern era with AI. I also think test based systems (as you may see in most of Asia like China's Gaokao or Korea's Suneung) put far too much pressure on memorization (lack of generalization) and are especially stressful to children's mental health and takes away from all the soft skills that one learns in schooling (and is especially important). I think it's important we have many opportunities for people to recover from mistakes or environmental situations that these tests do not account for and is likely a bigger problem for western societies and especially American culture.
But the big thing is that there's strong evidence that a child under 10 can learn calculus. I'm not saying we need to do that, but certainly we can put more onto our children who are far smarter than we give credit to. But we may need to radically think our education program to perform such feats at scale. I do think there is a danger to solve "no student left behind" through decreasing standards rather than creating more nuanced educational methods and metrics (we see this even in other countries too). There are certainly larger incentive problems too. Such as in the modern world it is actually a rational decision for these children to desire to be "YouTube Stars" rather than say an engineer and that's not resolved by mocking them but being realistic about the risk reward environment we've created and our social devaluation of these jobs. This is a cultural phenomena that the Asian cultures seem to have solved where performing well in school is considered cool, but there are so many cultural aspects at play that this is hard to disentangle and pinpoint what exactly would be the way to create a similar phenomena in the west. Most certainly we need to disregard all parental sentiment of "well I didn't learn this when I was in school" if we are to operate on the premise that our society gets smarter as the world gets smarter because this should instead be seen as an expected result that is desired. But that may have political ramifications that adds to the complexity.
> though difficult to comprehend the nuances associated with experiments like this until the data is available.
I think, unfortunately, this is one of those many situations where we're never going to have sufficient data until we take a leap of faith. There's far too many issues where if we wait to act on experimental data that we'll wait till the ends of time because performing such experiments are difficult to do and especially in a controlled way. Even more so considering the difficulties in decoupling extraneous variables from the system and finding the key causal ones. In the real world you kinda just have to make that leap at times and be willing to revert if it is a mistake rather than doubling down and also be willing to consider colliding variables being adequate explanations for lack of success rather than the variable that was actively modified. (Fuck, experimentation and evaluation is hard. I really wish this was better recognized. The world is fucking fuzzy and we're fucking dumb)
All of this is of course my opinions and I'm explicitly not adding sources to claims because I'm not trying to sound authoritative here but rather thinking aloud to promote discussion on the topic to form better communal consensus and how we as a community can figure out answers to these complex problems. So these are my views and the data I see. (Let's also try to encourage discussion like this where we aren't asserting authoritative conclusions because certainly none of us are authorities in this regard and certainly there are no hard conclusions from existing authorities)
And I do "weird low level crap." Generally if I'm interacting with the kernel, it's from below. Think introspection, emulation, hypervisors, "state analysis of a running kernel," firmware weeds, security analysis, etc.
If you know a bitter mid-to-late-40s sort who's been in the deep weeds and the security weeds long enough to carry a powered off flip phone and genuinely hate what we've done with computers, imagine that, and you're pretty close.
When I have a long weekend, a lot of times, its 'finally, no interruptions so I can get some work done', and end up working.
Guess, if you have an itch, could fill it with open source projects instead.
But I've also built the habits, over the years, of trying to make sure I have way more than just work going on in my life.
The "constantly coding on side projects" developer is pretty rare, in my experience, but tend to bubble together. (in startups, cooler tech companies or in the "innovation teams").
Somewhat related, but I do wonder what this community will look like once humans enter a post scarce (or mostly) world. Which a 4 day weekend seems like a step in that direction. Along with the other aspects of what humans will do with their new found free time. Which seems especially interesting in a consumer based economy.
The main reason is economic profit of any venture can go to pay 3 things: 1. capital invested (having an inventory of things, having done the R&D, having built an expensive factory, just represents existing wealth and assets (not money!!)) 2. labor (the people involved) 3. rent (for the land used)
With technology, and there is no indication AI is any better, capital owners get more and more of the profit of any venture. If anything, its point is to reduce the dependence on labor. So you have more people, competing for fewer spots, and you can get away with paying them less. The lower bound for what you could pay labor is just barely enough, so they keep having enough kids to provide future workers. If you start with a glut of workers, then it is a dark situation (which we are already living in, how many people can afford to have kids?)
Human preference is also wildly variable. I don't buy the constant "I'd rather not live in a city" argument that we hear because people could in fact do that, but there are plenty of preferences that people do make and it isn't like housing in fungible.
The simple model won't get us very far in estimating the actual effects and likely will actually make us make the wrong conclusions. Plus, there are solutions to many of the housing problems (which also is non-singular).
You need 4.2 40h teams of people for full coverage in a 168 hour week. You need 5.25 32h teams for the same coverage. It's not a radical jump.
I would also like to try a split week: work mon-tues, off wed, work thurs-fri, off sat-sun. This way you have a mini weekend giving you two "friday nights" and there's no weekly gauntlet to run.
Also note that federal holidays are often on a Monday, so having Mondays off reduces the number of holidays you have. You of course should get your 4-days/week and those holidays, so you should take an extra day off in that case, but the optics of that don't really work. (Maybe this is because those federal holidays are the minimal concession we have towards "people shouldn't work 5 days/week every week).
You are making up an imaginary issue here I think. Fine if you said it would take 5 hours but come on...5 min task?
Wondering if I should just hunt for 32h/w offers, if I could potentially miss on great 40h opportunities, etc. What's the success rate of asking for 32h/w in offers not advertised as such?
If it's an interesting 40h position, talk to them and put 32h as one of your non-negotiables in early conversations. Some will tell you they're not willing to consider it, and the conversation is done. Some are willing to consider it.
My employer has stated they've not noticed any change in productivity either, including on the day I'm off (I do a video handover and notes every Thursday for the rest of the team) - which I partly credit with the fact I no longer can justify "oh I'll just leave that to tomorrow" + feeling energised come Monday after 3 days of my own time.
I really would struggle to entertain changing back to 5 days now.
Outside of knowledge work, the 4-day week appears where demand outstrips supply. It's pretty common for dental offices, an one example, to work 4 days _just because they can_. The bos can pay themselves several hundred thousand dollars a year and pay their staff competitive salaries without giving up their long weekend plans.
I think it mainly speaks to the fact that "most stuff is not actually critical". So people have adapted accordingly and the work that needs to be done, is done, and that which isn't so pressing can wait.
There's a few ways to roll out 4 day work weeks. This was probably the worst.
If you're off from (say) Thursday 5pm until Monday 9am, that's 88 consecutive hours away from work, out of a week of 168 hours. Winning!
More than 80% of working moms utilise this option and around 10% of dads. [1] Among my friends I have parents where both of them work 4 days, taking the 5th day off on separate days, and their kid goes to daycare 3 days a week.
Note that most government subsidies (for childcare) are set up to encourage working at least 32 hours per day.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/economy/2013/07/10/worlds...
Luxury! I used to dream of my parents killing us every night.
Best I can tell, most schools no longer have classes on Saturday, but they do have Wednesday morning at least. And, at least at my daughter's school, most are there (or at another _recreation center_) in the afternoon.
No school on Wednesdays but school on Saturday mornings is definitely not the most convenient from the parents' POV.
Then the kids grow up and go to school and the parents, if they have enough money, have essentially no incentive to work more hours.
The anti-WFH people appear to fall into 3 camps: landlords and property owners, middle management who believe people are not as productive or efficient at home. And, as pointed out in a reply, there's also the group who believe that face to face communication is more agile and fosters more innovation.
Perhaps one question to ask is: who will lose money and/or power due to this move?
Somewhat offtopic: How has WFH been treated in European media? Has it been much the same as the USA?
Yeah, think like how you challenge yourself in deliberate practice. Putting up a "straw man" to fight doesn't really help one learn to fight.
And there are many companies large and small with mostly or fully remote teams delivering complex projects every day as we speak.
Whilst I'm sure there are edge cases where that face to face actually is essential, the idea that for teams to be agile, innovative and collaborative they must physically sit near each other has been shown to be unnecessary...?
No, it hasn't. And there isn't much serious work being done on it afaics, but lots of anectdata and politics.
I think it is clear that it is possible to build productive fully remote teams, for at least some applications. It's not clear if it's optimal, or how broadly it applies in terms of applications or people.
I get why such folks might hate WFH, especially if they believe that their personal difficulties are more common than they are, so others must not be able to function as remote workers, either, and especially that people couldn’t possibly efficiently come up with and refine ideas under remote work.
Edited to add: I also changed the language a little bit to be more neutral.
Otherwise, why does every place insists on destroying face-to-face interaction by adopting open-plan offices where any chat is disruptive?
Mostly superfluous verb.
Left: "Sounds like great idea, we must conduct trials!"
Center: "It sounds interesting, but we need more data blablablah"
Right: "A four-day week will never work, and people must put away that ridiculous idea. We (Norwegians) already work too little compared to the rest of Europe."
We oscillate between center-left and center-right every 4/8 years, so I'm not sure I have high hopes for this becoming a thing anytime soon.
The (political) right here is especially prone to knee-jerk reactions when it comes to anything related to labor and commerce, no mater what research says.
When you don’t have the space at home for a proper office, so you end up with something that is ergonomically suboptimal and makes a mental shift between ‘home’ and ‘work’ harder. When I’m already balancing my effort carefully to not end up spending more energy than I can recover week by week, asking for WFH without also cutting work days is something I find draining.
The “it’s great, but not for me”-crowd. Forcing people into the office or out of the office is the employer drastically changing the terms of the employment, and should at least be done over an extended period of time or in consultation with the affected employees (not including exceptional circumstances such as when it was part of the temporary efforts to dampen the pandemic).
I would gladly sign up for a 4 day work week. In fact, a 4 day in-office hybrid model would be perfect. As long as the work place policy involves no meetings or messages on that single remote day.
And, of course, pay is important, too. I'm only able to do this by walking the TOS knife-edge, and it would be nice if I could make something similar with a "real" job instead. America's workers, in general, should be getting out far more than they do.
A couple working 4 day work weeks amounts to 1.6 FTE, which is considerably more compared to the traditional breadwinner model. Now if you add that life got a whole lot more demanding/complex outside of work, the sum work load of a family is rather high instead of low.
Another interesting aspect we see in the Netherlands, where we work part-time a lot. Perhaps a little too much. There's a kind of defeatism regarding working more hours. People feel it doesn't really change their life for the better.
When you're already settled, can pay the bills and have reasonable disposable income, working more doesn't really improve your quality of life in a very tangible way.
Young people are even more apathetic. They figure they can't ever afford a home anyway, and with a pension age heading towards 70, they conclude they can't ever retire. In light of this, might as well maximize free time here and now.
Society wants you to work more to combat the population ageing or to compete with China, but on the ground people don't care about this call to arms. The societal contract is broken.
Without public health care and the subsequent lifting of healthcare costs from employers back over to a progressive tax system, I can't see the 4 day week being widely adopted.
I’d assume then that most part time employees work less than 30 hours a week
2. “Over regulating” my country
I wonder which I would choose.
By letting surplus value go to those who own the...
The whole idea is to generate ~95% of value with 80% of the work time, and to split the difference money-wise.
The trick is being senior enough (or in demand enough) that you can get one company to agree to a 32h week for you (and be willing to walk - I've interviewed with very interesting companies who weren't willing to consider it, and so we ended the discussions).
Once you have it in some form or another, you're good. It's just a condition of employing you, early in discussions with other companies.
Our company hired a greybeard with a rock solid condition of his employment being a four day work week. After that, it was much easier for "normal" employees to switch to it since management was familiar with the idea and saw that he was a very productive employee.
I switched to four day work weeks when I was 29 (based on his example) and have been very happy with it.
That's the secret. Being willing to GTFO if they don't meet your terms. And being good enough at what you do that they're willing to meet your terms.
My current employer, on initial contact, wasn't willing to consider fully remote and 32h/wk. Then a year later, they came back and were willing to talk because they'd been trying to find someone with my skillset locally.
https://www.databricks.com/blog/welcoming-bit-io-databricks-...
For example, if a divorced guy gets his kid on Friday and Saturday every week, it turns out getting every Friday off is a super-valuable benefit for him, and now you can hire a $120k programmer for $70k.
Only left them due to compulsory redundancy due to cost cutting.
It's not clear to me how these things are connected. How does generative AI make it necessary or feasible to shorten the work week? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to try it, but I don't get the sense that generative AI has made people 20% more productive across the board. In certain cases, sure, but I'm skeptical about making that claim for every member of a large-sized company.
We could say "it's okay to be less productive but have a better work-life balance", and that's fine, but it doesn't explain the quoted sentence.
One of the best uses of the 3rd day off would be being able to do things that are usually closed on a weekend (doctor visits, bank transactions, etc). So if we implemented a 4 day workweek by simply adding Friday to the weekend we would lose this benefit.
What inthink would be great is if we keep the 2 day Sat/Sun weekend and then add a rotating 3rd day off, where some people take Monday, some Tuesday, some Wednesday, etc off.
Maybe one day it will be time to push for a 3-day workweek. Then maybe 2. Then 1. And maybe the post-scarcity, automated society will actually exist and we have 0.
Those who don't at least have home office and/or can freely decide when to work.
I'm a freelance technical writer, and I don't get more than one draft/outline done a day. I work 3-5 days a week, but never more than 5h. When I'm done with a bigger task for the day, the following work won't be as good. It only works if I'm really hyped for the next task.
Source: I maintain a page listing 120 4-day week companies. For every 10 new companies I add, 6-8 will be from these two countries.
For anyone interested:https://okjob.io/companies/
I know there are studies that show it can be better and more productive, but employers don't care. They want butts in seats as long as possible.
What made it easier was backfilling the pay cut by beginning my 401k withdrawls, which you can do starting age 59 1/2.
Every Thursday evening I felt like I was on vacation!
This should be reasonably possible with all of the overheads that are impediments to progress given a consistent effort level between 32 and 40 hours.
Yes those people read reddit, hackernews and other sources.
edit: OK - didn't notice this was for "employees that move muscles" Carry on then
Not that it matters. "We shouldn't try to improve things for one set of people if things are bad for a different set of people" is an incoherent and toxic attitude regardless of context.
They wanted a great deal of documentation sent by post, and their three day work-week meant they'd ask me on Tuesday for some piece of documentation, I'd mail it the same day, and by the time it arrived they'd left for the week so I couldn't expect a reply until the next Tuesday at the absolute earliest.
I sure hope any move towards shorter work weeks doesn't turn into an excuse for lengthy bureaucratic processes to become even lengthier.
1) Due to AI advancements, companies and business models are going to be disrupted. The last thing a firm wants is to work 4 day / week when competition can do 60 hour per week and leap frog them (including crushing them) at a crucial period. tl ; dr -- we are entering a crunch mode for many firms (vs stability where we can think of these luxuries)
2) US is already facing labor shortage in many critical fields esp human services. A 4-day work week faces massive inflationary pressures. Again, when we enter deflation we can think of 4-day work week. A classic example would have been 2008/09 when unemployment touched 10%
3) AI will make people who work 70 hour per week even more productive. So in knowledge work roles, firms may opt to have one 70 hr extreme workaholic vs 2 32 hour people
I know sensitive topic to HNers who downvote just because they don't like the message
Not sure why you had to make this about AI.
Four hour or four day? Both are terms that have been tossed around, though this is discussing four day (which you then discuss as 32h weeks later).
> AI will make people who work 70 hour per week even more productive. So in knowledge work roles, firms may opt to have one 70 hr extreme workaholic vs 2 32 hour people
Have you ever had to debug code from people at the wrong end of a 60-70 hour week? For a while, I had a coworker who tended to to this sort of thing, and I eventually started looking at the relevant commit messages. If they were incoherent, expect the code to be "not even wrong" grade interesting - you basically had to re-write it to get it do what it was supposed to. The sort of people who enjoy 70h grinds also seem to not particularly enjoy writing tests.
2) That would mean more competition for labor, i.e, if 4-day week is all you can get as an employer you take it.
3) Firms in knowledge roles want certain skills and profiles, if those want a 4-day week, then that is what will happen.
There was a survey showing that a lot of Americans believe the recent inflation will be over once prices go back down to where they were in 2020. They, and you, are in for an unpleasant surprise.