Hacker News Reader

Comment by cridal | Hacker News Reader

First of all, I'd like to congratulate Ryan Carson on the idea of 4-day work week. Hopefully this would start the ball rolling on the whole discussion of work/life balance here in the states. It is such a great concept and I'm sure will attract a lot of top talent.

The only thing is, it needs validation. I hope the company does really well in the long run, and therefore puts 4-day work week on the table for others to follow. Wouldn't that be great...

View on HN

Thanks for the kind words :)

We've been doing a 4-day week since 2007, so it's been five years and thankfully we've been successful.

Hi Ryan, I've never worked at a place that had a 4-day week and I'd love if you could one day do a blog post about it (forgive me if you you've already done this before). The things that changed, adjustments that needed to be made, how it has affected productivity. I would like to run a company like that someday, but it feels so scary to lose 8 hours of paid work a week.

Have you seen this article yet?

I covered quite a bit of it here: http://ryanleecarson.tumblr.com/post/21708810513/4-day-week and also here: http://ryanleecarson.tumblr.com/post/21776487625/a-lot-of-fo...

Thank you.

the video was exactly what I was looking for.

I'm not sure how sustainable this 4day work week will be. Will it last the acquisition? Imagine buying a company that either makes your existing employee unhappy, make you lose the talent you just got, or forces you to convert the entire company into a 4 day week operation.

Two comments, you assume they intend to be acquired, and why optimize for something that late stage when you are trying to remain an competitive edge? (The edge in this case is a skillful happy workforce)

You could take validating from the original 5 day week (instead of the then norm of 6 day week) which Henry Ford introduced about 100 years ago.

I don't follow. If validation of the 5 day week implies the validation of the 4 day week, then... well, I am sure you see where this is going.

Well the logical conclusion is a 0 day week which is obviously not going to work. There must be some sort of balance somewhere.

Not really. The logical conclusion is that productivity becomes high enough to just use fewer employees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com