Once You Try a Four-Day Workweek, It's Hard to Go Back
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Ever since I've taken remote jobs that have unlimited PTO I haven't missed these arrangements at all. No commute and the ability to take time off with reasonable constraints means that I'm able to catch up on chores and personal obligations much more easily.
And my take is, I don't like either of these solutions.
I've never worked in a role where I feel like working 32 hours a week would deliver meaningfully similar results to working 40 hours. You're just gonna deliver less. That doesn't mean I'm coding for 40 hours a week, not even close, but there's so much admin and meetings (and even just finding availability for meetings!) that reducing net hours worked by 20% isn't going to have market success.
Increasing the hours worked on each day by 20%, but getting an extra day off, also sucks. There's more "things I gotta do every day" than "things I gotta do every week". I need every hour I've got most nights. Cooking, working out, reading, entertainment to keep the sad away, some types of shopping, these aren't by and large things that I can just say "lets wait and do them all on my extra Friday off!", they need to be done ~every day.
What you say is 100% my feeling as well: I am comfortable working 38-42 hours a week, and I want to by-and-large choose the hours and days I work to hit that. That is the best solution. If I need to schedule a dentist appointment for 1pm two weeks out, I want to do that without thinking even for a second that I need to check with "work", file PTO, etc. In exchange, I'll make up that hour by working until 6pm, or going to a coffee shop for a couple hours over the weekend, whatever feels like it makes the most sense for where I'm at and where the business is at. And, sure, there's core hours, there's meetings, we work around those; I'm talking policy, not the day to day.
This pattern of handling time off is so important to me that I have quit a job within the first month because they misrepresented how they handled PTO. I was told "oh yeah you can take off for a doctors, whatever bro no big deal", which turned into "oh no you've gotta file PTO, any time off throughout the day costs a full day and needs to be approved". I quit on the spot. Policies like that, four day work weeks, limited PTO, attract cogs, not high performers.
It may be my neurodivergency, but I'm the exact opposite. There's rarely a job where I'm *actually, butts-in-seats working* for 40 hours a week where I would deliver, over a study period of months, more good, correct and helpful work than if I spend less time at work.
I could probably technically vomit out more code; but it would be more buggy and have more design decisions that would bite me later (and more possibly sink the company).
Of course 20 hours is better than 10 hours; and for most people, 20 hours is better than 30; but is 40 hours better than 30? For a lot of people, I __don't think so__, but I also think those same people have been tricked into a system where they're forced to go beyond their own comfort and maximum operating efficiency just to show their presence and willingness to work.
And I think they're harmed in the long term for it.
So: Very generally speaking: I disagree.
You've conflated "productive" with "coding", which is something software engineers do quite often. There are many, many ways to be productive beyond just writing code, that even software engineers should consider within the realm of their responsibilities. I call out a couple in my original comment; admin, meetings, organizing information, documenting, writing tests, small chore-like tickets, mentorship, learning about some part of the system, etc.
Part of gaining seniority is, I think, that ability to recognize "I'm not gonna be able to write more code today; but I think my brain is in the right place to make some meaningful progress on {whatever}". Going steps beyond that; planning your days by predicting what your mental state will probably be, to maximize the things that need to be done when you are at your best to do them, is how you start going above Senior.
So I moved to a four day week just over a year ago. It's been crucial to get really strict about reducing the amount of time spent in meetings. It's not easy always being the awkward person that's often telling people to take tangential discussions offline, demanding agendas, or challenging whether a call is required.
> Policies like that, four day work weeks, limited PTO, attract cogs, not high performers.
Or high performers who've recently become parents, or whose own parents are nearing end of life, or who have some other reason to want to spend more time with family.
I don't feel this is a fair assessment of what I'm proposing.
I haven't personally met a parent who would choose "8am to 6pm, Mon-Thu, strict, in an office" over "core hours of 11am to 2pm, Mon-Fri, more lenient, but put in 40 hours a week". I have met two parents who have left jobs that were more like the former, for jobs more like the latter. So, N=2, YMMV, etc.
Everyone wants freedom. Less freedom benefits no-one.
Choosing between "9am to 5pm, Mon-Thu, strict, in an office, paid 20% less" over "core hours of 11am to 2pm, Mon-Fri, more lenient, put in 40 hours a week" is hazier. I think depending on the nature of your responsibilities parents/caregivers might be pretty split. On the one hand, that 20% pay-bump is significant; but on the other hand, the freedom to be able to e.g. take a 90 minute lunch with your kids every day is priceless.
My point is stated very clearly in my first paragraph: These discussions get so damn hazy because when people hear "four day work week" many will think "32 hour week", many will think "32 hour week, paid at 100%", some will think "40 hours compressed into 4 days", there's no standard way to talk about this.
Choosing between "9am to 5pm, Mon-Thu, strict, in an office, paid identically" over "core hours of 11am to 2pm, Mon-Fri, more lenient, put in 40 hours a week" is obviously the most hazy. Its also not what most 4-day-a-week outfits do. Have you ever had a sick kid, the doctor has an opening in 30 minutes, its 9:30am, and you want to worry about also asking your boss "pretty please boss-man let me go take care of my family"? I still think there's be a good split between the two. Is your childcare hourly or daily? Is the second job remote or not? Lots of variables.
I'm currently working reduced hours, coming in 4 days per week, with the same core hours on those days as everyone else, and the ability to shift hours into the evenings or weekends if needed. My boss is happy for me to take an hour or two extra at lunch to deal with house or family stuff. Sometimes I work a shorter day to go to the gym before dinner, then work slightly longer the following day. It's because I'm high-performing, valuable, and trusted that I was able to negotiate such a position.
Another thing worth mentioning is UK government childcare provisions. Parents get 15-30 hours of free childcare per week (depending on age). That's up to 3 days per week free at a nursery or childminder of your choice. Reducing fromm 5 to 4 days in childcare actually halves your outgoings. Given that nursery places can cost in excess of £100 per day, this is often not a bad deal even if you take a pay cut.
I do love my job, and once the kid is at school I'll assess whether I want to return to 5 days. I agree that you can get more done in 5 days, although I think in reality it's not a huge difference since I'm less incentivised to be strict about things that waste time.
The forty hour week also wouldn't "have market success" (i.e. allow many individual firms to move to it unilaterally). But it happened because organized workers compelled a few employers to adopt it through labor stoppages. This in turn created political momentum for the standard forty hour week in the legal form of collective bargaining agreements and/or working hour legislation.
But why the 40 hours at all ?
Why not 48 and be more productive ?
This sounds like a reductive answer, because it is: Capitalism is social, zero sum, and reductive. There are people out there who will put in 50, 60, 70 hour weeks. If you do 40, they'll probably beat you, plain and simple. Fortunately, we've all mostly agreed that 40 is enough, so you aren't regularly competing with the people who are willing to destroy themselves for shareholder value. There's nothing all that magical about the number 40. There are numbers greater than 40 that approach "ok, humans can't physically sustain that"; but fortunately we've pushed the number to 40 through years of positive labor movements.
Your lunch doesn't count. So that's now 9 hours at work. Your morning commute doesn't count. So that's now 10. And your evening commute doesn't count. Now up to 11. And those after-work meetings don't count, but you kind of need to attend them because of the implications. And so on.
While you may "work" 40 hours a week, you certainly contribute to work much more than 40 hours. For me, it's over 60, and from what I've seen that's fairly typical.
On paper it looks like progress, but I'm not so sure about the quality of life.
Pascal, in his "Pensées" book, wrote about this: humans keep getting busy, because otherwise they would understand how pointless their existence and suffering and reality is.
And so, in order to avoid the inner void that lurk behind everyone's mind, we run, we act, we play and we do thing, because even the useless is better than the nothing.
Uhhh last time i checked amazon truck drivers were still humans, and drone delivery is still a catchy marketing stunt at least for now.
Sorry you need things to be explained to you in such great detail.
But you only care that stuff is automated from your point of view, right? Other can sweat, suffer and keep slaving away, as long as you don’t have to lift a finger, right?
Yes the customer can click a button and have stuff delivered within minutes… as long as someone else is doing the delivery.
Your lack of empathy really shows the sadness of your soul, and the short sightedness of your mind.
You can be sorry for me if you want, but I pity you.
That's more time with your family, your friends, your loved ones. More time smiling, more time laughing, more time being creative. This is the "good" time - the part of life you actually care about. The parts of life you will remember when you're close to death. You won't remember meetings, or a commute, or even a project you did really good on at work.
Time with friends and family is important, sure, but everyone reaches a point of diminsihing returns. There's a reason most parents eventually want their kids out of the house. Or why Thanksgiving is only once a year.
> There's a reason most parents eventually want their kids out of the house. Or why Thanksgiving is only once a year.
Right, because people hate their lives and hate their families because they got married without putting much thought into it for financial incentives and then built a life with the intention of ignoring it as much as possible just to satisfy some perspective of white picket life and numbing heteronormativity.
I know many people - both men and women - who don't even like their partners. Forget about love. And they still committed to marrying them and settling down and then they like to work. Not because the work is good, but because it means they get away from their family.
Also, most adults eventually have no friends because nobody likes them, and they waste all their time on work. And, somehow, we're just supposed to be okay with the idea that nobody likes you and nobody is your friend. I mean, if you wanted to, could you even make a friend in the next year? For most, the answer is no.
We, as a whole, have destroyed any sense of community for the promise of a nuclear family and stable job. The end result is people being sad enough to pat themselves on the back for sending an email and hiding in a "man cave" to avoid the reality of having to make small talk with the person closest to them in their life.
Sorry, maybe this is harsh, but it's what I've observed. I mean just ask an older person what the best time of their life was. Most of the time they say college or high school. Sure, being young has something to do with it, but that's not it. Having friends, laughing a lot, doing activities, having a community... these are the parts that make life worth living. My father could recount countless stories from when he was in college, decades and decades ago. He couldn't tell you what the name of the dude hired 2 years ago at work.
It has. What you’re missing is that everybody on this forum is part of the top one percent: it all depends on the scale.
On a global scale, if you live in the west, most likely you’re in the top 1%.
Hardly. People here have a higher-than-one-percent chance of being in the top 1%, but it's a long way from "everyone here".
> On a global scale, if you live in the west, most likely you’re in the top 1%.
Obviously wrong. The global population is 8 billion; the US plus the EU is about 700 million.
Being ultra-rich is more about controlling society's destiny, not about how one lives.
Whether that's hood or bad is hard to say without checking what a specific person does with all that control, and what would the others do if the control was not so centralized in so few.
For example, it used to be that you had a printed schedule on each tram, train and bus stop, changed twice a year (summer/winter schedules).
Now we have electronic displays that display the time until the next tram or bus arrives in minutes.
Just imagine the gigantic difference in infrastructure to support either of those options. My dad (East Germany, 1970s/80s) used to hand-write train schedules for one or two stations twice a year - and that was all. Now you need an entire server infrastructure, massive electronics, daily maintenance, software, etc. etc.
Of course we gain something, but I think the difference in effort far outstrips the gains. Especially when trams and busses are mostly on time.
We have also massively increased our human and business networks, both global and local. Speed and throughput requirements are up for almost everything, from just-in-time deliveries to communication.
It seems either us humans ourselves, or our systems, immediately swallow all gains and put them back into increased complexity of the system(s).
Related, this study headline from a few years ago: "Humans solve problems by adding complexity, even when it’s against our best interests" -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/16/bias-prob...
I venture to guess that, in addition to most people's fascination with some form of "progress", another part of that is our capitalist financial and work system: Everybody has to do something that makes money. You just can't simplify away your own job. Well you can, but you would be stupid to do so. Competition is supposed to be the counter-force, but that does not seem to work all that well overall.
And with women, employers still haven't figured out how to afford women time for traditional responsibilities, like caring for their children, while still providing them with "equitable" workplace opportunities, while not being unfair to everyone else. Likely because it's just not possible. If I don't have kids and grind harder than women who take time to raise kids, why should we have equal opportunities? Makes you wonder if traditional gender roles were onto something. Yes we can do the same things, but no it is not wise to do so on a societal level.
There could be some jobs where it's hard to measure progress, like quality assurance, but these jobs have been looked at with ire by management for so long it's an old wives tale at this point.
What is likely more true, is that productivity varies between employees somewhat, and perhaps there are 2x employees. But, measuring relative productivity is much, much harder.
ding ding. Managers are paid roughly based on the number of employees they manage, so they will hire as many people as possible.
they're not comparing vs people who are grinding. I think they just want some guarantee that they won't be discriminated against because of maternity leave. And that they'll have some kind of on-ramp for getting back into the workforce
Which is entirely doable and reasonable, just a question of whether corporations are held accountable here or not
No one who’s advocating for employees with children with benefits like subsidized childcare, flexible schedules for driving children to and from things, etc., is suggesting that everyone should somehow get “equal opportunities”, or is proposing an actual concrete definition of how that would work. (Would you require that all promotions be internally posted and limit the amount of opportunities people can apply to? No one would call that equitable - that would disadvantage people with, say, racist bosses wanting to switch orgs.)
I don't think we work "more than ever", not at all.
This is something that's really hard to quantify, but even harder to get an idea about "anecdotally" (cause what're you comparing to, when you were working 100 years ago?). What makes you think it's true?
What has increased a lot is the time spent "on duty" (on the office or whatever).
This is not work per-se. But this is time retrieved from your life. This is not progress.
This applies to a lot of jobs these days, even from something like retail or hospitality worker or at the more extreme end you have the likes of an on call engineer or firefighter, mostly being paid to be ready to respond to the need to work, but not being guaranteed that it will happen. This type of work doesn't really respond to more hours being more productive. It may to a certain extent that if the shop is open long maybe more customers will come in but it's not guaranteed and there may be diminishing returns as you are paying employees for their time so you need to be making or saving more money having them available to work.
Most people still conceptualise work as something more like factory work or mining or labouring even something like legal work to some extent, where you have a set amount of output each hour and so more working hours should mean more production output to a certain extent. In this case work, hourly rate and time is fairly fixed and not that elastic.
Then there the type of job where the work is fixed, but the time and hourly rate can be very elastic, this is more contractor, startup, even parts of the military, where you need to complete a task or objective maybe to a deadline but the the time or cost can vary significantly depending on what's important. This is more the business owner, sole contractor or equity earning employee where they can potentially get a bigger payout by putting in more effort or else working more efficiently.
I always recommend it to people who may be lucky enough to afford and choose it.
My job nowadays is not programming but managerial. I'm lucky that a company offers a lot of flexibility, the main one being office not mandatory, so there are no issues when personal matter comes and you need to go out or something. Good companies like that are out there.
A two-day weekend is too short, a five-day workweek is too long. 4/3 is the perfect split.
I'm not sure it's so clear cut which of these is the better option.
There is a genuine trade off for me: I don’t make as much money, and concretely I’ve noticed that travel far less than my friends do, and unlike my friends I don’t own a car that I have to make long-term payments on. But I do get more focused work in during weekdays because of that, and time to explore my city during weekends, which scratches my traveling itch.
Unless one defies the 7days week.
I'm concocting a system based on 4/4 split, the actual perfect split.
Yes, sometimes it ends up as work on other people's weekend and that's on purpose.
"Employers saw benefits, too: 70% reported that recruiting workers was easier once they went to a four-day schedule—a boon in a country where many industries complain that intense competition for talent drives up costs. A dozen participants reported details of their financial performance, showing revenue and profit were stable overall."
The business world is not rationale by any means. The people in positions of control to make these decisions made it there because they LOVE being in control. They will often hurt themselves purely to maintain a delusion of strength. This self-destructive nature is an inherent flaw of humanity. Very few people have the ability to even recognize their own self-destruction, let alone fix it.
It doesn't seem unreasonable it could work for some jobs and people. Too many hours and people tend to get stressed, tired, worried about home matters they can't attend to, etc - and their performance suffers as a result.
Depends a lot on the job and person, though.
It was absolutely amazing for actually being able to get things done. I hated going back to the regular five day week after that.
But I'm conflicted about all the work I have to do to get there...
It was definitely much better than 11p-7a Sat-Wed which I had worked immediately before that.
Local companies in Germany have a very defensive business due to the nature of the market (not so internationalized, highly consolidated, a lot of small businesses that no big corporation would try to enter, and low competition in mid-sized businesses due to bureaucracy).
For local SaaS companies or local companies for sure, it can work since no big competitor can rise. Still, the real test would be Germany placing that in their industrial base (e.g. cars, industrial instruments, chemical industry, logistics), or in some other businesses where the entry barrier is low.
It's the law, it's the system, so of course that is what they are going to do.
My point is, considering this specific arrangement of 7 hours a day/workday (35h), what would be the offset comparing this same company with 28h/week (4D) with another company not in that arrangement in scenarios where throughput per hour matters?
Mon-thurs sucked about 20% more.
Fridays were 1,000% better.
It was a good trade and I miss it.
everything else is modern slavery.
I mean, that's definitely going away if all other employers also move to four-day workweeks, so it seems like you shouldn't factor that in as one of the benefits of this schedule.
And you're right, it would eventually go away - but only if and when late adopters find themselves being punished by the market.
1920 probably
Often by the end of the week, people in complex positions are well past the point of diminishing returns - pushing them harder may work in the short-term, but it's a recipe for burnout.
It's better to have someone operating closer to their peek performance for longer - even if you sacrifice a day overall.
Burnout's more insidious and pernicious than that - and it takes far more than a few days of rest to get over it.
I think if I were to be fired I would like to take 2-3 months off to build up before I started looking for a new job, but that's only possible due to having some savings I could tap into.
Back of the napkin calculations say I would need about $4,000/month liquid cash to not be in danger. Add another 1 month barrier in and I would need $16,000 on hand to take 3 months off assuming that I got another equally paying job almost immediately.
In my (likely very controversial to HN) opinion, software devs are already heavily compensated compared to other professions and adding more benefits on top of that in the form of WFH just make it even more unfair. What is fair? It is what the employers are willing to pay and if most are demanding RTO then that is just what the market is willing to bear.
Most jobs do not have the luxury of WFH. Not for a doctor, a biologist, a chemist, a civil engineer, a lawyer, etc. They are required to come to office to work and they are often paid less than a software dev.
It reminds me of people complaining of why are train drivers striking, when they're already paid more than nurses, thus how dare they.
Wealthy inequality isn't between us common folk, it's between them (the ultra wealthy) and us.
If there truly was fair compensation, there wouldn't be anyone with that much money. We're already doubtful of the 10x engineer, let alone the 1,000,000,000,000x engineer.
Not true.
There are many people who fought against the choice of WFH despite the flexibility being generally good for everyone. There are many reasons for this e.g. they are extroverts and need the social interaction, have a poor home life etc.
Which is why now the trend is now forced hybrid.
It is about what is acceptable to both the employer and the employee. The employee would like the freedom to WFH but the employer consider it a benefit that come at their cost and thus do not want to grant it. As shown by other professions, the idea of WFH is entirely new and rarely if ever granted or expected to most professionals. Software devs are in a unique position to demand and potentially getting it does not make it any less exceptional and a huge ask for the other side of the negotiation.
Whether it is really good or bad is not the point I am making.
The objective world does not always, and in fact rarely, intersects with the world of business management. In reality, WFH is cheaper across the board. In time, space, money... every aspect you can think of.
But a mutually beneficial nature makes is undesirable from a business perspective, because they don't want the implications of that word - "mutual".
Employees advocate for themselves because they have to. If you are not selfish in that manner, you are ONLY hurting yourself. Employers have discovered the art of selfishness thousands of years ago. You must push, you must be entitled. And, remember, the only reason you have what you have is because a lot of workers before you were very entitled. So entitled they often got what they wanted via violence.
You stated correctly when you said "most jobs do not have the luxury", and some people have specifically chosen these jobs for this luxury.
I mean I'd love to be able to enjoy a nice sky or a beautiful view of the sea while I'm working but alas, my work tool is neither a plane nor a boat.