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Comment by alexjplant | Hacker News Reader

Parts of US Department of Defense and their contractors do what they refer to as Compressed Work Schedule (CWS) wherein employees work 9-hour days and get every other Friday off. Some people opt to split their off day and make every Friday a half-day so that they can be on the links or at the riverside bar and grill by lunchtime. While in college I worked 10 hours a day Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Saturday was fairly productive on account of nobody being in the office to bother me.

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.

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Being able to step away for a couple of minutes to start a load of laundry, empty the dishwasher, carry out the trash, or perform some other bit of household maintenance is a seriously underrated benefit of working from home! Baking bread, for example, is an hours-long process consisting of quick tasks separated by long waits; I used to bake several times a week, last time I was working from home, but I haven't done it once since I resumed the office commute.

I am working from home and this reminded me to check the laundry

Do not disturb my deep work phases with your HN comments!

IMO: I have never worked in a job where I would have been like "heck yeah, four day work week lets do it". Part of that is, there's kinda two distinct and separate camps, and sometimes its unclear which camp people are in and what we're fighting for. Is it "I work ~40 hours in four days" or "I work ~32 hours in four days"?

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.

> 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.

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.

I've rarely met anyone who can get more than four useful hours a day. Sure, there's lots more time when you are thinking about work, writing code in your head, prioritizing, and planning. That stuff can and does happen when you sit at your desk, or while you are biking, running, doing laundry, or watching tv.

> 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).

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.

> there's so much admin and meetings (and even just finding availability for meetings!)

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.

> 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.

It sounds like you're assuming that 4-day weekers are necessarily trading in flexible hours and independence. The impression I had from your original post is that high performers do not like working fewer hours per week, all other things being equal. I didn't realise that you were talking about trade-offs.

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.

"reducing net hours worked by 20% isn't going to have market success."

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.

> 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.

But why the 40 hours at all ?

Why not 48 and be more productive ?

Because 40 is sustainable, and the standard we've mostly all agreed to (with some fuzzy room in there for heavy versus light weeks/etc).

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.

The problem is that typically the burden of work is much more than 40 hours, even if you only work 40 hours. Because those hours are calculated in the most ungenerous way possible.

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.

Why not split the difference and do four 9 hour days? I am reasonably sure most people will get just as much done as they would have with eight 5hr days after a couple weeks of adjusting. But then they may be to happy with their lives, and that is not something that upper levels like to see, I think.

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