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Comment by CachedaCodes | Hacker News Reader

Four-day week trials, for example, keep showing productivity holds or improves — Iceland ran the biggest pilot, the UK had 61 companies in their trial, Microsoft Japan saw a 40% boost. The data is there.

Yet I know a CEO who suggested implementing a four-day week if the least productive 10% of workers came in an extra day instead. Just bonkers.

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The extreme cognitive dissonance in these types is so odd - on the one hand, they claim that CEOs are these money-hungry evil tycoons who want to get as much out of their employees as possible, yet on the other hand, they also claim 4 day work weeks are supposedly so amazing and effective and improve productivity.

So .. why wouldn't these horrible CEOs who want to leech everything possible out of their employees gladly/immediately choose to implement 4 day work weeks, when they would supposedly make their employees more productive for the same cost? Why would they refuse to take that?

I'm not sure which types you have in mind? The most strident critics of CEOs I know say they're not just money hungry; they're power and status hungry, and will happily trade off additional money for opportunities to show that they're high status or exert additional power over the little folks. If that's what you value, directing your employees' lives for an extra day every week may be worth leaving a lot of money on the table.

If their goal is power and status, 4 day work week, at lower wages, frees up capital to hire more humans to control.

Option A: 800 employees working 5 days per week.

Option B: 960 employees working 4 days per week (and producing more than the 800)

You're assuming they'd prefer to control more people, but what if they prefer having more control over less people?

I had a boss like this when I worked at a call center, he would swing a golf club around (he was short and I think he wanted to feel like he had a weapon, he never hit any balls in the place) and he would go out of his way to offer overtime to the poorest and most hard off people and wanted to see how much OT he could get one person to work.

It was his little game to manipulate people that couldn't help but say yes into a situation that left them no time to live a life.

The stats were much worse for such people, and those stats had a direct impact on his pay, but if there was a sadistic option he always took it.

Same guy had a "water drinking contest" so he could watch all his employees throw up for a day off.

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