There's no doubt that there's a benefit to the employee, but for corporations to adopt this there has to be a measurable benefit to the company as well.
I do think there is one clear benefit as measured in the article - employee retention. It's an extremely strong incentive to stay with the current company, and ___domain knowledge gained over decades really is a competitive advantage if your employees commonly have it.
What remains to be seen though are if the efficiency gains are good enough to justify less hours. Are employees more productive? That's the question that remains to be answered or objectively measured here. Less burnout and better mental health means higher quality work for sure, but is output as a whole better with a 4 day work week versus a 5 day work week? That's what shareholders will care about more than anything else.
In the mid aughts, I worked at a company that put ROWE (results oriented work environment) into practice. This approach basically meant you could work whenever you wanted, as long as you were meeting goals and metrics. There was a list of metrics you had to meet before being eligible for it. They kept it in place for two years and nothing really changed. Devs were still meeting their metrics and the company was still doing well, but when the old VP who put ROWE in place left, the first thing the new VP did was take it away along with some other perks we had. Myself and about seven other devs left within the next 3-4 months.
I'm currently working for a large corporation who went through several cycles of trying to get people to come back to the office after C19 slowed down. After three or four versions, they finally gave up and put an optional (hybrid) model in place. It was interesting to hear the stunned VP's glowing about the increased productivity and the company had two of its most successful quarters going into and coming out of the pandemic. I'm guess seeing those results made it easier for them to allow people to work from home more easily.
Some anecdotal evidence for your retention theory. Since my current company allowed 100% WFH, our team has had barely any turn over and at least three of the teams I worked with have also have little or no turn over as well. It would stand to reason you probably have a good point about retaining people when you allow them a little more freedom to do their jobs.
I'm with a large organization (government, military) that also implemented a hybrid model under covid and decided to keep it going. But not a day goes by that someone doesn't scream for it to end. We have too many people "working from home" all the time and never getting done the stuff that cannot be done from home. Is the server not responding after the recent power outage? Too bad. The guy to turn it back on only comes in Monday-Tuesday. They put the real property maintenance people on a hybrid model. No joke: The plumbers and electricians still "work from home" half the week.
"Hello, this is General Smith."
"Sir, ... um .. you are answering your own phone?"
"Yup. My EA is working from home thursday-friday and we cannot get the secure phone to forward calls to her cellphone." "Did you talk to IT?" "It is friday. IT works remote on fridays." "How about I come to your office?" "Please do, I'm all alone here."
That sounds mostly dysfunctional and not really a WFH issue.
> Is the server not responding after the recent power outage? Too bad. The guy to turn it back on only comes in Monday-Tuesday.
A reasonable company would have some rotating in-office IT or at the very least an oncall that goes to wherever the server is to fix it.
> The plumbers and electricians still "work from home" half the week.
Pretty much the same thing.
As someone who is a big proponent of WFH, one thing I must still agree to is that organizational and cultural issues that existed prior to WFH at usually just worse in WFH. If your employees are so disfranchised that their install scripts to wiggle their mouse while they watch Netflix the battle is already lost.
> If your employees are so disfranchised that their install scripts to wiggle their mouse while they watch Netflix the battle is already lost.
That would be a lot of companies and workers out there, dare I say the vast majority even.
Believe it or not, many workers don't actually enjoy their work, their company, their boss or their job, but they put up with it because housing in expensive and it was the least horrible job they could find with the highest pay they could land, enabling them a lifestyle upgrade, even if they don't care for the work itself, so of course they'll take every opportunity they get to slack off and watch Netflix if they can.
Expecting all your workers to be fully invested and committed on work while on the clock is an exercise in futility and something no company past a certain size will ever accomplish because everyone just looks after themselves and their own self interest first, screw the company and their shareholders. And the companies know this, hence the culture of micromanagement, spyware, RTO, etc.
That's why start-ups and small companies can accomplish things the likes of Google can't, because they're formed mostly of motivated people who care about the product and the mission first and foremost, while the likes of Google are full of coasters who are there just to make as much money as possible with as little work as possible while the gravy train lasts.
> Believe it or not, many workers don't actually enjoy their work, their company, their boss or their job
There are a lot of people that don't enjoy their jobs, but do the work because they're getting paid to do it. You seem to assume that anyone doing their job _only_ because they're being paid to do it will _not_ do their job if they can get away with it (even though they're still being paid to do so). Not everyone is a horrible person. Plenty of people will continue to do their job even if they could lie and not do it; because they agreed "if you pay me, I will do my job".
I've had times where I wasn't enjoying my job, but I still did the work... because that's the agreement I had with the company I worked for. And, like a lot of people, I wouldn't see it as acceptable to scam the company I work for.
There's no expectation you're going to work 8 hours in the office.
What if you're taking a break?
What about drinking a coffee? Chatting with coworkers?
Playing table tennis or some arcade videogame in the break area?
Various studies point at a lower bound for endurance when doing knowledge work. Some say 4h.
As long as they get something done those employees will still feel like they put in their day of work and they will still get good reviews. Could they have done it in half the time? Maybe, but who can tell?
I'm my own boss and I'm paid if I deliver results (and I think everyone should work like this, being an employee is opaque and overall sucks for earning potential if you are a good performer) but sometimes I put on a movie on a second screen while I'm working, mainly to make dull work (it's crazy how much you can charge to write the same old boring API or the same old Reaxt component for the n-th time) more tolerable.
I'm definitely working slower but at least I'm getting things done without losing the will to live.
Because you said "the vast majority" of workers would not bother actually working, and very much sounded like you were saying that the subset of people that don't enjoy their jobs is the same subset that would watch netflix instead of doing their work. I don't think that's true at all. I think most people will attempt to fulfill the obligations they signed up for; their job.
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with people looking after themselves. A lot of of the people committed to a mission are going to end up getting screwed. (Not everyone, but probably most.)
Ok, so just consider a world where jobs paid no money. How many people do you think would have a job? 10% of the amount now? 1%?
Even if there are some very rare individuals that go to work primarily for companionship or for personal fulfillment that doesn't mean it's even worth bringing up in a discussion like this
This is a bit of a misdirection because it equates jobs, which are work done for someone else, with all work. I am sure that the majority of people would still do something that can be considered work in a world without jobs.
It's obvious that few people are going to subordinate themselves in a world where they don't get paid for doing so, and if they did it would look more like volunteer associations (only emergency response involves much hierarchy, most volunteers are only loosely associated with the org, individuals choose which shifts to turn up to, local leaders are elected and view it as a burden rather than a privilege) and less like work (you don't get to choose anything).
Edit: I should add that I'm in no way against jobs, I just think that people who are doing largely unproductive work for free are still working, even though it'd be better for everyone if they were getting paid to do something more useful.
For startups is it perhaps easier to be intrinsically motivated in the company's success because there is likely to be more financial benefits?
When large established companies complain about productivity and lack of employee commitment, the answer seems very obvious to me... Swap platitudes, certificates of recognition and motivational speeches with tangible financial incentives.
If the executive wants everyone to come into the office 5 days a week, then offer a 25%+ pay rise and watch people flood in
> because there is likely to be more financial benefits?
I don’t think this is true for the vast majority of startup employees though. Maybe the founders get some crazy return 10 years down the line if they’re lucky. Most everyone else would earn the same or less if there is a successful sale as they’d have at a “normal” company. And if there is no successful sale, they’d have earned less.
> That would be a lot of companies and workers out there, dare I say the vast majority even.
Since I joined the workforce, I encountered something like two or three people doing actually nothing at work. And once they are identified, I just know that I can't expect any output from them and just do without them.
It's the opposite that I'm confronted with daily : people who are absolutely terrible at their job and who constantly try participate.
Not only I know that I have to triple check their outputs, but I also have to come up with fake tasks to give them so that they are not constantly asking for things to do or worst, doing disasters on their own initiative.
They consume a lot of time and energy from the productive members of the team, while having no positive output for the company.
It's like daycare for adults.
And given that everybody is paid at the end of the month, I have nothing but love for unproductive (in the eyes of the company) people who take care of themselves.
I'd rather have both those people doing what they enjoy outside of work instead of forcing themselves to be here because governments and corporations are saying that you are not a member of society if you are not selling your time to capitalism.
>> A reasonable company would have some rotating in-office IT
Ya. We had that. We had 10+ people doing trouble tickets 8am to 4pm across more than a dozen buildings. They worked hard, but were never actually done. There was always a priority list. Now they work half the week from home. Stuff is piling up and we are begging for more non-at-home IT staff to be hired.
I think you missed the point—your organization is completely dysfunctional at this point and hiring won't change that.
Based on your description you don't have a WFH policy, you have a policy that incentivizes not working at all. What makes you think that these hypothetical new hires are going to actually work while the rest of their department doesn't? What sane person would put up with that treatment?
>I think you missed the point—your organization is completely dysfunctional at this point
Would you be surprised to hear that most companies in the world are just like that?
HN readers are in a bubble where they can afford to be picky on where they work choosing companies that fit in their belief system in terms of organizational efficiency and work culture, instead of just choosing the least horrible job they can find with the best pay, like the other 99% of the people in the world.
I said nothing about the ratio of dysfunctional organizations to non-dysfunctional, nor did I encourage OP to switch jobs or even try to change something in the org. All I said is that their organization is dysfunctional and hiring new people into the dysfunctional teams will do absolutely nothing to fix that.
I never said that's not dysfunctional, I said most companies ARE dysfunctional in one way or another, and it's something most workers who've been around the block a few times learn to live with eventually, since they prioritize hobbies, family and having a roof over their heads instand of finding that ideal Goldlacks company that's never dysfunctional in any way, because that doesn't really exist.
Especially traditional companies tend to be insanely dysfunctional when it comes to IT and SW engineering in general. And most people know this but still plenty choose to work there and put up with that dysfunctionality instead of fighting to change it, because like I said, it's just a job that pays the bills, not a personal identity, and a lot of the people in the real world aren't as fussy about this as HN is.
> most people know this but still plenty choose to work there and put up with that dysfunctionality instead of fighting to change it ... and a lot of the people in the real world aren't as fussy about this as HN is.
Again: I didn't suggest anyone fight to change anything or switch jobs. All I said is that hiring new people into the dysfunctional organization is going to do absolutely nothing to fix the problems OP is describing.
You're replying to what you imagine people on HN would often say, not replying to me.
You speak a lot about "reasonable" things. The parent probably could have made things a little more clear, but concerning "government, military" work policies it's almost expected a high percentage will be unreasonable.
At the rate things are currently changing, I won't be very surprised if non-trivial server capacity gets located in orbit thanks to some successor to Starlink.
This will make remote work mandatory, even if it still can't fix all the possible issues.
(Only due to your comment did I realise I was ambiguous, I meant remote work specifically for the IT department would be mandatory, not everyone in general).
It could still be office-based though, sure technically remote from the server, but so are the web servers software engineers develop for typically, sometimes even their development environment is. I don't think that really factors into remote (WFH) vs office working at all, at least from an employer's perspective. Maybe it makes it easier to work remotely, but certainly doesn't necessitate it: you can work from anywhere, and that can still be the office.
But only mandatory in the sense of distance to the equipment - it still won't stop some managers from wanting them all corraled into an office somewhere.
Your IT should always be remote. A laptop in the office is not any different from a laptop out of the office.
It definitely feels like most people complaining about wfh have no friends and work is their entire life. I honestly do not understand how anyone can pretend they get anything done, while also being constantly interrupted or having conversations about what they're doing this weekend, or such and such sports team last night etc. Like... just get the work done and move on, jeez, it's work, not a social club. Ending wfh so you can force people to hang out with you is weird.
>> Your IT should always be remote. A laptop in the office is not any different from a laptop out of the office.
Maybe if you are working at Google, with infinite budgets and gleaming-new machines everywhere. But we have old stuff. We have phones that cannot be managed remotely. We have desktop computers that cannot get up and walk between offices unaided. We have fiberoptic wires that break when 60+yo buildings shift on their foundations. We have UPSs that cannot change their own batteries. We have antennas exposed to the wind/rain/snow. We also have innumerable systems that are either too old or too classified to be managed from a laptop at starbucks. None of this stuff can be fixed from home.
I was always curious - in fully remote IT (especially one located in another state/country), who does the actual on-site visits? Say, a PC part has to be replaced or a new laptop has to be deployed.
For the deployment I guess you can use something like ImmyBot or Intune, but at some point someone has to be there and connect a new machine to the internet/intranet. How does that work in practice?
Employees go to local repair store and charge the expense to the employer.
Laptop arrive straight from China from Apple.
If the delivery doesn't make sense they don't even ask to return computers, they just do a call where they superficially check you deleted company stuff.
IT just solves dumb problems on slack "I can't download acrobat reader" and owns the admin roles on all the saas we use.
I'm really curious as to how ROWE works in practice for software developers, because the I'm extremely dubious.
In software development, there is usually an "infinite amount of work" to be done, so the important thing is to prioritize well as a lot of that work will never get done. But what does it mean to say "you've met all your objectives"? If you say "great, I finished all my objectives in 20 hours this week, see you at the beach", this company will eventually get killed by competitors who are just as productive yet work 40+ hours a week.
But fundamentally, the idea of "you've met your objectives, now you can go home" just feels like a fantasy in the world of software development.
ROWE would essentially encode a normal software job into a mix of goals and expectations. E.g. if you're expected to average some fraction of the team's point velocity over the year, that's written down. If you're expected to jump from a finished ticket to the next, or alternate reviewing and starting new work, that's written down. (A ROWE job description can totally be written to keep you stuck at work if it has availability or response time expectations.)
If you work at a smart company, your manager doesn't spell out much of your job, and ROWE can encapsulate that if you and your manager have a shared understanding of what an effective month/quarter/year looks like. If you're that kind of senior engineer, the exercise should prompt some good discussion about reducing the number of hours you spend on more measurable, less effective tasks.
The goal is to create something that both you and your manager buy into, so they feel good if that's 'all' you do and you feel it's doable to review the list and feel good about it before the end of a typical workweek.
As you might be able to tell, it's not easy to come up with a list that achieves this. Most managers will be too timid, or won't understand themselves well enough, to put the real full expectations of a job on paper.
However, a 'certified ROWE' workplace undergoes coaching so they have a better chance of success, similarly to how some organizations do for OKRs if they want to use them as intended and not as fantasy aspirations.
In practice, if you have a boss that hates ROWE, you're going to have a tough time convincing them that you've met your objectives enough to step away from work for a bit, no differently than how any other flexible work arrangement stops being flexible the moment your boss stops trusting you.
(I'm close to a ROWE-certified organization that has been successful with it for about 15 years.)
But it's not like you complete your objectives and then you say "great, we're all done, let's go home." Every company I've ever worked for had a backlog a mile long, and we knew we'd probably only ever get to 20% of it or so. The whole purpose of sprint planning is to just prioritize the most important stuff to work on for the next sprint, but if the teams capacity increases you'd pull more stuff in.
No, the purpose of sprint planning is to specify (more ot less) exactly what you plan to do this sprint. Usually the best case scenario. You make your best effort to finish the things you outlined, sometimes you manage to do it, sometimes you don’t, but why would you ever try to do more than you planned to do? If you’ve done the tasks, you’re done, period, go relax, grab a beer, wait till the next sprint. You’ve literally done your job. Why in the world would you want to “pull more stuff in”?
That’s how I’ve done it, and have seen it done in the last 7 companies I worked at.
Your reasoning is so foreign to me. The only way it makes sense if you are speaking as a manager.
> If you’ve done the tasks, you’re done, period, go relax, grab a beer, wait till the next sprint.
Well, to each their own, but that has never been the case in any of the companies I've worked at. In fairness, over the fast 5 years or so more and more the companies I've worked at have used Kanban over sprint planning, because usually the "estimation" part of agile (i.e. the cards, the voting) has proven to be the most useless piece of agile.
Regardless of what you use, you should have a clear idea of what you plan to accomplish in the next n days. And you need to communicate this information to your manager. If you have done that, and the manager agrees it’s a reasonable objective then I don’t see how what you describe can ever happen. If an unplanned task comes up with a high priority then you simply tell your manager: “OK, sure, which of the planned tasks do you want to delay?”
It doesn’t matter what you use for planning, you agree to do something in advance, and you provide a reasonable estimate of how long it will take. Your manager should trust your estimates, even if they are sometimes wrong.
I’ve worked at both types of places. The main difference was if one was a contractor or on salary.
I also believe everyone needs a mental break at the end of an accomplished iteration. The satisfaction of feeling done. You might only answer email or edit docs on that day but that’s definitely worthwhile.
Not to mention, when you have a family, weekends aren’t especially relaxing, so if you “sprint” every week for years, it leads to almost certain burnout.
In other words, we don’t run marathons at full speed for a reason.
Oh and by the way, even at the contracting place where we were given fresh tickets when done early, no one ever expected them done immediately. So in effect we’d sit on them, take a mental break, and everyone was happy with appearances—the theater of work.
I have no idea how metrics would be measured unless the work is always the same and trivial.
In my job, every problem seems to take a random amount of time. It might be the thing I'm assigned is trival and done in 1-2 hrs. It might be it would be trivial but it pointed out an issue elsewhere than needs to be fixed first. It might be trivial but the CI was down for 6hrs. It might be trival but requires some other library to roll to a new version and the roll broke something else. It might look trivial but turns out to need a non trival refactor to work.
I ran into that last one yesterday where I started on an issue that seemed like it should be trivial, in an object with different options than it currently has. These objects are cached by their options since they are heavy. The code that gets an existing or new one is 5 levels deep. It creates them from a factory but the info this new issue needs needs to query the factory to figure out the creation options. So, what seemed like a 10-15 min change is going to be several hours to decide how to surface or pass that factory to/from the top level
the point being, from outside management is going to see different levels of work. It's not as trivial as "created N widgets an hour" nor is it as trivial as "lines per hour"
I feel like there could be lots of unintended consequences with people only taking the smallest tasks or whatever to avoid taking tasks that take longer or to find ways to account things so it looks like they're doing more, etc
> I have no idea how metrics would be measured unless the work is always the same and trivial.
Don't count the result, but the actual work itself. Meaning, you need to document every little step you do, every command, script, search you have. Write down your thoughts and conclusions, and so on. But this is very annoying, and barely anyone is well-equipped for doing this. And most people have some natural defensive for exposing themselves to this level. Though, it would also be helpful for yourself to be able to review your work. So maybe some balanced middle would be a way to go?
Maybe if tools would be designed in a non-annoying way to support this, more people would be willing doing something like this.
It’s interesting and encouraging to see this working in the real world. I think most “leaders” are concerned about having to come up with what people, especially software engineers, should be getting done in X amount of time, which I sympathize with… but clearly it’s doable. Perhaps the concern is that high-performers will produce less, and low-performers will be canned, only for the high-performers to have to pick up the slack, or there just be a net negative in total work produced in X amount of time because some engineers have been fired for performance but there’s no one to replace them and others aren’t allowed/able to work more to compensate.
That tale of a policy being scrapped the moment new leadership shows up is typical though.
Leadership churn is often high these days, so workplace experiments or innovations tend to just vanish, unless they become popular across multiple companies very quickly and become the new norm.
Do you think the lack of turnover might be affected by the current macroeconomic factors? It feels like lots of people have been holding onto their jobs for the last 18 months for this reason.
___domain knowledge gained over decades really is a competitive advantage if your employees commonly have it
I’m not so sure. On the one hand, it seems nearly tautological. Yet, so much of the comp structure and general attitude towards employees in big tech seems to incentivize job hopping every few years. I would prefer not having to do that, but my hand is forced.
It's pretty clear to me that deep knowledge of how the company works and the historical quirks of how things happened, and how the tech-debt works, is considered of only small value to a typical company. I've seen countless examples of people in such positions being discarded without a thought during layoffs.
Additionally, having deep expertise in a particular technical area can protect you somewhat during a layoff, but also makes you easier to define a replacement for if there is more that one of you.
Companies will get what they pay for. They pay for short term gain.
> There's no doubt that there's a benefit to the employee, but for corporations to adopt this there has to be a measurable benefit to the company as well.
Thats a very Murican way to look at it. You know, workers Can also just demand it, worked for a lot og stuff in Europe. Like 5week vacation minimum. Unlimited paid sickdays, Paternity and maternity leave etc.
The idea that everything has to be a net positive for corporations is silly. We are a society of people, and corporations have to be a net positive for our society not the other way around.
I think it’s largely a question of whether a 4-day work week cuts your country’s GDP by 20%. People go to work because there’s work that needs to be done, you know.
4day work week won't do magic by itself. The company committing to it must also apply the necessary modifications and seek innovation to tap into this productivity well.
It's like in the Industrial revolution when kids (!!) shift were lowered from 18 hours to 12-8 hours. Adults that were assisted by kids also couldn't maintain the same 18 hours shift and for the factories to maintain productivity they had to implement innovations. And would you look at that, the average textile factory today is orders of magnitude more productive and efficient than that of the 19th century.
Conditions for factory workers in the US haven't improved because it turned out to be an optimal way to improve productivity. It's because of worker movements demanding it again and again.
Those productivity innovations you mention would've come either way. In other countries with worse working conditions and even less labor power than the US, factory owners reap the benefits of applying such productivity innovations AND the increased output of longer working hours than is generally tolerated by US workers.
From the parent comment:
> but for corporations to adopt this there has to be a measurable benefit to the company as well.
This is only true in a world where workers are entirely subservient to their masters.
Oh sure, don't get me wrong. I am not a techno-positivist that believes innovations will save us from evil. That was only to illustrate how a change in working policy has to go alongside technical and cultural adaptations.
These worker movements are crucial to keep workers from getting both pressured to produce more AND work longer hours.
The parent’s line about a company needing to maintain or increase productivity in order to make an improvement to working conditions is one that only those truly part of ownership should be making. Especially when it’s never said so in both directions: if productivity improved (through automation or otherwise) then the workers shouldn’t have to work as long hours. Only actual owners get to work less if they wish to in wage labor business. And it is their privilege to demand workers increase or maintain productivity if they wish to work fewer hours.
I suspect we'd see a bunch of change. A difference of when we moved 6 to 5 days is in those times most business were closed on the weekends + generally people were more tied to one company for longer term. Plus 2 days off is very different than 3 in terms of alternate work opportunity.
From that a likely issue is a steep increase in people having second jobs so they work a 4 day job and a second 2/3 day job.
I suspect the 4 day week will work well for people with good salaries and market power, but encourage working class to 'work the weekend' in alternate jobs resulting in lower downtime.
For this I'd actually like a 4 day week but with it either more restricted business opening on Sunday type thing or significant wage multiples over 3 day weekends to encourage time off vs the 24/7 economy.
I suspect a lot of the people yearning for 4 day work weeks wouldn't actually want to return to the days when most stores and other institutions were closed on Sundays.
As somebody who lives in Germany where everything is closed on Sundays, uh, it really isn't that bad. It's fine, actually. I'll take 4 day work weeks happily.
As someone who went to school in a state where almost nothing was open on Sunday at the time it was pretty annoying given that I was usually pretty busy (or what passed for it at the time) the other 6 days.
These days I wouldn't really care because I have a lot of flexibility.
Reducing the number of days worked per week per individual increases (relative) overhead costs, including administrative costs, benefits (most notably including healthcare), and capital costs (because everything is being used less, but still devaluing). These are all real changes with real impacts.
Also of note, the increase in these costs from going down to 4 days will be substantially larger than the prior one (due to the smaller dividend).
Capital costs spent do not go up. An opportunity for saving exist. One extra day means less electrical costs. Admin costs remain static. These costs do not change unless you are hiring someone for that one day.
The costs are not going up substantially or at all for most 9/5 businesses
It's "sort of" what I've done, only last time I changed jobs I told recruiters it'd take 20%-30% more for me to come into the office full time, and pro-rated below that.
I'm told it's a legal requirement for companies to provide that on request here in Germany, though I've never actually tried that yet, don't know any caveats.
> There's no doubt that there's a benefit to the employee, but for corporations to adopt this there has to be a measurable benefit to the company as well.
This assumes that the company and employees must have adversarial priorities. This is only true if that’s how the company wants to be structured
Employee owned companies have no such adversarial structures
The fact that a large number, not all, of billion dollar companies are not employee owned, is not a proof that it’s the optimal way to run a company. It’s only optimal for Capital
In fact most companies are employee owned if for no other reason than they are small LLCs you don’t know the name of but are, for example, driving your FedEx packages around.
I worked a 4 day week for over a year while the pandemic was going. I'm not sure about total output, but per day, I was definitely more productive since everyone had different days off.
I got paid for 1 day LESS, so I eventually went back to 5 days. I'd rather get paid for a full day of work, while we all slack off a bit.
> but for corporations to adopt this there has to be a measurable benefit to the company as well.
> I do think there is one clear benefit as measured in the article - employee retention.
Well, sure, I think that's a given. This is also, for example, why companies pay their employees money in exchange for their labor. The measurable benefit to the company is that very few people would work for free.
Got a new job recently that’s 80% remote. I find myself fantasizing about what I might do to keep my job and excel, simply because sitting on my porch on a sunny day with my cats is an unreasonably relaxing experience. I’ve never given a damn where I worked until now.
And some people are fine with that. I know freelancers and consultants who work for multiple companies (generally remotely) and they wouldn't have it any other way.
I have to wonder about that. There has been data for years now, confirmed via Covid that work from home not only works but saves companies millions in rent/bills/equipment and that doesn’t even include things like cheaper insurance rates due to having less people on the premises. And yet companies are chomping at the bit to get people to return to the office.
There seems to be a fine balance CEOs and board members want to hit between saving money and ensuring they have their boots as firmly placed on their lessers as possible.
If you come in with low-mid trust and say "Expectations are 9-5, 5 days a week, in office" that's what you'll get.
If you come in with high-trust and say "four day workweek, flexible hours, remote" you may well get 5-6 days a week most weeks and 7 days a week in crunch times, still with high morale.
People are fearful of the latter approach because if the wrong people are hired, it can absolutely be abused. The flipside is that the former approach will seem stifling to the right people.
If the wrong people are hired, they will spend 5 days a week drinking coffee, attending meetings that generate more meetings to seem super busy, and generally slacking off.
Mission accomplished. Otherwise what's the point of increasing productivity? If we can get the work done in less time, we should be able to work less. In an ideal world, we would work as little or as much as we want and be compensated accordingly.
> They began it as a six-month experiment. But today, 54 of the companies still have the policy. Just over half have declared it permanent, according to researchers with the think tank Autonomy, who organized the trial along with the groups 4-Day Week Campaign and 4 Day Week Global.
> One important finding, researchers say, is that there is no one-size-fits-all recipe when it comes to the four-day workweek.
Didn't we already know this is the case with a five-day workweek?
Five days is such an arbitrary situation, obtained only through a LOT of effort by a LOT of people to reduce that down from a 'perfectly normal and reasonable' six-day workweek.
We're persistently lumbered by the inertia of pervasive systems we inherited, and the assumption that what we have is what we should have.
Haha, ik wanted 5 days but got only 3, it took me a long time to figure out why i wanted 5, it seemed so self evident. It was every bit as dumb as you make it out to be.
A coworker did eventually get 5 days, after 6 months he said, what have i done, My life is just work now.
I remember working 5, i made more money. It was just as easy to spend as it is now. Nothing changed.
I personally first tried 4-day workweek about 10 years ago and still love it. That was one of the best decisions I made in my life.
Especially in software industry, it's not that hard to arrange I believe. Even easier if we do it collectively. And when more and more people do it and it becomes a norm, the income will just readjust and return to the current levels.
But even today, when it's still not a norm, and I have a reduced income compared to my fulltime working peers, I still consider it a bargain. Extra free day is totally worth it. I am basically paying for some extra happiness.
For me 6 months on and 6 months off would be incredible. But of course by the time 6 months goes by, someone has learned how to do my job and maintain all the shit I built, and I'm no longer valuable. Also I lose my health insurance and probably seniority. But man would it be sweet if I could make it work.
This would be my dream setup as well. Heck I would do 7 days a week 12 hour days (with a few mental health days built in) for 6 months if it meant not having to think about work for the other 6. I'll even live on a cot at the office during the work 6!
This is something that will never happen in India because no matter how bad you want 4 day work week theres always someone who will do full 5 days a week and do additional work over the weekend.
> Why employers can't see this on the balance sheet is a different discussion.
Because it isn't on the balance sheet. The job gets done, the overtime is unpaid.
They assume that if the hours reduce, the job won't get done, they don't see each hour of less hours being productive because they've but been convinced to try the fewer hours option.
The comment you’re replying to also has many characteristics of trolling. It’s ignorant of what actually happens inEU countries, as well as the motivation behind the regulations that seem to have become a between noir for a certain libertarian flavour of HN commenters.
Yeah some of the best times of my life have been on 4-day work weeks. Added bonus, they were 10 hours days so we not only got our 40 hours a week but a chunk of that was OT!
Oh yeah I totally get it, but we were hourly rather than salary so it was the best of both worlds. We were working out of town so what's a couple extra hours a day on the site getting paid when your alternative is primarily the hotel room. For us the killer benefit was driving home Thursday night (avoiding all that extra Friday traffic) for a full extra day home with our families
I've switched to 90%, working a total of 36 hours, and spreading that to 9 hours per day. Not even much of a difference on work days, as I used to work more Monday through Thursday to have a shorter Friday. So it's basically 30 minutes more, and a day off. And only 10% less pay instead of 20%.
That article notes most people can't make enough money from 15 hours of work to save up for retirement. I also wonder if "leisure" has to be redefined, since work and life blend so much online. What does 15 hours of work really mean in a knowledge work job?
For me and I think in the past leisure did not mean mindlesly doing something like nothing, it meant time after misery is gone. I see it as working necessary time at work that you likely do not want to do, like at a factory assembly line or farm, hospital, etc. After that, you can stay at work, but do something else, like engineering at that factory or what else there is you would like to do. This mean less working hours, more people could get a job, it is something like work sharing. It would allow older people to work too, since work day will be lower, it is not like old people can't work at all, they can't work as intensivelly. In the end, those who do not work at the moment, still connsume, they just do not produce what they consume. With smaller work day, they will be able to produce. By work here I mean work and firms that produce things related to "misery gone", not all there is. So if someone would like to work himself 16 h/day, ok, but not in those firms.
If everyone worked from 12 till 100 and the midle half of the population makes 24 hours the under and over aged would have to work 12 or so. 2x6 hours, 3x4 or 4x3 maybe 6x2.
You learn much more if you start young and keeping the expertice on the floor longer would also help.
If we reserve the younglings earnings for specific purchases productivity would increase even more.
While I find a lot of his stuff is a calculated over-the-top schtick, it's also the case that a lot of people overspend on things that are largely luxuries and don't materially improve their quality of life.
I've been doing a 20-hour 3 day work week (50% of total pay) for a few years now and I love it. I'm outperforming a full-time colleague in total output.
Edited to add that the 3 day work week totals 20 hours.
I did this for a few months while I was transitioning back from parental leave and was similarly insanely productive. It just made me absolutely ruthless about prioritizing. Part of it was motivation to keep up with ft colleagues while knowing I had a hard deadline when I would be back on baby duty, so not sure how replicable it is now, but it was wild to go through a few workdays with all the day trimmed out, and then have a very full extended weekend with family every week.
But does ruthless prioritization mean you’re making other people do that work? You might feel more productive because you cut your day down to well defined tickets. But who is doing the dirty work to define the tickets, iterate with product, mentor and unblock other engineers, do on call, work on incident review actions etc etc.
This is exactly what I'd like to do now that I'm in my 60s. I'd still like to work for several more years, but not full time. How did you arrange this? It seems to not be common in tech.
It was mostly accidental: first, I took a 3 month leave of absence to explore a midlife crisis. I came back announcing I'd like to go half-time to do a masters degree which my company was okay with, and when that was over, I just never went back to full time and my company was okay with it.
I guess and hope that simply directly asking for this is another strategy (and what I plan to do if I ever lose this job); otherwise, performing the above sort of misdirection, consciously, might also help justify the exception for management and peers.
Maybe I'm getting this wrong but... you're working 3/5 of the time, you're getting 1/2 of the money and you are earning the company > 100% than full time?
I'm working 1/2 the time (7 hours Monday & Tuesday, and 6 hours Wednesday), and, yes, it even surprised me that my total productivity is about the same as when I worked 40 hours per week. It's even possible that my total productivity is actually greater than before but we don't have sufficiently precise metrics off of which to judge that.
Probably, yes, but I suspect that it's so hard to find this arrangement (20 hours per week, full benefits, and still very good pay despite it being 50% of total), that I'm just very content with the arrangement.
I didn't mean to give the impression that I was boasting or that I bring this up with him or my management, but just that there's a somewhat objective relative measurement that shows that it's possible to keep up high output for some jobs. I was surprised that my _total_ output stayed so high after transitioning from 40 to 20 hours.
No backlash or retaliation so far after more than 2 years.
I didn’t mean to insinuate you were boasting! I apologize if that was the case.
I do my required work in 20 hours most weeks. I spend the rest of the 40 hour work week resting, learning, and working on myself. I am careful not to publicize this because I am concerned at backlash from colleagues who find they have to spend more time than me.
People work at different paces and provide different value to the company for many reasons. I may be efficient and effective, but I tend to burn out faster, hence the rest time.
I have some gripes with this group and their publications:
- They don't randomize pilots, so any effect you see is likely to be confounded
- In this publication, it appears there was ~50% attrition between the initial pilot and the follow-up study — again, a huge source of potential confounding
- As another example, in another publication, they showed a plot of GDP per capita against average working hours, and insinuated from the negative relationship that less working hours somehow made workers (causally) more productive, without even hinting at the obvious alternative explanation that people work less as they get more productive because they don't have to work as much to maintain standard of living.
I like that things like this are being tried, but I wish the research conducted on it were more intellectually honest and less obviously geared towards pursuing an agenda. The level of analysis here is more like a company marketing whitepaper than anything bordering on scientific.
Don't get me wrong, personally I think companies where it's feasible should just define minimum presence where the business needs it and leave it to employees where and when to do the work within those constraints depending on preferences and their situation. I don't have an axe to grind against working less (and in my circles it seems like many people are making this decision by reducing their workload to e.g. 80%, albeit at a corresponding salary cut). But the whole thing just seems a big disingenuous.
They also count charities/non-profits as "companies" - it's unclear to me if they also include local government, but it would be helpful to see the results that for-profit organisations achieved broken out separately.
If you run a trial like this hoping to get an idea of what effect the thing you're doing has, you have two things to worry about (using the terms common at least in econ here). The first is internal validity: Does what you're doing give you a good estimate (i.e., not biased) of the effect you're trying to estimate. The second is external validity: Does your result tell you enough about what would happen if you did the thing you did, but outside your trial context.
If you do a trial of four-day workweeks, you're probably always going to have issues with the latter for any feasible setup. As you allude to, the companies that self-select into participating in such a trial are probably not a good representation of the wider economy, even if you randomize among them.
Now if you randomize rollout of four-day weeks at least among those willing to participate, and you didn't lose about 50% of participants between the start of your trial and the follow-up survey, you would at least get an unbiased estimate of what the policy did for those companies. But alas, they don't even do that part.
Nope - it's a great reason to not even start spreading more bullshit into the info-sphere.
(The same can be said for almost everything related to nutritional "science".)
If we don't have a good mechanism for knowing something is true or not, we should acknowledge that and approach the problem philosophically / aesthetically.
We need to know what we know so that we can use knowledge as our building blocks, not fake information.
You can't magic science into existence and then use it to make decisions.
That seems reasonable. Take two equivalent companies, one that has a 4-day workweek and an otherwise identical one that has a 5-day workweek.
Which one would you rather work for? Which one do you think will have a relative abundance of applicants (read: supply of labor)? Which other one do you think will have a lower supply of labor and might need to pay more to attract candidates?
It seems logical that a company offering 4-day workweek would be more attractive and, on a balance of factors, could pay less to attract the same workforce.
Flip it around. If a four-day workweek was the standard, I feel like literally everyone would agree that companies who are trying to introduce a five-day workweek would have to pay more.
if productivity is the same why should i be paid less just because # of hours is lower? which isn’t even always the case as these companies will do 9-10 hour days
It’s not a matter of philosophy (“should”) but rather of economics.
I think that the balance of supply and demand will tend to have the market-clearing comp be somewhat lower, assuming that the offered labor for four-day weeks is well in excess of the demanded labor for four-day weeks.
Great callout for unionizing. Because corporations would extract as much from workers as they could without boundaries. Labor law modifications will help as well, but that takes longer as you wait for old political and business leaders to age out (and take their work ideas with them).
Unionizing is not enough. 4/day workweek needs to be universally standardized across the OECD/world for it to stick, because whether we like it or not, countries and economies are in competition with each other. And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per week, then all the jobs and industry will move to the former as the latter will not be competitive anymore.
The 4 day workweek seems to currently work without loosing productivity in wealthy service based economies like Amsterdam, the City of London, etc where a lot of "work" is just Blue Chip companies with theatrics and endless meetings while riding the gravy train of other peoples' productivity from across the globe who don't have access to a 4 day week doing all the heavy lifting(basically economic neo-colonialism), but this obviously can't scale across economies that actually depend on actually designing and making the stuff the wealthy economies speculate on.
I agree! But workers can organize today while moving forward improvement with each election result (which will take time; for example, 1.8M voters over the age of 55 die every year, 4M young folks age into voting ability at 18 in the US). Luckily, the entire world is getting old fast [1] [2] [3], which means there is a shrinking population of total workers; makes it more difficult to have workers compete against each other race to the bottom style.
Won't less workers also mean less consumers therefore less demands for goods and sdervices?
People keep saying how the declining demographics will mean the workers have more leverage but when will that come? As currently I'm struggling to find a job and a recruiter who rejected me just told me they have huge supply of "strong candidates" and they don't need to compromise anymore on offering WFH or accepting only English speaking candidates.
Maybe by the time I retire I can see that leverage?
> Won't less workers also mean less consumers therefore less demands for goods and sdervices?
Longer convo for another thread, but TLDR yes, "structural decline." Trajectory is a function of how fast folks age out of the working population (retire or death), because cohorts coming up behind them keep shrinking.
> And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per week,
When was the last time you saw a widget factory running 8 hours a day 5 days a week? Factories already run 24/7/365. They hire enough workers for their own economics to make sense (either enough so they all work no more than 40 a week or they just pay a bunch of overtime). If a 4 day workweek became standard it would just mean hiring more people or giving more overtime, since it's not the people that need to be optimized in that equation.
But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week.
>But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week.
But then why hasn't it become the norm already and even in some cases, like in Asia, people are forced to stay in the office way more hours than 40?
If I take that research and show it to my boss saying I should work 32 hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay, he'll most likely laugh in my face and tell me to go back to work.
Clearly the vast majority of companies don't believe the same research, otherwise we'd be working 32 hours/week a long time ago.
I'm sure your manager does. They aren't the ones demanding 40 hours and return to office.
It's the C-suite that is doing it. The C-Suite got where they are because they are extroverts who excel at in person interactions. They can't use that skill unless you're there in front of them. They also came up in a world where everyone worked in an office 40 hours a week. And since they are in charge, they get to choose the rules of engagement, and are seemingly choosing to ignore productivity studies that show their decisions don't make sense.
Eventually they will be eclipsed by C-Suites that follow the science as they will get out-competed. But it will take decades.
>and are seemingly choosing to ignore productivity studies that show their decisions don't make sense.
I also don't buy this. Companies are all profit oriented and don't like leaving money on the table if research shows there is left over money on the table.
They can't monetize control but they can monetize money. If research would show they would make more profits using AWS instead of Azure(example pulled out of my ass for simplicity), they would immediately switch to it.
So if research would be universal and clear cut that working 32 hours outcompetes those companies working 40 hours, then at least a significant proportion of companies would be using this new way of work as leverage to outcompete their competitors working 40 and beat them at profits and market share, and then that would become the new norm as it's the proven winning strategy, since that's how competition in capitalism works.
"Any one of the three economic factors described above (real estate, retention and recruitment), by itself, could justify the alleged loss in productivity. When you consider all three, it is extremely hard to imagine any organization for which the losses resulting from a strict RTO policy would be offset by a possible increase in worker productivity. As a further consideration, a strict RTO policy will also disproportionally impact certain traditionally disadvantaged groups, leading to further decreases in organizational diversity.":
You said you didn’t believe C-suites were ignoring things that could make them more money. I showed you a bunch of cases where C-suites are hurting themselves by ignoring data.
Except the money they currently make, or not make, is directly related to the stock market's performance or lack thereof due to the zero interest days being over, not to that of WFH or RTO employees.
Well, I suspect that--based on what I've seen from talking to people--remote makes it easier to do no-meeting, maybe do some light cleanup Fridays. So there's some relationship probably.
Highly factualized comment. I believe the mental model in question is not yet flexible enough to update based on the data, and there is an expectation of logic from fancy emotional monkeys ("executive leadership") grounded in status, control, and work as identity.
> So if research would be universal and clear cut that working 32 hours outcompetes those companies working 40 hours, then at least a significant proportion of companies would be using this new way of work as leverage to outcompete their competitors working 40 and beat them at profits and market share, and then that would become the new norm as it's the proven winning strategy, since that's how competition in capitalism works.
Your reply seems to assume that companies are efficient. Which is not the case, and the larger the company, the lower internal s/n ratio and, arguably, the larger percent of wastage.
Also, "immediately" switching across cloud vendors is not even a pipe dream, it's an impossibility and the very act of switching is incredibly expensive both short and long term (unless your cloud usage is one VM or so). So there's no simplicity in that example, it's a counter-example.
It would be decently hard to find an argument against the 4 day workweek that would not ALSO apply to the 5 day workweek (compared to 6) - perhaps the only real one is "it's what everyone does".
But then why work 4 day/week and not 3, when 4 days/week becomes the new normal that burns people out? And then why not work 2 days instead of 3? And so on.
How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?
Shouldn't the goal be to work as little as possible? Infinite growth in a finite world just makes us all work harder than necessary, and instead of using productivity and efficiency gains to benefit people/workers, they just go to pad some company's stock price.
>Shouldn't the goal be to work as little as possible?
It's my goal indeed, but not the goal of my country, the economy and the businesses in it who provide the jobs I work for and also lobby for the labor laws my EU country has.
Of course doing no work at all while getting paid loads would be the dream, but I wasn't talking about dreams, I was talking about reality. And the reality is way different than what you dream of.
How do we make less working days a reality for everyone, instead of just ~60 companies form the UK?
Too bad the "government goal of X% employment (whatever that is)" couldn't be met by tuning the workweek up and down instead of futzing with interest percentages.
Because at a certain point it will be impossible to argue that "Knowledge workers can get as much done in X-1 days as in X days" because it's trivially untrue. The problem is that the brain is a muscle and gets really really tired solving knowledge problems all day because it is optimized to avoid doing that at as much as possible because it is energy intensive and the ancient human who solved everything perfectly rationally died of starvation while the one that relied on imperfect heuristics and belief got to eat.
Solving super hard Sudoku puzzles 40 hours a week will take a toll on your brain that solving super hard Sudoku puzzles 1 hour a week empirically cannot.
>How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?
Through the exact science you say you "don't buy" because you seem to believe companies operating in a flawed market are better at finding ground truth than literal science.
>Through the exact science you say you "don't buy" because you seem to believe companies operating in a flawed market are better at finding ground truth than literal science.
I'm saying companies believe in science that leads to profit, as the market can stay irrational longer than companies can stay solvent.
Same how science showed switching to EUV lithography is better than sticking to DUV and then all companies adopted that, if science would also show workers working 32h per week results in more profit for them than 40h, then they would all switch in a heart beat to capture all that money left on the table by their competitors still stuck in their ancient 40h workweek.
Companies (currently) compete by offering more money - if the pool of applicants dried up enough, perhaps they'd begin competing by offering more time.
The problem is if they pay you $x per year, they don't care how many hours you work, as long as the job gets done. So something that makes their life a bit more annoying (no replies on Friday) but makes your life amazingly better won't get done.
>Companies (currently) compete by offering more money - if the pool of applicants dried up enough, perhaps they'd begin competing by offering more time.
Because more money is what most candidates prioritize when job hopping, because when buying a house they can pay it with that money but can't pay it with more time off.
The only people who prioritize less hours for less money are
those who are already fortunate enough to have enough money but those can always choose to work less hours for proportionately less pay.
Like it or not, there are so many people in this rat race trying to build wealth that 40h and more money is preferable to 32h and less money. That's why the 40h sticks and the negotiation is done on money.
>Because more money is what most candidates prioritize when job hopping, because when buying a house they can pay it with that money but can't pay it with more time off.
Although you could argue that's already the case in a lot of Europe vs. parts of the US. Of course, it's an imperfect comparison because of the barriers to moving countries or even acquiring a remote job in a different country.
And money is money, it's a known quantity. Time is more ephemeral and for many "knowledge jobs" people work off the clock anyway; so having every Friday off may sound great but you may be (correctly) afraid it's going to turn into a half-day's work anyway.
And there are things you can do to turn money into time, it's possible but not as easy to go the other way around when you're salaried.
Conversion is difficult without e.g. working at at a company that lets you take a week or two or two of leave a year (or just looking the other way). You can have a side business but that's harder to turn into something that's actually financially competitive with a professional-level salary and isn't ethically questionable.
We went from "six days thou shalt labour" to the 5-day week for a number of reasons. Unions were one reason, Henry Ford was another [1][2]. His original argument was that if we give workers an extra day of leisure time, there'll be more demand for leisure products to consume - like, you know, Model T cars. Then, Ford noticed that his new 5-day workers were so much more productive per hour than before, that it more than made up the difference for the extra hours not worked.
So I'd have two criticisms of your "X-20%" figure. The first is that just because individual workers are only in 4 days a week, doesn't have to mean the factory only operates 4 days a week; indeed a lot of steel factories do some kind of shift work anyway because firing up a furnace from cold is hugely inefficient. Sure, that means more heads total and so more HR expenses than if everyone worked 5 days, but I don't think it adds up to the 20% you quoted.
Secondly, as in Ford's case, the extra productivity you get this way might be enough to more than offset the losses, and even increase your profits.
>Secondly, as in Ford's case, the extra productivity you get this way might be enough to more than offset the losses, and even increase your profits.
Henry Ford's revenue boost firstly came from his improvements to automation and innovative highly optimized production line assembly processes, not because le let his workers work 5 days a week instead of 6.
It was those innovations that allowed him to reduce the numbers of worker hours needed while get same productivity levels or higher, not vice versa as they didn't just magically come from working his workers less but from innovations to production lines efficiency. Workers working less was a consequence of that, not the cause.
> Ernst Abbe, the head of one of the greatest German factories, wrote many years ago that the shortening from nine to eight hours, that is, a cutting-down of more than 10 per cent, did not involve a reduction of the day’s product, but an increase, and that this increase did not result from any supplementary efforts by which the intensity of the work would be reinforced in an unhygienic way. This conviction of Abbe still seems to hold true after millions of experiments over the whole globe.
This was written 1913, about the time when Ford's automation was just getting going - the "many years ago" and the fact that Abbe died 1905, shows his studies were referring to a time before Ford's production lines and efficiency gains.
> That output does not rise or fall in direct proportion to the number of hours worked is a lesson that seemingly has to be relearned each generation. In 1848, the English parliament passed the ten-hours law and total output per-worker, per-day increased. In the 1890s employers experimented widely with the eight hour day and repeatedly found that total output per-worker increased. In the first decades of the 20th century, Frederick W. Taylor, the originator of “scientific management” prescribed reduced work times and attained remarkable increases in per-worker output.
This too is from a pre-Ford time.
So I would reply that while Ford's innovations might have compounded any gains from shorter working hours, such gains have been found in many other places and times. indeed, the IGDA summarises their evidence by saying "five-day weeks of eight-hour days maximize long-term output in every industry that has been studied over the past century".
>> And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another X -20% because they work only 4 days per week
The number of widgets produced and the price asked for them is not a function of workdays.
You’d need to control for quality of widget produced - and since buyers are human that may mean perceived quality rather than some absolute assessment of quality.
You’d need to control for ___location & distance to market/customer for each widget produced.
You’d need to control for efficiency of production process.
You’d need to control for… you get the point. The only possible way your idea could stand would be if all else was held equal - and that’s simply not possible outside of horse shit models.
Models can be useful, but not like this. This is a BS way to think about an economic model.
Exactly. And most companies and factories in the west have already optimized for all these factors to get maximum output on a 5 day work week. Moving to a 4 day workweek would be an automatic production loss and therefore a loss on economic competitiveness compared top those still on 5.
What you're talking about, companies who can lower working hours without loosing productivity and competitiveness are very few and far between, usually world champions who have a captive market to themselves like Nvidia, ASML, Airbus, high end service jobs, etc, but that's only a microscopic share of the total amount of players on the market. The rest are firing on all cylinders trying to overtake or catch up to those established market players, and if you ever worked at a startup, it usually means longer hours, not fewer.
>This is a BS way to think about an economic model.
What's the better way? If all companies could get the same levels of productivity form 4 days a weeks from 5 why haven't they done that already?
Complicated. It’s rare for any interesting scenario not to be complicated.
>> how do you describe it
By aiming for honesty and accuracy but with enough humility to realise these absolutes are unachievable in most interesting cases. To make it more concrete in this particular case It means being careful to state assumptions is essential.
Not necessarily - I work for a company which went down to a 4 day work week about 2 years ago and the goal is entirely to improve employee wellbeing. Salaries have not changed and will not change.
When my failing to find a job for three months is no more painful to me than an employer failing to fill a role for three months, and when applying and interviewing takes so little of my attention that I can also do several other things at the same time (as a company is not paralyzed by conducting some interviews and reviewing some applications), sure.
Except most employers just do what everyone else does - and one might say “the market forces them to” but that’s total nonsense.
Look at remote work, it was fairly uncommon in programming and very uncommon outside of programming.
Then everyone was forced to do it with Covid and now it’s much more common because it works. Everyone was free to negotiate at any time before and after Covid, but anything that was even mildly radical would be met with a hard no. Simply because nobody else does it that way.
I agree that it shouldn’t be mandated with laws, but I don’t agree that it should be left totally up to employer / employee because the power balance of negotiation still sits with the employer too much.
Unfortunately I don’t know what the solution is, we need some external force that’s not as firm as a law to push a large number of companies to 4 days, what could that be I wonder… ?
No one said there wasn't, what was stated is that it wasn't common.
Great for you to manage to find those gigs, it's not representative of the more general trend.
It was always there, for a very few select opportunities. I only got 2 remote gigs for very early stage startups without an office before COVID (and I've been in this industry for 20 years), after it's been 70% of offers from recruiters telling me "we're remote friendly".
Do you understand the difference? If you don't like unions, don't join one, you're free to do it, as others are free to associate and be part of one. If you don't like a unionised place you can always move to another job, it will always be there for you, no worries.
It wasn't hard to find for you. In the market you were looking for a job, at the time you were looking for a job, given that the vast majority of people weren't working remotely before can we agree that it wasn't common nor easy to find for a vast swath of the population?
You seem to conflate your experience with the general experience, that's an extremely harmful bias to have since it signals you are unable to see the bigger picture, nor empathise with how others have very different life experiences...
Again, great for you, it wasn't the common experience.
I simply do not understand your grudge against unions.
You're absolutely free to not join one, I have no idea where you are from so can't understand the cultural aspect of your grudge. It's just really tiring to read the same non-sequitur repeated ad nauseum, yes, you do not like unions, I got that, what else do you have to say?
Unions where I live are a central and core component of the labour market, the government does not interfere in the market, all employment contracts are established by employees and employers with the support of strong unions to provide the basics: minimum wage, working hours, additional benefits not covered by law, etc. That's a free market of labour, and the right of freedom of association working as intended.
If you care to expand the discussion further than being edgy about unions we can have a meaningful chat, right now you just sound like a parrot.
I think future generations will look back and find unfathomable that we spent the best part of 5 days a week (if not more) working. At least I hope so.
I'm starting to think most people have an instinct to work. People thought the dream was to become post-scarcity. But instead of taking steps towards that, people just keep working regardless and then find themselves with huge excesses of money and nothing better to spend it on than oversized cars etc.
Agreed. For all the talk about “AI can make you more efficient,” which it has, in my personal experience, there should be no excuse for worldwide standardization of 4 days over 5 days.
I think the biggest thing we often miss when we talk about the 4-day work week is that most employees would not mind doing condensed hours i.e. longer hours everyday but then work fewer days. It doesn't have to be straight cut to 32 hours etc
Why not point to actual flaws in the methodology then? It’s a really interesting a very hard to run piece of research. Inevitably it will be flawed because tight real world experiments in economics are hard/impossible.
I mean... there are basically no robustness checks.They only had a pre- and post-intervention comparisons with no random comparison group for a counterfactual. They asked retrospective questions. There are multiple poorly documented interventions. The analysis of the non-positive responses is extremely limited and what does exist draws conclusions that reek of confirmation bias. Their response rate for surveys appears to be crap which brings up questions of sampling bias. There is a strong appearance of cherry-picking. The descriptive statistics are extremely lacking - no confidence intervals, standard deviation, etc. - giving an appearance of p-hacking.
Just curios, why single-out HN crowd though???. In a typical 'HN crowd' comment, it is usually about a persona that think 'tech is great' or 'tech can solve all problems', not this particular characterization of 'worker vs management'.
The HN crowd tends to have unrealistic views of money and employment, probably partly because software development is an unusual job - extremely well paid for relatively little work and responsibility - and partly because the kinds of people on HN are surprisingly naïve when it comes to economics (and also people; but that's not surprising).
Some examples:
* Never-ending optimism about UBI, despite the maths clearly not working. Kind of similar to this really.
* Expecting salary to exactly match value - i.e. to get the same pay remote working no matter where you live. The number of people here that fundamentally don't understand that salary is a supply/demand negotiation is weird. And they really don't think it through to the obvious conclusion if it did happen - they'd get paid the same as people in Eastern Europe or India.
I think a 4-day work week could eventually happen, but HN types like to pretend it will make people more productive which it absolutely won't. It probably won't reduce productivity to 80%. More like 90%. But it will happen as a cultural shift; not because it increases productivity.
4 day work weeks will be required to compete as structural demographics compresses the working age population [1] [2]. For example, over 1000 school districts in the US have moved to a 4 day week to retain teachers, as they have no other choice [3]. There is evidence it works in many industries (office work, manufacturing, law enforcement, government) [4]; it might not work everywhere, but it can work where it works.
There is no reason not to ratchet down the work week as productivity has increased, and most people work to live, not live to work (as indicated by the satisfaction indicators in these 4 day week trials).
I was excited about this until I read that companies had introduced efficiencies such as “monk mondays” to get more done in less time. Couldn’t a company do this, keep a five-day work week, and see an increase in productivity?
Unpopular opinion: 4-days workweeks is used as a scam to force people in the office instead of full-remote. That's is.
Since https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ "productivity" in not a thing really interests companies, they are much more interesting in having an effective grip on their workers, with remote workers the sole grip is fair conditions and nice work environment. They do want to keep the geographical grip and various other small potatoes grip on workers. Here the popularity of shorter workweeks, of course "if you go in the office", meaning if you live nearby.
I can work 6 days a week, no issue, but if the job can be done from remote it MUST BE done from remote.
I work in contracting, so this could never work. At the end of the day, many Americans sell time. There’s no incentive for my organization to produce more in less time.
Once you get into the top tax band, the 20% cut in base pay only corresponds to an ~8% cut in take-home pay - a pretty good deal as far as I'm concerned. The problem is that employers who pay this much tend to be large US companies and therefore not well equipped to deal with requests for flexible working. Fortunately the law here means that such requests can't be dismissed out of hand, but unfortunately that doesn't mean HR is obligated to make such requests easy for managers to go along with.
They love it because while everyone works 5 days they work 4. Once everyone has 4 they will be back to square one just like everyone is now (5 days a week). Humans are like that, they compare what others have to see if they have it better. Where do you think we got the term, grass is always greener on the other side?
Newsflash: most people working 40 hour weeks aren't working the whole time and spend a lot of time surfing reddit and HN when they're not yapping about sports or their weekends with coworkers.
At a job I had a few years ago, 95% of my time was spent on reddit/HN.
There was corporate in-fighting over who would would be responsible for some work, and my team lost, so my team no longer had any work to do. My manager quit, but his manager didn't actually know what we did on a day-to-day basis so basically left us alone. He was extremely occupied with the work from another one of his teams, anyways.
It was actually kind of stressful. I was always waiting for the day that my acting manager would discover that we had no work to do and would eliminate the entire team. I ended up leaving and getting a job where I actually had important (to the company, anyways) work to do at a significantly higher salary.
I actually like working, minus the business/management BS. Current $job is very good. Would love a 5h/day expectation, though. I'd work 7pm to midnight and be more productive than 9-5.
If we get so efficient that we can meet all our needs working once every 14 days, spending the rest of our time exercising and enjoying life, why is that bad?
The point of a 4-day work week isn't to cram the 5th day into 4 days, it's completely removing the 5th day, thus working 8 hours every day for 4 days, as opposed to 10 hours for 5 days.
Question: If they removed the 5th work day and the same amount of work got done, then management can say that basically the employees were slacking off for a day a week.
And if so, what's stopping them next to increase it back to 5 and chase 5 days worth of productivity out of 5 days/week instead of the previous 4 using the same efficiency gains as performance benchmarks of the 4 days/week?
I suppose the same forces that usually prevent a move from a 5 day week up to a 6 day week: it's unpopular and counterproductive. But I wouldn't be opposed to a 4 day week being privileged in law somehow.
Many of us only work 5 days a week officially, there's many of us that deliberately and knowingly slack off one day a week. Others will just slow down a little to fill the five days. Yet others will use WFH as an opportunity to do a 4 day work week.
> there's many of us that deliberately and knowingly slack off one day a week
Many? I doubt it. Maybe many very privileged tech/big-corp workers in developed rich western countries, but globally that's not that many.
Your argument is exactly the argument companies use to justify not going 4 days a week. If workers already have it so good that they have free time to slack off one day out of 5 days per week what's to say they also won't slack off for a day at 4 days per week once that becomes the norm?
Don't get me wrong I'd be al for it, but your comment proves many already have it so much better even at 5 days/week.
You have a choice. Work at 100%, 60% of the time, or work at 60% 100% of the time. It's not slacking off, it's managing mental health and endurance. You're not at 100% all the time. You're lying to yourself if you think you are. You may be spinning the tires, but the car isn't going as fast as you think it is.
The fact they already tried 5 days a week and it apparently didn't work. Why would anything be any different when going back?
It reminds me of the way that as we improve in our ability to automate laws, we're going to need to do a better job of thinking about what laws are for rather than assuming that simply reifying the current laws exactly into computerized enforcement will do what we expect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17094010
Just because a butt is in a seat does not mean a butt is doing work. It wasn't true before, it isn't true now, and it won't be true if they try to squeeze another day out at the new efficiency levels. It may be a common delusion but there is no magic path to that level of productivity.
>The fact they already tried 5 days a week and it apparently didn't work.
How didn't it work? Probably the devie you're typing this on was made by a person working 5 days/week, or way more if we're talking early iOS /Android devices.
I am speaking in the context of your own assumption in your post, that previously people were only doing 4 days of work in a 5 day week, so there's some option of getting people to work 5 days a week at the 4-day-a-week pace. Please don't equivocate on your own terminology for the purpose of hostilely misunderstanding my reply.
If you're going to roll with "actually people have in fact been productively working 5 days a week after all" than I would advise FirmwareBurner of 6 minutes ago to take the debate up with FirmwareBurner of 1 hour ago. I don't see that I'd add any value in mediating that discussion.
I'll pile on since I find your "sudden" confusion on this comment chain to be a disgusting and shameful way to try and engage conversations with other people.
The top post tries to identify the results as reducing the hours of 5 days of work into 4, the response to that was highlighting that the goal wasn't to make up for missing hours but to try and measure the efficacy of needing that fifth day's 'worth' of hours. You then selectively choose how you interprete the topic to be either:
1) questioning why they couldn't use their results of 5 days VS 4 days to effectively say "if you're effective in 4, then why not 5?
then when questioned on how this doesn't make sense in the context of the article, feign confusion on the distinction and ignore the results of the article to flip flop to your other point:
2) questioning the articles results by asking others outside of the study to personally prove to you what the measure of "success" is since you see modern technology built with this framework (phones) as a reason why it shouldn't change
despite this being a nonsequitor that isn't a point anyone has shown interest in discussing. Then when asked why you went from being confused on why they couldn't use the results showing their effectiveness to try and enforce another "effective" day, to then denying the results and saying that it's already effective and to ask others to personally prove to you why it isn't effective (instead of reading the article).
Counterpoint: When hiring people reasonably early out of school, they often just want the additional hours. I know of a business in my area that tried the 4 day work week and they ended up having to open on Fridays for half a day because people just wanted more hours (and money). Without it, the same people were just getting second jobs.
I do think there is one clear benefit as measured in the article - employee retention. It's an extremely strong incentive to stay with the current company, and ___domain knowledge gained over decades really is a competitive advantage if your employees commonly have it.
What remains to be seen though are if the efficiency gains are good enough to justify less hours. Are employees more productive? That's the question that remains to be answered or objectively measured here. Less burnout and better mental health means higher quality work for sure, but is output as a whole better with a 4 day work week versus a 5 day work week? That's what shareholders will care about more than anything else.