Some time last year I stopped working Mondays. I’m a contractor and I know my boss well, so I just said that I didn’t want to work Mondays any more.
The difference is remarkable. You go from spending three quarters of your days at work to just over half. The weekend is actually relaxing. You can do chores, relax, and really unwind before the work week starts again.
We use Mondays to work on our side projects. You can actually focus on that stuff rather than it feeling like an after-thought.
I don’t think I get any less done. Sometimes, but not always (or even often), I’ll work longer days. Sometimes I’ll get up really early and start at 07:00, but that’s mostly because I want to.
I’m never going back. Five days a week feels barbaric now. And if the younger kids (I’m 45) want to work harder and get ahead, well, let ‘em.
I see a lot of people go for Monday or Friday when going down to 4 days a week. There's definitely some advantages to that, however as an alternative suggestion I prefer Wednesdays off.
I find even in the best jobs, there's a general level of stress that builds up at work over consecutive days. There's a great feeling being a bit stressed on Tuesday and thinking "ah it's ok I've got tomorrow off". It's like that "Friday Feeling" twice a week.
I opted for monday off when i worked 4 days a week, i tried wednesdays a few times but didn't like it as much
I preferred the large block of time off, I found that I enjoyed Friday-Sunday more knowing I had a bonus day on Monday to relax - I could really pack in stuff over the weekend without worrying about being exhausted back at work. And I found the Wednesday off just felt... wasted. Nobody else was free, nobody really wants to do things on Wednesday, and I wasn't tired enough to want a day of doing nothing.
I thought the same, but tried it for a month and it didn't work for me. Just as you get two Fridays a week (Tuesday and Friday) it also felt like I had two Mondays (Monday and Thursday). I just ended up hating Thursdays as much or more than Mondays, maybe because I was the only one doing it.
Also, sometimes I need a few days momentum to get something over the line and two days is often not enough. Anyway, just my 2p, more to the point I would totally jump at the chance to have a 4 day week permanently.
I actually think it's quite astounding that they haven't been forced to give this up, and I hope they never have to.
Specifically, when I go to my GP, the staff are always busy, don't appear to get much of a break at all. I doubt a half day on a Wednesday makes up for extra hours put into their job just to get through the week.
I mean to me it makes sense that they would be less busy if they worked a full week like everyone else. When we have a shortage of GP's and it's impacting people across the country (and having a knock on effect on hospital A&E usage) disallowing 4.5 day weeks would probably help. There are obviously much bigger issues at play (e.g. recruiting GP's) but that doesn't mean we should ignore things that could impact immediately in a smaller way.
The odd thing is that you have about as many GPs per capita as Norway yet GPs in Norway don't seem to be anything like as busy and they are also much easier to get appointments with. I do realize this is anecdotal evidence though.
When I did a three day week I worked M, Tue and W and took Thursdays and Fridays off. This gave me a long contiguous block, and meant that I was contactable on Mondays, when various start-the-week activities were scheduled.
The downside of the two day (Th and F) block when I wasn't around was that it was hard to contribute to projects that needed high levels of ad-hoc customer interaction. This actually meant I had to walk away from a couple of projects that were technically appealing, but I was at the point in my career (hence three-day week) where life-work balance was a higher priority, so this wasn't a hard decision.
Part of my decision on the timing was also influenced by discussion with women in the company who came back to a three day week after maternity leave. They pointed out the pros and cons of the various options and made it easier for me to pick the right option from the outset.
I personally find my weekends a bit exhausting because of my 5 year old, and get to relax at just doing my professional job on Monday when he is back to school. I fear that 3 day weekends every week (since we shouldn’t leave day care workers and teachers out of this) would be the end of me.
I’m sure my perspective will change after we are out of the needy kid stage, but even before my son was born, I liked working (I would spend Saturday mornings at work, obviously impossible now) and would carefully select jobs that I would like doing. In addition to, or besides, perhaps we could focus on creating and encouraging fulfilling jobs (to satisfy a wide variety of tastes) vs just cutting back days or hours worked?
It's funny how the most honest groups of people with respect to the purpose of schooling is parents with young kids. Basically what you want is daycare and it just so happens that school fulfills that on Monday. Not judging, I think that's a very common perspective, but amused.
Parent (boys aged 6 and 9) here. At first I figured that school at that age (kindergarten) was basic skills, not very critical, and as you say mainly a way of getting kids out of the way.
With some experience now, I think that school provided more than I thought:
* socialisation
* authority outside of bfamily
* development of personality
* habit-forming for later school
.. aside from the fact that even if you're a good parent and have already exposed your kids to letters and numbers, you will likely not have ensure a complete coverage.
Example of importantance of school choice: my first son went to a regular public kindergarten and lost some of the autonomy he had built-up with us. Going to the bathroom was done together with an aide at school, so why not at home?
My youngest ended going to a Montessori kindergarten by accident. They focus a lot on autonomy and as a result he is very much 'his own boy', even at the age of 6.
And beyond kindergarten, even just in primary, the 'skills' part of school is difficult to do 'in-house' unless you spend a lot of time on it. There's a reason we applied Taylorism to education.
I think wanting daycare is totally reasonable though. I just think it'd be nicer if it didn't have to be school. Traditionally, multigenerational households would have helped with child rearing but now it's often pretty much entirely on the shoulders of the parents which I know would be extremely draining.
> Traditionally, multigenerational households would have helped with child rearing but now it's often pretty much entirely on the shoulders of the parents
It goes much further. In 90% of human societies up to 60 years ago, it was normal for children to spend a lot of time interacting with neighbors and others outside of the home and schools environments.
Furthermore, the extreme forms of helicopter parenting where children are not even allowed to walk to school by themselves is very US-centric and very modern.
I agree. As a parent, I both want my kids to learn, and I want care for them so I can work. I think if we were more honest about both these needs, we could do better at both. I have seen a certain mania that schools are only for education, and it leads to crazy things like expecting five year olds to spend 45 minutes per day writing, or otherwise asking kids to sit and learn for a lot more of the day than they can really tolerate - as opposed to more outside time, more play time, more movement. It's ok to be a school and a daycare!
Semi-related, I know I'm responsible for deciding to have kids, but the ongoing functioning of society relies on a continuous supply of people to keep it running. I sure hope some people are still working after I retire! It would be nice if the U.S. could support parents more than we currently do.
That’s also why the “remote learning” during Covid was such an infuriating joke: the main purpose of schooling (which is daycare) was destroyed, and the learning was marginal at best. This is all while the elementary school children were at no risk from the disease, and while plenty of other “essential workers” were busy working their jobs in person. What a joke.
Of course it's not even close to the death rate in adults, especially older ones, thankfully, but it isn't "no risk".
Second, the main reason for school closures was that the kids, even if there's very little risk for them, can transmit the disease to family and friends.
Nonetheless, some countries, like France, made the choice to keep the schools open to maintain some level of schooling for most kids. It wasn't without issues and massive criticism from teachers ( who were risking their lives to keep other people's kids occupied), parents ( because classes were closed when a kid got Covid to prevent further transmission, so you could suddenly have to deal with your kid), etc.
That link is a very complicated one that could mislead people due to the first numbers they see. The number of direct deaths of under 10s in developed countries who did not suffer from a serious congenital condition is essentially 0 (e.g. in the UK about 1 in 20k deaths were of a child under 10 and as far as I know they all had serious health conditions).
There's been an outbreak of hepatitis recently which has resulted in a number of deaths and is very probably Covid-related.
There's also a significant risk of Long Covid, although the details are still being debated.
Covid attacks the immune system and also hugely increases the risk of complications from micro-clotting. It's certainly not a disease to be casual about, in either kids or adults.
People who don’t want to get exposed can just continue to stay at home. Sure, they might not like it, but my children don’t like the house arrest either. The difference is that I’m not forcing anything on you, it is you who are forcing things on me.
I've got a toddler and already work 4 days week (Friday off). Daycare is 5 days a week, so it's great to have Fridays free to work on my side projects, read, go on small hikes - and when my wife is free - we take long lunches together etc.
As long as daycare / schooling remains 5 days a week, I think 4 days a week of work for parents is a fantastic idea.
But if we are working four days a week, why not daycare providers? They have jobs that are difficult as well, they would enjoy that extra day off. I just don’t see them staying open and working 5 days a week if everyone else are just working 4. Maybe with extra staff? But staffing is already impossible in that sector.
There's a short story "Chronopolis" by J.G. Ballard, about a future where society was separated by watches with different colors, and each color had a different time slot for things like commute, lunches, and when they could go to the bank...
If you really just want escape from life, then maybe more personal time is bad & lots of work time is good.
But I'd hope that for many parents, having a day with neither work nor childcare might be an opportunity, might be appreciated, might be a time, finally, where you can rediscover & do some you.
I love spending time with my kid, but it really is hard work. Taking care of my kid is my real job, the one I work for money is much easier to do. Weekends are exhausting, not really about rest, the week is much more relaxed. Many parents would say similar, is that surprising?
Daycare is great for the kid. The teachers can provide much more attention and direction on things that I simply can’t, and he really gets a leg up on social skills being with other kids, not just mom and dad. Spending long stretches at home with just mom and dad (and given COVID, without many play dates), he tends to become a bit wild…three day weekends or week offs aren’t just harder in a linear manner.
That all makes sense. Thanks for sharing. I guess I'm still interested in considering- how could your life be better if you did have some you time too? A lot of parents really lack any kind of time, it's always work or family, and it seems unreasonable in extreme to me; I really want to see a world where parents have some self time too.
I feel even worse for layering on more here, but I think, ultimately, one of the best things a parent can give their child is a sense of personhood. It's one of the slowest, least clear lessons, and the impact seems slow to naught, but having hobbies, doing things, having your own interests as a parent is setting a model of being interested in the world: of engaging yourself & demonstrating control & direction & volition. Parents- in living- to demonstrate what a self is.
That idea- of a world where we can visibly see others who are motivated, have intrinsic motivations desires and pursuits- beyond subsistence & survival- I think that's a keystone factor in the world, in what has made humanity enduring & interesting & capable. I worry after it, significantly. And I want, very much, for parents to have time & permission, for their self to continue to mature & engage, and to not just have to always be engaged, always be tending or working.
I have plenty of time & I spend a lot of it somewhat-inertly, so I can't expect too much from 1 day a week where there might be no work & not constant family. But I do have lots of pursuits, and they do help me shape myself, help me grow & see myself over time. I want very much everyone to have some option, some time to explore on this earth, engaging, not just being engaged.
<puts hockey coach hat on> Semi-off-topic, but did you try taking your kid to play ice hockey? It is one of the best sports for kids that have a lot of energy and need to shake it off. And they have so much padding it is really safe. Where I live we have lots of 5-6 year olds (and a few 3-4 year olds) who really enjoy it. Usually clubs have old kids equipment that you can borrow for the first couple of months while you try it out.
He takes soccer classes, will do basketball also in the fall. We are trying to pack his schedule with fun things to do as those things reopen. Going through the 3-5 stage during COVID wasn’t fun.
Sounds good :) Yeah, the lockdown periods were really hard on all the kids. It seems even the most die-hard "I hate school and it sucks forever" kids were openly admitting they missed going after a couple of weeks of online home school and being mainly confined indoors.
Plenty of people, me included, (males and/or high performance in particular) care more about things than people and will find extremely tiring to talk to people or take care or their kids. Coding doesn't tire me, dealing with kids does.
There are people who have the opposite experience and people who feel ok with both.
This idea that parents should uniquely and equally be caretaker for their kids is absolutely against biological reality for a lot of people; I'm happy to be around my kids for a limited amount of time (and the less they're toddlers the more I can spend with them without going insane) but my main contribution is providing them food, shelter and protection.
My mandated paternity leaves, while being economically advantageous, were an absolute nightmare.
This is besides the point you're making, but I personally feel that being a parent is mostly a ghost job. You need to figure out how to put the children in positions where they'll find things to play with themselves, and then let them do it.
For me, I just bring a package of crackers, some water, then go out in the streets with my kids, visiting nearby playgrounds or lots with trees. They'll then start playing, perhaps needing a little help getting started, and my involvement is mostly coming up with a plan for where to go next, and watching out for signs of exhaustion. So most of the time, I'm actually not active.
I also enjoy having limited help with say cooking or cleaning, but yeah, that's exhausting, because you need to multitask and both do the job and monitor their state and the job they are doing.
If you're doing it right, it's pretty boring. Kids need to play and you're just kind of hanging around the playground. Good opportunity for reading, or sometimes I listen to a podcast with one ear and keep the other one free for kids.
Mandated paternity leaves is to provide an equal part contributions towards children for both the mother and the father. Otherwise the mother take most of the hit ( as evidence in countries without it ).
It's also to create gender equality in the work place. If there's only maternity leave then hiring a woman of childbearing age has a higher risk for an employer than hiring a man. This leads to discrimination in the workplace with women having lower salaries, less access to interesting projects etc.. because the thinking goes that she is likely to become pregnant and have maternity leave.
In countries where men have mandatory paternity leaves that are significant this imbalance is greatly reduced.
To me it seems he doesn't like spending time with toddlers. It's a big jump from here to conclude that he doesn't want to be a parent. Toddlerhood is just a temporary state.
He literally said he cares more about things than people and his parental leave was a nightmare. To me it seems he just hates toddlers more than other people.
But even if what you say is true I'd still say he doesn't want to be a parent. You don't pick and choose with parenthood.
Many new parents always go through some depression when their first kid is just born, the life changes are drastic and sacrifices have to be made. My wife got hit with more of this than me, so I took a couple of years off of work to take care of our (then) baby so she could go back to work earlier (she just moved to the USA and was unemployed, and I just got laid off from YCR, so we got to make a choice). Always got to look out for the mental health of your partner, and judging isn’t very useful.
A few individuals at my work when COVID hit it's first of many peaks/waves of March 2020, were forced to stop coming to the office.
They shutdown the office March 14, yet these people were still coming in March 31.
The reasons varried.
Children, family, environment, , lack of wfh infrastructure, personal challenges (one employee hit hard times and didn't have internet at home or mobile device, company hooked him up with mobile hot spot and mobile), and many more.
With my own personal home life challenges, working from home 3+ years now, I have sat in my home office "working" while I catchup on binge watching on days I am actually off (I work with clients in North America, i might work a stat holiday of one country, I might not, varies per holiday if they are on diff days -- I take of both Canada and USA thanksgivings).
I have a friend at work who sounds alot like your post.
The only exception is he doesn't have a family/responsibilities really.
Work is his hobby/life, shows up on his days off just to chit chat with friends at work(he does have friends outside of work).
We joke he would sleep there if he could.
You need a hobby, something productive to do outside of work :) something I am struggling a little myself with
Day care centres near me already have their staff on shifts, or at least some people working part time and starting later than others, so that they can cover the extra couple of hours that parents doing a 9-5 would need to be able to do those hours + the journey from day care to their work and back. If they gave their staff less hours each, that would simply mean they'd need to employ more staff to give the same service.
Daycare centers where I live are already stretched thin with staffing. It is already becoming less accessible because they simply can’t hire enough workers, anyone who wants to work full time can easily do that. Minimum per kid staffing rules mean that the staffing problem can’t be solved by increasing productivity.
The only way they could employ more staff is by drastically increasing pay, but then daycare becomes even less accessible than it already is. It’s a huge mess that is probably unrelated to this proposal, but an excuse to go to 4 day a week schedules (because parents can fill in for 3) would probably be taken quickly.
You said it. Sometimes I can’t wait for Monday to roll around. Sometimes I daydream of just checking into a random hotel or airbnb and hide for half a day.
I wonder what the perspective of other people who run businesses or manage teams are on this subject? I have managed teams at top tech companies in bay area in the past (although switched back to an engineering position recently). Regardless of the company, I have always wondered why everyone around me is working so slowly. Things that a good engineer should be able to do in a day gets done in a month or more. When working as an engineer people always commented that I'm very efficient. But honestly I think the reason is a lot of people just barely put 10 hours a week in the current 5 days a week routine. Lots of times I feel like you could just let 60-70% of people go at companies I've worked at and literally nothing changes. My experience has been that a handful of high output individuals at each company are responsible for 90% of things that gets done. So I wonder what happens if we reduce this even more? Probably nothing, because high output individuals usually have intrinsic motivations and will continue putting more hours than is required.
This is the reason I don't hire anyone for my business but partner with other developers I trust and promise part of the revenue.
Without promises of passive revenue (30-50% equity), almost no engineer worth their salt would be productive.
I could hire contractors for a project and get shitty code but at that point I'd rather just do it myself.
I've tried hiring multiple times in my startups and little equity is essentially wasted on people, same as market rate salaries.
That's why nothing gets done in mid - big companies. People are not tied to the success of the company and layers of middle management provide a way to hide.
I often think a particular problem is a day's task. Then a week later I'm still working on it. For sure, it might be me being lazy, but I suspect I've also underestimated the complexity of the task. Other factors play in as well, like if I'm tired my ability to solve tricky problems goes waay down.
Perhaps I should always be not tired, but sometimes life has a habit of getting in the way.
> Regardless of the company, I have always wondered why everyone around me is working so slowly.
The barrier is never the code, always the communication. Depending on the feature, you will have to work across a few teams, delegate, coordinate, etc. Writing the code is the easy part, the hard part is getting everyone on the same page.
> high output individuals usually have intrinsic motivations
I agree a lot that intrinsic motivation is key, changes everything, and I think this is a widescale struggle. But while the motivation is intrinsic, the survival rate of intrinsic motivation is deeply governed by the organization. Many many decent-size and/or moderately-mature organizations create resistance, ongoingly tax motivation, sap our will & sense that we can influence things, can change things, can take control.
Preserving your team's sense of agency is paramount, but almost always fucked over. The rest of the org (that isn't doing the actual labor) constantly worries, constantly wants to make sure things are going ok, frets & wants to do things when the waterfall product-roadmap isn't going as they hoped or expected. If things are happening off the roadmap, outside of the top-down plan, well, you betcha there's gonna be a lot of meetings & discussions. The company's extrinsic desires are what matters: you, the human resource, are there to crank out the expected work at a predictable rate. Got it? Good. Now stay intrinsically motivated & go tackle the work we've given you!
Very few organizations give their employees real license to do good things, to tackle the work well & encompass broad wins. Doing obviously good & great things might impact the roadmap! Oh no!
In short, there's too many "decision makers," too much management deciding, and too many people checking in & trying to help make sure everyone is spending their times wisely, that "there's not something we can do to speed this up". There's a lot of would-be highly productive people in most orgs, except the org itself is medium/low-performance, eats away & erodes at the sense of autonomy & mastery & purpose (not a huge Daniel Pink fan but this continues to be a good set of dimensions) that are integral to maintaining high output.
Often in many orgs, there's an informal social agreement that some vaunted select people can just do whatever & we'll trust them, but everyone else gets the regular employee treatment. You have to slay the backlog for a couple quarters, non-stop, do only product work, and then you're off the hook.
External factors confound confound confound the intrinsic motivation that we need desperately to keep fueled & stoked. There's so few people who can sympathize or go with us as we do good things, as we set ourselves & the product up for future success, beyond just getting the mundane features cranked out. There's constant skepticism about the 10x hacker, who gets great accolades & is celebrated in the org, but leaves behind them a wake of messy & terrible systems: this too speaks to the visible versus invisible pieces of our job, about what the extrinsic motivators look like and what intrinsically drives a hacker.
Software is massive, & tending to this realm & keeping it technically healthy is largely invisible labor that the organization often lacks competence to see or assess. We're rated superficially, based off the tip of the iceberg that is visible, and come to feel we're living in our own shadows of greatness, unseen, hidden. Yes, the Hacker can continue to find good tasks, good work, to define their own success & enjoy chomping through tasks with abandon. But I see, so often, the distance & dissonance grows, and doing good deeds rarely seems to get easier over time in most orgs. I think there is huge potential in many many people to be high performing, to engage avidly & actively, but the organization & it's quest for certainty, it's drive for reliable consistent output- it's desire to understand while clearly never understanding- quell the ability to work well, to create high-performance.
> Very few organizations give their employees real license to do good things, to tackle the work well & encompass broad wins.
I sympathise with your argument but the problem is that the Dunning–Kruger effect exists for both the employee and the manager.
I've seen 20-something, know-nothing developers relentlessly question every business decision during planning when they clearly have no idea about the larger scope of the business.
The reality is that the average person is average and every organisation is setup to succeed _despite_ the lowest common denominator.
I think part of the reciprocal aspect, that businesses are also terrible at, is feedback. Most technical work is unremarked upon. There's code review, but how often do your teams retrospect their own work? How often do they retrospect some system or another teams work? Businesses use their same superficial tip-of-the-iceberg views, more often than not, to assess employees. 10x hacker wins again!
Let's take your scenario:
> I've seen 20-something, know-nothing developers relentlessly question every business decision during planning when they clearly have no idea about the larger scope of the business.
I'd like to see some stake in here. If this persons on our payroll, give them, I dunno, 3-sprints of their own work/2-times-per-year to go try to make shit they talk up real. Maybe insist they spend a sprint or two working with at least one other person on it, to make it a little more real & not independent fuck off time. Have some sort of coder council at the end that can discuss highlights & negatives of the approach. Make sure not-passing is a known & not-irregular result. But let them go at it, find out!
It's weird to me how consensus is nearly the only operating paradigm for organizations. The overwhelming & singular pattern is always the same: somehow a path is picked, and everyone must hem to it. The actual cost of doing duplicate work seems low to me, given how often I think we leave massive potential gains behind. I recall a mention of 1-10-100[1] today, which is nominally about the cost of bad data: 1x if prevented, 10x if corrected, 100x if failure happens. Computer systems/code seem like a hyper-complected version of this. Finding good systems, good patterns, good ways to do things, that make things easy & simple will keep paying off, will be endlessly rewarding. It's so so hard to project, and we often pick "safe" in terms of what we know, but we rarely get to explore the opportunity cost of other paths. And we damage our employee's belief in the company by consistently rejecting bold ideas.
Right now it sounds insane to develop something twice, to let two groups do a thing, and then figure out latter where to head- someone's going to get hurt probably- but I think, if we want to tame the 20-something bucks, some real world challenges like this would be very compelling intrinsic motivators. Would show us very quickly a lot of different kinds of legitimacy: the legitimacy of the organization's concerns, which are unmet by the small-scoped young mind, and the legitimacy of the young mind, which may have some great out of the box stellar wins. Right now we don't try to let people try- we reject people's sense of purpose, we deny them autonomy, we refuse to acknowledge their mastery, for a litany of well-intended & perhaps-functional concerns, but they never construct the understanding & knowledge that would clarify why they are snubbed. If they could live the experience[2] instead, it might alter their intrinsic motivations in the future, might align them differently. Instead, we use hierarchy & roadmaps to coral & drive our talent forward.
It sounds daft & wild, the processes we'd need seem like they'd mostly just be spitballed together at this stage, but breaking the mold: rejecting the concensus practice of consensus based knowledge-working, allowing different people to try different things, having stronger review & higher candor & willingness/ability to try things & reject some, say no: I think there's huge wins for amplifying the highly-important intrinsic motivation, and I think it would unlock a lot of higher-performance work. Leaving mono-culture & allowing diversity into the organization sounds is an idea that sounds both radical to me, and flabbergastingly right-in-front-of-us.
Things that a good engineer should be able to do in a day gets done in a month or more.
I think the fact that you put "a good engineer" in your post undermines the point you're making.
People taking too long to complete simple tasks is a problem, but only where those tasks don't really require any significant ability to complete. Something simple and low risk should be completed quickly by anyone, even a terrible engineer.
Good engineers don't go quickly though. Where something is complex or high risk they should take their time and go slowly. Spending more than a day just considering the task in full is fine. Honestly, for the majority of tasks beyond anything trivial, I'd be very wary of any dev who claimed to be able to go quickly.
The point is that things that there isn't anything that requires a good engineer that also can be done in a day. Either a job is something that can be done in a trivial amount of time because it's simple, or it's something that's hard enough to take some skill. It's never both. There are no jobs that can be done faster by being a better engineer.
Good engineers do better work, not faster work. Often they're actually slower because they consider the edge cases and they don't cut corners.
Besides the benefits or drawbacks of the 4-day workweek on its merits, it's worth remembering that behind the headlines such as "$COUNTRY tests $SOCIAL_CHANGE", it's usually some entity in $COUNTRY on a mission rather than an organization that's representative of the opinions of its population. Same thing has been happening with Scandinavian countries too – there's always a rotating cast of Sweden, Finland and Norway making such headlines. Usually, though, it's a smaller organization or a government agency that wouldn't have the power or influence to turn this pilot into transformative social change.
Minor nitpick - Finland is not a part of Scandinavia, which is a cultural/historical/linguistic concept, and is generally understood to mean Denmark, Sweden, Norway. If you want to include Finland, which is quite different linguistically historically, and to a lesser extent culturally , the correct term is Nordics.
As for the main point in your comment, yes and no. In Finland for instance, the UBI pilot was an official government pilot, thus it could be turned into official policy.
I've worked for a number of tech companies in the US and many of them could easily move to a 4 day workweek. Reason I say that is at every place, there was a culture of slacking off on a Friday.
Not in an overt way but you could tell, meetings wouldn't be scheduled after 10AM on Friday, any meeting would be short and sweet. Any longer meetings would be pushed off to Monday. Slack is usually pretty quiet, and the green dots turn grey starting around 1PM.
The bosses could do something about it, but they don't because they also don't want meetings and are just looking forward to the weekend themselves. The only time you would even hear from bosses is a reminder to submit your timesheet before leaving for the weekend.
This has been my experience as well, but during busier periods people do actually work full days on Fridays. It might only add up to a few weeks per year.
This is much better than the alternative, though (working on weekends a few weeks a year).
Also a lot of jobs have enough flex hours and vacation that it's close enough to 4 days/week anyway.
The downside of shorter workweeks is it may cause a loss of productivity at the endpoints of the week. For example, there is often a marked slowdown on the Thursdays and Mondays before and after 3-day weekends. So you are not just losing an extra day but more like 1.5 days due to slowdowns and loss of productivity.
Not that I disagree with what your saying, for me however there is a difference between feeling like your "skiving" and having real time off.
I may duck out a bit sooner than 5pm on a Friday afternoon, but its not the same as taking Friday and going for a walk somewhere with no reception sort of thing.
Friday afternoon and Monday morning are already pretty ineffective - the length of the weekend might not impact the existence of those bookend periods.
I suspect it gets worse around public holidays because that's a break from routine.
Break from routine, plus presumably a tendency on long weekends for people do things that impact their energy for days after, like travel or excessive drinking.
If every weekend was a three day weekend I don't imagine you'd see so much of this.
In knowledge based industries, what could as important as getting time off is to see if your colleagues have time off at the same time.
If a colleague is working there is always this message that needs to be addressed that can't wait, and even otherwise, you come back from the weekend with an overflowing inbox
I usually work 7 days a week, but very casually. Basically work takes a back seat to most other things (hanging out with my kids, gym, etc.). I get to hang out with my kids a solid amount every single day (not just weekends), which I love. It's totally worth giving up large blocks of non-work (weekends) for me.
It all just depends on what works for you, your employer / client(s), and even then it varies over time. Some time soon my kids may not want to hang out with me as much, and I'll tweak my schedule.
It feels sort of like being retired, but I'm still putting in close to a full work week of hours (and those are productive hours generally).
One thing I would do with a 4 day work week is make more food.
As a country we eat out too damn much. Every time I make falafels or pita bread (from scratch - as in soaking garbanzo beans) it's like the best tasting food ever. Just no time.
Careers are about opportunity. Come into the office less, and you’ll come across fewer opportunities. As someone said, “eighty percent of success is just showing up.”
I'd argue the tech industry provides enough good opportunities that its worth going for better quality of life from WFH and 4 day weeks without worrying what one loses by not being in the office every day. The more people that do WFH or 4 days, the less anyone is hurt if not physically there every day, so this opportunity cost diminishes. So we should encourage our coworkers to do the same :). Also consider that you might perform more impressively in your work if you've had lower stress from WFH/4 days, and that could get noticed too by your boss.
It's a joke how such a simple thing as reducing the maximum allowed working hours involves so much politics. There's nothing magical about 5-day/40-hour weeks. If it was reduced to 4-day/32-hour weeks, the employers can still manage their employees to work 5 days in overlapping shifts.
I think it's as simple as holding a referendum and seeing what do people want.
It was recently reported that Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, wanted to rein in wage growth. Encouraging part-time work is surely the best way to achieve that. Many people will be happy to accept shorter hours in place of a raise, which will have the desired effect of slowing down inflation without harming the workers.
I believe the model is "100% pay for 80% of the hours and 100% of the output". This is usually accompanied by hand waving talk of "improving productivity" but I don't see how it will work realistically. If you were already spending 20% of your working hours scrolling Facebook (or HN) then you will do so on a four day week too (perhaps after an initial honeymoon period).
The alternative approach where employees just spread their 40h of work over 4 days instead of 5 is interesting too, but in a different way. Is the loss of productivity caused by being tired by hour 10 each day offset by having 3 full days to rest? Or even, perhaps those long stretches with nothing to think about but work are MORE productive? A 10h day could be tough on home life (kids/spouse/evening leisure), but if WFH that could just be offset against hours now not spent commuting. Everyone's situation is different. Will be fascinating to see the outcomes of this study. For starters, "define productivity" for a software business!
Not sure about Britain. But In Canada you can buy a bag of air mislabeled as a bag of chips for $6. Sized have decreased, while food prices have gone up.
I would take hybrid-time over a shorter work week ...
I'm honestly unsure why we're not keeping things flexible as each worker is different, their role and preferences are different, etc.
I'll take a 4 day week and I could make it work - but why give up the flexibility we've learned over the last couple of years?
I don't get it ... people talk a good game when it comes to Capitalism and capital allocation, but when it comes down it, pfft ... why not leave the capital allocation of time and location to the employee (with obvious guard rails and results expectation from the manager/boss).
This feels like it all boils down to one thing ... very few people know what actual management is.
Nice for employees but most succesful Hackers/entrepreneurs I know work 6-7 days a week. Availability is often key rather than actual total hours worked.
I work 4 day weeks with Wednesday's off, but I'm flexible. If I need to do something on a Wednesday I'll have a different day off instead, if it all hits the fan at 9pm on saturday night, I'll fix it (or one of my colleagues will), If I need to do a 70 hour week then I will (with the appropriate time-and-a-half for the extra 30 hours worked)
Unless I have a big a chunk of equity I'm working for a paycheck, not the company. I know the sacrifices entrepreneurs make: no thank you. Unless you want communism where everyone has equity.
I worked a 4 day work week at one point. My counterargument to this is that most people aren't productive as they think they are. I feel like most people only actually work half the time they say they do.
When I was working 4 days I got more done. This isn't speculation. My hours were tracked and my billable hours went up. My deadlines remained the same but I had less "fuck around" time.
I agree, I also think the original point doesn't take into account burnout and employee retention. Even if the premise that people were doing 80% of the work were true, how does that stack up against how long they're willing to do the job for/how much it costs to replace them. I've seen companies refuse raises, only to go on to spend multiple times what the raise would have cost recruiting and training a new employee
Yes, and I was sarcastically replying to you in earnest ;-)
But I think you're making a slippery-slope argument. We're not actually talking about increasing the workweek, but whether to shorten it. In fact, there is simply no denying that there is a non-zero correlation between productivity and # hours worked, so finding the right balance is key.
If your output scales linearly with your input, and you're working less than your competitor, you will fall behind.
If the gradient of your input-to-output curve becomes negative and stays negative, and you're working less than your competitor, then your competitor will fall behind if they're working sufficiently far past the point of negative returns.
I'm pretty sure the gradient of all input-to-output curves becomes negative at some point, and don't see any reason why that point should be exactly 40 hours a week. It could be more and it could be less, and probably depends on a whole bunch of other factors, but exactly 40 hours spread evenly across 5 days seems oddly specific.
> I'm pretty sure the gradient of all input-to-output curves becomes negative at some point, and don't see any reason why that point should be exactly 40 hours a week
Tbf, it's the 4 day workweek advocates explicitly making the claim that everyone's output curves become negative on the fifth day such that 32hr output ~= 40 hrs output.
Legal restrictions on working hours weren't put in place with the assumption that firms no longer being able to demand 80 hours from their employees couldn't possibly lose any output as a result. That was done because governments decided 80 hour weeks were unreasonable.
Anybody advocating a specific n-day workweek, whether n is 4, 5, 6, or anything else, is probably going to claim their system has advantages related to productivity.
The argument can be more complicated than just "the company will be more productive." Examples are "society will be overall more productive" (because the free time will be used productively), or "people should be allowed to work more hours if they want" (because even if people are on average less productive working past 40 hours a week, some might be able to cope).
I think it's wrong to claim anyone advocating a 4-day workweek must necessarily believe a company will have higher productivity.
> I think it's wrong to claim anyone advocating a 4-day workweek must necessarily believe a company will have higher productivity.
The experiment being discussed here literally sets workers the target of achieving the same output as they previously managed in 5 days.
Sure, some people prefer 4 day weeks and happily take a pay cut in return and some people want government intervention to give them a better deal, but - unlike the 5 day week - there is an explicit productivity claim by many 4 day week advocates being assessed here
"Many" is fine. The earlier comment implied every single one believed every single job would be more more productive at 32 hours than 40, which seems like a misrepresentation.
The beauty is that I want this experiment to run and see how it performs. The pessimism I have (based on last 10-15 years of decline and anti-capitalist motifs today) is that we're going to shy away from looking at the performance of this project anyways and prevent anyone from talking about it. 4-day workweeks will become the de-facto standard. By force. My prediction is that we will see shaming of companies that even try to go against the grain and institute 5-day work weeks.
We're living in a hyper-emotional empathy-based irrational society that prevents people from even asking probing questions; prevents us from seeking truth by using tools of reason and logic. If you want a proof of this, just read old HN threads. People were so damn amazing at the time, everyone had a basic tenet of rationale. Not everything is falling, but the trend is worrying.
I'd like to see 6-day work weeks as an experiment. I am not convinced that 20% less time is 20% less productivity. Far more important is whether people are motivated and happy.
> I'd like to see 6-day work weeks as an experiment.
IMO this needs without a lot of additional context.
Being from the GDR (East Germany), before studying and then working in IT I got to experience a variety of production jobs. From brewery, sausage factory, chocolate factory, to various metal working and consumer equipment making jobs, both as part of regular education (yes, school kids went into production as part of the curriculum - and it was FUN and not "evil child work", and we only got as much as was reasonable at that early age and good training too), but later (after receiving a "Facharbeiter" - skilled worker title after three years of vocational training, combined with high-school, "Abitur", for me "mechatronics" in a large chemical fiber factory) also building factory electronics for VW as part-time job to finance my university life.
Most of those jobs would produce more output with longer times. A conveyor belt job such as in the brewery, the chocolate factory, or any of the other production jobs would mean less products with just four days of work.
HOWEVER, the big difference is what I did later. The IT stuff, the office and computer work, had quickly diminishing returns. When I worked at a large well-known and successful US software company I saw most people browsing the web, playing office golf, or just not being there, and the company HQ parking lot never filled up before 9 am and emptied again by 4 pm - that was late 1990s, with not that many working from home. Similar in almost all other IT related activities I participated in, which were a lot, in both Germany and in the US, in many companies (since my job almost always was at other companies then the one I was employed by, and I later worked as freelancer too).
Production work is manual and often not all that stressful. I could turn off my brain or at the very least not think too much while doing it. Sure, when using a lathe you have to pay some attention, but it's not nearly as stressful as planning and designing software, what I do now. I could easily do the lath job all day, I can't do the software design for more than ca. four hours without the resulting code quality getting significantly worse.
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When the discussion does not mention the context to me it's a sign that it's going off the rails and that people are talking past one another.
Some jobs are okay and useful to do 5 days a week, but others are not. The generalization of talking about ALL work at once makes for a very bad quality of the discussion IMHO.
I also wanted to add that those two things are separate for the purpose of this discussion:
- How people feel (after shorter or longer work periods)
- How productive people are.
From my experience, while doing a more mundane "conveyor belt" type of job I sure would like to have shorter work days too, I'm still able to churn out pretty much consistent quality to the end. That is different from (very design oriented, vs. standard not-much-brain-needed) code writing, where quality of what I produce suffers dramatically and I have to redo everything the next day(s) or get a lot of hard to maintain and/or debug code.
Of course, people may burn out more quickly or have negative health outcomes later, but that still is a different discussion than the one about productivity.
Not to mention, you can't map out "work" as one monolithic activity. Machine learning to delivering pizza.
I also don't think you should conflate society as a whole with an empathy-based irrational class of highly compensated knowledge workers.
If you take pizza delivery for example this is really just an argument about the number of hours per week for mandatory overtime as practically all non-knowledge work is best measured in hours of labor.
Lowering this to 32 hours for pizza delivery is rewarding economies of scale that can better absorb higher labor cost. Rewarding Pizza Hut at the expense of the locally owned pizza place that goes out of business.
Pretty much in line with economist Joseph Schumpeter 100 year old prediction about the end of capitalism in that that our capitalist system will be so successful that it will create a class of people with so much leisure time that this class has nothing much to do other than to try to improve the system and in turn destroys it.
In this age of rampant globalism, one really has to wonder who advocates for such things; remember that "competitor" doesn't just mean another company in the same country.
- The impact is dampened because most hard roles aren't going to work 80% time. Sales, customer support, executives, and the important engineers will just work 5 days a week anyway, so you end up with like 4% less actual work being done, so it takes a while for this impact to be clear.
- There are other strategic differences which can easily swing a company +/- 10%, so looking at just two examples might not give clear guidance on the overall effect.
- You would be shocked how many mental gymnastics one can do. Never underestimate how far they can go.
That is thinking that all workdays are days working. I tend to believe that, given less workdays, you can benefit from increased focus during work and in the longer run.
Dell's also doing it. I really liked the one exec's comments, that opening up opportunities to people who are no longer interested in working until "they drop" or have other obligations means they get better technical skills from candidates.
I love a three-day weekend as much as the next guy, but I don't understand how people are pushing for shorter workweeks, and even for universal basic income, meanwhile all the Starbucks near me close at 7pm because they're short-staffed. And restaurants and grocery stores and everywhere you look, there's still a labor shortage.
There's not a labor shortage there's a wage shortage, because wages are not and have not been keeping up with inflation for most jobs since at least 2008 if not earlier
It's a bit disingenuous to conflate working less or part-time with universal basic income.
The first can be done by choice for some people, and doesn't always imply government subsidy. Also why pick 4 days as being closer to UBI, when you could make the same argument about 5 days vs 6.
I don't think it's disingenuous at all. They both have in common the fairly-recent idea that it's time to work less: whether a shorter week for the same pay, or in the case of UBI you get money for no work at all. These two are not the same, but they're in the same space of recent re-examinations of the relationship between work and money.
