I am running a bootstrapped start-up (by choice). We pay salaries to 5 people (three MIT EECS grads, one Berkeley CS). I think these people are very good. From my prospective, if you operate without VC money, I.e. from the actual revenues that you get, what's described in the post is irrational exuberance. It's a sign of a VC investment bubble. We absolutely could NOT work 4 days a week and remain competitive ( we could not even run the existing service that way, with user all complaints, attack threats, vendor interactions, hardware failures).
I'm a member of the product team at Treehouse, and was employee #3. We don't go around talking about the 4 day work week because it's something that we think is a great gimmick that we were fortunate enough to be able to pull off because we hit the VC lottery. It's something at the core of who we are as a company and something we've seen help us compete - not only in hiring but also in productivity. We see a huge benefit in rest, fresh thinking, and a healthy balance between our work and the rest of our lives. The 4 day work week builds that into who we are. It's not the only way to achieve those goals, but one of the primary ways we pull it off.
We've been working the 4-day work week far longer than we've had VC money. Our first investment came in the fall of 2011, long after we existed as a company, and we were profitable prior to raising VC.
So how do you address the points made in the GP post? Specifically, attacks, hardware failures, other issues that immediately impact customers? I assume that you don't wait until monday to address a failure that occurs thursday night, right?
When it comes to keeping the service running, there's always one person on call. We're really flexible on our team about hours, so if you need to do something on Saturday night you can cut out a little early a different day - honestly if you feel done for the day you can be done any day, but most of us are super driven and don't want to stop working when it's time. Despite the general 9-6 guideline we're not super formal about our hours.
Our support team also works a bit on the weekend (around 3 hours per day), and that's something we're working on fixing by adding to the team.
I work between 32 and 35 hours each week. I think about Treehouse a ton more (if I'm not asleep I've probably thought about Treehouse in the past couple of minutes), and answer email from time to time, but I don't know anyone who doesn't do that, and I usually get mean looks from my wife when I spend much time outside of my normal work hours answering email or playing around with code.
In general I don't think people on our team work more than 32-35 hours or so. One exception is our support team, and that's something we're working on remedying.
I think it's great that you guys are trying out new ways to work. I'm an entrepreneur myself, and while I don't have employees yet I'm open to new business models. I wish more companies, funded or not, would be more daring.
You might be right or you might wrong for bootstrapped companies but in my experience working at different small and big companies working long hours really don't translate into profitability and productivity.
In general I saw that developers working on "a secret sauce" (i.e., engineers in Oracle working on RDBMS, etc.) are not working more than 35 hours a week while developers working on some generic CRUD crap work all days and night.
Now the challenge is to hire developers which can work on or develop your "secret sauce"... which is point of this post.
You should consider the possibility that you are wrong.
As I understand it, Henry Ford chose a 40-hour work week because he found that it maximized the total output of his employees. Computer programming is (minute-for-minute) considerably more demanding than working an assembly line. Maybe an average programmer maximizes her total output when she works substantially less than 40 hours a week. In fact I'd be surprised if that weren't the case.
And of course you could still run the service if you guys worked four-day weeks. Just make sure somebody's working on any given day.
Have you ever worked on an assembly line (or in a factory of any kind)? It's hard, backbreaking work that from my experience sucks much, much harder than any programming job I've ever had.
Hacking code may be more mentally taxing, but if you need to take break (for the bathroom or whatever) you can do it on your own schedule -- not on your lunch break like a lot of factory workers.
Look, I know little about Treehouse, but I read the blog when things appear on HN. It looks like a useful product, and seems to be run by sincere guys. But you're talking about attracting good talent when you're able to offer amazing benefits, salaries and a 4 day work week. That is only possible because you're swimming in cash, and you're only swimming in cash because this space is still riding the upswing of the business cycle. The market will sort this out, and one only has to look around to see that. It's unsustainable. How old is your business? Let's see if you're still working 4 day weeks in five years.
That said, it's probably a great place to work. Kudos for sharing the wealth with your employees.
I keep forgetting that SV operates under completely different definitions than the rest of the business world. I don't mean offense by that, it's just the truth.
You started a business in 2007 using a 4 day work week and it was acquired in 2008? That's not evidence of sustainability. Smart? Yes, apparently. But is that business still using a 4 day week?
