8 ms·

How did you manage to arrange that? I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approv

How did you manage to arrange that? I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approval for that.

seren 11y ago
GP does not mention the impact on its salary. Usually if you work 80% of your previous time, you are also payed 80% of the previous salary.
- tukum 11y ago
  Most likely, but taking into consideration taxes the decrease could be smaller. Some countries have progressive income tax. So it depends on salary, but it could be that by working 20% less you receive only 15% less.
  - throwaway7767 11y ago
    Hit the nail on the head. We have a progressive income tax here. The 20% comes from the part of my salary that gets the higher tax bracket. So in fact the decrease in amount I get paid is quite a bit less than 20%. I also suggested this change at the yearly salary interview during which I negotiated a 10% raise. So really the amount I get paid each month didn't change all that much.
- rufb 11y ago
  You're assuming a fixed workload-based salary. If we're talking about a salary that has a big variable component (commissions, fees, bonuses), the cut may have been smaller.
fizgig 11y ago
Who said the pay was the same? I'd be happy to take a 20% pay cut for a 4-day work week at some point in my life. I have a semi-retired relative who does just that. As it is now, I'm vocal at reviews that I'll take more days off per year in lieu of direct salary increase -- an idea which seems to throw people off and hasn't been seriously entertained. At some point, I'll make enough annually, that I'll simply start taking days off without pay, which is something payroll seems to really hate for some reason when it concerns salaried folks. Corporate pay/work expectations are really odd sometimes.
- yourapostasy 11y ago
  > ...I'll simply start taking days off without pay, which is something payroll seems to really hate for some reason when it concerns salaried folks. At the risk of sounding too glib, the short answer to why they hate it is it creates work for them. In the US, all of the major payroll processing services are geared towards either hourly or salaried templates. Most companies' payroll procedures are built around the core assumption that if you are salaried, then it is X salary divided across N weeks/months/your-pay-period. If you take days off without pay, changing the salary, someone in payroll has to manually key in the delta off your normal pay period processing numbers. That sometimes has downstream ramifications upon unemployment insurance reporting and remittance, for larger companies there are other regulatory-originated reporting that this can impact, and put in common issues like tax liens and family court-mandated levies, just for starters, and it gets hairy. Generally payroll processing is still built around a set of assumptions that are at odds with emerging knowledge workforce trends; the trends can be accommodated, but it's a hassle. If you have a good enough relationship with your manager, then you are far better off negotiating a sub-rosa agreement to (in your example) work Wednesday this week and take off a couple days next week (or leave a couple hours earlier each day), and net out to zero change in time worked over a short (sub-month) period and leaving payroll none the wiser to any change in time worked, than making the payroll department perform an exception-based processing of your payroll. US payroll processing trivia to illustrate how rigid payroll processing systems are today for the small business, and for flexible work arrangements: if you are a really small, micro-sized business, like say an Etsy seller with a couple full-time employees, set up as your own LLC or whatever, you will run payroll, except unlike larger businesses you will frequently want to know how much to pay yourself (after paying off all employees and vendors) including all employER-side tax liabilities, and not just the employEE-side disbursement. All of the top-ten payroll processors have no capability to compute that for you; you have to iterate to an approximation. In other words, if you know you can afford to pay yourself only $10K total this month, payroll processors force you to key in a employEE net pay number then they spit out the gross including the employER side, and only then do you see if you are over/under the $10K amount. There is no feature that lets a small business owner say, this pay period, I can only afford at most $X cash out the door total including all tax liabilities for so-and-so employee, iterate and solve for me what the best result is to achieve that. US payroll processing can get really complex, really fast even for small businesses, so I can imagine what a nightmare it must be for the designers and developers of those systems. However, I believe there is still plenty of room for someone to create a disruptive service that caters to and appeals to small businesses.
douche 11y ago
The better deal would be working four ten-hour days. Particularly if you have a long commute, this is wildly better than five eights. Eight hours isn't really enough time to get anything done, particularly during business hours.
- joshuacc 11y ago
  I have done this before, but arranged my days off to be alternating Mondays and Fridays so that every two weeks I'd get a four day weekend. My bosses were very generous with my schedule. :-)
  - pc86 11y ago
    Honestly this seems like the ideal scenario. Full pay, likely no argument from superiors about the amount of work you'd accomplish, and the ability to take long weekend trips without wasting a day or two of PTO. I only see a few possible downsides: - Someone expecting you to be in the office and you're not, particularly if they're not familiar with your schedule. - For developers the same issues with 60+ work weeks often come up in hours 7-10 of a single working day. Off-campus lunch for a full hour (or more) would probably be important, which pushes your full day to 11+ hours. - Using 10 hours of PTO when you take a day off, but I guess that's what you get for getting the 4-day weekends :)
    - douche 11y ago
      This is the schedule my father has, working as a mechanic in a power plant. It's pretty solid. The only (kind of ironic) downside is that holiday weeks are kind of sucky. The holiday day only pays 8 hours, so he ends up having to still work four eight hour days those weeks.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      Working 3 10-hour days during a week and 6 5-hour days during a week seems equally doable, but I think I would get more complex, brainy problems solved with the latter, and more simpleminded grunt work done with the former.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vinceguidry 11y ago
Can't speak for GP, but what I did was move my schedule up to 9:30-6:00 or so, let my arrival date float between 9:30 and 10:00 so I could come in pretty much when I felt like it. After awhile my workload dropped practically to zero, and I started leaving at 5. Kept it up even when there was a workload, and found that completion times didn't suffer. Don't propose anything. Just start shifting your schedule around and see if people complain. Do it slowly and people won't notice, or if they do, won't care. In the corporate world, you don't ask for permission, only forgiveness. The word they use for it is 'initiative'.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  I should also note that management is likely to see this not as a wayward employee bucking the rules, but as someone doing what he needs to under the circumstances to make himself happy. So long as it's not egregious and work quality stays ultra-sharp, everybody involved is going to just work around your preferences. They know you'll be much less likely to leave if you're happy with your situation, the damage you cause by leaving is far worse than the damage caused by bucking the standards. Around the time I was doing this, I got a new manager. I was wholly unwilling to reorient my schedule around his expectations, but I would stay until he left for the first few weeks. One day I followed him out, even though it was at least an hour before I "should" have been leaving. I'd also taken an hour-plus long lunch that day. I told him I usually leave at 5, but I was staying late in case he had any questions for me. He was like, "even though you took a long lunch??" and I just nodded, and followed him out. He didn't mention it again, until I started talking about taking another job. There is a space in between political expectations, business needs, and personal wishes at any job that is ripe for exploration and exploitation. One can iterate towards their ideal work environment and conditions at any job where their performance is stellar. Just keep the business needs and political expectations in mind and you can practically get away with murder.
sheepmullet 11y ago
> I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approval for that. Get a 25% raise, and then 6 months to 1 year later drop down to an 80% workload and take the corresponding 20% cut in pay.
marcosdumay 11y ago
You propose spend 20% less time working for 20% less pay. He'll probably not accept it too, and if he accepts you'll probably not progress inside that company anymore. But he very probably won't get annoyed either.

How did you manage to arrange that? I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approval for that.

seren 11y ago

GP does not mention the impact on its salary. Usually if you work 80% of your previous time, you are also payed 80% of the previous salary.

tukum 11y ago
Most likely, but taking into consideration taxes the decrease could be smaller. Some countries have progressive income tax. So it depends on salary, but it could be that by working 20% less you receive only 15% less.
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  Hit the nail on the head. We have a progressive income tax here. The 20% comes from the part of my salary that gets the higher tax bracket. So in fact the decrease in amount I get paid is quite a bit less than 20%. I also suggested this change at the yearly salary interview during which I negotiated a 10% raise. So really the amount I get paid each month didn't change all that much.
rufb 11y ago
You're assuming a fixed workload-based salary. If we're talking about a salary that has a big variable component (commissions, fees, bonuses), the cut may have been smaller.

fizgig 11y ago

Who said the pay was the same? I'd be happy to take a 20% pay cut for a 4-day work week at some point in my life. I have a semi-retired relative who does just that. As it is now, I'm vocal at reviews that I'll take more days off per year in lieu of direct salary increase -- an idea which seems to throw people off and hasn't been seriously entertained. At some point, I'll make enough annually, that I'll simply start taking days off without pay, which is something payroll seems to really hate for some reason when it concerns salaried folks. Corporate pay/work expectations are really odd sometimes.

yourapostasy 11y ago
> ...I'll simply start taking days off without pay, which is something payroll seems to really hate for some reason when it concerns salaried folks. At the risk of sounding too glib, the short answer to why they hate it is it creates work for them. In the US, all of the major payroll processing services are geared towards either hourly or salaried templates. Most companies' payroll procedures are built around the core assumption that if you are salaried, then it is X salary divided across N weeks/months/your-pay-period. If you take days off without pay, changing the salary, someone in payroll has to manually key in the delta off your normal pay period processing numbers. That sometimes has downstream ramifications upon unemployment insurance reporting and remittance, for larger companies there are other regulatory-originated reporting that this can impact, and put in common issues like tax liens and family court-mandated levies, just for starters, and it gets hairy. Generally payroll processing is still built around a set of assumptions that are at odds with emerging knowledge workforce trends; the trends can be accommodated, but it's a hassle. If you have a good enough relationship with your manager, then you are far better off negotiating a sub-rosa agreement to (in your example) work Wednesday this week and take off a couple days next week (or leave a couple hours earlier each day), and net out to zero change in time worked over a short (sub-month) period and leaving payroll none the wiser to any change in time worked, than making the payroll department perform an exception-based processing of your payroll. US payroll processing trivia to illustrate how rigid payroll processing systems are today for the small business, and for flexible work arrangements: if you are a really small, micro-sized business, like say an Etsy seller with a couple full-time employees, set up as your own LLC or whatever, you will run payroll, except unlike larger businesses you will frequently want to know how much to pay yourself (after paying off all employees and vendors) including all employER-side tax liabilities, and not just the employEE-side disbursement. All of the top-ten payroll processors have no capability to compute that for you; you have to iterate to an approximation. In other words, if you know you can afford to pay yourself only $10K total this month, payroll processors force you to key in a employEE net pay number then they spit out the gross including the employER side, and only then do you see if you are over/under the $10K amount. There is no feature that lets a small business owner say, this pay period, I can only afford at most $X cash out the door total including all tax liabilities for so-and-so employee, iterate and solve for me what the best result is to achieve that. US payroll processing can get really complex, really fast even for small businesses, so I can imagine what a nightmare it must be for the designers and developers of those systems. However, I believe there is still plenty of room for someone to create a disruptive service that caters to and appeals to small businesses.

douche 11y ago

The better deal would be working four ten-hour days. Particularly if you have a long commute, this is wildly better than five eights. Eight hours isn't really enough time to get anything done, particularly during business hours.

joshuacc 11y ago
I have done this before, but arranged my days off to be alternating Mondays and Fridays so that every two weeks I'd get a four day weekend. My bosses were very generous with my schedule. :-)
- pc86 11y ago
  Honestly this seems like the ideal scenario. Full pay, likely no argument from superiors about the amount of work you'd accomplish, and the ability to take long weekend trips without wasting a day or two of PTO. I only see a few possible downsides: - Someone expecting you to be in the office and you're not, particularly if they're not familiar with your schedule. - For developers the same issues with 60+ work weeks often come up in hours 7-10 of a single working day. Off-campus lunch for a full hour (or more) would probably be important, which pushes your full day to 11+ hours. - Using 10 hours of PTO when you take a day off, but I guess that's what you get for getting the 4-day weekends :)
  - douche 11y ago
    This is the schedule my father has, working as a mechanic in a power plant. It's pretty solid. The only (kind of ironic) downside is that holiday weeks are kind of sucky. The holiday day only pays 8 hours, so he ends up having to still work four eight hour days those weeks.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    Working 3 10-hour days during a week and 6 5-hour days during a week seems equally doable, but I think I would get more complex, brainy problems solved with the latter, and more simpleminded grunt work done with the former.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

vinceguidry 11y ago

Can't speak for GP, but what I did was move my schedule up to 9:30-6:00 or so, let my arrival date float between 9:30 and 10:00 so I could come in pretty much when I felt like it. After awhile my workload dropped practically to zero, and I started leaving at 5. Kept it up even when there was a workload, and found that completion times didn't suffer. Don't propose anything. Just start shifting your schedule around and see if people complain. Do it slowly and people won't notice, or if they do, won't care. In the corporate world, you don't ask for permission, only forgiveness. The word they use for it is 'initiative'.

vinceguidry 11y ago
I should also note that management is likely to see this not as a wayward employee bucking the rules, but as someone doing what he needs to under the circumstances to make himself happy. So long as it's not egregious and work quality stays ultra-sharp, everybody involved is going to just work around your preferences. They know you'll be much less likely to leave if you're happy with your situation, the damage you cause by leaving is far worse than the damage caused by bucking the standards. Around the time I was doing this, I got a new manager. I was wholly unwilling to reorient my schedule around his expectations, but I would stay until he left for the first few weeks. One day I followed him out, even though it was at least an hour before I "should" have been leaving. I'd also taken an hour-plus long lunch that day. I told him I usually leave at 5, but I was staying late in case he had any questions for me. He was like, "even though you took a long lunch??" and I just nodded, and followed him out. He didn't mention it again, until I started talking about taking another job. There is a space in between political expectations, business needs, and personal wishes at any job that is ripe for exploration and exploitation. One can iterate towards their ideal work environment and conditions at any job where their performance is stellar. Just keep the business needs and political expectations in mind and you can practically get away with murder.

sheepmullet 11y ago

> I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approval for that. Get a 25% raise, and then 6 months to 1 year later drop down to an 80% workload and take the corresponding 20% cut in pay.

marcosdumay 11y ago

You propose spend 20% less time working for 20% less pay. He'll probably not accept it too, and if he accepts you'll probably not progress inside that company anymore. But he very probably won't get annoyed either.