There is a lot of truth to what you say but there is also many studies that show longer hours have a rapid decrease in productivity. Working overtime over exten

There is a lot of truth to what you say but there is also many studies that show longer hours have a rapid decrease in productivity. Working overtime over extended periods of time has an even larger drop. There is also the thought that someone working a 4 day week for 80% pay is more effective per hour than a person working a 5 day week for 100% pay. The 4 day is generally less stressed and (especially in software) likely to be thinking about the work even on their day off. There are other benefits too of staffing slack. If you do get in a crunch, you could easily pay overtime to the 4 day people to work their old schedule to get something out. This also generally leads to better cross training, vacation coverage and just happier people in general. The loss in net productivity every time an employee quits is huge and it takes time and money to find and train a replacement. I'd would agree that there is a lot of bureaucracy in knowledge worker's days. Cutting that by an hour per day would have similar productivity gains.