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More bosses give four-day workweek a try

934 points by hhs 7y ago

BlameKaneda 7y ago
Wonder how hourly employees who work 4-days weeks at 32 hours would feel about this proposal.
- izzydata 7y ago
  If they increase the hourly pay by 20% then probably quite happy. Edit: 25%.
  - rejschaap 7y ago
    25%, I don't think there is any way around that, it seems untenable to have such big difference in rate between employees
  - echelon 7y ago
    Conversely, I'd accept lower pay for 4x8. I'm close to financial independence and would rather have my time than more money.
    - clarry 7y ago
      > I'm close to financial independence and would rather have my time than more money. I'm not close, but I'd still take time over money. I need enough money to live healthy and have a bit of fun sometimes. After that, I just need time and energy to actually live my life.
- strig 7y ago
  They could do 4x 10 hour days instead
  - thrower123 7y ago
    I really liked working 4x10 when I was working a blue-collar industrial job over college breaks. It was not union, but it had a similar attitude towards the sacrosanctity of break times, which broke the day up nicely. Clock in at 6:30, spend the first 15-30 minutes going over the plan for the day. Work until 9, then everybody downed tools and took a coffee break. Go back and work until 12:00, clock out for half hour lunch. Go back and work until 3 for another coffee break. Then you'd usually just wind down and pick up until you clocked out at 5. In a lot of ways, working an 8 hour day as a software developer is more stressful, because it's so disordered and interrupt-driven. Meetings are strewn around all over the calendar, wherever they can best fit the constraints of people in disparate locations. Emails or pings come in with problems you've got to handle right away - and it seems to be easier for people to rationalize making you switch tasks rather than finish what you're doing when you have a piece of software in pieces in your IDE than when you have a bulldozer in pieces with the tracks off...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
askafriend 7y ago
I'd really like to do 4x10hrs versus 5x8hrs. I think that'd be a significant improvement for a lot of people.
- gordon_freeman 7y ago
  I think stuffing 10 hours in a workday will have a diminishing rate of productivity return during the last couple of hours during the workday.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    How about a compromise? 4x9 hours.
    - xboxnolifes 7y ago
      I like 4x9, because a lot of work is already 5x9 if you include mandatory lunch break.
      - anticensor 7y ago
        Mandatory or "mandatory"?
      - SauciestGNU 7y ago
        I have a huge problem with the 5x9 expectation. 9-5 means 9-5 including a lunch. I promise any employer that demanding my presence from 8-5 (or any other 9 hours) will not result in greater productivity, and furthermore will leave me disgruntled. There's only so much development that can be done in a day before I'm in a haze from all the abstract thought, and that productivity asymptote comes well under 8 hours.
        jinglebells 7y ago
        It's 4 hours for me. Doesn't matter how long the day is, maximum concentration tops out at 4 hours. The rest of the time is just admin work, emails and house keeping.
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
I did this (4x10) for about a year at a previous company, really enjoyed it. The hardest part was coming back after the 3 day weekend, it always felt like coming back from vacation.
- tasogare 7y ago
  If were an a 4 day week I would like to have Wednesday free instead of Friday.
  - ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
    That or a floating day.
  - rabidrat 7y ago
    I thought so too, but it turned out for me that having a 'break' in the middle of the week interrupted my work momentum, and I also never got the luxurious feeling of a 3-day weekend. 4+/3- worked a lot better for me (both work-wise and emotionally) than 2+/1-/2+/2-.
gdubs 7y ago
When the 40 hour workweek was first proposed, doomsayers said it would be the end of the American economy. The opposite happened, and as injuries and illness decreased, productivity increased. [1] Something to keep in mind, as it’s counterintuitive and the instinct is to say, “that can never happen here”, or, “it’ll never work.” 1: Robert Gordon, “The Rise and Fall is American Growth”
- mortenjorck 7y ago
  I'm genuinely impressed that the Overton window on hours seems to have changed since the last time the 4-day work week was in the headlines. Not that long ago, it was unquestioned that four days meant 4x10. It was simply unthinkable that we would consider less than forty hours "full time." I even skipped this article initially, expecting it to have the same assumptions! And yet, they specifically report that Shake Shack cut back to 32 hours without cutting pay. I would have expected service-sector jobs to be the last to see something like this. And if a burger chain can do it, an office where we spend 40 hours in a combination of productivity and reading HN can absolutely do it.
  - wasdfff 7y ago
    Service sector does not want you working 40 hours a week for benefits purposes.
    - piffey 7y ago
      You can never afford those benefits on a service sector job anyways.
      - dv_dt 7y ago
        At a time of coronavirus outbreaks in the news, I have to think that models of propagation should account for national differences like which areas have required vacation & sicktime benefits as well as universal healthcare.
    - xxandroxygen 7y ago
Ididntdothis 7y ago
It seems a lot of these experiments are a success. But after a while somebody gets greedy and thinks “we get good productivity at 32 hours. I wonder how much more we could get at 40 hours?” And soon you are back at the old schedule. Something similar happened at my company. For once a project was ahead of schedule. So instead of thinking that the system worked well and keep working in relaxed manner management decided to “pull in” the deadline and suddenly the project was a death march again. For some people it’s hard to accept that relaxed people are productive. They want to see stress and overtime or they will think that people are underperforming.
- toper-centage 7y ago
  Is it not also the responsibility of employees to ask for that benefit? Specially developers have that leverage. We have the ability of changing the whole job landscape.
  - ahoy 7y ago
    Sounds like labor organizing, and yes, its the best way to ensure you say some say in what your work-life looks like.
    - pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
      The BEST way to ensure what your work-life looks like is to start your own company... not whine to an existing company that has already proven willing to exploit you.
  - castlecrasher2 7y ago
    >Is it not also the responsibility of employees to ask for that benefit? I've been on both sides of this equation and yes employees have a responsibility to speak up, but given the dynamic of the relationship it's easy to see why they wouldn't. If managers aren't interested in listening then speaking up can just get you on their bad side.
    - 7y ago
kody 7y ago
I worked 4x10s when I worked for the Army and it was awesome. 3 day weekends take off so much pressure, and come Sunday night I was starting to feel the itch to get back into work rather than the dreadful feeling that I 'wasted' my weekend. The only work experience that was better than this was 100% flexibility to work remotely and/or flex hours. So there's my anecdata for you :)
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
  I worked 9 hour days with every other Friday off and hated it.
  - kody 7y ago
    Yeah that sounds way too inconsistent on a weekly basis for me
  - sithlord 7y ago
    and still on average > 80 hours every 2 weeks.
    - nrp 7y ago
      The way these typically work (and how I am doing it) is that the first Friday is 8 hours, the second Friday is 0 hours, and all other days are 9 hours. I’ve found it to be extremely useful for the reasons mentioned in the article. It gives everyone a weekday off regularly to get weekday-requiring things done like personal appointments. It also makes it easy to take long weekend trips more often. Both of these are aligned in a way that lets the remaining weekdays more productive, since people have their time off aligned.
    - gpanders 7y ago
      This type of schedule is called a 9/80 and you work 80 hours every 2 work weeks. Your Fridays "on" you work 8 hours instead of 9. And you get every other Friday off. At my company, we have the option between the standard 5x8, the 9/80, and the 4x10 schedules. Surprisingly (at least to me), the 9/80 is by far the most popular (the 4x10 being the 2nd most popular and the standard schedule being the rarest option).
hinkley 7y ago
Many of us work in spaces where servers are expected to be working and running 24/7. Yet our bosses still want every single employee to have butts in seats 9:00 am to 5 pm, 5 days a week and in the same time zone. Sometimes with a little guilt-tripping on the side for taking sick days and vacation. Wouldn't we be better off with several shifts, 4 days a week, covering Monday through Saturday or even the entire week?
- wolco 7y ago
  Mature places have this with a global workforce. Not so mature places put 9-5ers on call with a tiny bump in pay.
  - hawaiianbrah 7y ago
    And the least mature do it without a bump at all!
    - hinkley 7y ago
      Guilt is a hell of a drug.
  - greedo 7y ago
    My org has been around for over 150 years, and our IT department expects admins to take a rotating week of oncall. Not only are you expected on call with a 10 minutes response time, but you're expected to do your normal day to day operations/projects. And during normal business hours, a ton of extra stuff gets dumped into the lap of the oncall person, because why not? My boss describes this as everyone's turn in the barrel, and part of working in IT. There's nothing more demoralizing for my coworkers than being on call. Well, maybe having our tickets be the metric we're evaluated by.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      I would argue you’re in a toxic work environment and encourage a change of scenery via interviewing and finding a better employer.
mjayhn 7y ago
I can't begin to explain how much less stress I encounter in day to day life having just one week day to stay home. Just having a day to be able to easily knock out chores between Jira issues; drop the car off at the dealer, sell something on craigslist, complete a house project, go to the dentist, meet the handyman, go to the bank, etc is so nice. All of these things wind up on the back burner when I'm in the middle of high stress projects and forced to sit at a desk for 8-10 hours a day. All that does is lead to more stress because now I'm falling behind on my life tasks and have to burn a weekend catching up when I should be able to spend that weekend de-stressing. I know not everyone is as sapped for energy as I am after work, I hate that I'm this way. But after leaving work and siting in an hour of traffic my energy is just sapped from me by the time I make it home. I have enough energy to feed myself and sometimes work out to maintain my health..
- volkk 7y ago
  > I know not everyone is as sapped for energy as I am after work, but I leave work and sit in an hour of traffic. My energy is just sapped from me by the time I make it home. I have enough energy to feed myself and sometimes work out to maintain my health.. I know that some people just dont have the privilege of living close to their jobs, but after spending one internship getting up at 5;45am to drive with my dad to work to beat the traffic for 1hr, and then spending 1.5-2 hours driving back in heavy traffic in NYC, I vowed to never ever live in a place where I have to drive that far to get to work. 2 months of that and I was already losing my will to live. My dad did it for 15 years and I can see why towards the last leg of that job, he was bitter and angry on a daily basis. That is not a way to live.
  - tombert 7y ago
    I live in NYC, and I have a roughly 1 hour commute each way, but I just take the train everywhere. Of course I can't speak for anyone else, but I find that taking a train to work is a lot less stressful than driving every day. At least on the train, I can read, or pull out my laptop, or just play a video game.
    - 7y ago
sky_rw 7y ago
I encourage everybody to work as little as possible, that way the competition for me is lower.
- postsantum 7y ago
  Many people optimize for life quality, they are not competing with you
amyjess 7y ago
Going down to a 32-hour workweek would be lovely, but I'm simply not interested in doing 4×10. I'd rather get home at a decent hour than have an extra day off.
- echelon 7y ago
  To each their own. My work week is spent on work and I can't really enjoy the time before or after work. I'll never enjoy M-F. I'd rather have a 4x10 than a 5x8. If my side hustle ever graduates into a startup and I start hiring other people, we're doing 4x10 or 4x9.
  - domingobingo 7y ago
    What's the nature of the side hustle if you don't mind me asking?
  - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
    I wonder whether the benefits decrease when the whole team does 4X10 - I found when I did 4X10 that I was much more productive for the two hours I was alone in the office. Of course, no saying everyone has to work the same 4X10.
  - wobblykiwi 7y ago
    Why not try a 4x8?
    - echelon 7y ago
      Maybe so. And it might make it easier to offer as a perk when I can't offer a salary that competes with Google and Facebook.
  - TrueGeek 7y ago
    Why not let your employees choose? From what I’ve seen single people love 4x10, people with kids don’t. 2 extra hours a day means my kid can’t possibly make it to practice in time 4 days a week.
OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
9/80 schedules are common in my industry. We are paid based on 80 hours/2 weeks. Week 1 is 36 hours (4 days x 9 hrs/day) and the Friday is off. Week 2 is 44 hours (4 days x 9 hrs/day, 1 8 hr Friday). There's flexibility around this with management approval. I think most people like this arrangement, especially those with long commutes. A full free day for appointments, errands, or just relaxing can be a big help.
tombert 7y ago
I remember when I interned at Lockheed Martin forever ago, they had a system where you normally work 9-hour days (8 on Fridays), and as a result had every other Friday off. It equated to a 80 hours for every two weeks, and it was really nice if you ever had to go to the bank or DMV (which are typically only open during weekdays). I always wondered why this wasn't more popular.
- aetherson 7y ago
  Popularly known as the 9-80 schedule. My wife has it, it's really nice to get the Friday off but it makes it rough for her to be at all involved in picking up/dropping off the kids (which is hard even with a normal 8 hour day).
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
  Why is this so common in defense?
  - tombert 7y ago
    What? I was just saying that I liked that system, I wasn't trying to engage in any kind of real apologia.
    - jhomedall 7y ago
      I think he meant that as 'why is this so common in the defense industry'.
      - tombert 7y ago
        Oh, upon rereading the comment that makes more sense, that's my dumb fault :) I don't know actually; presumably one defense company started doing it any then the rest just followed.
        positr0n 7y ago
        It also might be a government thing? 9/80 is common in the few national labs I've worked at or know people in. DoE and DoD labs.
k__ 7y ago
I'm from Germany and none of my friends works 40h anymore. They're all down to 50-80% This is even regulated by the law, your employer has to allow you to reduce your work time, only in some extreme cases they can deny it. Works like a charm.
- frockington1 7y ago
  I like the idea of working less, but it's going to be hard to use Germany as a poster child. The German economy hasn't been doing to great recently. In my opinion it's largely due to carrying lagging EU economies, but it will be hard to use a struggling economy as a positive indicator Germany: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-growth US: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
  - standardUser 7y ago
    The German standard of living is exceptional. Abstract worries about "the economy not doing too well" don't really matter until the standard of living declines in some meaningful way for a lot of people. Owners demand perpetual growth. People demand comfortable lives and occasional vacations. Most achieve that in Germany. There probably isn't a single better "poster child" of a prosperous society with anywhere near the same population.
    - frockington1 7y ago
      I'd rather be an owner in America with perpetual growth. Difference of culture I guess.
      - siquick 7y ago
        That growth only really benefits a tiny minority of the country though. There are far more people in a precarious position in the US than in Germany
  - devmunchies 7y ago
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Some of our hourly employees are on a 4x10 schedule. One wrinkle that has come up is for holidays and vacation days, which are paid at 8 hours each. The 4x10 employees end up being two hours short each paid day off. The company won't change it to ten hours as that is unfair to the 5x8 employees. Maybe if 4x10 became the standard, they would.
jacquesm 7y ago
It's interesting to note that in Europe that 32 hour workweek is fairly standard and nobody would even bat an eye or think this is special in any way. https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/11/working-hours.html https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/11/working-hours.html
- fogetti 7y ago
  Is it though? I worked in 4 different jobs across 2 different countries and this was unheard of. Not even a single one of my friends do this.
- nagyf 7y ago
  Source for this? I'm from Europe and I have friends working in 2-3 different countries in Europe, but 32 hour workweek is not standard anywhere. Never even heard of such a thing being standard in Europe.
  - zhdc1 7y ago
    Germany and Switzerland, at least. I can't speak for other countries, but at least where I'm at, most folks are on an 80% contract (four days a week) and enjoying it.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    It depends on the country. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, NL, Germany, Switzerland, France. Others probably less so, depending on how well the economy is and general attitude towards workers rights. Eastern Europe much less so, in some cases (Romania, Bulgaria) conditions are still terrible.
    - timwaagh 7y ago
      Lawful workweek in nl is 40 hours I'd wager the others are similar, with perhaps one exception.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
I feel like I'd probably be as-effective with a four-day work week. I monitor and respond to issues when I'm at home anyways. But I think it'll still be a while until this becomes substantially more popular. At a previous job I was furloughed one day a week for a while, and it was definitely time I enjoyed having available, I just wasn't fond of the 20% pay cut that went with it.
mikkergp 7y ago
I don't know if I'm pro a 4-day work week, (I'm personally not for it if it's 4x10 instead of 5x8) But I'm reading the book [peak performance](https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Performance-Elevate-Burnout-Science-ebook/dp/B01N1RNP9N/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1582313496&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Performance-Elevate-Burnout-Scie...) (Highly recommended) and I generally think that companies should really encourage those employees to work at a schedule that works best for them (This is obviously harder for shift work where the value comes from having a person in a chair at certain times) We have all these norms about 8 hour days, and 5 day weeks and not sleeping at work, and I think people should be given the freedom to work in the way that works best for them. One norm I'm trying to get used to breaking right now is the norm about "sleeping at work". I would be much more productive if I napped for 15 or so minutes twice a day. I know that when it comes to coding or writing I could get a ton done in a 3-4 1-hour-sessions day if those 3-4 hours were clear, well defined and rested. I could get much more done in "3-4 hours" than an "8 hour day" with meetings and other administrivia thrown in. I'd guess my optimal work week is somewhere around 26 hours, assuming that the space between those 26 hours is spent resting and focusing and getting ready to work hard those 26 hours.
- Darkphibre 7y ago
  > Nap time adds to productivity Amen to this! I pushed for, and saw implemented, a dual nap room for our studio. It was used around the clock by people stretching, meditating, and napping. I found a huge productivity spike taking out 20 minutes a day. Then, we hired a bunch more people for the upcoming launch, and it was re-purposed into a storage room for old rack hardware (I pushed against this, but was told it was a temporarily unavoidable allocation for the space... meanwhile, the dedicated Lego room sits unused 38 hours a week). So we lost the nap room right as we enter our year of crunch. Boggles the mind. Ah well. Have an interesting read on recent research into the commonality of four (rather than two) chronotypes (which I'd used in laying out my position): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886919303071 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...
  - sloppycee 7y ago
    Most children stop napping around four years old. Maybe there's a deeper problem at your job if people need a nap room. Just get more sleep at home, you're not being paid to sleep. btw, a 'dedicated lego room' sounds like another symptom of a toxic infantilizing culture that eats confidence and breeds reliance.
cft 7y ago
Karl Marx saw it as of vital importance to the workers' health, writing in Das Kapital (1867): "By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production...not only produces a deterioration of human labour power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour power itself."
blobbers 7y ago
"Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is backing a parliamentary proposal to shift to a four-day week." -- with all the Russian meddling in the U.S.A., maybe they can get this pushed through! Jokes aside, I would love this. Right now in tech asking for this sort of thing feels like a 'career limiting move', and definitely in a hiring situation could label you as 'not a hard worker' despite your emphasis on efficiency and productive hours.
- blackearl 7y ago
  If not career limiting, pay limiting. I'd worry that I suddenly get a 20% cut in salary
  - philshem 7y ago
    I consider it a 20% bump in time. edit: or is it 25%?!
    - black_puppydog 7y ago
      it's 33%, adding one day to the two of the weekend :)
      - blobbers 7y ago
        That's a 50% increase in time!
    - discordance 7y ago
      If you move from a 2 day weekend to a 3 day weekend it’s a 50% increase in free time.
brozaman 7y ago
In Spain it's somewhat common to do 9 hours Monday to Thursday and only working 4 hours on Friday. Unfortunately I only worked for a company that did this only for one year, but it is the one thing I miss of this company. Personally, I'm reluctant to the 4x10, but doing 4x9 and 1x4 was simply awesome, plus you could get a 3 day weekend by just spending half day of vacation.
jt2190 7y ago
Counter-point, from the article: > Natalie Nagele, co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, has heard from other leaders who say it didn't work for them. She says it fails when employees aren't motivated and where managers don't trust employees. Also it would be good to keep in mind the Hawthorne Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#History
- chadlavi 7y ago
  > it fails when employees aren't motivated and where managers don't trust employees I'd counter that _anything_ (including the standard 5x8 schedule) will fail in those conditions.
gist 7y ago
'More bosses give 4 day workweek a try'. How weak is that? What does 'more' mean anyway? .001 more? 40% more. Of course there is no answer to that. What about 'more bosses think wearing blue shirts in the office is fine' (Everyone would laugh at that right on the surface right and say 'how many exactly percentage wise'? Unclear why people seem to think there needs to be some kind of 'one size fits all' approach. If a job is such that 32 hours works fine. If it's not fine. And the media saying things like 'a move toward' and 'more companies are' when clearly there is no significant push in this area appears to be just some kind of evergreen story to sell advertising. Media does this frequently. Keys are statements not backed up by anything but anecdotes such as 'and questions are being raised' and so on. That one 'questions are being asked' is literally a nightly occurrence on network news broadcasts (says me using the same technique but it is happening). Guess what? Some people don't mind working 5 days. Some people like working 7 days. Some people would rather sit and not work at all. Everyone is different.
kosii 7y ago
I'm a software engineer, I started working 4 days/32 hours per week about a month ago, and I couldn't be happier :)
- perfunctory 7y ago
  I started working 4 days/32 hours I think about a decade ago. Never looked back.
  - tren 7y ago
    I was 4 days 32 hours for 7 years, now I do 3 days 24 hours. It has allowed me to spend time a lot of time with my boy. Now that he's started school I generally work on side projects in my 2 extra days and do the school pickups. Of course there are days where you don't feel like coding so you can read a book, do chores, go to the beach.
  - birdyrooster 7y ago
    I'm going to do that now and fuck what my manager thinks honestly.
notjustanymike 7y ago
I introduced "work from home Wednesday" at our company and the reduction in stress is palpable. Hell, I sleep better on Tuesday nights knowing I've got a day of silence lined up. The naysayers quickly fell in line too, once they realized how much more they could get done that day.
- david-gpu 7y ago
  Working from home is still working. Working four days a week is entirely different.
- bananamerica 7y ago
  Why Wednesday though?
  - notjustanymike 7y ago
    So that you never have to spend more than 2 days a row in the office. It keeps the stress build up low.
    - bananamerica 7y ago
      I would prefer have a long weekend.
  - triceratops 7y ago
    In addition to OP's reply, I guess it also keeps people from turning it into a long weekend if it's not a Monday or Friday.
    - bananamerica 7y ago
      What’s bad about long weekends?
saghul 7y ago
I've been working 32 hour weeks ever since my daughter was born 2 years ago. Mondays are my day off, we go to music classes, walk on the park and just spend time together. On tuesdays I'm "hungry" when I go back to work. I think this is the perfect balance for me and I feel I'm more productive than ever. It may not be for everyone, and it's definitely a privilege, but if you can, I really encourage you to try it out.
minikites 7y ago
Worker productivity has gone way up over the recent decades but wages have stagnated, so why shouldn't we work fewer hours? It's not like the average worker is reaping the benefits of working longer.
ivanhoe 7y ago
I worked 4 days a week on one project that lasted 14 months. It's really great for motivation and productivity. I actually started to enjoy Mondays first time in my life, and I'd be coming to work full of inspiration. The downside is obviously that as a contractor you earn 20% less that way.
annoyingnoob 7y ago
I feel like my best work happens in about 6 hours on most days. Beyond 6 I feel like I'm less motivated/productive, I get things done but it goes a little slower. I've previously done a 9/80 schedule with every other Friday off. The 9 hour days made my personal life harder, harder to meet family obligations like pickup/dropoff. I'm cool with 5 shorter days, I would be happier and probably more productive.
ndespres 7y ago
I met with someone recently who offered 4-day workweek as a benefit, but it wasn't a 32-hour week over 4 days, it was just 4 longer days with the same number of total hours. It would be great to have 1 less commute, a 3 day weekend etc but where are the benefits of these computers that were supposed to save us all time?
lwb 7y ago
Something felt fishy about their claim that number of hours worked has been climbing in the United States so I checked their source. It turns out that "average annual hours worked" has changed from 1,780 in 2011 to 1,786 last year. This seems like barely a rounding error... On the other hand, if you look at the FRED website it shows that average annual hours worked has massively decreased in the last 50 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG 1951, for example, shows 2,030 hours worked on average. That's the equivalent of more than six additional weeks of full time work. I would say that Keynes's prediction that economic growth could get to the point where we would only need to work 15 hours a week (750 hours per year, assuming 2 weeks vacation) is ... trending towards becoming true? At current trends, it will take another ~280 years. (Obviously this is a silly prediction but, an interesting thought experiment.)
- chadlavi 7y ago
  these numbers are across all industries, right? a 40 hour union job has certain parameters such that the work hours aren't going to shift much without larger political shifts within those orgs. But I suspect the number of hours a non-union knowledge worker works per year has gone up in the same time frame.
  - lwb 7y ago
    > these numbers are across all industries, right? I think so. The way these sources gather data is somewhat opaque to me but there's nothing to suggest that it's filtered out by industry. > I suspect the number of hours a non-union knowledge worker works per year has gone up in the same time frame Huh... I don't see that data anywhere on FRED but it would be interesting to know. You can search for yourself here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/searchresults/?st=hours%20worked https://fred.stlouisfed.org/searchresults/?st=hours%20worked Anecdotally, I have swapped stories with my father in law who started his career as a finance worker for a large corporation in the 1980s and he worked significantly more hours than I have at any of my current or previous jobs. 10+ hours 5 days a week was the expectation, plus an hour commute both ways... hard to say if that generalizes in any meaningful way though.
- 7y ago
SimianLogic2 7y ago
My current job is a 4-day workweek (not the whole company, just me), but it's also not the most interesting job. I've seen other jobs posted that look more interesting in the last year or two (and would likely be for higher pay), but after doing this for almost 2 years I decided that the chill work-life balance is more important than total comp or having "interesting" work.
ausbah 7y ago
"Natalie Nagele, co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, has heard from other leaders who say it didn't work for them. She says it fails when employees aren't motivated and where managers don't trust employees." I would muse that employees usually aren't motivated because they hate their working conditions, usually imposed by shitty managers / company cultures. Managers & companies may complain about "unproductive" or "motivated" employees as if its some personal failing of their employees, but news flash people aren't going to care unless they have a reason to care. If you want employees to enjoy their work and actually be motivated to some degree greater than the bare minimum, give them working conditions that they enjoy. Give them retirement benefits, less working hours, less micromanagement, more pay, remote working options, etc. This is a problem that stems from crappy notions of how work cultures "ought to be" in America, and can only be solved by destroying those notions and getting rid of the idea "productivity above all else" in companies.
- polishdude20 7y ago
  Yeah it's almost as if when you have one hundred people, is everyone lazy? Or are you the one causing the problem?
- globular-toast 7y ago
  Unfortunately some people are just lazy. At my job they introduced 10% time to be used for personal development, but it's been abundantly clear that most employees are simply taking it as holiday.
- nathan_compton 7y ago
  My superficial understanding of capitalism is that the only thing that motivates employees is money. If you want people to be more motivated, give them more money.
KoftaBob 7y ago
As another thing to try, how about making the “standard” workday 9-4 instead of 9-5? This way, it ends up being 3 hours of work, 1 hour of lunch, then another 3 hours of work. It’s more balanced, people get an extra hour in their day to spend on themselves, and it seems that for many people, the extra hour from 4-5 is relatively low productivity compared to the rest of the day anyway.
- icedchai 7y ago
  I think it's already that way in many places. You just have to pretend to work for the other hour or two.
airstrike 7y ago
I've recently come up with a crazy pet theory. If we are indeed living a simulation, maybe this simulation is just to test whether 5-day workweeks make better modern civilizations than 4- or 6-day ones...
gaogao 7y ago
We have No Meeting Wednesdays, which being salaried and having generous work from home policies, is roughly a four-day work week if you want.
anderson7 7y ago
Cockroach Labs (nyc) used to have a 4 day workweek as their version of “20% time”, looks like it’s still in place: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/can-a-4-day-work-week-work/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/can-a-4-day-work-week-wor...
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nbrempel 7y ago
Some shameless self-promotion: I run a job board for jobs like this. https://30hourjobs.com https://30hourjobs.com
duxup 7y ago
I fear this is likely an advantage just a few will have... a lot of folks who are poor with multiple jobs will still have to muddle through.
combatentropy 7y ago
I'm still waiting for someone to do a study of a three-day (24-hour) work week.
- tren 7y ago
  I've been doing this for 3 years now and it works great for me. 3/4 of our company are 4 days or less a week and in the last 5 years we've turned a loss making company into something quite profitable. We generally have one short meeting a week, outside of that we do 1 on 1s when necessary. The rest of the time we can sit down and focus 100%.
namelosw 7y ago
I feel burned out from time to time. Then I found this really works for me: don't spend vacation all at once, instead, spend it on every Wednesday. It's not just one day off, it actually changes the workdays from 5 days to 2 days.
perfunctory 7y ago
In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue. -- Bertrand Russell http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
- jariel 7y ago
  This is a funny kind of bubble quote, by someone I think out of touch with most people. I believe most people would watch TV, play cards, play video games. This is what they already do with their spare time, there's no reason to believe there wouldn't be more of it. It's amazing what a 'schedule' and 'working with others' and 'requirements' and 'deadlines' can do - it brings people to life and is probably the only way hard things get done. For a certain kind of person, some free time would lead to a lot of exploration but for most people it would not.
  - tprice7 7y ago
    "This is what they already do with their spare time, there's no reason to believe there wouldn't be more of it." I can see one reason: the benefit that you get from an activity is a nonlinear function of how much time you invest in it. This is why people tend to specialize in certain domains. If you barely have any time to practice painting for example, maybe it's not worth learning to paint in the first place. Conversely, if you have more free time, it could be worthwhile to find more creative things to do with it. This is especially true if you consider frame-switching overhead. The amount you can get done in 6 hours of some demanding creative activity is probably more than 3 times the amount you could get done in 2 hours. And obviously people would have more long uninterrupted blocks of free time if they had to work less overall. Also, with most schools being the way they are, I think children in general get very little opportunity to pursue their creative impulses; it's always about following the teacher's instructions. Maybe adults would have more curiosity and creativity if these traits weren't snuffed out in their formative years. Finally, even in our current society, being just a lazy consumer in your free time is far from universal, for example: https://www.namm.org/news/press-releases/gallup-organization-reveals-findings-american-atti https://www.namm.org/news/press-releases/gallup-organization...
timwaagh 7y ago
honestly would be pretty bad for singles who just want to hustle and make some money to afford plans later in life. i can see the appeal for families to take some time off, but currently there are enough facilities for dad-days and the like (at least, where i am). yes you need to pay for those, as is only fair. If this becomes law i'd guess the 'solution' for a lot of people would be to take two jobs. suddenly these plans dont look so amazing anymore.
- deadbunny 7y ago
  I don't follow your logic. If you're working 4x8 rather than 5x8 for the same pay (as discussed in the article) you are not losing any money and have another whole day to "hustle".
  - timwaagh 7y ago
    Well, i made a few leaps. I will try to explain. In economics there are no free lunches. That's a pretty basic economic dogma (it might sound extreme to an outsider, but take a 101 class and it's what they will tell you). So you don't really get to have your cake and eat it too. The article's 'proposal' therefore doesn't really make sense. My reaction kind of assumes people already sort of know this, perhaps intuitively. my apologies for not explaining. What pm Medvedev (as mentioned in the article) is proposing is, to me, the only interesting thing to talk about, a reduction of the lawful workweek to 32 hours. Even if he requires (as you propose) the salaries in existing contracts to stay the same countrywide, salaries for new positions will be affected as they can be set by the employer. As for those already employed, well the country is likely to be producing less because of less input (labor productivity being mainly a function of technological progress, ie, it doesnt change in the short term) and thus their trade balance will suffer, because more needs to be imported and less is available for expot. So in the end the rubble will get cheaper to make up for it and the employees get their salary deduction anyways. Whether that is the exact way the price will be paid is not certain, but what is certain is there are no free lunches in economics. Because of the reduction in salary, employees will have reduced spending power. Which is particularly relevant if you are without a partner and/or don't own a house yet. In that case, your best (and only) option to stay competitive might be to take two jobs and work 7 days a week to make up for it. I hope I made my argument more clear now.
habanany 7y ago
I’m willing to work a day less with less pay
bash-j 7y ago
In Australia it's pretty common to be paid for 38 or 36 hours a week and take a RDO (rostered day off) once a month or fortnight depending on what you choose. This plus minimum 4 weeks paid annual leave for full timers, 2 weeks paid sick leave, 13 weeks paid long service leave if you have worked at the same company for 10 years, paid parental leave, carers leave, grievance leave, volunteer leave, etc. If you work casual hours then you usually receive a 17.5% more per hour. Weekends and public holidays usually attract higher wages too.
erikerikson 7y ago
I am using this as a company/boss/role filter and it is fantastic. Some are offended that I think I have any control (literally uncontrolled in their negative response, "how dare you ask that?"). Some seem confused ("but you're supposed to be lying to present an image of the perfect employee, aren't you?"). Others are glad for the request and appreciate my honest straightforwardness and willingness to discard convention to achieve better results. There's been sufficient discussion of this that it no longer counts as innovative but I've always been on the leading edge (sometimes, sadly so) and am obviously willing to take risks. Always remember that interviews are mutual.
abecedarius 7y ago
I used to work 4 days during a contract job with a very long commute. I was made to stop because of a new state law requiring overtime on >8 hours. Thanks, Sacramento.
- aaronchall 7y ago
  I wonder what you'd say to the lawmakers who caused that change...
  - abecedarius 7y ago
    It's pretty small on the scale of other damage. I liked https://equilibriabook.com/ https://equilibriabook.com/ for an interesting recent perspective on this sort of thing, not limited to politics. Still, nobody made them go into that field.
theatraine 7y ago
I never understand these studies. I'm bootstrapping a startup and my work output scales linearly with hours until about 60 hours per week. 60 hours per week is comfortable with 4x12 hour days and then 12 hours over two shorter days. To accomplish errands and the like I just do things before 2pm which is plenty of time. For me personally more time working = more output. What am I missing? I should note that I have no family, no commute, and my gym is in my home so I'm able to save some hours on those things. I could see how in those cases one would have less time for work.
- quietthrow 7y ago
  You are part of the hyperactive onsite mainstream HN crowd.single or married but no other responsibilities (children, aging parents and other such commitments). When you live the other life you will see how work just fills up and an extra day feels like a miracle.
  - genocidicbunny 7y ago
    Exactly this. Once you have other responsibilities or hobbies outside of work, a 12-hour workday will leave you with absolutely no free time. Add in your typical bay area commute time, and you'd hardly have time to sleep.
    - adele11 7y ago
      When I was single, no kids, I couldn't do 60 hours a week. Just not possible for me to keep focusing, keep writing good code.
- incompatible 7y ago
  I'm wondering how many people would take advantage of the 4-day work week to fit in another job in one or more of the off-days. How many people are obsessed with obtaining higher income, far beyond what they need to survive?
- kharak 7y ago
  I wonder what you do. There are plenty of things I could do for 12 hours, coding isn't one of them. Honestly, I'd say that I average about 6 hours a day of coding ability. That's an up to 4 hours before, because I changed a great deal of unhealthy habits.
polyphonicist 7y ago
I have a regular five-day workweek but to be honest, I work productively only 4 days a week. I find it hard to work productively all 5 days. On the day's I am not working productively, I just pretend to look busy to my manager. It would be nice to formalize this working pattern as a four-day workweek. Where can I find such four-day workweek jobs?
foxx-boxx 7y ago
Communist news.
Ericson2314 7y ago
Everyone always asks "why don't well all do this". Well, let me tell you. The system doesn't reward productivity like you imagine it, profit / per time work. It rewards profit / hours. Never mind if working more makes you less productive per the first measure, as long the extra time spent offsets the loss in productivity you will be compelled to do it. Well, almost. If you are willing to be paid less that helps. But how many people are rich enough to be able make that choice? Enough to change the cultural and mores? We need UBI or laws to break that. There is no distributed / individual way to escape the baton of the market here.
ojbyrne 7y ago
I feel like the “bosses” Should work 4 day weeks. The rest of us would get more done on the 5th day than the other 4 combined.
- allset_ 7y ago
  This is the work from home day each week.
toephu2 7y ago
What companies in the Bay Area have a 4-day work week?
stitched2gethr 7y ago
I would love to go to a 32 hour work week, but not for the obvious reason. I would still put in 50 hours but it would give me more of an edge over everyone else. I don't feel like I'm in direct competition with my peers, but I always hold myself to a sometimes unreasonable standard for what I "feel I should be getting done," and I use those around me as a ruler. I always just want to be better, and especially faster, but without losing the clean thought process. For as long as I have been doing things slightly outside my comfort zone, so always, I only get there with more time. Am I totally alone or does this resonate?
adapter 7y ago
Unpopular opinion: It's not 5 days that wear people out but the routines[0]. [0] same commuting, same people, same updates, same stand-ups, same gossiping, same negativity, same office politics
bboygravity 7y ago
These recurring 4-day work week discussions on HN show how non-European this site is. 4-day work weeks have been completely normal for lots of people in Europe for decades. In the Netherlands it's almost the norm to chose whether you want to work 4 or 5 days. 4 day work weeks are not always accepted everywhere, but usually they are in most places. In France the standard work week has been 35 hours for the past 2 decades, which may or may not equate to a 4 day work week depending on how you organize your work days. The Netherlands and France are still alive and kicking. They have plenty of successful businesses. Conclusion: no, 4 day work weeks will not destroy your country, economy, business or lifestyle. The one and only reason to have 5 day or longer work weeks is: greed. IMHO. Having said that IMO a more important factor in time savings would be remote working or not. Assuming a commute of an hour a day to and from work (2 hours total per day, reality for lots of people) you waste 10 hours per week of your life commuting. Unpaid. 5 days a week without commute = -10 unpaid hours spent on work related things (vs with commute) 4 days a week with commute = -2 unpaid hours spent on work related things.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- SnowProblem 7y ago
  > The Netherlands and France are still alive and kicking. They have plenty of successful businesses. Are they? I can't think of a single technology company coming out of either.
  - nmd 7y ago
    Booking.com, TomTom GPS are both from Amsterdam. As is Adyen, the payments provider used Linkedin, Uber, Spotify, Microsoft. Philips is also from the Netherlands.
    - nlitened 7y ago
      Are any of them on 4-day work week?
torgian 7y ago
Four day work week sounds great, but how do you prevent employers from taking advantage of that and saying, "Hey, as an hourly employee working four days a week, we don't have to cover your insurance because reasons". I'm sure there are a lot of loopholes or rules that companies can't wait to exploit to pay people less money or fork over less money overall.
foxx-boxx 7y ago
Only half of population really works. The other half lives of tax money, received from the first half. It’s the last half will claim less work, which is outrageous: they should be thankful they have a job at the first place. Communism is contagious.
hkt 7y ago
I'm just about to start a job where I'll be working 30 hours a week. This is nominally over 4 days, but I'll have the right to do it over three. I haven't been so excited about work in years, and I'm sure it'll be challenging but the rewards - time for hobbies, study, side projects and family - promise to be massive. I was a pretty high earner before and have given up 60% of pay to do this. The premium I place on my time is huge. It'd be lovely to see more companies who understand this and offer the same kind of arrangement.
eatbitseveryday 7y ago
> Also, he did away with open-floor office plans and saw workers spending far less time on social media. While mentioned as an aside late in the article, I wonder how much this contributed to overall productivity. The author may be undervaluing this change in the work environment.
tamaharbor 7y ago
For many professionals, it would just be the same amount of work in less available time.
barbs 7y ago
As a software developer, how do I advocate for a 4-day work week in my current and future workplaces? Can I demand a 4-day work week in my future contracts?
Proven 7y ago
If you need an extra day, do your own shit on Saturdays. Completely ridiculous.
yosito 7y ago
Apart from occasional experiments, I can't imagine this ever catching on as the "norm". Another reason to become a freelancer though. If you're a freelancer, you could alternate between 4 day workweeks and 3 day workweeks, and take a few months off every year.

934 points by hhs 7y ago

BlameKaneda 7y ago

Wonder how hourly employees who work 4-days weeks at 32 hours would feel about this proposal.

izzydata 7y ago
If they increase the hourly pay by 20% then probably quite happy. Edit: 25%.
- rejschaap 7y ago
  25%, I don't think there is any way around that, it seems untenable to have such big difference in rate between employees
- echelon 7y ago
  Conversely, I'd accept lower pay for 4x8. I'm close to financial independence and would rather have my time than more money.
  - clarry 7y ago
    > I'm close to financial independence and would rather have my time than more money. I'm not close, but I'd still take time over money. I need enough money to live healthy and have a bit of fun sometimes. After that, I just need time and energy to actually live my life.
strig 7y ago
They could do 4x 10 hour days instead
- thrower123 7y ago
  I really liked working 4x10 when I was working a blue-collar industrial job over college breaks. It was not union, but it had a similar attitude towards the sacrosanctity of break times, which broke the day up nicely. Clock in at 6:30, spend the first 15-30 minutes going over the plan for the day. Work until 9, then everybody downed tools and took a coffee break. Go back and work until 12:00, clock out for half hour lunch. Go back and work until 3 for another coffee break. Then you'd usually just wind down and pick up until you clocked out at 5. In a lot of ways, working an 8 hour day as a software developer is more stressful, because it's so disordered and interrupt-driven. Meetings are strewn around all over the calendar, wherever they can best fit the constraints of people in disparate locations. Emails or pings come in with problems you've got to handle right away - and it seems to be easier for people to rationalize making you switch tasks rather than finish what you're doing when you have a piece of software in pieces in your IDE than when you have a bulldozer in pieces with the tracks off...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

askafriend 7y ago

I'd really like to do 4x10hrs versus 5x8hrs. I think that'd be a significant improvement for a lot of people.

gordon_freeman 7y ago
I think stuffing 10 hours in a workday will have a diminishing rate of productivity return during the last couple of hours during the workday.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  How about a compromise? 4x9 hours.
  - xboxnolifes 7y ago
    I like 4x9, because a lot of work is already 5x9 if you include mandatory lunch break.
    - anticensor 7y ago
      Mandatory or "mandatory"?
    - SauciestGNU 7y ago
      I have a huge problem with the 5x9 expectation. 9-5 means 9-5 including a lunch. I promise any employer that demanding my presence from 8-5 (or any other 9 hours) will not result in greater productivity, and furthermore will leave me disgruntled. There's only so much development that can be done in a day before I'm in a haze from all the abstract thought, and that productivity asymptote comes well under 8 hours.
      - jinglebells 7y ago
        It's 4 hours for me. Doesn't matter how long the day is, maximum concentration tops out at 4 hours. The rest of the time is just admin work, emails and house keeping.

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago

I did this (4x10) for about a year at a previous company, really enjoyed it. The hardest part was coming back after the 3 day weekend, it always felt like coming back from vacation.

tasogare 7y ago
If were an a 4 day week I would like to have Wednesday free instead of Friday.
- ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
  That or a floating day.
- rabidrat 7y ago
  I thought so too, but it turned out for me that having a 'break' in the middle of the week interrupted my work momentum, and I also never got the luxurious feeling of a 3-day weekend. 4+/3- worked a lot better for me (both work-wise and emotionally) than 2+/1-/2+/2-.

gdubs 7y ago

When the 40 hour workweek was first proposed, doomsayers said it would be the end of the American economy. The opposite happened, and as injuries and illness decreased, productivity increased. [1] Something to keep in mind, as it’s counterintuitive and the instinct is to say, “that can never happen here”, or, “it’ll never work.” 1: Robert Gordon, “The Rise and Fall is American Growth”

mortenjorck 7y ago
I'm genuinely impressed that the Overton window on hours seems to have changed since the last time the 4-day work week was in the headlines. Not that long ago, it was unquestioned that four days meant 4x10. It was simply unthinkable that we would consider less than forty hours "full time." I even skipped this article initially, expecting it to have the same assumptions! And yet, they specifically report that Shake Shack cut back to 32 hours without cutting pay. I would have expected service-sector jobs to be the last to see something like this. And if a burger chain can do it, an office where we spend 40 hours in a combination of productivity and reading HN can absolutely do it.
- wasdfff 7y ago
  Service sector does not want you working 40 hours a week for benefits purposes.
  - piffey 7y ago
    You can never afford those benefits on a service sector job anyways.
    - dv_dt 7y ago
      At a time of coronavirus outbreaks in the news, I have to think that models of propagation should account for national differences like which areas have required vacation & sicktime benefits as well as universal healthcare.
  - xxandroxygen 7y ago

Ididntdothis 7y ago

It seems a lot of these experiments are a success. But after a while somebody gets greedy and thinks “we get good productivity at 32 hours. I wonder how much more we could get at 40 hours?” And soon you are back at the old schedule. Something similar happened at my company. For once a project was ahead of schedule. So instead of thinking that the system worked well and keep working in relaxed manner management decided to “pull in” the deadline and suddenly the project was a death march again. For some people it’s hard to accept that relaxed people are productive. They want to see stress and overtime or they will think that people are underperforming.

toper-centage 7y ago
Is it not also the responsibility of employees to ask for that benefit? Specially developers have that leverage. We have the ability of changing the whole job landscape.
- ahoy 7y ago
  Sounds like labor organizing, and yes, its the best way to ensure you say some say in what your work-life looks like.
  - pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
    The BEST way to ensure what your work-life looks like is to start your own company... not whine to an existing company that has already proven willing to exploit you.
- castlecrasher2 7y ago
  >Is it not also the responsibility of employees to ask for that benefit? I've been on both sides of this equation and yes employees have a responsibility to speak up, but given the dynamic of the relationship it's easy to see why they wouldn't. If managers aren't interested in listening then speaking up can just get you on their bad side.
  - 7y ago

kody 7y ago

I worked 4x10s when I worked for the Army and it was awesome. 3 day weekends take off so much pressure, and come Sunday night I was starting to feel the itch to get back into work rather than the dreadful feeling that I 'wasted' my weekend. The only work experience that was better than this was 100% flexibility to work remotely and/or flex hours. So there's my anecdata for you :)

clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
I worked 9 hour days with every other Friday off and hated it.
- kody 7y ago
  Yeah that sounds way too inconsistent on a weekly basis for me
- sithlord 7y ago
  and still on average > 80 hours every 2 weeks.
  - nrp 7y ago
    The way these typically work (and how I am doing it) is that the first Friday is 8 hours, the second Friday is 0 hours, and all other days are 9 hours. I’ve found it to be extremely useful for the reasons mentioned in the article. It gives everyone a weekday off regularly to get weekday-requiring things done like personal appointments. It also makes it easy to take long weekend trips more often. Both of these are aligned in a way that lets the remaining weekdays more productive, since people have their time off aligned.
  - gpanders 7y ago
    This type of schedule is called a 9/80 and you work 80 hours every 2 work weeks. Your Fridays "on" you work 8 hours instead of 9. And you get every other Friday off. At my company, we have the option between the standard 5x8, the 9/80, and the 4x10 schedules. Surprisingly (at least to me), the 9/80 is by far the most popular (the 4x10 being the 2nd most popular and the standard schedule being the rarest option).

hinkley 7y ago

Many of us work in spaces where servers are expected to be working and running 24/7. Yet our bosses still want every single employee to have butts in seats 9:00 am to 5 pm, 5 days a week and in the same time zone. Sometimes with a little guilt-tripping on the side for taking sick days and vacation. Wouldn't we be better off with several shifts, 4 days a week, covering Monday through Saturday or even the entire week?

wolco 7y ago
Mature places have this with a global workforce. Not so mature places put 9-5ers on call with a tiny bump in pay.
- hawaiianbrah 7y ago
  And the least mature do it without a bump at all!
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Guilt is a hell of a drug.
- greedo 7y ago
  My org has been around for over 150 years, and our IT department expects admins to take a rotating week of oncall. Not only are you expected on call with a 10 minutes response time, but you're expected to do your normal day to day operations/projects. And during normal business hours, a ton of extra stuff gets dumped into the lap of the oncall person, because why not? My boss describes this as everyone's turn in the barrel, and part of working in IT. There's nothing more demoralizing for my coworkers than being on call. Well, maybe having our tickets be the metric we're evaluated by.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    I would argue you’re in a toxic work environment and encourage a change of scenery via interviewing and finding a better employer.

mjayhn 7y ago

I can't begin to explain how much less stress I encounter in day to day life having just one week day to stay home. Just having a day to be able to easily knock out chores between Jira issues; drop the car off at the dealer, sell something on craigslist, complete a house project, go to the dentist, meet the handyman, go to the bank, etc is so nice. All of these things wind up on the back burner when I'm in the middle of high stress projects and forced to sit at a desk for 8-10 hours a day. All that does is lead to more stress because now I'm falling behind on my life tasks and have to burn a weekend catching up when I should be able to spend that weekend de-stressing. I know not everyone is as sapped for energy as I am after work, I hate that I'm this way. But after leaving work and siting in an hour of traffic my energy is just sapped from me by the time I make it home. I have enough energy to feed myself and sometimes work out to maintain my health..

volkk 7y ago
> I know not everyone is as sapped for energy as I am after work, but I leave work and sit in an hour of traffic. My energy is just sapped from me by the time I make it home. I have enough energy to feed myself and sometimes work out to maintain my health.. I know that some people just dont have the privilege of living close to their jobs, but after spending one internship getting up at 5;45am to drive with my dad to work to beat the traffic for 1hr, and then spending 1.5-2 hours driving back in heavy traffic in NYC, I vowed to never ever live in a place where I have to drive that far to get to work. 2 months of that and I was already losing my will to live. My dad did it for 15 years and I can see why towards the last leg of that job, he was bitter and angry on a daily basis. That is not a way to live.
- tombert 7y ago
  I live in NYC, and I have a roughly 1 hour commute each way, but I just take the train everywhere. Of course I can't speak for anyone else, but I find that taking a train to work is a lot less stressful than driving every day. At least on the train, I can read, or pull out my laptop, or just play a video game.
  - 7y ago

sky_rw 7y ago

I encourage everybody to work as little as possible, that way the competition for me is lower.

postsantum 7y ago
Many people optimize for life quality, they are not competing with you

amyjess 7y ago

Going down to a 32-hour workweek would be lovely, but I'm simply not interested in doing 4×10. I'd rather get home at a decent hour than have an extra day off.

echelon 7y ago
To each their own. My work week is spent on work and I can't really enjoy the time before or after work. I'll never enjoy M-F. I'd rather have a 4x10 than a 5x8. If my side hustle ever graduates into a startup and I start hiring other people, we're doing 4x10 or 4x9.
- domingobingo 7y ago
  What's the nature of the side hustle if you don't mind me asking?
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  I wonder whether the benefits decrease when the whole team does 4X10 - I found when I did 4X10 that I was much more productive for the two hours I was alone in the office. Of course, no saying everyone has to work the same 4X10.
- wobblykiwi 7y ago
  Why not try a 4x8?
  - echelon 7y ago
    Maybe so. And it might make it easier to offer as a perk when I can't offer a salary that competes with Google and Facebook.
- TrueGeek 7y ago
  Why not let your employees choose? From what I’ve seen single people love 4x10, people with kids don’t. 2 extra hours a day means my kid can’t possibly make it to practice in time 4 days a week.

OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago

9/80 schedules are common in my industry. We are paid based on 80 hours/2 weeks. Week 1 is 36 hours (4 days x 9 hrs/day) and the Friday is off. Week 2 is 44 hours (4 days x 9 hrs/day, 1 8 hr Friday). There's flexibility around this with management approval. I think most people like this arrangement, especially those with long commutes. A full free day for appointments, errands, or just relaxing can be a big help.

tombert 7y ago

I remember when I interned at Lockheed Martin forever ago, they had a system where you normally work 9-hour days (8 on Fridays), and as a result had every other Friday off. It equated to a 80 hours for every two weeks, and it was really nice if you ever had to go to the bank or DMV (which are typically only open during weekdays). I always wondered why this wasn't more popular.

aetherson 7y ago
Popularly known as the 9-80 schedule. My wife has it, it's really nice to get the Friday off but it makes it rough for her to be at all involved in picking up/dropping off the kids (which is hard even with a normal 8 hour day).
clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
Why is this so common in defense?
- tombert 7y ago
  What? I was just saying that I liked that system, I wasn't trying to engage in any kind of real apologia.
  - jhomedall 7y ago
    I think he meant that as 'why is this so common in the defense industry'.
    - tombert 7y ago
      Oh, upon rereading the comment that makes more sense, that's my dumb fault :) I don't know actually; presumably one defense company started doing it any then the rest just followed.
      - positr0n 7y ago
        It also might be a government thing? 9/80 is common in the few national labs I've worked at or know people in. DoE and DoD labs.

k__ 7y ago

I'm from Germany and none of my friends works 40h anymore. They're all down to 50-80% This is even regulated by the law, your employer has to allow you to reduce your work time, only in some extreme cases they can deny it. Works like a charm.

frockington1 7y ago
I like the idea of working less, but it's going to be hard to use Germany as a poster child. The German economy hasn't been doing to great recently. In my opinion it's largely due to carrying lagging EU economies, but it will be hard to use a struggling economy as a positive indicator Germany: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-growth US: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
- standardUser 7y ago
  The German standard of living is exceptional. Abstract worries about "the economy not doing too well" don't really matter until the standard of living declines in some meaningful way for a lot of people. Owners demand perpetual growth. People demand comfortable lives and occasional vacations. Most achieve that in Germany. There probably isn't a single better "poster child" of a prosperous society with anywhere near the same population.
  - frockington1 7y ago
    I'd rather be an owner in America with perpetual growth. Difference of culture I guess.
    - siquick 7y ago
      That growth only really benefits a tiny minority of the country though. There are far more people in a precarious position in the US than in Germany
- devmunchies 7y ago

Mountain_Skies 7y ago

Some of our hourly employees are on a 4x10 schedule. One wrinkle that has come up is for holidays and vacation days, which are paid at 8 hours each. The 4x10 employees end up being two hours short each paid day off. The company won't change it to ten hours as that is unfair to the 5x8 employees. Maybe if 4x10 became the standard, they would.

jacquesm 7y ago

It's interesting to note that in Europe that 32 hour workweek is fairly standard and nobody would even bat an eye or think this is special in any way. https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/11/working-hours.html https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/11/working-hours.html

fogetti 7y ago
Is it though? I worked in 4 different jobs across 2 different countries and this was unheard of. Not even a single one of my friends do this.
nagyf 7y ago
Source for this? I'm from Europe and I have friends working in 2-3 different countries in Europe, but 32 hour workweek is not standard anywhere. Never even heard of such a thing being standard in Europe.
- zhdc1 7y ago
  Germany and Switzerland, at least. I can't speak for other countries, but at least where I'm at, most folks are on an 80% contract (four days a week) and enjoying it.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  It depends on the country. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, NL, Germany, Switzerland, France. Others probably less so, depending on how well the economy is and general attitude towards workers rights. Eastern Europe much less so, in some cases (Romania, Bulgaria) conditions are still terrible.
  - timwaagh 7y ago
    Lawful workweek in nl is 40 hours I'd wager the others are similar, with perhaps one exception.
    - jacquesm 7y ago

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

I feel like I'd probably be as-effective with a four-day work week. I monitor and respond to issues when I'm at home anyways. But I think it'll still be a while until this becomes substantially more popular. At a previous job I was furloughed one day a week for a while, and it was definitely time I enjoyed having available, I just wasn't fond of the 20% pay cut that went with it.

mikkergp 7y ago

I don't know if I'm pro a 4-day work week, (I'm personally not for it if it's 4x10 instead of 5x8) But I'm reading the book [peak performance](https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Performance-Elevate-Burnout-Science-ebook/dp/B01N1RNP9N/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1582313496&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Performance-Elevate-Burnout-Scie...) (Highly recommended) and I generally think that companies should really encourage those employees to work at a schedule that works best for them (This is obviously harder for shift work where the value comes from having a person in a chair at certain times) We have all these norms about 8 hour days, and 5 day weeks and not sleeping at work, and I think people should be given the freedom to work in the way that works best for them. One norm I'm trying to get used to breaking right now is the norm about "sleeping at work". I would be much more productive if I napped for 15 or so minutes twice a day. I know that when it comes to coding or writing I could get a ton done in a 3-4 1-hour-sessions day if those 3-4 hours were clear, well defined and rested. I could get much more done in "3-4 hours" than an "8 hour day" with meetings and other administrivia thrown in. I'd guess my optimal work week is somewhere around 26 hours, assuming that the space between those 26 hours is spent resting and focusing and getting ready to work hard those 26 hours.

Darkphibre 7y ago
> Nap time adds to productivity Amen to this! I pushed for, and saw implemented, a dual nap room for our studio. It was used around the clock by people stretching, meditating, and napping. I found a huge productivity spike taking out 20 minutes a day. Then, we hired a bunch more people for the upcoming launch, and it was re-purposed into a storage room for old rack hardware (I pushed against this, but was told it was a temporarily unavoidable allocation for the space... meanwhile, the dedicated Lego room sits unused 38 hours a week). So we lost the nap room right as we enter our year of crunch. Boggles the mind. Ah well. Have an interesting read on recent research into the commonality of four (rather than two) chronotypes (which I'd used in laying out my position): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886919303071 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...
- sloppycee 7y ago
  Most children stop napping around four years old. Maybe there's a deeper problem at your job if people need a nap room. Just get more sleep at home, you're not being paid to sleep. btw, a 'dedicated lego room' sounds like another symptom of a toxic infantilizing culture that eats confidence and breeds reliance.

cft 7y ago

Karl Marx saw it as of vital importance to the workers' health, writing in Das Kapital (1867): "By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production...not only produces a deterioration of human labour power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour power itself."

blobbers 7y ago

"Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is backing a parliamentary proposal to shift to a four-day week." -- with all the Russian meddling in the U.S.A., maybe they can get this pushed through! Jokes aside, I would love this. Right now in tech asking for this sort of thing feels like a 'career limiting move', and definitely in a hiring situation could label you as 'not a hard worker' despite your emphasis on efficiency and productive hours.

blackearl 7y ago
If not career limiting, pay limiting. I'd worry that I suddenly get a 20% cut in salary
- philshem 7y ago
  I consider it a 20% bump in time. edit: or is it 25%?!
  - black_puppydog 7y ago
    it's 33%, adding one day to the two of the weekend :)
    - blobbers 7y ago
      That's a 50% increase in time!
  - discordance 7y ago
    If you move from a 2 day weekend to a 3 day weekend it’s a 50% increase in free time.

brozaman 7y ago

In Spain it's somewhat common to do 9 hours Monday to Thursday and only working 4 hours on Friday. Unfortunately I only worked for a company that did this only for one year, but it is the one thing I miss of this company. Personally, I'm reluctant to the 4x10, but doing 4x9 and 1x4 was simply awesome, plus you could get a 3 day weekend by just spending half day of vacation.

jt2190 7y ago

Counter-point, from the article: > Natalie Nagele, co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, has heard from other leaders who say it didn't work for them. She says it fails when employees aren't motivated and where managers don't trust employees. Also it would be good to keep in mind the Hawthorne Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#History

chadlavi 7y ago
> it fails when employees aren't motivated and where managers don't trust employees I'd counter that _anything_ (including the standard 5x8 schedule) will fail in those conditions.

gist 7y ago

'More bosses give 4 day workweek a try'. How weak is that? What does 'more' mean anyway? .001 more? 40% more. Of course there is no answer to that. What about 'more bosses think wearing blue shirts in the office is fine' (Everyone would laugh at that right on the surface right and say 'how many exactly percentage wise'? Unclear why people seem to think there needs to be some kind of 'one size fits all' approach. If a job is such that 32 hours works fine. If it's not fine. And the media saying things like 'a move toward' and 'more companies are' when clearly there is no significant push in this area appears to be just some kind of evergreen story to sell advertising. Media does this frequently. Keys are statements not backed up by anything but anecdotes such as 'and questions are being raised' and so on. That one 'questions are being asked' is literally a nightly occurrence on network news broadcasts (says me using the same technique but it is happening). Guess what? Some people don't mind working 5 days. Some people like working 7 days. Some people would rather sit and not work at all. Everyone is different.

kosii 7y ago

I'm a software engineer, I started working 4 days/32 hours per week about a month ago, and I couldn't be happier :)

perfunctory 7y ago
I started working 4 days/32 hours I think about a decade ago. Never looked back.
- tren 7y ago
  I was 4 days 32 hours for 7 years, now I do 3 days 24 hours. It has allowed me to spend time a lot of time with my boy. Now that he's started school I generally work on side projects in my 2 extra days and do the school pickups. Of course there are days where you don't feel like coding so you can read a book, do chores, go to the beach.
- birdyrooster 7y ago
  I'm going to do that now and fuck what my manager thinks honestly.

notjustanymike 7y ago

I introduced "work from home Wednesday" at our company and the reduction in stress is palpable. Hell, I sleep better on Tuesday nights knowing I've got a day of silence lined up. The naysayers quickly fell in line too, once they realized how much more they could get done that day.

david-gpu 7y ago
Working from home is still working. Working four days a week is entirely different.
bananamerica 7y ago
Why Wednesday though?
- notjustanymike 7y ago
  So that you never have to spend more than 2 days a row in the office. It keeps the stress build up low.
  - bananamerica 7y ago
    I would prefer have a long weekend.
- triceratops 7y ago
  In addition to OP's reply, I guess it also keeps people from turning it into a long weekend if it's not a Monday or Friday.
  - bananamerica 7y ago
    What’s bad about long weekends?

saghul 7y ago

I've been working 32 hour weeks ever since my daughter was born 2 years ago. Mondays are my day off, we go to music classes, walk on the park and just spend time together. On tuesdays I'm "hungry" when I go back to work. I think this is the perfect balance for me and I feel I'm more productive than ever. It may not be for everyone, and it's definitely a privilege, but if you can, I really encourage you to try it out.

minikites 7y ago

Worker productivity has gone way up over the recent decades but wages have stagnated, so why shouldn't we work fewer hours? It's not like the average worker is reaping the benefits of working longer.

ivanhoe 7y ago

I worked 4 days a week on one project that lasted 14 months. It's really great for motivation and productivity. I actually started to enjoy Mondays first time in my life, and I'd be coming to work full of inspiration. The downside is obviously that as a contractor you earn 20% less that way.

annoyingnoob 7y ago

I feel like my best work happens in about 6 hours on most days. Beyond 6 I feel like I'm less motivated/productive, I get things done but it goes a little slower. I've previously done a 9/80 schedule with every other Friday off. The 9 hour days made my personal life harder, harder to meet family obligations like pickup/dropoff. I'm cool with 5 shorter days, I would be happier and probably more productive.

ndespres 7y ago

I met with someone recently who offered 4-day workweek as a benefit, but it wasn't a 32-hour week over 4 days, it was just 4 longer days with the same number of total hours. It would be great to have 1 less commute, a 3 day weekend etc but where are the benefits of these computers that were supposed to save us all time?

lwb 7y ago

Something felt fishy about their claim that number of hours worked has been climbing in the United States so I checked their source. It turns out that "average annual hours worked" has changed from 1,780 in 2011 to 1,786 last year. This seems like barely a rounding error... On the other hand, if you look at the FRED website it shows that average annual hours worked has massively decreased in the last 50 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG 1951, for example, shows 2,030 hours worked on average. That's the equivalent of more than six additional weeks of full time work. I would say that Keynes's prediction that economic growth could get to the point where we would only need to work 15 hours a week (750 hours per year, assuming 2 weeks vacation) is ... trending towards becoming true? At current trends, it will take another ~280 years. (Obviously this is a silly prediction but, an interesting thought experiment.)

chadlavi 7y ago
these numbers are across all industries, right? a 40 hour union job has certain parameters such that the work hours aren't going to shift much without larger political shifts within those orgs. But I suspect the number of hours a non-union knowledge worker works per year has gone up in the same time frame.
- lwb 7y ago
  > these numbers are across all industries, right? I think so. The way these sources gather data is somewhat opaque to me but there's nothing to suggest that it's filtered out by industry. > I suspect the number of hours a non-union knowledge worker works per year has gone up in the same time frame Huh... I don't see that data anywhere on FRED but it would be interesting to know. You can search for yourself here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/searchresults/?st=hours%20worked https://fred.stlouisfed.org/searchresults/?st=hours%20worked Anecdotally, I have swapped stories with my father in law who started his career as a finance worker for a large corporation in the 1980s and he worked significantly more hours than I have at any of my current or previous jobs. 10+ hours 5 days a week was the expectation, plus an hour commute both ways... hard to say if that generalizes in any meaningful way though.
7y ago

SimianLogic2 7y ago

My current job is a 4-day workweek (not the whole company, just me), but it's also not the most interesting job. I've seen other jobs posted that look more interesting in the last year or two (and would likely be for higher pay), but after doing this for almost 2 years I decided that the chill work-life balance is more important than total comp or having "interesting" work.

ausbah 7y ago

"Natalie Nagele, co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, has heard from other leaders who say it didn't work for them. She says it fails when employees aren't motivated and where managers don't trust employees." I would muse that employees usually aren't motivated because they hate their working conditions, usually imposed by shitty managers / company cultures. Managers & companies may complain about "unproductive" or "motivated" employees as if its some personal failing of their employees, but news flash people aren't going to care unless they have a reason to care. If you want employees to enjoy their work and actually be motivated to some degree greater than the bare minimum, give them working conditions that they enjoy. Give them retirement benefits, less working hours, less micromanagement, more pay, remote working options, etc. This is a problem that stems from crappy notions of how work cultures "ought to be" in America, and can only be solved by destroying those notions and getting rid of the idea "productivity above all else" in companies.

polishdude20 7y ago
Yeah it's almost as if when you have one hundred people, is everyone lazy? Or are you the one causing the problem?
globular-toast 7y ago
Unfortunately some people are just lazy. At my job they introduced 10% time to be used for personal development, but it's been abundantly clear that most employees are simply taking it as holiday.
nathan_compton 7y ago
My superficial understanding of capitalism is that the only thing that motivates employees is money. If you want people to be more motivated, give them more money.

KoftaBob 7y ago

As another thing to try, how about making the “standard” workday 9-4 instead of 9-5? This way, it ends up being 3 hours of work, 1 hour of lunch, then another 3 hours of work. It’s more balanced, people get an extra hour in their day to spend on themselves, and it seems that for many people, the extra hour from 4-5 is relatively low productivity compared to the rest of the day anyway.

icedchai 7y ago
I think it's already that way in many places. You just have to pretend to work for the other hour or two.

airstrike 7y ago

I've recently come up with a crazy pet theory. If we are indeed living a simulation, maybe this simulation is just to test whether 5-day workweeks make better modern civilizations than 4- or 6-day ones...

gaogao 7y ago

We have No Meeting Wednesdays, which being salaried and having generous work from home policies, is roughly a four-day work week if you want.

anderson7 7y ago

Cockroach Labs (nyc) used to have a 4 day workweek as their version of “20% time”, looks like it’s still in place: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/can-a-4-day-work-week-work/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/can-a-4-day-work-week-wor...

deleted 7y ago

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nbrempel 7y ago

Some shameless self-promotion: I run a job board for jobs like this. https://30hourjobs.com https://30hourjobs.com

duxup 7y ago

I fear this is likely an advantage just a few will have... a lot of folks who are poor with multiple jobs will still have to muddle through.

combatentropy 7y ago

I'm still waiting for someone to do a study of a three-day (24-hour) work week.

tren 7y ago
I've been doing this for 3 years now and it works great for me. 3/4 of our company are 4 days or less a week and in the last 5 years we've turned a loss making company into something quite profitable. We generally have one short meeting a week, outside of that we do 1 on 1s when necessary. The rest of the time we can sit down and focus 100%.

namelosw 7y ago

I feel burned out from time to time. Then I found this really works for me: don't spend vacation all at once, instead, spend it on every Wednesday. It's not just one day off, it actually changes the workdays from 5 days to 2 days.

perfunctory 7y ago

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue. -- Bertrand Russell http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

jariel 7y ago
This is a funny kind of bubble quote, by someone I think out of touch with most people. I believe most people would watch TV, play cards, play video games. This is what they already do with their spare time, there's no reason to believe there wouldn't be more of it. It's amazing what a 'schedule' and 'working with others' and 'requirements' and 'deadlines' can do - it brings people to life and is probably the only way hard things get done. For a certain kind of person, some free time would lead to a lot of exploration but for most people it would not.
- tprice7 7y ago
  "This is what they already do with their spare time, there's no reason to believe there wouldn't be more of it." I can see one reason: the benefit that you get from an activity is a nonlinear function of how much time you invest in it. This is why people tend to specialize in certain domains. If you barely have any time to practice painting for example, maybe it's not worth learning to paint in the first place. Conversely, if you have more free time, it could be worthwhile to find more creative things to do with it. This is especially true if you consider frame-switching overhead. The amount you can get done in 6 hours of some demanding creative activity is probably more than 3 times the amount you could get done in 2 hours. And obviously people would have more long uninterrupted blocks of free time if they had to work less overall. Also, with most schools being the way they are, I think children in general get very little opportunity to pursue their creative impulses; it's always about following the teacher's instructions. Maybe adults would have more curiosity and creativity if these traits weren't snuffed out in their formative years. Finally, even in our current society, being just a lazy consumer in your free time is far from universal, for example: https://www.namm.org/news/press-releases/gallup-organization-reveals-findings-american-atti https://www.namm.org/news/press-releases/gallup-organization...

timwaagh 7y ago

honestly would be pretty bad for singles who just want to hustle and make some money to afford plans later in life. i can see the appeal for families to take some time off, but currently there are enough facilities for dad-days and the like (at least, where i am). yes you need to pay for those, as is only fair. If this becomes law i'd guess the 'solution' for a lot of people would be to take two jobs. suddenly these plans dont look so amazing anymore.

deadbunny 7y ago
I don't follow your logic. If you're working 4x8 rather than 5x8 for the same pay (as discussed in the article) you are not losing any money and have another whole day to "hustle".
- timwaagh 7y ago
  Well, i made a few leaps. I will try to explain. In economics there are no free lunches. That's a pretty basic economic dogma (it might sound extreme to an outsider, but take a 101 class and it's what they will tell you). So you don't really get to have your cake and eat it too. The article's 'proposal' therefore doesn't really make sense. My reaction kind of assumes people already sort of know this, perhaps intuitively. my apologies for not explaining. What pm Medvedev (as mentioned in the article) is proposing is, to me, the only interesting thing to talk about, a reduction of the lawful workweek to 32 hours. Even if he requires (as you propose) the salaries in existing contracts to stay the same countrywide, salaries for new positions will be affected as they can be set by the employer. As for those already employed, well the country is likely to be producing less because of less input (labor productivity being mainly a function of technological progress, ie, it doesnt change in the short term) and thus their trade balance will suffer, because more needs to be imported and less is available for expot. So in the end the rubble will get cheaper to make up for it and the employees get their salary deduction anyways. Whether that is the exact way the price will be paid is not certain, but what is certain is there are no free lunches in economics. Because of the reduction in salary, employees will have reduced spending power. Which is particularly relevant if you are without a partner and/or don't own a house yet. In that case, your best (and only) option to stay competitive might be to take two jobs and work 7 days a week to make up for it. I hope I made my argument more clear now.

habanany 7y ago

I’m willing to work a day less with less pay

bash-j 7y ago

In Australia it's pretty common to be paid for 38 or 36 hours a week and take a RDO (rostered day off) once a month or fortnight depending on what you choose. This plus minimum 4 weeks paid annual leave for full timers, 2 weeks paid sick leave, 13 weeks paid long service leave if you have worked at the same company for 10 years, paid parental leave, carers leave, grievance leave, volunteer leave, etc. If you work casual hours then you usually receive a 17.5% more per hour. Weekends and public holidays usually attract higher wages too.

erikerikson 7y ago

I am using this as a company/boss/role filter and it is fantastic. Some are offended that I think I have any control (literally uncontrolled in their negative response, "how dare you ask that?"). Some seem confused ("but you're supposed to be lying to present an image of the perfect employee, aren't you?"). Others are glad for the request and appreciate my honest straightforwardness and willingness to discard convention to achieve better results. There's been sufficient discussion of this that it no longer counts as innovative but I've always been on the leading edge (sometimes, sadly so) and am obviously willing to take risks. Always remember that interviews are mutual.

abecedarius 7y ago

I used to work 4 days during a contract job with a very long commute. I was made to stop because of a new state law requiring overtime on >8 hours. Thanks, Sacramento.

aaronchall 7y ago
I wonder what you'd say to the lawmakers who caused that change...
- abecedarius 7y ago
  It's pretty small on the scale of other damage. I liked https://equilibriabook.com/ https://equilibriabook.com/ for an interesting recent perspective on this sort of thing, not limited to politics. Still, nobody made them go into that field.

theatraine 7y ago

I never understand these studies. I'm bootstrapping a startup and my work output scales linearly with hours until about 60 hours per week. 60 hours per week is comfortable with 4x12 hour days and then 12 hours over two shorter days. To accomplish errands and the like I just do things before 2pm which is plenty of time. For me personally more time working = more output. What am I missing? I should note that I have no family, no commute, and my gym is in my home so I'm able to save some hours on those things. I could see how in those cases one would have less time for work.

quietthrow 7y ago
You are part of the hyperactive onsite mainstream HN crowd.single or married but no other responsibilities (children, aging parents and other such commitments). When you live the other life you will see how work just fills up and an extra day feels like a miracle.
- genocidicbunny 7y ago
  Exactly this. Once you have other responsibilities or hobbies outside of work, a 12-hour workday will leave you with absolutely no free time. Add in your typical bay area commute time, and you'd hardly have time to sleep.
  - adele11 7y ago
    When I was single, no kids, I couldn't do 60 hours a week. Just not possible for me to keep focusing, keep writing good code.
incompatible 7y ago
I'm wondering how many people would take advantage of the 4-day work week to fit in another job in one or more of the off-days. How many people are obsessed with obtaining higher income, far beyond what they need to survive?
kharak 7y ago
I wonder what you do. There are plenty of things I could do for 12 hours, coding isn't one of them. Honestly, I'd say that I average about 6 hours a day of coding ability. That's an up to 4 hours before, because I changed a great deal of unhealthy habits.

polyphonicist 7y ago

I have a regular five-day workweek but to be honest, I work productively only 4 days a week. I find it hard to work productively all 5 days. On the day's I am not working productively, I just pretend to look busy to my manager. It would be nice to formalize this working pattern as a four-day workweek. Where can I find such four-day workweek jobs?

foxx-boxx 7y ago

Communist news.

Ericson2314 7y ago

Everyone always asks "why don't well all do this". Well, let me tell you. The system doesn't reward productivity like you imagine it, profit / per time work. It rewards profit / hours. Never mind if working more makes you less productive per the first measure, as long the extra time spent offsets the loss in productivity you will be compelled to do it. Well, almost. If you are willing to be paid less that helps. But how many people are rich enough to be able make that choice? Enough to change the cultural and mores? We need UBI or laws to break that. There is no distributed / individual way to escape the baton of the market here.

ojbyrne 7y ago

I feel like the “bosses” Should work 4 day weeks. The rest of us would get more done on the 5th day than the other 4 combined.

allset_ 7y ago
This is the work from home day each week.

toephu2 7y ago

What companies in the Bay Area have a 4-day work week?

stitched2gethr 7y ago

I would love to go to a 32 hour work week, but not for the obvious reason. I would still put in 50 hours but it would give me more of an edge over everyone else. I don't feel like I'm in direct competition with my peers, but I always hold myself to a sometimes unreasonable standard for what I "feel I should be getting done," and I use those around me as a ruler. I always just want to be better, and especially faster, but without losing the clean thought process. For as long as I have been doing things slightly outside my comfort zone, so always, I only get there with more time. Am I totally alone or does this resonate?

adapter 7y ago

Unpopular opinion: It's not 5 days that wear people out but the routines[0]. [0] same commuting, same people, same updates, same stand-ups, same gossiping, same negativity, same office politics

bboygravity 7y ago

These recurring 4-day work week discussions on HN show how non-European this site is. 4-day work weeks have been completely normal for lots of people in Europe for decades. In the Netherlands it's almost the norm to chose whether you want to work 4 or 5 days. 4 day work weeks are not always accepted everywhere, but usually they are in most places. In France the standard work week has been 35 hours for the past 2 decades, which may or may not equate to a 4 day work week depending on how you organize your work days. The Netherlands and France are still alive and kicking. They have plenty of successful businesses. Conclusion: no, 4 day work weeks will not destroy your country, economy, business or lifestyle. The one and only reason to have 5 day or longer work weeks is: greed. IMHO. Having said that IMO a more important factor in time savings would be remote working or not. Assuming a commute of an hour a day to and from work (2 hours total per day, reality for lots of people) you waste 10 hours per week of your life commuting. Unpaid. 5 days a week without commute = -10 unpaid hours spent on work related things (vs with commute) 4 days a week with commute = -2 unpaid hours spent on work related things.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
SnowProblem 7y ago
> The Netherlands and France are still alive and kicking. They have plenty of successful businesses. Are they? I can't think of a single technology company coming out of either.
- nmd 7y ago
  Booking.com, TomTom GPS are both from Amsterdam. As is Adyen, the payments provider used Linkedin, Uber, Spotify, Microsoft. Philips is also from the Netherlands.
  - nlitened 7y ago
    Are any of them on 4-day work week?

torgian 7y ago

Four day work week sounds great, but how do you prevent employers from taking advantage of that and saying, "Hey, as an hourly employee working four days a week, we don't have to cover your insurance because reasons". I'm sure there are a lot of loopholes or rules that companies can't wait to exploit to pay people less money or fork over less money overall.

foxx-boxx 7y ago

Only half of population really works. The other half lives of tax money, received from the first half. It’s the last half will claim less work, which is outrageous: they should be thankful they have a job at the first place. Communism is contagious.

hkt 7y ago

I'm just about to start a job where I'll be working 30 hours a week. This is nominally over 4 days, but I'll have the right to do it over three. I haven't been so excited about work in years, and I'm sure it'll be challenging but the rewards - time for hobbies, study, side projects and family - promise to be massive. I was a pretty high earner before and have given up 60% of pay to do this. The premium I place on my time is huge. It'd be lovely to see more companies who understand this and offer the same kind of arrangement.

eatbitseveryday 7y ago

> Also, he did away with open-floor office plans and saw workers spending far less time on social media. While mentioned as an aside late in the article, I wonder how much this contributed to overall productivity. The author may be undervaluing this change in the work environment.

tamaharbor 7y ago

For many professionals, it would just be the same amount of work in less available time.

barbs 7y ago

As a software developer, how do I advocate for a 4-day work week in my current and future workplaces? Can I demand a 4-day work week in my future contracts?

Proven 7y ago

If you need an extra day, do your own shit on Saturdays. Completely ridiculous.

yosito 7y ago

Apart from occasional experiments, I can't imagine this ever catching on as the "norm". Another reason to become a freelancer though. If you're a freelancer, you could alternate between 4 day workweeks and 3 day workweeks, and take a few months off every year.