4 ms·

I just asked my manager for a 24 hr work week (3 days on, 4 days off), and they said sure, and the company prorated my salary down. The company I was working f

by liamuk 6y ago

I just asked my manager for a 24 hr work week (3 days on, 4 days off), and they said sure, and the company prorated my salary down. The company I was working for came out of a university research lab, and so had a culture of PhD students working part time for it, so this was not outside the norm there. The downside was not getting equity, nor benefits, but I was on my parent's insurance and wasn't too keen on their equity anyway, so this was fine for me.

liamuk 6y ago
The other path here might be working somewhere with a culture of fixed goals rather than a time expectation. For example, many remote companies that operate asynchronously won't expect you to be in the office 40hrs a week, but will expect a certain level of work to be done each week. If you can get that done in 24 rather than 40, then it works out fine for you.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  This is why I love remote work. Studies [0] show that most office workers work only 2.5 hours a day on average, with the rest being socializing, procrastinating, surfing the web, and so on. If I can get my work done in 4 hours a day, I'll have done more work and have more free time, since managers in an office expect you to be there for 8 hours a day, but not so for remote. [0] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...
  - jazz_from_hell 6y ago
    Do you work remotely now? If so may I ask how many hours of work you put down on average? (If you rather not share that I totally understand.)
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      Yeah with coronavirus and all, but I did before as well. Generally it's about 2 hours a day, but I work intensely in those hours. I never go over 4, as a general principle. Again, this isn't really comparable to office hours, as most people don't work non-stop (with short breaks of course) or as intensely, so I do finish much faster than my other in person and colleagues.
      - jazz_from_hell 6y ago
        Interesting! I’m curious if this is a silent agreement with your boss or if it’s explicit?
        cercatrova 6y ago
        As long as the work gets done, at my company, no one cares how many hours you work.
        jazz_from_hell 6y ago
        Cool! How does one find such a great employer? ;-)
        cercatrova 6y ago
        You can search remote job boards like RemoteOK.
        rabidrat 6y ago
        Every software job I've ever had, has an infinite amount of work that could be done. So somehow I have to justify the amount of work I've gotten done, which is usually less than the amount they 'want' done (which is all of it), and the justification is usually "couldn't spend any more hours on it, literally".
  - ashr 6y ago
    I don't believe 2.5 hours is representative, so please cite these studies. Personally,senior engineers (individual contributors) that I have worked with spend 4-6 hours per day making significant contributions on their own and the other 4-2 hours working/coordinating with their team and sister teams. The only plausible scenario where one can do an acceptable job in 2.5 hours per day is where a senior person is doing the job of an entry level person. For people managers, having effective 2-4 hour days on an ongoing basis are very unlikely in my experience. I am open to be surprised with examples that prove otherwise.
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      Here is the study I read it from, there might be others. In my experience, yes, it doesn't work for managers, only those who are individual contributors doing programming full time. I doubt however that even the senior managers are coding the entire time for 4 to 6 hours, it is difficult to do so every single day. More likely, you perceive them to be doing that much work since they are present during that time, which is the same reaction I get as well; colleagues and bosses speak of how much work I get done compared to others, yet they don't realize I work a lot fewer hours. It's all about efficiency. https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...
      - yoloswagins 6y ago
        A specific note about this quote: > However, this eight-hour movement didn't become standard until nearly a century later, when, in 1914, Ford Motor Company astonished everyone by cutting daily hours down to eight while simultaneously doubling wages. The result? Increased productivity. What happened was the shift from craftsmen at a workbench to a deskilled assembly line had significant turnover. The cost of training and retention was high enough that Ford instituted the lower working hours and higher wages. From one of Ford's biographers: “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.” You see this in shipyards during the war war 2 years where once the initial pool of workers is burned out, you need to raise wages to bring in more workers.
  - jazz_from_hell 6y ago
    To my ears, 2.5 hours sounds a bit low. But yes, actually productive hours can sometimes be way lower than the wall time.
- jazz_from_hell 6y ago
  Interesting. Seems like it also could backfire…? If what is expected to get done needs 40 h.
  - quickthrower2 6y ago
    It also goes against the essence of many companies that want to grow and to do so make everyone more productive. So you want to cash in that productivity but so do they!
jazz_from_hell 6y ago
Cool! Had you been working there for long before suggesting that?

by liamuk 6y ago

liamuk 6y ago

The other path here might be working somewhere with a culture of fixed goals rather than a time expectation. For example, many remote companies that operate asynchronously won't expect you to be in the office 40hrs a week, but will expect a certain level of work to be done each week. If you can get that done in 24 rather than 40, then it works out fine for you.

cercatrova 6y ago
This is why I love remote work. Studies [0] show that most office workers work only 2.5 hours a day on average, with the rest being socializing, procrastinating, surfing the web, and so on. If I can get my work done in 4 hours a day, I'll have done more work and have more free time, since managers in an office expect you to be there for 8 hours a day, but not so for remote. [0] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...
- jazz_from_hell 6y ago
  Do you work remotely now? If so may I ask how many hours of work you put down on average? (If you rather not share that I totally understand.)
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    Yeah with coronavirus and all, but I did before as well. Generally it's about 2 hours a day, but I work intensely in those hours. I never go over 4, as a general principle. Again, this isn't really comparable to office hours, as most people don't work non-stop (with short breaks of course) or as intensely, so I do finish much faster than my other in person and colleagues.
    - jazz_from_hell 6y ago
      Interesting! I’m curious if this is a silent agreement with your boss or if it’s explicit?
      - cercatrova 6y ago
        As long as the work gets done, at my company, no one cares how many hours you work.
        jazz_from_hell 6y ago
        Cool! How does one find such a great employer? ;-)
        cercatrova 6y ago
        You can search remote job boards like RemoteOK.
        rabidrat 6y ago
        Every software job I've ever had, has an infinite amount of work that could be done. So somehow I have to justify the amount of work I've gotten done, which is usually less than the amount they 'want' done (which is all of it), and the justification is usually "couldn't spend any more hours on it, literally".
- ashr 6y ago
  I don't believe 2.5 hours is representative, so please cite these studies. Personally,senior engineers (individual contributors) that I have worked with spend 4-6 hours per day making significant contributions on their own and the other 4-2 hours working/coordinating with their team and sister teams. The only plausible scenario where one can do an acceptable job in 2.5 hours per day is where a senior person is doing the job of an entry level person. For people managers, having effective 2-4 hour days on an ongoing basis are very unlikely in my experience. I am open to be surprised with examples that prove otherwise.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    Here is the study I read it from, there might be others. In my experience, yes, it doesn't work for managers, only those who are individual contributors doing programming full time. I doubt however that even the senior managers are coding the entire time for 4 to 6 hours, it is difficult to do so every single day. More likely, you perceive them to be doing that much work since they are present during that time, which is the same reaction I get as well; colleagues and bosses speak of how much work I get done compared to others, yet they don't realize I work a lot fewer hours. It's all about efficiency. https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...
    - yoloswagins 6y ago
      A specific note about this quote: > However, this eight-hour movement didn't become standard until nearly a century later, when, in 1914, Ford Motor Company astonished everyone by cutting daily hours down to eight while simultaneously doubling wages. The result? Increased productivity. What happened was the shift from craftsmen at a workbench to a deskilled assembly line had significant turnover. The cost of training and retention was high enough that Ford instituted the lower working hours and higher wages. From one of Ford's biographers: “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.” You see this in shipyards during the war war 2 years where once the initial pool of workers is burned out, you need to raise wages to bring in more workers.
- jazz_from_hell 6y ago
  To my ears, 2.5 hours sounds a bit low. But yes, actually productive hours can sometimes be way lower than the wall time.
jazz_from_hell 6y ago
Interesting. Seems like it also could backfire…? If what is expected to get done needs 40 h.
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  It also goes against the essence of many companies that want to grow and to do so make everyone more productive. So you want to cash in that productivity but so do they!

jazz_from_hell 6y ago

Cool! Had you been working there for long before suggesting that?