13 ms·

I switched to a 4-day working week a few years back, taking a 20% pay cut in the process - and I haven't looked back! There has been no drop in productivity -

• anoncow 6y ago
  More details, if possible please. Is this a company that we know? Thank you for sharing.
  • GordonS 6y ago
    You know the name, yes. I'm using a pseudoname, but I'd still rather not say which company exactly. I can narrow it down to a handful of Indian outsourcing companies though (I'm British, working out of the UK tho), since I've talked about them all in the past. It's a megacorp (100s of thousands of employees) known for outsourcing. It calls itself a USA company (but it's not; it's mainly based in India).
    • saimiam 6y ago
      See Tea Ess Aitch?
      • GordonS 6y ago
        Definitely maybe, but I won't be drawn further, especially since I just made another comment elsewhere in this thread about how much I hate the company :D From my other post, you should easily be able to narrow it down to about 5 (which includes the horrible company you mentioned), and TBH, they are all about equally horrible.
• sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Super inspiring to hear that someone, somewhere has pulled this off. Cheers!
  • yodsanklai 6y ago
    Is it that rare? I thought that it was pretty common in Europe.
    • treve 6y ago
      In the Netherlands (where I'm from) I know loads of people on 4 day workweeks. It's often an option, and there's very few drawbacks for employee and employer. The 20% paycut is pre-tax, so the real cut is a lot lower. It also lets employers hire a 5th person for every 4 80%s, so total productivity is likely higher due to people being happier, and there's more jobs total. It's hard for me to imagine why tech companies wouldn't want to offer this to all their employees.
    • WJW 6y ago
      Over here in the Netherlands there is a law that makes it compulsory for the employer to agree to this kind of request, unless they can prove it is impossible to keep the business going otherwise (ie, "but we'd have to hire more people" is not a valid reason). There are a few minor restrictions like having had a permanent contract for at least six (I think) months, but otherwise any employee can request this.
    • balfirevic 6y ago
      Europe is big and varied. Where I live (Croatia) I only know of one person who did it and it was only because he practically already accepted another job offer and the current company said "Alright, what can we do to keep you?" (and the salary scaled accordingly). I'm sure there are other similar cases, but overall it's pretty rare here.
    • GordonS 6y ago
      I'm in the UK, and have yet to come across anyone else doing it, though several of my European colleagues seem to be. In the EU, employers have to, by law, consider reasonable requests for flexible working. If you work for a large company, that should mean most will have the option.
• MHordecki 6y ago
  > There has been no drop in productivity. As in, your output is the same as with a 5 day work week? So essentially a 20% pay cut per unit of work performed?
  • Closi 6y ago
    Out of interest, do you have permanent employment and get paid based on unit of work performed?
    • foobiekr 6y ago
      Realistically, all full time employees are paid per work unit. Those who don't deliver the required work units in that time period are eventually managed out.
      • Closi 6y ago
        And those who deliver more work units are paid more, exactly in line with the number of work units performed?
  • GordonS 6y ago
    Well, I work 7.5h per day, so if one "unit" is 1 hour, yes.
    • 0xffff2 6y ago
      One unit of work independent of time taken. When you say "no drop in productivity", do you mean you do the same amount of work in 4 days now instead of 5, or that you do 80% of the work you used to do?
      • GordonS 6y ago
        I mean I get the same amount of work done in 4 days that I used to get done in 5. Perhaps Parkinson's law in action: 'work expands to fill available time'.
• dpc_pw 6y ago
  Done that myself in the past. Can recommend. 20% cut, but feels like 50/50 weekend to workweek ratio indeed.
  • kelnos 6y ago
    Another poster made this point, but I think this explains the different feel: you've dropped your working days by only 20%, but you've increased your free days by 50%. Even though it's still 4-work/3-off, it feels like a lot more.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• tristanperry 6y ago
  This had always been my goal too. 20% less pay for 50% more leisure time each week = winning.
  • yodsanklai 6y ago
    For me, 20% less pay = 100% less saving at the end of the month.
    • pmg102 6y ago
      Rather than keeping all your other expenditures the same and reducing your savings outgoings by 100% each month, what about reducing all your expenditures by 20%? Unless your income and outgoings have been fixed at their exact current levels for your whole life, there's nothing magical about their current values and they could change?
      • eyelidlessness 6y ago
        Having 50% more free time and ~45% (20% of each 2 day weekend and none allocated to the additional weekend day) reduced financial means to enjoy it sounds like a pretty bad tradeoff.
    • rightbyte 6y ago
      With another day at hand you can paint your garage door on our own etc. I find the costs quite elastic in that sense given the work load.
      • ACow_Adonis 6y ago
        ok, but then your free time isn't +50% because you're spending that extra day on labour to now compensate for the lost savings. Don't get me wrong, both myself and my wife are both working 4 day weeks after the birth of our son (culturally, that certainly helps the discussion), and that extra flexibility let's you choose the option that's best for you, but there is an opportunity costs trade off between them all...
• yodsanklai 6y ago
  > taking a 20% pay cut in the process It's something I could do, but I always think that as long as I'm able to earn that money, better get it as we don't know what tomorrow will be made of.
  • GordonS 6y ago
    I have a young family, and your priorities change after that. Still though, as a software engineer without a family and with money as high priority, you'd have a whole extra day per week to spend on side projects...
    • foobarian 6y ago
      Makes me wonder, with all the Covid WFH if people work more than one full-time job...
  • giantg2 6y ago
    I agree and have heard similar comments from older relatives. Make it while you can, because maybe one day you won't have that opportunity.
    • julianlam 6y ago
      You also hear the reverse, that you should enjoy life while you can, because maybe one day you won't be able to anymore (that is, getting old). What it boils down to is: do things (work & play) while you're young. Spinning in place is the only real waste of time.
      • giantg2 6y ago
        Yeah, they also recommend living life. I think the work thing kind of came up more/first just because one typically needs money to go do enjoyable stuff. I spin in place.
• SkyPuncher 6y ago
  I had a 32-hour/week contract position for a while. I'm pretty sure I was within a rounding error of productivity for full time. The biggest thing about working fewer hours was I could shift my days around to optimize for tasks. When I sat down to write code, I was in the zone to write code.
  • tunesmith 6y ago
    I think some of this is because other people are working on your day off. Like if you're awaiting feedback (or code review), you find yourself aiming to enable all those people you're waiting on to do that stuff on your day off. If they also worked 4 days a week, I bet productivity would fall.
• Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
  I know trying to measure productivity is controversial and prone to issues but I wish there was an accepted way to measure it. At least then we'd be able to ask for a 4-day week and promise the same productivity. I know I've spent half a day messing around before and then smashed out a piece of work in a few hours and still had the impression of being productive. Simply because the majority of employees aren't as productive as me. Being a very productive and capable developer will open lots of opportunities but some of us don't want to climb the ladder. I just want a comfortable job and be good at it. I'd never take a pay cut though. If you kept the same productivity at a lower pay then you're effectively saying they overpaid you before. 20% less pay is 20% less work in my eyes.
  • rightbyte 6y ago
    For most kind of boring programming tasks I can't do more than 3h a day. Maybe that would go to 4h with a 4 day week? It was first when Covid19 WFH hit I realized how few hour a day I actually "work". It was hidden by meetings and discussions at the office I guess.
    • gambiting 6y ago
      Right, but those meetings and discussions are part of work as well. It's not just coding that counts.
      • rightbyte 6y ago
        Sure I didn't mean that they are not part of my duties but that they hid my "bad" endurance at coding. Regarding meetings maybe half the time in meetings is of no use for me and I am of no use for the others at the meeting but I still need to be there is the topic changes. The single biggest productivity improvement in WFH is that I can just work during uninteresting parts of meetings without being rude.
  • yrimaxi 6y ago
    del
• rvanmil 6y ago
  I’m guessing you’re in EU somewhere? If so you should probably mention that, because very normal and humane things like these (and others like healthcare, 25+ paid holidays, unemployment policies, maternity/paternity leave, etc.) are unimaginable for our HN fellows from the US ;) edit: I’m teasing ofcourse forgive me :) But like I mention in another comment, you have to agree employment in the US is generally very different from the EU with regard to working hours etc.
  • cmdshiftf4 6y ago
    >humane things like these ... are unimaginable for our HN fellows from the US ;) What are you doing about it?
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    All my 4-day-workweek jobs have been in the US. Usually all you have to do is ask.
    • rvanmil 6y ago
      Interesting, that is very different from the things one commonly reads about US working conditions.
      • StavrosK 6y ago
        I don't think employers would mind "20% less pay for 20% less work" much, but then again I've always had a contracting working relationship due to the fact that I don't live in the US. It might be more complicated if you're an employee.
      • violetgarden 6y ago
        I worked 4 days a week for 10 hours a day for a while. It was really nice. We’d often end up working late anyways, so even though the days were long it still felt normal, but then you also got a three day weekend every week. One of us would take Friday off and the other would take Monday off.
• simmons 6y ago
  I think working less than 100% time, even as low as 50% time, is sort of a holy grail for software engineers, and can be well worth the reduction in pay. Any of your extra time you choose to spend on education will pay dividends in the future. I've managed to pull this off on occasion. I'm a freelancer and not an employee, so you'd think it would be easy to negotiate such. However, I keep running into the same issue: few people need just a little software engineering. If someone needs some software engineering, they usually need a lot of it. Several times, I've been hired by customers with the promise of "we just need 10 hours a week", but somehow get talked into working full time pretty quickly.
• StavrosK 6y ago
  100% seconded. I was expecting 4-day workweeks to be 20% better, but no, they're massively better. The weekend just drags on for ever and the workweek is over before you know it. Highly recommended.
  • toast0 6y ago
    I had to use up a bunch of PTO and I took every wednesday off for several months. It was nice because wednesday is a great day to get anything that needs business hours done. Almost everywhere is open and not too busy like fridays usually are and mondays sometimes are. And it means the workweek is only two days (but there's twice as many of them)
• bitcurious 6y ago
  >I have an extra day for family and side projects - 1 day might not sound like much, but having that extra day off feels like my work/life balance is so much better! That's because you increase your free days by 50% by cutting your work days by 20%. It's not a symmetric exchange. I did the same over the summer (just by using my excess vacation days) and it was a revelation. Highly recommend, especially now that it's so hard to travel.
  • whichdan 6y ago
    I've never thought of contextualizing 4-day work weeks that way; that's a great point.
  • ghaff 6y ago
    I'm actually going to be working mostly 3 day weeks until mid-March (at which point I would otherwise lose my vacation). I kept holding onto it until there seemed like a good time to take it and that time never came.
  • kelnos 6y ago
    I never thought about it that way. A few months into COVID, I started taking every other Friday off, and it's felt like a huge increase in free time. Using your metric, I've cut my work days by 10% but increased my free days by 25%, which definitely helps quantify the larger difference.
  • BeetleB 6y ago
    Indeed. I realized some years ago that when trying to figure out how much my time is worth to scale everything with respect to the amount of discretionary free time I will have. If a new job will cut that free time by half then I expect double the pay. And then I realized there are second order effects. Double my pay actually means much more than double my savings per year as my costs are more or less fixed. So then I changed the formula to scale with respect to the amount I am saving versus the discretionary free time. Maybe a 30% raise would actually double my savings. And by discretionary free time I am subtracting time spent doing chores. I live very close to work and even getting a job that requires a 1 hour commute each way makes a huge difference in my discretionary free time and should be compensated accordingly. And then I took it one step further. I decided to take an Excel sheet and map out all the discretionary free time I think I will have for the rest of my life. And then I evaluated job offers based on which one will maximize that free time. So maybe cutting short free time right now is okay if it is more than compensated by having me retire a lot earlier. Of course then you may want to factor that free time while young is perhaps worth more than free time when your body is not that healthy. And of course you may not live long enough to retire and you do want to take that into account as well and not put all your joy off towards the end. It's a bit of a rabbit hole.
• gazelleeatslion 6y ago
  So true. I floated this idea before: Why as people do we not just add an extra day to the week between Saturday and Sunday? Who cares about official calendar? Make all months 4 days longer. All work weeks still 5 days. All monthly : 30 day contracts stay the same. People who need cash or work hard can use the extra day to get ahead. 3 day weekend society - I would vote for it.
  • warent 6y ago
    I think changing the calendar is much, much more complicated than making the work week 4 days long. There's countless systems that depend on the current calendar. It would be a herculean undertaking
    • gazelleeatslion 6y ago
      Eh. I disagree there could just be two running in parallel for a bit or even forever: original and modern. 3 day weekend society
      • bumby 6y ago
        Kinda like using a Gregorian and Julian calendar simultaneously? It can cause issues
    • giantg2 6y ago
      This. And you won't have a consistent tracking mechanism anymore. You would have a month shift every decade. As a child the season in January might be winter, but as an older person it might be summer. The laws, customs, etc would need a drastic overhaul.
      • gazelleeatslion 6y ago
        All those things you are flagging just don’t really seem that important versus having a 3 Day Weekend Society - Seasons shift, who cares... - Law overhaul (this is the ask, make it the law...) - Consistent tracking mechanism (we aren’t throwing anything out)
• hkt 6y ago
  I nearly joined the UK's civil service on the same basis but couldn't deal with the problems caused by the 20% pay cut.
• jahewson 6y ago
  > There has been no drop in productivity That means there’s been a 20% increase in productivity! So you’re now underpaid by 20%.
  • GordonS 6y ago
    Technically, yes :) Of course, my employer would never see it that way. If I worked for a smaller company with reasonable people (e.g. nobody screaming "comply or face disciplinary action!" in daily emails), then I'm sure I would have some leverage, either before or after cutting my hours. As it stands however, I work for a megacorp that offers nice projects to work on, but with a "system" that's like a dystopian nightmare, and a rulebook and HR staff that exist to waste your time, use you up and spit you out.
  • undreren 6y ago
    Technically, if they work 20% less with the same output, productivity has increased by 25%, not 20%. They are underpaid by 25%. It's weird that owners are paid proportional to aggregate productivity (units produced and sold), but those delivering the results are most often paid proportional to costs (hours worked). I get why the system is this way, but it's not a "good" system in my opinion.
  • vlasev 6y ago
    If you're looking at the money, yes. But how much is the potential happiness and stress reduction worth? 5%? 10%? 20%?
• blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  For me, working from home these past 7 years has added this same kind of balance to my life. Chores and errands became easier to fit in, exercise at noon literally is a matter of stepping outside to bike, run, or hit the gym. It saves 10+ hours a week of travel, less stress and expense of commuting, and did I mention I don't need to shower until after my noontime workout? Granted, at times I'm on the job until late at night, to get things done and, sometimes, to make up for an extra long shopping excursion etc. A 4 day on-site job would feel severely disadvantageous by comparison.
  • GordonS 6y ago
    Oh, I totally agree! Yet another thing I should probably have mentioned, is that I work mostly from home (completely now, of course!). Not having to waste time commuting is fabulous, and in my case all my colleagues work in other countries. We do have a small office nearby, and I choose to go in once every 2 weeks or so, just for a change of scenery and a wee bit of socialising.
• foobiekr 6y ago
  A parallel experiment would have been to do the same informally - just work four days a week and "work" from home one day a week refusing to take meetings/oncall on that day - and see if anyone really noticed. The megacorp I have spent large amounts of time at actually seems to have a significant population of people with this informal arrangement with mixed opinion on the part of their management mostly based on how close they are to a realist position.
  • domano 6y ago
    This sounds like a good way to get fired
    • unethical_ban 6y ago
      They didn't say "don't work" - which believe me, plenty of people especially in COVID have gotten away with - they said "Don't take calls". And like the parent, my department has a similar take on it. The majority of the team avoids meetings and calls if their role at all allows it.
    • gabereiser 6y ago
      It has to be supported by the culture. If your culture is one where you must be in the office at all times this wouldn’t fly. When I managed large teams I allowed this on a few conditions. 1) Work/Delivery can’t suffer. No decrease in velocity because of some work/life balance. This is easily measured and padded with a +\- 5%. 2) Accountable. If you have things you are accountable for and they aren’t done yet, better get that homework done. 3) If your an engineer, we pay you to think, not to sit in a chair. The “office” benefits are communication, collaboration, and contemplation. If you can achieve that with cohesion with the team then +1 I’m all for it! The ‘70s white collar management style doesn’t really work well for productivity in 2020. It makes unhappy employees which makes people leave. If you enjoy interviewing people by all means, continue that oppression. If you value your employees and their innovation they bring to your company (or your department, or team) then you should practice servant leadership and remove any blockers from them being able to bring their best work to the table.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  where under EU law Though you're not really under EU law anymore, has the UK resolved these sorts of issues, i.e., EU law will apply unless/until changed by Parliament?
  • GordonS 6y ago
    Honestly, not sure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ One of the reasons I wanted to remain in the EU was because of things like people-friendly labour laws - I trust the EU far more than I trust the government (regardless which party is in power). AFAIK we are basically keeping everything from the EU at the time of severance, and I think the Brexit trade deal means we can't make any significant degredation of labour laws going forward. If anyone reading this knows different, please do correct me.
• sodapopcan 6y ago
  Since being mandated to work from home, my team has switched to seven hour days (including an hour for lunch, ie, 10:00am - 5:00pm). My dream was a four day work week but this was my second choice! It’s so much easier to stay focused knowing the day is shorter and our productivity has shot up. There are, of course, other factors as well like. It having to commute and working remote, but still, the shorter day makes a huge difference.
• iso1210 6y ago
  Half my team do 4x10 hour days, I've done it in the past myself too, now I just flex my time over 5 days though. Perhaps helps that the larger department work shifts (the department we work most closely with are 16/7/365, but others are 24/7/365)
• maya24 6y ago
  It's possible to give yourself unapproved 4 day week at megacorps if you are a high performer. Nobody bothers me in Friday and no problems yet.
  • GordonS 6y ago
    It depends what kind of company. The company I'm at is a consultancy, so you're (ideally) mostly working on billable customer projects - you are not going to get away with disappearing for a day. And when you're not on a customer project, you are on a 7-week countdown to termination, and are constantly asked by random people what you are doing.
  • IkmoIkmo 6y ago
    I get no substantially fewer calls or mail on fridays than on other days. I can get my work done in four days, but I also get work requests with same-day deadlines, either a soft expectation that you can miss sometimes but not structurally, or a hard expectation that you simply can't miss. This is especially the case for friday because clients will often work weekends on the high-priority stuff. Sometimes they rely on something that takes me 2 hours on a friday, if I don't do that, they're stuck till monday. It's just not acceptable in my line of work. I've not really found a good solution. I can get fridays off formally, but then you're not just cutting your salary, you're also cutting chances for promotions (which isn't just a matter of pay, but also a matter of career development, personal development, keeping work interesting and dynamic, status/ego). There's a strong preference for employees with full-availability such that clients have one point of contact, instead of multiple parttimers across the week. And leadership positions are expected to always be working during regular working hours.
• sbeller 6y ago
  20% pay cut (pre-tax, after tax it is less due to progressive taxation) for 50% more weekend is superb IMHO.
• Scapeghost 6y ago
  > taking a 20% pay cut > There has been no drop in productivity Your employer seems to believes different.
  • Thorrez 6y ago
    I wonder how his compensation works. If it's based on performance reviews, is he now only expected to do 80% as much work? If so, him doing 100% as much work should lead to better performance reviews and maybe allow him to reach back up to his previous salary.
    • vlasev 6y ago
      Call me cynical, but I feel like the 4 day work week will be forgotten when it comes to reviews.
  • GordonS 6y ago
    They don't, my manager even said as much.
• runawaybottle 6y ago
  I prefer the jury nullification approach. I pretty much don’t do any work on Fridays unless it’s an urgent bug fix or meetings. Fake-work-fridays is the new casual Friday. What are you gonna do it about? And no, I’m not taking a pay cut either.
• emrah 6y ago
  If %20 is too much (in terms of hour reduction for the employer or salary reduction for the employee), perhaps one could negotiate a 4-day work week by proposing four 9-hour days for a %10 reduction in pay.