15 ms·

In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution. It abso

• spaetzleesser 6y ago
  Totally agree. Due to COVID most of my company worked only 4 days per week last year. The improvement in quality of life was amazing and productivity didn’t drop noticeably. There was a time when 6 days per week were normal. People thought the world would go under if people worked only 5 days but things were ok. The same will happen with 4 day weeks. Once people get used to it it will be hard to imagine working more.
  • philmcp 6y ago
    Exactly - the productivity boost employees gain from not being burned out, combined with a slightly lower wage bill. I see it as a win / win for both parties tbh.
• jfengel 6y ago
  Some of it is a quirk of the American health care system. Your health care costs the same regardless of your work hours, and it's a significant fraction of compensation. If you were working 80% as much, they would probably only be able to pay 70% of your salary. (Assuming you were linearly productive, which it's not, but it's the same assumption you were making and is good enough for this illustration.) There are other fixed overheads, like your manager, human resources, the office itself, and even the cost of hiring you in the first place. It's possible that to make all things equal, they might have to change your salary to as much at 60%. Of course all things are never equal, so these numbers have really wide error bars. And after all that, you might well decide that 60% salary for a 32 hour week would still be a good deal. I know I'd consider it. But it's important to note that it's going to be rare to find a job that will pay you 80% as much for 80% of the work.
  • alfiedotwtf 6y ago
    > Some of it is a quirk of the American health care system. Probably more to do with Britain’s Factory Act of 1833 and follow up Act of 1844.
    • brabel 6y ago
      No country is in a vacuum... popular movements spread across borders and as the population of one country achieves something, their neighbours start demanding the same and so on... according to Wikipedia, the huge decline in working hours seen in the 20th century was mostly due to unionisation and legislation in response to popular demand. Today, the US and the UK seem to be pretty typical compared to other countries, which is to be expected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#/media/File:Heures_travaillees_OCDE.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#/media/File:Heure...
      • alfiedotwtf 6y ago
        Good point on unionisation. In all honesty, I would have though reduction of hours was due to automation and the advent of machinery, but I found this quote interesting... When a labourer,” said Mr. Ashworth, a cotton magnate, to Professor Nassau W. Senior, “lays down his spade, he renders useless, for that period, a capital worth eighteen-pence. When one of our people leaves the mill, he renders useless a capital that has cost £100,000.” Only fancy! making “useless” for a single moment, a capital that has cost £100,000! It is, in truth, monstrous, that a single one of our people should ever leave the factory! The increased use of machinery, as Senior after the instruction he received from Ashworth clearly perceives, makes a constantly increasing lengthening of the working-day “desirable.”
  • thebean11 6y ago
    > There are other fixed overheads, like your manager, human resources Are these fixed costs, or would these employees also be working 80% as much? I think only the healthcare / office space for these people are fixed costs, but that would be factored in calculating their new salary.
  • 6y ago
• shafyy 6y ago
  In my experience, in Europe (at least in Switzerland and Germany) it's much more common for people to work 80% than it is in the US.
  • ativzzz 6y ago
    Curious how being laid back in regards to work opens up opportunity from countries such as China that have some companies working 996 schedules (9-am - 9pm, 6 days a week) to overtake and make obsolete European global companies. I guess the only way EU can compete is protectionism, no?
    • exoque 6y ago
      For the Swiss it doesn't matter what China does, anywhere else is cheaper anyway.
    • shafyy 6y ago
      Your underlying assumption is that companies where employees work more hours are more successful on the market place. I would say this is a deeply flawed assumption.
      • ativzzz 6y ago
        If two equally capable entities are competing, the one who puts in more time will almost always win. The Chinese may be lacking the (social and physical) infrastructure that the Europeans have a head start on for productivity, but they are catching up or have already caught up. This probably applies less to big conglomerates who exist and will continue existing regardless of what happens (honestly most of their employees can just not show up and they will be fine), but more to technical innovation.
        • lynguist 6y ago
          No. I can guarantee you that in general in software engineering, you will produce the same result, whether you work 30 or 40 or 60 hr a week. The productive hours will be the same as you just have so much focused hours inside of you.
• pc86 6y ago
  A B2B business has two choices if they want to institute a 4-day week. They can be closed 20% of the week, when their competition is likely open, or they can be open 5 days and spread 4 days of work out among their staff. So now if your coworker takes off Tuesdays, and you take off Wednesdays, you better not have a question for him on Tuesday morning. And isn't 28 hours 3.5 days?
  • philmcp 6y ago
    I think if managed correctly the second option is more than achievable for a software development team. I agree it doesn't work for all industries / jobs (e.g. support staff etc), but for the majority of technical positions, I think the gain in productivity and saving in salary will more than make up for these inconveniences. I also think it will make the recruitment of developers easier as you'll be offering a benefit rarely seen. And ye, a few people have mentioned the point about 28hrs - I'm going to rebrand it as "4 day week".
    • pc86 6y ago
      I'm sure some people will disagree but working less for less money isn't seen as a benefit to me, especially in the US where there may be healthcare implications. And as others have said, given static overhead you're more likely to earn less per hour. You're likely better off going contract and having a higher hourly rate and just billing less, but that has its own set of difficulties. The real benefit I've seen very few places implement is a 36-38 hour week, over 4 days, with no decrease in salary. Productivity is the same or slightly higher (quite a bit higher if it's a set schedule, e.g. everyone has the same day off so there's no communication latency). Satisfaction is through the roof because not only are people getting paid more per hour, but it's a benefit that they're extremely unlikely to find anywhere else, so retention goes up as well.
      • BlargMcLarg 6y ago
        I both agree and disagree. Disagree as this implicitly assumes working 40 hours won't produce relatively more negative feedback on one's personal life than a 32 hour week would. Once you start accounting for that, the "net loss" story becomes a lot more vague. Given if the requirement was "you really have to work this number of hours to get that total income", I would prefer longer days + fewer days over the 9-5 mentality most countries have. Unfortunately, the last time I requested 9x4, it got denied. Let alone more extreme variants, 4x10, 3x10 or 3x12. Ironic, since 4x10 would also have less overhead, despite still being a 40h workweek.
• dcolkitt 6y ago
  The bigger issue to me is that there's no diversification of risk. If your company goes under, you lose 100% of your income all at once. From that perspective, it'd be a lot more rational to work say ten jobs at a single time. You're never at serious risk of losing more than 30% of your paycheck in any short period. You could even get smart and balance your portfolio of jobs between pro and counter-cyclical industries. Plus, it's a good way to let people gracefully transition between careers. Want to move into machine learning? Take a low-paying junior ML internship for one of your 1/10 jobs to build experience. It'd also be good from a societal perspective, since jobs at small, fast-growing, but high-risk companies would become comparatively more attractive. It'd be harder to sustain toxic workplace environments, since any given employee would have plenty of other options. Managers would be less hesitant to shutdown money losing divisions or fire underperfomers, since you're not leaving the employee destitute.
  • kaftoy 6y ago
    For your example's sake, if the work for one job is just a tenth, then it means that for a 5 men job, a manager would need to hire 50 people. The manager would be overwhelmed and add cost to the company by asking for a colleague. It's not easy to manage 50 people. But maybe the manager wants to diversify himself, so instead of 2 manager for 50 people, you'll have... 20 managers for 50 people. You need a managers' manager. Where does it end? :)
    • Grimm1 6y ago
      I think they're implying that the majority of current working time isn't actually work, that those jobs could be done with 1/10th the current man hours and still be just as productive. In that world you don't need to hire anyone else because all you've done is cut back all the bs idling time that we all know exists in many jobs while keeping output the same. FWIW I'm not sure I agree on the 1/10th but like 1/3rd or 1/2 absolutely from my position.
  • TeaDrunk 6y ago
    We'd need to radically change the system with which education happens to make this real, otherwise teachers and the infrastructure of teachers (administrators, social workers, counselors, janitors, IT people, etc) would still need that workweek + parents who have to follow that workweek.
• exoque 6y ago
  I worked 80% for one and a half years on a decent salary. In the end I decided it wasn't worth the cost.
  • namdnay 6y ago
    Yeah the trap with 80% is it often ends up being 100% compressed to 4 days :(
  • philmcp 6y ago
    Fair enough, it's not for everyone. After 10 years of being a developer in a country which is relatively cheap to live in, however, I'd be more than happy to take the financial hit.
• namdnay 6y ago
  > why is there basically no variation on this model? I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week So part time? This is pretty normal in nearly every company I’ve worked in, lots of people take it to spend more time with young kids
  • philmcp 6y ago
    For all the companies I've worked at, the developers are all full-time so I envy your industry / location if part-time is common. More generally though, I feel employees almost need an "excuse" to work part time (i.e. some reason such as childcare). I wish for a time when a significant % of developer jobs are advertised as near-full time and that I'm not stereotyped as lazy for applying to them. There's more to life than reviewing pull requests...
    • andruby 6y ago
      Some of my most productive colleagues work 4/5th. They are often more productive than fulltimers. In most European countries this is normal and not frowned upon. Some countries even protect this option for employees by law.
    • namdnay 6y ago
      Completely normal in most European jobs. And you don’t need to have an excuse, especially as a developer, which adapts perfectly to part-time work (harder for a PM or PjM or EM) But don’t envy us too much, the counterpart is that our salaries are much much lower than the US (even at 100%).
• conductr 6y ago
  Most want/need the full check. And the company wants full “value”/40 hours. So what you end up seeing more often is the 10x4 model or every other Friday off. It’s just a reallocation of time.
• langitbiru 6y ago
  Similar to you, I'm building a part-time jobs website. https://parttime.careers https://parttime.careers I feel that the part-time jobs trend now is like the remote jobs trend in 2007. It's still in the early days.
  • philmcp 6y ago
    Awesome! Completely agree its in the early days. Out of interest, how did you find these part time jobs, just by searching Google?
    • langitbiru 6y ago
      Twitter, Hackernews threads. Interestingly, I haven't used Google yet.
• john4532452 6y ago
  Exactly. On this topic Bertrand Russell has an essay http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
• newswasboring 6y ago
  > I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week... In the Netherlands it works exactly like this. Half my team is on either a 90% or 80% contract. Other half doesn't have children yet :P