20 ms·

We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

393 points by 500and4 4y ago

john_the_writer 4y ago
Four days in the office :( I mean you do you, but Bleck. "You don't have to come to work on Friday but we still want you to spend 12 hours a week crammed onto a bus or train." How else could you possibly write code or sit in front of a computer all day?
- alarmingfox 4y ago
  Yeah that surprised me too. Surely if they are able to get the same job done while working from home that would be the better option for everyone involved no? As some employees may lose like an hour a day just to travel whereas that hour could be spent working on features etc. if they didn't have to travel into the office.
- ginko 4y ago
  >we still want you to spend 12 hours a week crammed onto a bus or train Your commute is 3 hours per day?!
  - anon2020dot00 4y ago
    Common in countries in SEA like the Philippines
    - ginko 4y ago
      That's crazy. My "commute" is 30 minutes of walking each way. Could do it in 10 if I took the bus but I like the workout.
  - cjg 4y ago
    That was easily my commute when I was working in London. I'd drive to the train station, take the train into London, then the tube within London and walk the last 10 minutes to the office. On a normal day it would take 1h40 each way. On a bad day it could be much longer. That's nearly 17 hours over a 5 day week assuming no problems.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  They don't want you to spend 3 hours a day commuting, that's up to you. That does sound like a miserable commute. A quick google search suggests that the average US commute is 28 minutes one way, or about an hour a day, not 3 hours a day. The average US commuter is probably in their own car though, mass transit is usually going to add some, despite other social and personal benefits. I also know it's going to be higher in certain major metro areas. And that the US built environment is kind of insane, and sometimes seems like it was honestly designed to maximize commutes. I agree nobody should ever be spending 3 hours a day commuting. But it's not like the only possibilities are working from home or 3 hours commuting...
pattle 4y ago
Four day work weeks sound good but since being remote from 2019 I could never go back to working in an office. Seems like a case of one step forward, two steps back
- encrux 4y ago
  I was very pro home-office (and even Anti-Office) before and during the pandemic. Now that restrictions are more or less gone, I'm glad to be working in the office again. Being in the office for the first time in my career showed me that there are definitely upsides, especially when you get along with your team really well. Though 100% mandatory office time is BS.
  - basisword 4y ago
    >> I'm glad to be working in the office again. / Being in the office for the first time. I think the fact it's your first time has a big impact. Give it time. Any time I start a new job I enjoy being in the office for the first 6-12 months. Once it becomes routine (same commute, same lunch, same people) and you have learnt how to do your job (and rely on others less) it becomes much less attractive. I'm not saying you'd go full remote but I would bet you will go hybrid and transition further remote over time. This is what I've seen happen with all of my colleagues (including people I thought would jump straight back to the office post-pandemic).
  - ironlake 4y ago
    >Now that restrictions are more or less gone, I'm glad to be working in the office again. In the US, COVID cases are five times higher than this time last year, and the CDC estimates that 1 in 5 will result in long COVID.
    - floren 4y ago
      > the CDC estimates that 1 in 5 will result in long COVID. This scolding "I'm not sure exactly how, yet, but you'll be sorry!" any time anyone admits that they're no longer hiding inside & wiping down every banana with bleach is getting a little tired.
orzig 4y ago
If you were explaining the world to an alien, it would be hard to justify the lack of diversity in working arrangements. I applaud any such non standard option in the labor market - may your office be full of good fits!
- viraptor 4y ago
  I'm not saying it's right or the most effective option, but I believe it would be trivial to justify: it's easier to organise something in a group if everyone's available at the same time. I'm the only person in the team working 4 day week and even that was a bit awkward in planning. (still totally worth it)
  - musingsole 4y ago
    > it's easier to organise something in a group if everyone's available at the same time I think most workgroups have effectively been paying extremely high overhead in social costs just so the organization could have the option to organize easily. The problem then is that meetings are called flippantly. If it's hard to get everyone in a room, you'll do a better job capitalizing on when it happens. The downside is there really are a large array of tasks that a group can tackle better than an individual, but I've never seen a corporate group meaningfully recognize or organize for those tasks. Far more often, I get pulled into meetings because some specific individual or another is lacking in autonomy and expertise.
    - laserlight 4y ago
      > I get pulled into meetings because some specific individual or another is lacking in autonomy and expertise These people are unconsciously aware that they are incompetent. They pull people into meetings in order to have a sense of having done work, at the cost of total productivity.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I think it would be pretty easy to explain how everyone converged on the same system. If you continually optimise for the best arrangement, everyone is going to end up on pretty much the same thing.
TheGigaChad 4y ago
iLoveOncall 4y ago
Lol, what a scam, 4 day work week but you have to be in the office. I live close to Shoreditch but preparation time and travel both ways is easily 2 hours a day (for some of my colleagues that would be 3+ hours a day). If you went from working from home 100% 5 days a week to working from the office 100% 4 days a week results in the exact same amount of time, except you remove all the monetary savings from working from home (~100GBP in travel alone). No thank you.
- drclau 4y ago
  Scam is a bit strong. But I can see leadership wanting everyone back to office for whatever reasons, and out of fear of people leaving if they are forced to return to office, they came up with this 4 day work week thing to make it attractive enough for people to stay.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    Scam is strong? They tell people they will spend 20% less time to work-related activities which as I said is a lie. Not only will they spend just as much time for work, it will be more unpleasant and more costly than working from home.
    - realharo 4y ago
      Calling it a scam is completely inaccurate, scams rely on people not being aware (on some level) of what they're signing up for, and on people making promises they don't intend to keep. Here it is perfectly clear what everyone's getting. Tons of people would prefer a 4-day in-office work week over a 5-day remote work week. You may not, but there are many who do.
- kristiandupont 4y ago
  The fact that this wouldn't be favorable to you given your particular situation does not make it a "scam".
  - 4y ago
sshah1983 4y ago
I still don’t understand the 100% as productive in 80% of the time. The math doesn’t check out there unless the expectation is people are working 10 hr days Mon-Thurs. Even in that scenario, not everyone has the stamina to execute at that pace and it also makes it hard to recruit anyone with a kid who needs to navigate school dropoffs/pickups etc.
- xnorswap 4y ago
  People aren't machines, they bend to their environment. Even without crunching extra hours per day, you can be essentially as productive with fewer working days per week if you are more focussed on the days do you do work.
  - sshah1983 4y ago
    Agreed but I’ve yet to hear the killer tactic for how a company gets every employee 100% focused 100% of the time. I think there are some roles that end up suffering. Like someone who is a product designer and now has to cram more creativity in fewer hours. Someone who is in inside or outside sales and has less time where they overlap with customers to perform demos and close deals. It may work - it may not work. The penalty for being sick for a day (or your kid being sick for a day) is more drastic too. Although perhaps those folks just use their extra day to catch up. I’m more bullish on remote work than these 4 day a week experiments.
    - xnorswap 4y ago
      100% focussed 100% of the time is a strawman argument set up to fail, there's no killer tactic because it doesn't exist and no-one is arguing it does. You literally don't have to cram in the hours, you can just work less, enjoy a healthier work/life balance and still be productive. To argue otherwise is to suggest that we should all work 6 day weeks. If you accept that working 5 day weeks has benefits over 6 day weeks then why not accept that 4 day weeks could have benefits too?
      - 4y ago
robbiep 4y ago
I would love to hear some stories of startups that have tried to implement a 4 day week… any examples?
- jansan 4y ago
  I can give you examples of startups with 7 day work weeks, but 4 day work weeks seem to be very rare in startups.
truthwhisperer 4y ago
howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
Quick refresher on productivity in economic terms: decreasing inputs = decreasing outputs UNLESS tech or technique improves. During supply and/or debt driven inflationary periods (eg. now), increased productivity = increased supply and/or decreased debt. What do these maxims of economics mean for a 4 day work week? At Beacon, nothing*. But implement this at Tyson Foods, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Waste Management, the FX trading desk at JP Morgan Chase, etc. and you get 2-6% productivity declines & some amount of increased supply-driven inflation unless you offset with new technology (eg. software, robotics) or techniques. Celebrate work from home, 4 day weeks, flex-time, etc.... but understand that as these benefits carry costs in important (not all) industries. Also, the migration to jobs having these benefits, from those important jobs that do not, drives inflation and/or illegal immigration and so-called "white collar" top-heavy joblessness risk during recession. No free lunch, even on Fridays. ** Note: UK small business situation is concerning, even if it doesn't apply to Beacon: "Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, showing that 2 million (or about 40%) of the UK's small businesses had less than three months of cash in reserves to support operations. He noted that 10% (or 200,000) were in grave danger, and 300,000 only had a few weeks of cash left."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tharax 4y ago
  That's why in my next start-up, we're making sure that each employee works 168 hours a week. We believe that maximising inputs is the only way to get results.
  - throwawayacc2 4y ago
    That’s some bleeding heart liberal commie bs. I make my employees bend the space time continuum to work more than 168 hours per week! <serveral bicep, rocket and fire emojis here>
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
    Hustle grindset!!!
devilishDev 4y ago
80% of work time at 100% pay doesn’t really add up when you’re paying £53k for a office-based role in London. For a mid level role, £66k at 0.8FTE would just be the same. Sure, some benefits sound decent but also deceiving… pension match is nice but 6 weeks of holiday (+BH) is actually 24 days and getting £60 for each holiday day taken is £1440 a year that won’t rise with pay rises.
JamesAdir 4y ago
I really can't wrap my head around this four-day week trend. If the organization is focused on KPI's so why does it matter if people work one day or four-days? If the organization is focused on time spend no work (either in office or remotely) how can work be done in 80% of the time? Really don't understand how it works in day-to-day. It resembles the unlimited vacation days policy which was later found out to be unhelpful to employees.
- michaelmior 4y ago
  > If the organization is focused on KPI's so why does it matter if people work one day or four-days? Arguably it matters in how you KPIs are set. I think it's reasonable to expect a full time employee to work more than one day a week. If you can meet all your KPIs with everyone working one day a week, then maybe you're aiming too low. Of course, if you require everyone to work 60 hour weeks to hit KPIs, that's an even bigger problem.
  - JamesAdir 4y ago
    KPIs can be change continuously so that's why I'm baffled by this trend. Companies can just say - we measure only by KPIs, work whenever you want. Something like this signals a much better workspace than four-days workweek, since the latter still measures time instead of output.
    - michaelmior 4y ago
      I'm not sure which trend are you referring to. In any case, I'm not suggesting employees should be measured solely by time worked. Only that I think setting performance targets based on a reasonable number of hours worked seems to make sense to me. Otherwise, I'm not really sure what benchmark you would use.
- bencollier49 4y ago
  It's mostly a case of figuring out when people will be available to work together. Some companies have a concept of "core hours". As long as you're active during the core hours, the rest are flexible.
simonswords82 4y ago
This is part of a wider scheme in the UK whereby 60 firms and 3000 employees are piloting 4 day weeks. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/04/thousands-of-uk-workers-to-take-part-in-four-day-week-trial https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/04/thousands-o... From the article: Employees from a wide range of businesses and charities are expected to take part in the scheme, which will run initially from June to December, including the Royal Society of Biology, the London-based brewing company Pressure Drop, a Manchester-based medical devices firm, and a fish and chip shop in Norfolk. It comes as the push for companies to adopt a shorter working week – crucially with no loss of pay while aiming for higher productivity – gains momentum as a way of improving working conditions.
- belter 4y ago
  "Which country and city governments have a four-day work week?": https://buildremote.co/four-day-week/4-day-work-week-countries/ https://buildremote.co/four-day-week/4-day-work-week-countri... I am surprised the lack of mention of Denmark, Sweden or the Netherlands. Most business persons I contact, normally only work 4 days a week.
  - kqr 4y ago
    I live in Sweden and have never hard of any company doing a four day week. The closest I get is one of my first jobs which had a 37.5 hour week (rather than the customary 40 hours) but again, spread out over five days. That said, some of the last few weeks at the time of writing have in practise turned out to be four day weeks due to public holidays. Could this be what causes the confusion?
    - snowAbstraction 4y ago
      In Sweden, a significant number of parents with young children who work 80% so maybe that has caused the confusion.
      - kqr 4y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I wish them luck. I understand their need to have folks in the office, and this is one way to make that more attractive. But it is only one factor. Good management, strong teams, and a whole lot of "soft" stuff is even more important than beanbag chairs and foozball tables. The "good management" part is where most companies go pear-shaped. I wouldn't want to go to Buckingham Palace every day, if I hated the people I worked with/for, and felt like my work was being treated badly[0]. Although I work exclusively at home, and have no desire to ever dress "business casual" again, I think that a good* office environment can be extremely conducive to great work. * As in "not like 99% of today's offices." [0] https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02 https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02
- natly 4y ago
  Wow, that comic really makes me question how much of todays complaning about work and life struggles has been a multi decade persistent thing - not just hardships facing this particular generation. (As someone who was 5 in 1996 and didn't see this first hand.)
  - basisword 4y ago
    I think work is just like everything else in this regard. Providing you have standard white collar job, as things continue to improve and get better, we just find new things to complain about. e.g. parent poster complaining about 'business casual' when it wasn't that long ago business casual was a nice step down from having to wear a suit. The workplace continuously adjusts but so do our expectations.
    - jihadjihad 4y ago
      It's always weird to watch Office Space and see the guys all wearing ties. I can't imagine having to do that for a typical software job.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > It's always weird to watch Office Space and see the guys all wearing ties. I can't imagine having to do that for a typical software job I believe this changed in the early 2000s. The dot-com crash reset Silicon Valley. And the Enron scandal reduced corporate America's pull on it. (Steve Jobs wasn't an icon when business casual began taking its hold.) [1] https://high-tech-guide.com/article/how-did-steve-jobs-help-pixar https://high-tech-guide.com/article/how-did-steve-jobs-help-...
jacquesm 4y ago
In quite a few countries the 32 hour workweek is already very normal, it creates a bit of extra scheduling work but nothing you can't handle in a larger organization. For smaller companies this is a bigger problem because they don't usually have the headcount to fill the resulting gaps and things tend to rely more on personal relationships.
- gargs 4y ago
  It's not common to be paid 100% (aka for 40 hrs), though.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    But you won't be paid 100% for 40 hours, you will be paid 100% for 32 hours. And people that work 40 hours should get more than those that work 32 hours. By the way, it is common to be paid far less for 40 hours than you should receive as well, and plenty of people work unpaid overtime who would be happy just to work the 40 hours they get paid for. Salary negotiations are always tricky, especially if you don't know your true market value. Given the difference between compensation at different companies one way you could attack this problem is to find a company that will match your current salary but at a reduced number of hours. Employees have the same problem that companies have: it is hard to charge by value if you don't know your value. As a gardener my work is worth less than as a computer programmer than as a financial advisor. Because each of those domains values time entirely differently, and because there are different levels of competition. If you can show your boss that if you work less that your productivity will likely remain the same or that it will go up they will probably wonder why they've been paying you for all that extra time in the past... so instead I would just argue to try moving to a different company at a better salary for the same amount of work or for the same salary with less work.
    - paulcole 4y ago
      > And people that work 40 hours should get more than those that work 32 hours. Someone who’s 25% less efficient at their job should get paid the same as someone else who’s more efficient?
yrgulation 4y ago
Strange how many orgs discover that working less hours or remote increases productivity for most people. It’s almost as if unstressed “workers” produce better quality work. There was an experiment whereby cows were shown to give more milk if not stressed. Certainly the same applies to humans. When will companies learn that milking their “workforce” of their energy doesnt yield the expected results but quite the opposite.
- prometheus76 4y ago
  It was the fatal shift from "personnel" to "human resources".
  - xcambar 4y ago
    - fpl67 4y ago
      Fun for who? You? The people around you getting off on it? The HR employee who didn’t elect the name of the organization and who is just trying to get through a day like you are, and apparently has to put up with meme confrontations in the workplace? There is not much that is more cringe than overhearing someone do this within earshot; it’s almost as bad as a joke everyone has heard and can predict while someone loudly stumbles through it a few cubes over. As described, you’re not funny, you’re just an asshole. What form does this confrontation take, exactly? That might help clarify. (I’m not in HR)
      - xcambar 4y ago
        Every position has a storytelling. That of HR is about building a double standard: on the one hand, a discourse that emphasizes on the employees' best interests, while on the other hand, take actions that are on the employer's sole interest. Is it expected? Yes of course, I stopped being naive on the topic long ago. Where this is pervasive is that even some HR people tend to buy it. Also the tech industry should consider happy to at least have some reassuring (yet false) speech. Sure, in the tech industry, people may be considered a bit better, but I've seen and met people in blue collar industries where people were not worth so much more than the paper clips holding their contracts together. And since HR, as a support function of a company, does not differ much from one indistry to another, the culture of HR, really, fundamentally, is to treat people as you'd do with your trucks or machines or chairs or paperclips, and that is, treat them as resources. Hence the very apt name of the function: human resources. And this is the kind of perspective I have on HR and the kind of points I could (but not always do) raise if we touch on the societal aspects of our jobs. Note that as a manager myself, I have my fair share of cognitive dissonance to bear as well, and critics are always welcome :)
mmaunder 4y ago
Any large profitable public companies doing this? These guys raised $56M less than a year ago. Just curious who has proved the concept is sustainable without burning VC money.
da39a3ee 4y ago
In other words, another management team fails to understand that many of the best software engineers work most effectively in silence, and on their own for large periods of time, and that this is best done at home. The obstinacy, arrogance, and stupidity of managers from these guys to Musk and Sandberg is incredibly disappointing.
anuraj 4y ago
What I don't understand about Europe is 1. They are facing a huge negative demographic dividend. 2. They are facing steep inflation, low energy and food security and lower economic growth. 3. High social security costs may not be sustainable in the long term. 4. Finance is crumbling and real economy is taking over. Monetary expansion had its run and is no longer the panacea. How will they handle this and still emerge unscathed while competing with China and India and Indonesia and the likes.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Immigration -- they'll be a move to a two-tired (zero-hours, contract-only, fire-at-will) base largely made up of the young and immigrants. Then gold-plated 4d work-from-home jobs for 45-65s.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  Higher import tariffs are a mid term solution, but in the end nation states and national governance are dysfunctional concepts for an ultimately globalized world.
- atonse 4y ago
  I’m all for experimenting with hours. But it is something only information workers can do because productivity doesn’t translate linearly to hours put in. But anything physical, manufacturing, etc, it is simply more time = more output. Unless we use more and more automation and better tools of course. Which is also happening.
- timkam 4y ago
  The idea is that 4-hours work weeks for relatively highly skilled knowledge workers will actually help lower the costs for the social security system (less burnouts, early retirements) and a more productive society (instead of 'grinding out' pointlessly long hours, work less and contribute to society in your free time) -- work is merely one way to be productive in society.
- 4y ago
dnndev 4y ago
Is this better than a results oriented work week? And figure out your own schedule as individual or team.
- eweise 4y ago
  What is a results oriented work week? How do you measure? If its "I said I would get X done" then yes, a four day work week is much better.
  - dnndev 4y ago
    Sounds to me like someone does not trust employees to manage themselves and meet deadlines, and thats ok. I was coming into this thread from a highly skilled, well paid workers perspective. Completely agree, if you need to micro-manage then workday oriented results are easier.
    - eweise 4y ago
      Well, if you ever get the chance to work with highly skilled, well paid workers I think you'll be surprised to find that even we have a hard time estimating the effort needed to complete tasks since we are usually doing unique and complex things that have unknowns. I also suggest studying agile methodologies which assume workers are working at 100% and instead of guaranteeing work gets completed according to estimates it tracks work completed and adjusts accordingly.
      - dnndev 4y ago
        estimate and result oriented work are two different things. Result oriented work is: Here is how much I did this week. I either met, exceeded or fell short of some expectation. The person then decides if this is the place they want to be and the employer decides if they are a good fit. Agile in most places is a managers whip. I will go so far to say I have never seen it implemented in a way that is beneficial to devs. (possibly by design) Estimates are even worse... you cant estimate software at scale. spending dollars to pickup dimes as the saying goes.
fleddr 4y ago
I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself. As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the exact same workload as before and now need to achieve it in less time. There's many ways to cross this gap. An obvious one is that a typical 5 day work week has moments of slack, depending on the culture. Friday after lunch is where productivity sinks in many offices. Wednesdays are also slower as it's typically the first moment in the week where things are running (planned, prepared, on track). In a 4 day work week you sacrifice this breathing room, the 4 days become more compressed. Another natural change is to take a more aggressive stand in rejecting non-sense. Excess meetings, unimportant emails, etc. This works very well and is extremely effective for the simple reason that you MUST. As such this time compression is a blessing, a cleansing mechanism for yourself and the organization. You'll be amazed at how much time you can win back. Let's say you do need to attend a meeting. It's a 1 hour meeting. You're needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins. As if by sheer magic, what needed to be discussed gets done in 20 mins. Without this forced "budgeting", people would just fill the hour with bullshit. Counter intuitive, but by being rigid instead of elastic, you maximize value.
- sktrdie 4y ago
  This makes sense and understand what you're saying. But the idea of having a full extra day where I don't have to open the laptop and can instead concentrate totally on myself is much more important than a decompression day at work.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    Exactly, that's also why I made the change.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  I'm starting to get more militant about zoom calls. Trying to avoid angering people explicitly, but still pushing back as best I can to protect to the team from incessant zoom calls to have conversations that would be faster on slack, and better documented in email. Zoom calls just invite conversation that has to repeated again because 80% of everyone on the call forgot some amount of detail.
vaughan 4y ago
Is taking the Monday or Friday off better? I’ve always found Monday is a slow day for me to reload everything back into my working memory and get back into flow. I wonder if this is why Monday meetings are good. So that everyone can be reinvigorated for the week ahead.
aczerepinski 4y ago
My last job (America’s Test Kitchen in case they’re hiring) did/does 4.5 day work weeks. Friday afternoons off. Zero loss of productivity. For me it was a built in zero-guilt place to schedule my dentist appointments, rare in-person tasks at the bank, take cats to the vet, etc. Of course, 4.0 days would be even better!
formvoltron 4y ago
The 4 day workweek. This is life just laughing at me for having the gall to try & start my own company. 30 years on I'm still trying. Everybody else who just went & got a job are now millionaires & retired. I wrote a news publishing system 2 years before Elon sold them. I wrote the first Taxi app on iPhone. On my todo list for 2 years before Instagram was "twitter with photos".
- suction 4y ago
  Seems like you're always two years too early for the market?
  - formvoltron 4y ago
    You definitely need a biz partner you can count on. Unless you have a family situation that encourages & helps this sort of endeavor. When someone burns you, don't go back to him / her for the second go around! Even if that person is a good friend. That's what I've learned. Alternative version of this is don't start a company with someone who is a newly minted millionaire & is single, not sure of what to do next in life, and not all that interested in money.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
I feel many people in tech and other office jobs have implicitly worked 4 day workweeks for years. During an average workday, how much time do you spend doing personal things at your desk (texting friends, reading non work-related online articles, etc.)? I bet that time aggregated across Monday to Friday adds up to at least a full 8 hour day.
- dangets 4y ago
  The larger question is whether one would stop doing those personal things during a 4 day work week.
krnlpnc 4y ago
> in the same way that nobody wants to go to a wedding over Zoom, we don't want to build our product over Zoom. It's absurd to compare a once-in-a-lifetime event to everyday work meetings.
mavhc 4y ago
Can we spend the spare day going to school to learn about all the new stuff since we left school, or stuff we've forgotten?
jrochkind1 4y ago
I work a four-day week (80% time, not imagining 4-10s) as a software engineer at a non-profit academic organization. For a paycut basically, I make 80% of what I think of as my "actual" salary. I have managed to do this at a succession of several jobs now. When I briefly tried to go back to 5 days, it was really hard. It seems insane to me now that anyone works 5 days a week. (And I do know plenty of people work even more, and I am very lucky). Fridays are for doctor's appointments and car repair and grocery shopping and errands. Which probably does mean I'm away from "work hours" for these things less than I would be full-time, I just schedule such things for Fridays where possible. In general, I am pretty convinced that I'm at least 90% as productive on 80% time as I would be on 100%, maybe more. Working at non-profit academic, I'm definitely not making my "market" salary. I could be making a lot more than I am now, even at 80% of a salary, at various more typical organizations. But I'm not sure how viable the 4-day week is with potential employers -- even if I'm willing to take a paycut to 80% of salary, which I am! Unlike the OP which is giving everyone a 4-day week at full salary? My impression is that most high-paying software engineering jobs/organizations are not going to let you do 4-days a week? Which is crazy when they could get me for 80% of the cost with most of the productivity -- but I guess the high-paying organizations aren't exactly trying to save money on salary. I really don't think I'd go back to 40-hour-a-week-standard unless I had to.
- draw_down 4y ago
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  To clarify to a since flagged (by someone else) comment: When i say "I'm at least 90% as productive" -- I mean I am more productive per hour worked. Not that I end up working 90% hours but only getting paid for 80%. I really do work 80% hours, only four days a week, Monday to Thursday. I am not expected to and don't work on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays. I just get done I think 90% or more of what I would get done in five days, in four days. As seems to be commonly reported by people in this situation. Some people have also said "Yeah, but in my remote software dev job, I work even less than 80% of my expected hours, I just don't tell them, and I get paid a full salary." I'm not gonna say much about the ethics of that, I guess I think it depends on the specific situation. But regardless, I'd myself just be stressed out if I had to be less than honest about my work. And my 80% schedule is clear -- I really don't work on Friday, nobody expects to be able to reach me on Friday (any better than they could on a Sunday or at 4am, unless I'm on-call), I don't check my email or look at my work calendar, I am really not working. And that's the whole benefit to me -- it's a different thing than using lots of hours for personal social media or something (which, sure, I do to some extent too whether 4 or 5 days a week.
shadowtree 4y ago
This is escalating like the Gilette wars (3 blades, 4 blades...12 blades). Soon you'll only stand out by announcing the 3 day work week. ...and get killed by a team that just outworks you. How many pro-sports teams have switched to less and less training :) I do hope all our competitors switch to 0 day workweeks...
- krnlpnc 4y ago
  Says a person currently on HN instead of working...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- maltyr 4y ago
  For me, the common usage of the terms "training" and "working" are not the same. In most jobs, we perform a lot of "working," or applying known patterns, and very little "training," or learning new patterns. Pro sports is flipped, and often each week the athletes are learning new tactics/counter-tactics based on their opponent, or adjusting their existing patterns to perfection, or grinding out exercise routines to be able to demand more from their body. Drills are required to "train" their body into being able to do these routines reliably on-demand, and new exercise routines are often the best at forcing your body to adapt and grow. That said, even pro-athletes have rest periods once the season is over. Also, many of them incorporate rest into training routines as well. An NFL player usually will rest after game day for 1 or 2 days.
krm01 4y ago
I’ve mentioned this before, but when moving my team (design agency that helps B2B SaaS)to a 4-day work week, productivity increased dramatically. Most businesses can move to a 4-day work week. If you’re an employer and you read this, just give it a try for a month and measure output. Your limiting beliefs will most likely become weak opinions.
- switch007 4y ago
  How'd you measure productivity?
  - bern4444 4y ago
    Presumably the company already has indicators and metrics they use. You just continue using those same indicators and validate there is no significant change.
imjared 4y ago
We've been doing this (4day x 8hr) at Monograph (monograph.com) for much longer than I've been at the company. I like to think we're a bit of an outlier since we take Wednesdays off. While this seems strange, it means that I never work more than two days at a time, I have time in the middle of the week to recharge, and I don't totally lose context on problems I'm working on. We could argue that this means it's not a true "off" day which may be true but I'm completely happy with this setup. Tuesdays are the new Fridays, y'all.
- standardUser 4y ago
  That sounds like a very family-friendly policy, but as a single individual it would be vastly less useful than regular 3 and 4 day weekends that could be used for travel.
giorgioz 4y ago
At https://www.waiterio.com https://www.waiterio.com we are fully remote and we introduced 32 hours work weeks except for customer support which still does 40 hours a week. We track hours with hubstaff.com which takes a random screenshot every 10 minutes. It's been a mixed bag. Half of the team kept productivity up and logged those 32 hours stably. Another half of the team, when left unchecked went down to 14 hours a week and very low output. I have still a lot to learn and I'm far from a great manager. I know perfectly well I might be the reason why a part of my team is underperforming and not working while I don't watch. I too have dreamt of giving autonomy and see the team reach great goals on their own. Those dreams seem naive now given the much harsher reality I've faced so far. Given how all this announcement of reduce hours look more like self-advertisement rather than a justly curious trial in something new that might or might not work, I'm a bit skeptic the others are getting things done with the same budget and efficiency that I do. What if the others have a larger budget and hiring more senior team-mates? What if their efficiency is actually lower than mine? What if they have already fired all the employees that were not absolute workaholics? Frankly I'm not so confident of my ways. I'll keep hustling and crawling my way up in the mud though. At least I know I'm not sugar-coating it.
- reneherse 4y ago
  You'll probably do better once you can retain people who reject employer surveillance.
  - giorgioz 4y ago
    No-one ever quit from our company so that's not it.
    - lolinder 4y ago
      How many got wind of your surveillance policies and never bothered to apply? How many sensed your attitude towards your employees in the interview and took a different offer? How many spoke to one of your employees after the interview and then ghosted you? You can't measure the potentially wide-ranging negative impacts of your attitude and policies.
standardUser 4y ago
My employer has been fully remote with half-day Fridays for 2 years. In practice, those half-days are worth maybe 20% of a regular work day, not 50%. I feel like we've already proven a 4-day work week can be effective and the only thing holding us back is an adherence to convention and expectations (by managers, execs and investors).
pc86 4y ago
They say it's 100% of the full-time salary, but the one open position they have is a full-stack JS engineer for the equivalent of about $66k USD. Is the market really that bad in the UK? That's not even a good new grad offer in the US.
- gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
  Yes, yes it is that bad. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/london-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,6_IM1035_KO7,24.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/london-software-engineer-.... 60k Pounds is about 75k USD. Seems like Beacon might be on the low side.
  - renaudg 4y ago
    I wouldn't trust that : for one thing, they list the "Entry Level Software Engineer" average as £57,581 when "Software Engineer" is £53,392 overall. Better in my experience : https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Almost every company outside the US pays at most half of what the US offers for similar positions. Only a few unicorns and a few countries are exceptions to this.
  - corrral 4y ago
    Most of the US pays at most half of what a handful of (mainly) California and New York companies do.
- renaudg 4y ago
  No that's definitely on the very low side for a London engineer unless you're a new grad or with very outdated skills. You can't directly compare salaries with the US though : the tax and benefits structure is vastly different.
- TrackerFF 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xutopia 4y ago
France tried to limit work week to 35 hours thinking that all hours are equal and it would lead to reduced productivity and a need to hire more workers. It failed to have the intended effect except for factory workers. We are starting to have plenty of signals saying that 4 day work week is good for morale, happiness and not at all detrimental to productivity.
ag56 4y ago
So if this becomes the new ‘standard’ work week, which day becomes part of the weekend? Friday? I see these stories all the time. I’m pro the idea. But it’s not going to work if one industry works Tue-Fri and another Mon-Thu and their customers are taking off Wednesday. That standard work week being _standard_ is a feature.
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  Negotiating schedules is already an issue in most workplaces, as everyone is essentially close to overbooked. And the outcome of almost every meeting is the same whether it happens on a Friday or a Monday.
theonething 4y ago
too bad they don't do four-day and remote.
swader999 4y ago
Wonder if school will ever switch to four days a week.
- corrral 4y ago
  I'd prefer they cut hours over cutting days. 7+ hours in classrooms with hardly any breaks is brutal. Keep them for childcare purposes if you must, but cut the instruction hours. More free time or recess, and wholly-optional, casual courses in various subjects on a drop-in basis. Fewer hours sitting in classrooms and expected to be fully engaged, unable to even take a piss without begging permission first.
- troupe 4y ago
  There are some small private schools that do this.
motohagiography 4y ago
Sincere question: is this 4-day work week mostly an inflation hedge? Anticipating huge real CPI cost increases, weighed against net productivity of people working from home, is the bet that you can net the same amount of value and productivity from existing employees in a 20% shorter period, and compensate for inflation by giving them time "off" instead of spending cash on a raise? Not cynical, just a very wise hedge. I will probably ask this on other 4-day threads, as it seems like a very economical way to retain staff at the same net productivity without paying out cost of living increases. If the economy ever finds a new equillibrium and your company is still profitable, it becomes a tempting private equity target, as they could buy it and simply remove the 4-day week compensation and reap easy growth benefits.
bern4444 4y ago
4 day work weeks are clearly here to stay and a huge quality of life improvement but taking a 20% pay check reduction for it is absurd. You are doing the same amount of work in less time, not less work. Company goals do not change, nor do their deliverables or expectations of you. A reduction would only make sense for hourly employees (though I think the hourly rate should go up so the total weekly pay is the same) but if you are being paid full time, it should not matter how much time it takes you to complete your work. You are paid for your knowledge, skill, and ability to deliver. You are not paid to be working a set amount of hours or days.
ComradePhil 4y ago
I believe that a company that does 6-day work week for 25% higher pay would completely put competitors out of business... and considering the world economy, NOW is the time to do THAT. Changing to 4-day work week at this time just shows how out of touch some people are. It's only a matter of time before reality catches up to them.
tomohawk 4y ago
Not sure what the big deal is with working a 4 day week. I've done it for years, but at 40 hours. It not hard at all to work 40 hours in 4 days, and I am very productive. Advocating for working 32 hours a week as if 40 is hard? I don't really get that at all. I know lots of people in other areas who easily work 60+ hours a week for years on end. I suppose if all you want to do is coast along at a company that will likely get wiped out by the competition when TSHTF, it would be nice to work 32 hours, but if you want to get ahead, don't set your sights so low.
Markoff 4y ago
it sounds all nice except you will end up with company splitted to two parts working Mo-Th and Tu-Fr, because customers/clients/partners want to reach you at least 5 days a week so while I would not mind having 20% income cut considering I work most projects for company which embrace more likely 996 scheme this would either mean I would have on Monday twice as much work as usual or i would lose these projects this can't work unless you are isolated company (hard to imagine the field) or there is nationwide law making this standard

393 points by 500and4 4y ago

Four days in the office :( I mean you do you, but Bleck. "You don't have to come to work on Friday but we still want you to spend 12 hours a week crammed onto a bus or train." How else could you possibly write code or sit in front of a computer all day?

alarmingfox 4y ago
Yeah that surprised me too. Surely if they are able to get the same job done while working from home that would be the better option for everyone involved no? As some employees may lose like an hour a day just to travel whereas that hour could be spent working on features etc. if they didn't have to travel into the office.
ginko 4y ago
>we still want you to spend 12 hours a week crammed onto a bus or train Your commute is 3 hours per day?!
- anon2020dot00 4y ago
  Common in countries in SEA like the Philippines
  - ginko 4y ago
    That's crazy. My "commute" is 30 minutes of walking each way. Could do it in 10 if I took the bus but I like the workout.
- cjg 4y ago
  That was easily my commute when I was working in London. I'd drive to the train station, take the train into London, then the tube within London and walk the last 10 minutes to the office. On a normal day it would take 1h40 each way. On a bad day it could be much longer. That's nearly 17 hours over a 5 day week assuming no problems.
jrochkind1 4y ago
They don't want you to spend 3 hours a day commuting, that's up to you. That does sound like a miserable commute. A quick google search suggests that the average US commute is 28 minutes one way, or about an hour a day, not 3 hours a day. The average US commuter is probably in their own car though, mass transit is usually going to add some, despite other social and personal benefits. I also know it's going to be higher in certain major metro areas. And that the US built environment is kind of insane, and sometimes seems like it was honestly designed to maximize commutes. I agree nobody should ever be spending 3 hours a day commuting. But it's not like the only possibilities are working from home or 3 hours commuting...

pattle 4y ago

Four day work weeks sound good but since being remote from 2019 I could never go back to working in an office. Seems like a case of one step forward, two steps back

encrux 4y ago
I was very pro home-office (and even Anti-Office) before and during the pandemic. Now that restrictions are more or less gone, I'm glad to be working in the office again. Being in the office for the first time in my career showed me that there are definitely upsides, especially when you get along with your team really well. Though 100% mandatory office time is BS.
- basisword 4y ago
  >> I'm glad to be working in the office again. / Being in the office for the first time. I think the fact it's your first time has a big impact. Give it time. Any time I start a new job I enjoy being in the office for the first 6-12 months. Once it becomes routine (same commute, same lunch, same people) and you have learnt how to do your job (and rely on others less) it becomes much less attractive. I'm not saying you'd go full remote but I would bet you will go hybrid and transition further remote over time. This is what I've seen happen with all of my colleagues (including people I thought would jump straight back to the office post-pandemic).
- ironlake 4y ago
  >Now that restrictions are more or less gone, I'm glad to be working in the office again. In the US, COVID cases are five times higher than this time last year, and the CDC estimates that 1 in 5 will result in long COVID.
  - floren 4y ago
    > the CDC estimates that 1 in 5 will result in long COVID. This scolding "I'm not sure exactly how, yet, but you'll be sorry!" any time anyone admits that they're no longer hiding inside & wiping down every banana with bleach is getting a little tired.

orzig 4y ago

If you were explaining the world to an alien, it would be hard to justify the lack of diversity in working arrangements. I applaud any such non standard option in the labor market - may your office be full of good fits!

viraptor 4y ago
I'm not saying it's right or the most effective option, but I believe it would be trivial to justify: it's easier to organise something in a group if everyone's available at the same time. I'm the only person in the team working 4 day week and even that was a bit awkward in planning. (still totally worth it)
- musingsole 4y ago
  > it's easier to organise something in a group if everyone's available at the same time I think most workgroups have effectively been paying extremely high overhead in social costs just so the organization could have the option to organize easily. The problem then is that meetings are called flippantly. If it's hard to get everyone in a room, you'll do a better job capitalizing on when it happens. The downside is there really are a large array of tasks that a group can tackle better than an individual, but I've never seen a corporate group meaningfully recognize or organize for those tasks. Far more often, I get pulled into meetings because some specific individual or another is lacking in autonomy and expertise.
  - laserlight 4y ago
    > I get pulled into meetings because some specific individual or another is lacking in autonomy and expertise These people are unconsciously aware that they are incompetent. They pull people into meetings in order to have a sense of having done work, at the cost of total productivity.
Gigachad 4y ago
I think it would be pretty easy to explain how everyone converged on the same system. If you continually optimise for the best arrangement, everyone is going to end up on pretty much the same thing.

TheGigaChad 4y ago

iLoveOncall 4y ago

Lol, what a scam, 4 day work week but you have to be in the office. I live close to Shoreditch but preparation time and travel both ways is easily 2 hours a day (for some of my colleagues that would be 3+ hours a day). If you went from working from home 100% 5 days a week to working from the office 100% 4 days a week results in the exact same amount of time, except you remove all the monetary savings from working from home (~100GBP in travel alone). No thank you.

drclau 4y ago
Scam is a bit strong. But I can see leadership wanting everyone back to office for whatever reasons, and out of fear of people leaving if they are forced to return to office, they came up with this 4 day work week thing to make it attractive enough for people to stay.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  Scam is strong? They tell people they will spend 20% less time to work-related activities which as I said is a lie. Not only will they spend just as much time for work, it will be more unpleasant and more costly than working from home.
  - realharo 4y ago
    Calling it a scam is completely inaccurate, scams rely on people not being aware (on some level) of what they're signing up for, and on people making promises they don't intend to keep. Here it is perfectly clear what everyone's getting. Tons of people would prefer a 4-day in-office work week over a 5-day remote work week. You may not, but there are many who do.
kristiandupont 4y ago
The fact that this wouldn't be favorable to you given your particular situation does not make it a "scam".
- 4y ago

sshah1983 4y ago

I still don’t understand the 100% as productive in 80% of the time. The math doesn’t check out there unless the expectation is people are working 10 hr days Mon-Thurs. Even in that scenario, not everyone has the stamina to execute at that pace and it also makes it hard to recruit anyone with a kid who needs to navigate school dropoffs/pickups etc.

xnorswap 4y ago
People aren't machines, they bend to their environment. Even without crunching extra hours per day, you can be essentially as productive with fewer working days per week if you are more focussed on the days do you do work.
- sshah1983 4y ago
  Agreed but I’ve yet to hear the killer tactic for how a company gets every employee 100% focused 100% of the time. I think there are some roles that end up suffering. Like someone who is a product designer and now has to cram more creativity in fewer hours. Someone who is in inside or outside sales and has less time where they overlap with customers to perform demos and close deals. It may work - it may not work. The penalty for being sick for a day (or your kid being sick for a day) is more drastic too. Although perhaps those folks just use their extra day to catch up. I’m more bullish on remote work than these 4 day a week experiments.
  - xnorswap 4y ago
    100% focussed 100% of the time is a strawman argument set up to fail, there's no killer tactic because it doesn't exist and no-one is arguing it does. You literally don't have to cram in the hours, you can just work less, enjoy a healthier work/life balance and still be productive. To argue otherwise is to suggest that we should all work 6 day weeks. If you accept that working 5 day weeks has benefits over 6 day weeks then why not accept that 4 day weeks could have benefits too?
    - 4y ago

robbiep 4y ago

I would love to hear some stories of startups that have tried to implement a 4 day week… any examples?

jansan 4y ago
I can give you examples of startups with 7 day work weeks, but 4 day work weeks seem to be very rare in startups.

truthwhisperer 4y ago

howmayiannoyyou 4y ago

Quick refresher on productivity in economic terms: decreasing inputs = decreasing outputs UNLESS tech or technique improves. During supply and/or debt driven inflationary periods (eg. now), increased productivity = increased supply and/or decreased debt. What do these maxims of economics mean for a 4 day work week? At Beacon, nothing*. But implement this at Tyson Foods, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Waste Management, the FX trading desk at JP Morgan Chase, etc. and you get 2-6% productivity declines & some amount of increased supply-driven inflation unless you offset with new technology (eg. software, robotics) or techniques. Celebrate work from home, 4 day weeks, flex-time, etc.... but understand that as these benefits carry costs in important (not all) industries. Also, the migration to jobs having these benefits, from those important jobs that do not, drives inflation and/or illegal immigration and so-called "white collar" top-heavy joblessness risk during recession. No free lunch, even on Fridays. ** Note: UK small business situation is concerning, even if it doesn't apply to Beacon: "Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, showing that 2 million (or about 40%) of the UK's small businesses had less than three months of cash in reserves to support operations. He noted that 10% (or 200,000) were in grave danger, and 300,000 only had a few weeks of cash left."

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tharax 4y ago
That's why in my next start-up, we're making sure that each employee works 168 hours a week. We believe that maximising inputs is the only way to get results.
- throwawayacc2 4y ago
  That’s some bleeding heart liberal commie bs. I make my employees bend the space time continuum to work more than 168 hours per week! <serveral bicep, rocket and fire emojis here>
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  Hustle grindset!!!

devilishDev 4y ago

80% of work time at 100% pay doesn’t really add up when you’re paying £53k for a office-based role in London. For a mid level role, £66k at 0.8FTE would just be the same. Sure, some benefits sound decent but also deceiving… pension match is nice but 6 weeks of holiday (+BH) is actually 24 days and getting £60 for each holiday day taken is £1440 a year that won’t rise with pay rises.

JamesAdir 4y ago

I really can't wrap my head around this four-day week trend. If the organization is focused on KPI's so why does it matter if people work one day or four-days? If the organization is focused on time spend no work (either in office or remotely) how can work be done in 80% of the time? Really don't understand how it works in day-to-day. It resembles the unlimited vacation days policy which was later found out to be unhelpful to employees.

michaelmior 4y ago
> If the organization is focused on KPI's so why does it matter if people work one day or four-days? Arguably it matters in how you KPIs are set. I think it's reasonable to expect a full time employee to work more than one day a week. If you can meet all your KPIs with everyone working one day a week, then maybe you're aiming too low. Of course, if you require everyone to work 60 hour weeks to hit KPIs, that's an even bigger problem.
- JamesAdir 4y ago
  KPIs can be change continuously so that's why I'm baffled by this trend. Companies can just say - we measure only by KPIs, work whenever you want. Something like this signals a much better workspace than four-days workweek, since the latter still measures time instead of output.
  - michaelmior 4y ago
    I'm not sure which trend are you referring to. In any case, I'm not suggesting employees should be measured solely by time worked. Only that I think setting performance targets based on a reasonable number of hours worked seems to make sense to me. Otherwise, I'm not really sure what benchmark you would use.
bencollier49 4y ago
It's mostly a case of figuring out when people will be available to work together. Some companies have a concept of "core hours". As long as you're active during the core hours, the rest are flexible.

simonswords82 4y ago

This is part of a wider scheme in the UK whereby 60 firms and 3000 employees are piloting 4 day weeks. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/04/thousands-of-uk-workers-to-take-part-in-four-day-week-trial https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/04/thousands-o... From the article: Employees from a wide range of businesses and charities are expected to take part in the scheme, which will run initially from June to December, including the Royal Society of Biology, the London-based brewing company Pressure Drop, a Manchester-based medical devices firm, and a fish and chip shop in Norfolk. It comes as the push for companies to adopt a shorter working week – crucially with no loss of pay while aiming for higher productivity – gains momentum as a way of improving working conditions.

belter 4y ago
"Which country and city governments have a four-day work week?": https://buildremote.co/four-day-week/4-day-work-week-countries/ https://buildremote.co/four-day-week/4-day-work-week-countri... I am surprised the lack of mention of Denmark, Sweden or the Netherlands. Most business persons I contact, normally only work 4 days a week.
- kqr 4y ago
  I live in Sweden and have never hard of any company doing a four day week. The closest I get is one of my first jobs which had a 37.5 hour week (rather than the customary 40 hours) but again, spread out over five days. That said, some of the last few weeks at the time of writing have in practise turned out to be four day weeks due to public holidays. Could this be what causes the confusion?
  - snowAbstraction 4y ago
    In Sweden, a significant number of parents with young children who work 80% so maybe that has caused the confusion.
    - kqr 4y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I wish them luck. I understand their need to have folks in the office, and this is one way to make that more attractive. But it is only one factor. Good management, strong teams, and a whole lot of "soft" stuff is even more important than beanbag chairs and foozball tables. The "good management" part is where most companies go pear-shaped. I wouldn't want to go to Buckingham Palace every day, if I hated the people I worked with/for, and felt like my work was being treated badly[0]. Although I work exclusively at home, and have no desire to ever dress "business casual" again, I think that a good* office environment can be extremely conducive to great work. * As in "not like 99% of today's offices." [0] https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02 https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02

natly 4y ago
Wow, that comic really makes me question how much of todays complaning about work and life struggles has been a multi decade persistent thing - not just hardships facing this particular generation. (As someone who was 5 in 1996 and didn't see this first hand.)
- basisword 4y ago
  I think work is just like everything else in this regard. Providing you have standard white collar job, as things continue to improve and get better, we just find new things to complain about. e.g. parent poster complaining about 'business casual' when it wasn't that long ago business casual was a nice step down from having to wear a suit. The workplace continuously adjusts but so do our expectations.
  - jihadjihad 4y ago
    It's always weird to watch Office Space and see the guys all wearing ties. I can't imagine having to do that for a typical software job.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > It's always weird to watch Office Space and see the guys all wearing ties. I can't imagine having to do that for a typical software job I believe this changed in the early 2000s. The dot-com crash reset Silicon Valley. And the Enron scandal reduced corporate America's pull on it. (Steve Jobs wasn't an icon when business casual began taking its hold.) [1] https://high-tech-guide.com/article/how-did-steve-jobs-help-pixar https://high-tech-guide.com/article/how-did-steve-jobs-help-...

jacquesm 4y ago

In quite a few countries the 32 hour workweek is already very normal, it creates a bit of extra scheduling work but nothing you can't handle in a larger organization. For smaller companies this is a bigger problem because they don't usually have the headcount to fill the resulting gaps and things tend to rely more on personal relationships.

gargs 4y ago
It's not common to be paid 100% (aka for 40 hrs), though.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  But you won't be paid 100% for 40 hours, you will be paid 100% for 32 hours. And people that work 40 hours should get more than those that work 32 hours. By the way, it is common to be paid far less for 40 hours than you should receive as well, and plenty of people work unpaid overtime who would be happy just to work the 40 hours they get paid for. Salary negotiations are always tricky, especially if you don't know your true market value. Given the difference between compensation at different companies one way you could attack this problem is to find a company that will match your current salary but at a reduced number of hours. Employees have the same problem that companies have: it is hard to charge by value if you don't know your value. As a gardener my work is worth less than as a computer programmer than as a financial advisor. Because each of those domains values time entirely differently, and because there are different levels of competition. If you can show your boss that if you work less that your productivity will likely remain the same or that it will go up they will probably wonder why they've been paying you for all that extra time in the past... so instead I would just argue to try moving to a different company at a better salary for the same amount of work or for the same salary with less work.
  - paulcole 4y ago
    > And people that work 40 hours should get more than those that work 32 hours. Someone who’s 25% less efficient at their job should get paid the same as someone else who’s more efficient?

yrgulation 4y ago

Strange how many orgs discover that working less hours or remote increases productivity for most people. It’s almost as if unstressed “workers” produce better quality work. There was an experiment whereby cows were shown to give more milk if not stressed. Certainly the same applies to humans. When will companies learn that milking their “workforce” of their energy doesnt yield the expected results but quite the opposite.

prometheus76 4y ago
It was the fatal shift from "personnel" to "human resources".
- xcambar 4y ago
  - fpl67 4y ago
    Fun for who? You? The people around you getting off on it? The HR employee who didn’t elect the name of the organization and who is just trying to get through a day like you are, and apparently has to put up with meme confrontations in the workplace? There is not much that is more cringe than overhearing someone do this within earshot; it’s almost as bad as a joke everyone has heard and can predict while someone loudly stumbles through it a few cubes over. As described, you’re not funny, you’re just an asshole. What form does this confrontation take, exactly? That might help clarify. (I’m not in HR)
    - xcambar 4y ago
      Every position has a storytelling. That of HR is about building a double standard: on the one hand, a discourse that emphasizes on the employees' best interests, while on the other hand, take actions that are on the employer's sole interest. Is it expected? Yes of course, I stopped being naive on the topic long ago. Where this is pervasive is that even some HR people tend to buy it. Also the tech industry should consider happy to at least have some reassuring (yet false) speech. Sure, in the tech industry, people may be considered a bit better, but I've seen and met people in blue collar industries where people were not worth so much more than the paper clips holding their contracts together. And since HR, as a support function of a company, does not differ much from one indistry to another, the culture of HR, really, fundamentally, is to treat people as you'd do with your trucks or machines or chairs or paperclips, and that is, treat them as resources. Hence the very apt name of the function: human resources. And this is the kind of perspective I have on HR and the kind of points I could (but not always do) raise if we touch on the societal aspects of our jobs. Note that as a manager myself, I have my fair share of cognitive dissonance to bear as well, and critics are always welcome :)

mmaunder 4y ago

Any large profitable public companies doing this? These guys raised $56M less than a year ago. Just curious who has proved the concept is sustainable without burning VC money.

da39a3ee 4y ago

In other words, another management team fails to understand that many of the best software engineers work most effectively in silence, and on their own for large periods of time, and that this is best done at home. The obstinacy, arrogance, and stupidity of managers from these guys to Musk and Sandberg is incredibly disappointing.

anuraj 4y ago

What I don't understand about Europe is 1. They are facing a huge negative demographic dividend. 2. They are facing steep inflation, low energy and food security and lower economic growth. 3. High social security costs may not be sustainable in the long term. 4. Finance is crumbling and real economy is taking over. Monetary expansion had its run and is no longer the panacea. How will they handle this and still emerge unscathed while competing with China and India and Indonesia and the likes.

mjburgess 4y ago
Immigration -- they'll be a move to a two-tired (zero-hours, contract-only, fire-at-will) base largely made up of the young and immigrants. Then gold-plated 4d work-from-home jobs for 45-65s.
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jstummbillig 4y ago
Higher import tariffs are a mid term solution, but in the end nation states and national governance are dysfunctional concepts for an ultimately globalized world.
atonse 4y ago
I’m all for experimenting with hours. But it is something only information workers can do because productivity doesn’t translate linearly to hours put in. But anything physical, manufacturing, etc, it is simply more time = more output. Unless we use more and more automation and better tools of course. Which is also happening.
timkam 4y ago
The idea is that 4-hours work weeks for relatively highly skilled knowledge workers will actually help lower the costs for the social security system (less burnouts, early retirements) and a more productive society (instead of 'grinding out' pointlessly long hours, work less and contribute to society in your free time) -- work is merely one way to be productive in society.
4y ago

dnndev 4y ago

Is this better than a results oriented work week? And figure out your own schedule as individual or team.

eweise 4y ago
What is a results oriented work week? How do you measure? If its "I said I would get X done" then yes, a four day work week is much better.
- dnndev 4y ago
  Sounds to me like someone does not trust employees to manage themselves and meet deadlines, and thats ok. I was coming into this thread from a highly skilled, well paid workers perspective. Completely agree, if you need to micro-manage then workday oriented results are easier.
  - eweise 4y ago
    Well, if you ever get the chance to work with highly skilled, well paid workers I think you'll be surprised to find that even we have a hard time estimating the effort needed to complete tasks since we are usually doing unique and complex things that have unknowns. I also suggest studying agile methodologies which assume workers are working at 100% and instead of guaranteeing work gets completed according to estimates it tracks work completed and adjusts accordingly.
    - dnndev 4y ago
      estimate and result oriented work are two different things. Result oriented work is: Here is how much I did this week. I either met, exceeded or fell short of some expectation. The person then decides if this is the place they want to be and the employer decides if they are a good fit. Agile in most places is a managers whip. I will go so far to say I have never seen it implemented in a way that is beneficial to devs. (possibly by design) Estimates are even worse... you cant estimate software at scale. spending dollars to pickup dimes as the saying goes.

fleddr 4y ago

I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself. As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the exact same workload as before and now need to achieve it in less time. There's many ways to cross this gap. An obvious one is that a typical 5 day work week has moments of slack, depending on the culture. Friday after lunch is where productivity sinks in many offices. Wednesdays are also slower as it's typically the first moment in the week where things are running (planned, prepared, on track). In a 4 day work week you sacrifice this breathing room, the 4 days become more compressed. Another natural change is to take a more aggressive stand in rejecting non-sense. Excess meetings, unimportant emails, etc. This works very well and is extremely effective for the simple reason that you MUST. As such this time compression is a blessing, a cleansing mechanism for yourself and the organization. You'll be amazed at how much time you can win back. Let's say you do need to attend a meeting. It's a 1 hour meeting. You're needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins. As if by sheer magic, what needed to be discussed gets done in 20 mins. Without this forced "budgeting", people would just fill the hour with bullshit. Counter intuitive, but by being rigid instead of elastic, you maximize value.

sktrdie 4y ago
This makes sense and understand what you're saying. But the idea of having a full extra day where I don't have to open the laptop and can instead concentrate totally on myself is much more important than a decompression day at work.
- fleddr 4y ago
  Exactly, that's also why I made the change.
rootusrootus 4y ago
I'm starting to get more militant about zoom calls. Trying to avoid angering people explicitly, but still pushing back as best I can to protect to the team from incessant zoom calls to have conversations that would be faster on slack, and better documented in email. Zoom calls just invite conversation that has to repeated again because 80% of everyone on the call forgot some amount of detail.

vaughan 4y ago

Is taking the Monday or Friday off better? I’ve always found Monday is a slow day for me to reload everything back into my working memory and get back into flow. I wonder if this is why Monday meetings are good. So that everyone can be reinvigorated for the week ahead.

aczerepinski 4y ago

My last job (America’s Test Kitchen in case they’re hiring) did/does 4.5 day work weeks. Friday afternoons off. Zero loss of productivity. For me it was a built in zero-guilt place to schedule my dentist appointments, rare in-person tasks at the bank, take cats to the vet, etc. Of course, 4.0 days would be even better!

formvoltron 4y ago

The 4 day workweek. This is life just laughing at me for having the gall to try & start my own company. 30 years on I'm still trying. Everybody else who just went & got a job are now millionaires & retired. I wrote a news publishing system 2 years before Elon sold them. I wrote the first Taxi app on iPhone. On my todo list for 2 years before Instagram was "twitter with photos".

suction 4y ago
Seems like you're always two years too early for the market?
- formvoltron 4y ago
  You definitely need a biz partner you can count on. Unless you have a family situation that encourages & helps this sort of endeavor. When someone burns you, don't go back to him / her for the second go around! Even if that person is a good friend. That's what I've learned. Alternative version of this is don't start a company with someone who is a newly minted millionaire & is single, not sure of what to do next in life, and not all that interested in money.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

I feel many people in tech and other office jobs have implicitly worked 4 day workweeks for years. During an average workday, how much time do you spend doing personal things at your desk (texting friends, reading non work-related online articles, etc.)? I bet that time aggregated across Monday to Friday adds up to at least a full 8 hour day.

dangets 4y ago
The larger question is whether one would stop doing those personal things during a 4 day work week.

krnlpnc 4y ago

> in the same way that nobody wants to go to a wedding over Zoom, we don't want to build our product over Zoom. It's absurd to compare a once-in-a-lifetime event to everyday work meetings.

mavhc 4y ago

Can we spend the spare day going to school to learn about all the new stuff since we left school, or stuff we've forgotten?

jrochkind1 4y ago

I work a four-day week (80% time, not imagining 4-10s) as a software engineer at a non-profit academic organization. For a paycut basically, I make 80% of what I think of as my "actual" salary. I have managed to do this at a succession of several jobs now. When I briefly tried to go back to 5 days, it was really hard. It seems insane to me now that anyone works 5 days a week. (And I do know plenty of people work even more, and I am very lucky). Fridays are for doctor's appointments and car repair and grocery shopping and errands. Which probably does mean I'm away from "work hours" for these things less than I would be full-time, I just schedule such things for Fridays where possible. In general, I am pretty convinced that I'm at least 90% as productive on 80% time as I would be on 100%, maybe more. Working at non-profit academic, I'm definitely not making my "market" salary. I could be making a lot more than I am now, even at 80% of a salary, at various more typical organizations. But I'm not sure how viable the 4-day week is with potential employers -- even if I'm willing to take a paycut to 80% of salary, which I am! Unlike the OP which is giving everyone a 4-day week at full salary? My impression is that most high-paying software engineering jobs/organizations are not going to let you do 4-days a week? Which is crazy when they could get me for 80% of the cost with most of the productivity -- but I guess the high-paying organizations aren't exactly trying to save money on salary. I really don't think I'd go back to 40-hour-a-week-standard unless I had to.

draw_down 4y ago
jrochkind1 4y ago
To clarify to a since flagged (by someone else) comment: When i say "I'm at least 90% as productive" -- I mean I am more productive per hour worked. Not that I end up working 90% hours but only getting paid for 80%. I really do work 80% hours, only four days a week, Monday to Thursday. I am not expected to and don't work on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays. I just get done I think 90% or more of what I would get done in five days, in four days. As seems to be commonly reported by people in this situation. Some people have also said "Yeah, but in my remote software dev job, I work even less than 80% of my expected hours, I just don't tell them, and I get paid a full salary." I'm not gonna say much about the ethics of that, I guess I think it depends on the specific situation. But regardless, I'd myself just be stressed out if I had to be less than honest about my work. And my 80% schedule is clear -- I really don't work on Friday, nobody expects to be able to reach me on Friday (any better than they could on a Sunday or at 4am, unless I'm on-call), I don't check my email or look at my work calendar, I am really not working. And that's the whole benefit to me -- it's a different thing than using lots of hours for personal social media or something (which, sure, I do to some extent too whether 4 or 5 days a week.

shadowtree 4y ago

This is escalating like the Gilette wars (3 blades, 4 blades...12 blades). Soon you'll only stand out by announcing the 3 day work week. ...and get killed by a team that just outworks you. How many pro-sports teams have switched to less and less training :) I do hope all our competitors switch to 0 day workweeks...

krnlpnc 4y ago
Says a person currently on HN instead of working...
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maltyr 4y ago
For me, the common usage of the terms "training" and "working" are not the same. In most jobs, we perform a lot of "working," or applying known patterns, and very little "training," or learning new patterns. Pro sports is flipped, and often each week the athletes are learning new tactics/counter-tactics based on their opponent, or adjusting their existing patterns to perfection, or grinding out exercise routines to be able to demand more from their body. Drills are required to "train" their body into being able to do these routines reliably on-demand, and new exercise routines are often the best at forcing your body to adapt and grow. That said, even pro-athletes have rest periods once the season is over. Also, many of them incorporate rest into training routines as well. An NFL player usually will rest after game day for 1 or 2 days.

krm01 4y ago

I’ve mentioned this before, but when moving my team (design agency that helps B2B SaaS)to a 4-day work week, productivity increased dramatically. Most businesses can move to a 4-day work week. If you’re an employer and you read this, just give it a try for a month and measure output. Your limiting beliefs will most likely become weak opinions.

switch007 4y ago
How'd you measure productivity?
- bern4444 4y ago
  Presumably the company already has indicators and metrics they use. You just continue using those same indicators and validate there is no significant change.

imjared 4y ago

We've been doing this (4day x 8hr) at Monograph (monograph.com) for much longer than I've been at the company. I like to think we're a bit of an outlier since we take Wednesdays off. While this seems strange, it means that I never work more than two days at a time, I have time in the middle of the week to recharge, and I don't totally lose context on problems I'm working on. We could argue that this means it's not a true "off" day which may be true but I'm completely happy with this setup. Tuesdays are the new Fridays, y'all.

standardUser 4y ago
That sounds like a very family-friendly policy, but as a single individual it would be vastly less useful than regular 3 and 4 day weekends that could be used for travel.

giorgioz 4y ago

At https://www.waiterio.com https://www.waiterio.com we are fully remote and we introduced 32 hours work weeks except for customer support which still does 40 hours a week. We track hours with hubstaff.com which takes a random screenshot every 10 minutes. It's been a mixed bag. Half of the team kept productivity up and logged those 32 hours stably. Another half of the team, when left unchecked went down to 14 hours a week and very low output. I have still a lot to learn and I'm far from a great manager. I know perfectly well I might be the reason why a part of my team is underperforming and not working while I don't watch. I too have dreamt of giving autonomy and see the team reach great goals on their own. Those dreams seem naive now given the much harsher reality I've faced so far. Given how all this announcement of reduce hours look more like self-advertisement rather than a justly curious trial in something new that might or might not work, I'm a bit skeptic the others are getting things done with the same budget and efficiency that I do. What if the others have a larger budget and hiring more senior team-mates? What if their efficiency is actually lower than mine? What if they have already fired all the employees that were not absolute workaholics? Frankly I'm not so confident of my ways. I'll keep hustling and crawling my way up in the mud though. At least I know I'm not sugar-coating it.

reneherse 4y ago
You'll probably do better once you can retain people who reject employer surveillance.
- giorgioz 4y ago
  No-one ever quit from our company so that's not it.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    How many got wind of your surveillance policies and never bothered to apply? How many sensed your attitude towards your employees in the interview and took a different offer? How many spoke to one of your employees after the interview and then ghosted you? You can't measure the potentially wide-ranging negative impacts of your attitude and policies.

standardUser 4y ago

My employer has been fully remote with half-day Fridays for 2 years. In practice, those half-days are worth maybe 20% of a regular work day, not 50%. I feel like we've already proven a 4-day work week can be effective and the only thing holding us back is an adherence to convention and expectations (by managers, execs and investors).

pc86 4y ago

They say it's 100% of the full-time salary, but the one open position they have is a full-stack JS engineer for the equivalent of about $66k USD. Is the market really that bad in the UK? That's not even a good new grad offer in the US.

gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
Yes, yes it is that bad. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/london-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,6_IM1035_KO7,24.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/london-software-engineer-.... 60k Pounds is about 75k USD. Seems like Beacon might be on the low side.
- renaudg 4y ago
  I wouldn't trust that : for one thing, they list the "Entry Level Software Engineer" average as £57,581 when "Software Engineer" is £53,392 overall. Better in my experience : https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Almost every company outside the US pays at most half of what the US offers for similar positions. Only a few unicorns and a few countries are exceptions to this.
- corrral 4y ago
  Most of the US pays at most half of what a handful of (mainly) California and New York companies do.
renaudg 4y ago
No that's definitely on the very low side for a London engineer unless you're a new grad or with very outdated skills. You can't directly compare salaries with the US though : the tax and benefits structure is vastly different.
TrackerFF 4y ago

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xutopia 4y ago

France tried to limit work week to 35 hours thinking that all hours are equal and it would lead to reduced productivity and a need to hire more workers. It failed to have the intended effect except for factory workers. We are starting to have plenty of signals saying that 4 day work week is good for morale, happiness and not at all detrimental to productivity.

ag56 4y ago

So if this becomes the new ‘standard’ work week, which day becomes part of the weekend? Friday? I see these stories all the time. I’m pro the idea. But it’s not going to work if one industry works Tue-Fri and another Mon-Thu and their customers are taking off Wednesday. That standard work week being _standard_ is a feature.

mattgreenrocks 4y ago
Negotiating schedules is already an issue in most workplaces, as everyone is essentially close to overbooked. And the outcome of almost every meeting is the same whether it happens on a Friday or a Monday.

theonething 4y ago

too bad they don't do four-day and remote.

swader999 4y ago

Wonder if school will ever switch to four days a week.

corrral 4y ago
I'd prefer they cut hours over cutting days. 7+ hours in classrooms with hardly any breaks is brutal. Keep them for childcare purposes if you must, but cut the instruction hours. More free time or recess, and wholly-optional, casual courses in various subjects on a drop-in basis. Fewer hours sitting in classrooms and expected to be fully engaged, unable to even take a piss without begging permission first.
troupe 4y ago
There are some small private schools that do this.

motohagiography 4y ago

Sincere question: is this 4-day work week mostly an inflation hedge? Anticipating huge real CPI cost increases, weighed against net productivity of people working from home, is the bet that you can net the same amount of value and productivity from existing employees in a 20% shorter period, and compensate for inflation by giving them time "off" instead of spending cash on a raise? Not cynical, just a very wise hedge. I will probably ask this on other 4-day threads, as it seems like a very economical way to retain staff at the same net productivity without paying out cost of living increases. If the economy ever finds a new equillibrium and your company is still profitable, it becomes a tempting private equity target, as they could buy it and simply remove the 4-day week compensation and reap easy growth benefits.

bern4444 4y ago

4 day work weeks are clearly here to stay and a huge quality of life improvement but taking a 20% pay check reduction for it is absurd. You are doing the same amount of work in less time, not less work. Company goals do not change, nor do their deliverables or expectations of you. A reduction would only make sense for hourly employees (though I think the hourly rate should go up so the total weekly pay is the same) but if you are being paid full time, it should not matter how much time it takes you to complete your work. You are paid for your knowledge, skill, and ability to deliver. You are not paid to be working a set amount of hours or days.

ComradePhil 4y ago

I believe that a company that does 6-day work week for 25% higher pay would completely put competitors out of business... and considering the world economy, NOW is the time to do THAT. Changing to 4-day work week at this time just shows how out of touch some people are. It's only a matter of time before reality catches up to them.

tomohawk 4y ago

Not sure what the big deal is with working a 4 day week. I've done it for years, but at 40 hours. It not hard at all to work 40 hours in 4 days, and I am very productive. Advocating for working 32 hours a week as if 40 is hard? I don't really get that at all. I know lots of people in other areas who easily work 60+ hours a week for years on end. I suppose if all you want to do is coast along at a company that will likely get wiped out by the competition when TSHTF, it would be nice to work 32 hours, but if you want to get ahead, don't set your sights so low.

Markoff 4y ago

it sounds all nice except you will end up with company splitted to two parts working Mo-Th and Tu-Fr, because customers/clients/partners want to reach you at least 5 days a week so while I would not mind having 20% income cut considering I work most projects for company which embrace more likely 996 scheme this would either mean I would have on Monday twice as much work as usual or i would lose these projects this can't work unless you are isolated company (hard to imagine the field) or there is nationwide law making this standard