9 ms·

Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

67 points by minicaionut 3y ago

mnky9800n 3y ago
I don't think anyone would ever follow such rules they would just say it's true. It will be like unlimited holidays meaning no holidays.
hunglee2 3y ago
I believe the Netherlands stipulates the requirement to offer every job as either part or full time, and a substantial number of job applicants go for the part time option, especially women. Interestingly, there have been some unintended downstream impact of this progressive law, such as lower women participation in senior level roles.
- Okkef 3y ago
  It is simply not true that all jobs are offered at parttime. There is some amount of part-time time available after getting kids, but it's not a general requirement for all jobs.
- corethree 3y ago
  >Interestingly, there have been some unintended downstream impact of this progressive law, such as lower women participation in senior level roles This isn't downstream impact. It's more of a choice. The women choose not to strive for senior level roles. They express this choice by choosing the 4 day work week. We shouldn't call it an unintended downstream impact because it's not something that should be corrected. If women choose not to work as hard as men, then we shouldn't try to equalize their participation in senior roles.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    Interesting to see someone on HN of all places equate longer hours with "working harder" or being more qualified for senior roles. Speaking from personal experience with a cohort of Millenial dads: a lot of "women working less to prioritize family" comes down to women being expected to be caregivers and men typically not having experienced the same socialization from a young age and feeling overwhelmed, thus retreating into work to both avoid care work and be able to justify it by being "the provider". It's pretty telling when we chastise women for "not pulling their weight" at work when they're also typically expected to do most of the household chores, social labor (e.g. keeping track of birthdays, relationships and preferences throughout the family's social circles) and caregiving but don't call out deadbeat dads like Elon Musk who sire new children left and right while being completely incapable of maintaining a relationship with any of the mothers and abandoning any child that calls him out for his bullshit once they get old enough to form an opinion. And as a reminder: Musk holds several official positions including multiple C-tier ones and still spends an ungodly amount of time shitposting on Twitter. If you think that the time he spends on any one of his jobs on average accounts for more than the equivalent of a 4 day work week while also being this heavily distracted and spread thin, you're being ridiculous.
    - corethree 3y ago
      >Speaking from personal experience with a cohort of Millenial dads: a lot of "women working less to prioritize family" comes down to women being expected to be caregivers and men typically not having experienced the same socialization from a young age and feeling overwhelmed, thus retreating into work to both avoid care work and be able to justify it by being "the provider". It is not an expectation. It's been part of human behavior across all cultures since history. Men are the workers and women are the care givers and home makers. The behavior is seen so consistently across cultures that it's safe to say it's more then social conditioning. It's biological. Humans are flexible enough to behave outside of biological parameters but you are in utter denial if you deny the evidence that spans across ancient history and all cultures across the world. But this is besides the point. The point is if I run a business, my objective is to succeed. My objective is not to hire some women who wants to do a 4 day work week to support a child. It may be beneficial to the mother to give her advantages but it is not beneficial to me as the person who spent my hard earned cash paying her. >It's pretty telling when we chastise women for "not pulling their weight" at work when they're also typically expected to do most of the household chores, social labor (e.g. keeping track of birthdays, relationships and preferences throughout the family's social circles) and caregiving but don't call out deadbeat dads like Elon Musk who sire new children left and right while being completely incapable of maintaining a relationship with any of the mothers and abandoning any child that calls him out for his bullshit once they get old enough to form an opinion. As a person who risked all my resources on a business how the hell does house hold chores apply to me? If the woman demands to have the same pay and rank as the hard working guy who works 5 days a week because she spent a lot of time caring for some kid that has nothing to do with my business, how is that fair to me? It's asking for a handout. And sure if the government wants to force me to give a hand out to make society a better place than great. I support this. What I don't support is this lie that what was given out is anything but a hand out. It is extra help and it is not something that was earned with fair trade. The person who devotes the most effort and has the best results deserves the most reward. >If you think that the time he spends on any one of his jobs on average accounts for more than the equivalent of a 4 day work week while also being this heavily distracted and spread thin, you're being ridiculous. If you're asking me what I think is ridiculous I would say your response to me is ridiculous. Not being snarky here, your hypothetical implies ridiculousness and I respond with another hypothetical about your statement. What does Elon have to do with anything? If Elon sired 50 children and abandoned them, that's evil and wrong, but that's completely orthogonal to my business. I pay someone for results and Elon delivers. What he does outside of that is a completely different thing. In general Men spend more time and more effort at work so they tend to deliver better results and thus they get more senior positions. It's obvious if women choose a 4 day work week they're just not as into it as men and thus they get paid less and get less senior positions. Not all women make the choice to take care of children. A good number of women choose to do what the men do and when you control for that the data shows that the gender pay gap largely disappears. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender-pay-gap/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gende... I support equal pay and standards for the women who deliver equal results as men. Are you saying you don't support this? You support unequal standards? You support handouts for women when they raise kids? It's a valid thing to support. But don't call it what it isn't. It is a gift and not something women are entitled to.
  - isoprophlex 3y ago
    > If women choose not to work as hard as men, then we shouldn't try to equalize their participation in senior roles This is a myopic, reductionist take. You're missing the forest for the trees. It is not a matter of women choosing not to work as hard as men, it is a matter of society being structured in such a way that men are disproportionately not involved in raising a family, and women being delegated to the task of caregiver even though they themselves would like more equality. Economically, women are pressured to stay out of the workplace for 6+ months, whereas men get a couple of days-weeks to stay at home.
    - corethree 3y ago
      Your the frog living in the well. Think bigger. For eons and millennia society has been structured this way since forever. It's only in the recent three or four decades has there been a cultural shift. Men have been taking home the income since they were hunting, farming and now programming. Women taking home the money is a new thing. That only happened in the last 50 or so years. And the social pressures aren't even forcing them to take home the money. To women, it's just an option. For men the pressure is worse. For men it's a social requirement... the survival of the family unit still rests entirely on their shoulders. But again this is besides the point. The main question here is, how does this new opportunity for women to make money suddenly make women deserve a hand out when they choose divide the time devoted to these new opportunities with care giving? You do less work and as a business owner I have to give you the same pay because you're entitled to it? How does that logic work out? It doesn't. If an employee works 4 days a week and obviously has his/her attention divided to other endeavors how does he/she deserve a promotion? Are you kidding? Maybe in her eyes she deserves a promotion, but as a business owner I'd rather promote the single guy who is 100% dedicated because he's the one that actually deserves it. That being said if society wants to make themselves better and give hand outs to women for caregiving... I'm all for it. But don't twist it any other way. What's going on here is a charity. A kind gift to caregivers who are not entitled to said gift in any way. Don't come to me as if women deserve promotions because they have kids to take care of or social pressures to deal with. That's just garbage. Also don't get me started on the pressures on men, it's magnitudes larger than it is for women, magnitudes and we don't go around screaming for a handout.
  - HelloNurse 3y ago
    It can be considered an imperfect intermediate step towards gender equality: women that are more or less voluntarily burdened with child care are very likely to work part time, instead of quitting completely because part time is out of the question (which is a far worse discrimination than a "glass ceiling" with respect to high level promotions).
    - corethree 3y ago
      Yeah this is fair. It makes sense. Equality is about equal pay for equal results. Not handouts. People forget that although the handout might be good for society overall it is unfair to the person giving out the handout. I don't think this step is intermediate. It is the most fair step possible.
      - HelloNurse 3y ago
        Further improvement would involve a more balanced workplace culture than promoting only "dedicated" workaholics (and expecting those workaholics to be men).
        corethree 3y ago
        No it makes sense to promote dedicated workaholics to the highest echelons. They have maximal impact to business. If those workaholics are women then those women very much need to be promoted as well. The data actually shows this is already happening. It shows that when you control for the choices women make about child care... the gender pay gap is largely negligible. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender-pay-gap/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gende... This is an interesting podcast about the topic if you haven't hear of this concept already. They interview a female statistical professor from Harvard about it.
        kuchenbecker 3y ago
        > Female Statistics Professor Claudia Goldin, the economic "Nobel" Laurette this year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Goldin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Goldin
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  I'm dutch and this is definitely not some stipulated requirement. Mandatory 40 hr jobs do exist. (Edit! A commenter above me shows that apparently it's difficult for employers to disallow requests for shorter workweeks, so take what i say with a grain of salt. All i know is that i often come across job openings for 40hr/wk contracts only) That said, taxation and society as a whole is structured such that it doesn't always make sense to work 5 days. Like the author mentions, in a certain tax bracket you effectively lose 10% of your income to go from a 5 day to a 4 day work week. Then, if you have kids, getting daycare reduces the benefits of working full time even further. To wit: I spend ~€1250/month after tax cuts on putting two kids into daycare, for 2 days. That exceeds my mortgage. Earn more? Less tax cuts. Work longer hours? Be prepared to fork over even more money.
- WJW 3y ago
  Explanatory page at https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/arbeidsovereenkomst-en-cao/vraag-en-antwoord/wanneer-mag-ik-meer-of-minder-uren-werken https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/arbeidsovereenkomst... (Dutch only AFAICT, sorry) Employers are almost required to approve a request to work less hours than full time. The reasons why it would not be allowed are fairly minimal. The only reasons allowed are: - Nobody else can take over the work (ie very specialized knowledge) - Insurmountable problems with work shift planning (simply having to hire another person is not considered insurmountable) - Not enough money or work (rare, would primarily occur for people wanting to work more instead of less) - No space in the personnel formation (would presumably also mostly apply for people wanting to work more rather than less) In addition this law only applies to companies with more than 10 employees, the employee requesting part time has to work there for at least 26 weeks and they need to file the request at least 8 weeks in advance (to give the employer time to hire additional people) That said, yes it is great and I agree completely with TFA. I fully believe that having 5 employees at 32 hours/week is better for a company than 4 employees at 40 hours/week, for the reasons stated in the article. It is better for employees too, because an extra day a week to do errands (while the kids are at school!) brings some much needed extra time in a household where both partners are working. Even if you are not married having more time for yourself can be a great choice if you already have enough income.
  - bux93 3y ago
    It's a stipulated requirement in most cases but enforcement of rules for employers is massively underfunded, so companies that don't have to deal with a union aren't bothered that much by regulations. Government workers are well organized and don't notice that the rules they thought up (and are responsible for having enforced) actually are ignored by most non-government employers. In fact, government is usually calling for a more flexible labor market, even though the Dutch labor market is among the most flexible in the EU (if not the most flexible as, again, any costs to getting rid of employees in an illegal fashion are neglible in the first place. They are also not enforced at all unless the illegally fired employee has the wherewithal to sue. Which is not trivial for lower paid people as access to subsidized legal help has been slashed. And even if you have a fixed term/hour contract, no country has as many temps and contractors which can be shown the door by the people paying their fees, which leads to unhealthy power dynamics with their immediate employer as well.) So yes, in theory (and for government workers in practice) it's all nice.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > Interestingly, there have been some unintended downstream impact of this progressive law, such as lower women participation in senior level roles. The word “unintended,” while probably accurate, is bothersome. The intention should be to maximize individual choice. Are we supposed to force women into senior positions to please our sensibilities?
  - hunglee2 3y ago
    I hear you, and you make a good point. However, I think the term 'unintended' is both accurate and non-bothersome in this case, as I am confident that when the law was designed, it did not factor in this downstream impact.
corethree 3y ago
Honestly everyone is just happier in Scandinavia. I feel most of the innovation comes from the US though, but this isn't a disadvantage for the Netherlands because technology developed in the US percolates to them as well. They get the benefits without the downsides. Heck I remember reading about how more people own Tesla's their then here.
- sunbum 3y ago
  The Netherlands are not in Scandinavia?
  - corethree 3y ago
    Ok, I meant Scandinavian influenced or Scandinavian-like countries.
    - sunbum 3y ago
      What does this even mean.
      - eviks 3y ago
        it means it's somewhere around that part of the world
        quickthrower2 3y ago
        Russia too?
        corethree 3y ago
        Again please educate yourself: https://nordicperspective.com/facts/netherlands-scandinavia-connection https://nordicperspective.com/facts/netherlands-scandinavia-... Thank you.
      - corethree 3y ago
oldpersonintx 3y ago
The endgame for something like this is purely-dynamic percentages....i.e hourly pay. IMHO this is where many rank-and-file dev jobs are headed...you will be paid by the hour to close tickets, and when there are no tickets, there is no work, and no pay. Employers will sell this as a "benefit" like "unlimited PTO"...but it's really not Be careful about pursuing that four day work week...
- rkachowski 3y ago
  This would require well defined tickets + work items with scope that is realistic, and an entire system behind the creation of these items which entails product + process understanding (not to mention designing tickets in a way which is minimally exploitable). If this could happen we would advance the state of project management into the sci-fi era.
  - oldpersonintx 3y ago
    The number of devs is well on its way to exceeding available work, so none of what you stipulate is necessary Employers can simply say : "this ticket is three hours of work and that is all that we will pay", and your choice will be take it or leave it We are well on our way to most tech jobs becoming "McJobs", this is one more step...HN really has its collective head buried in the sand in this regard imho I already see this at my employer (well known HW maker)...more and more dev work falls to QA staff who are poorly compensated and have no mobility....QA has just become code for "low end dev" and they do nothing but pull from JIRA (advice: never take a QA job in tech if you desire good pay or mobility)
    - vasco 3y ago
      > The number of devs is well on its way to exceeding available work Is this something you've read or that you made up?
      - prepend 3y ago
        Seems like BLS is projecting programmer jobs to decrease by 11% by 2032 [0]. This isn’t perfect, but seems like a pretty reputable source for employment trends. Of course it also says median salary is $100k and I haven’t been able to hire a programmer at $100k in 20 years. So I think there’s a lot of variability. [0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
imiric 3y ago
It's borderline criminal that after decades of productivity increases due to automation and technology, people are still working 40-hour weeks or more, and their wages have been mostly stagnant[1,2,3]. Most of the benefits of this change is instead being reaped by already highly paid executives. Not only should people in most industries be working less, they should be paid more for it. Cutting my income by 20% for the privilege of working less is unacceptable. Especially when it's been proven that working less is an overall net positive for companies as well[4]. Stop being greedy, and treat your employees well. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_productivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ... [2]: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ [3]: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ [4]: https://www.businessinsider.com/4-day-workweek-successful-trial-evidence-productivity-retention-revenue-2023-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/4-day-workweek-successful-tr...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lynx23 3y ago
  I am totally fine with 40-hours a week. However, what I am not fine with is people like you speaking for everyone else. You can work less then 40 hours already, volutnarily. But you are not qualified to determine how long other people are supposed to work, or actually knowing how long they would want to work. This "we need to work less" attitude comes from people that dont like they work. That is sad. But it doesn't apply to me, for instance.
  - abenga 3y ago
    The issue isn't the number of hours, it's the stagnant wages despite increased productivity.
    - hcks 3y ago
      Wages in the USA have not stagnated, actually
j7ake 3y ago
There are 80 percent jobs, but unlikely for highly sought after careers(note career != jobs) with nonlinear payoff functions. Think of the NBA, Olympic athletes, or movie stars. The performance difference between the top 10 people versus unemployed is probably much less than 20 percent. In the extreme case: a 100 m sprinter sprinting 12 seconds vs 10 seconds is the difference between gold vs unknown.
- fakedang 3y ago
  Why compare apples and oranges? Most jobs aren't as NBA athletes, Olympic athletes or movie stars. Those aren't highly sought after careers either. That privilege goes to whichever careers pay more as a median. It's only kids who want to become moonshot stars.
  - j7ake 3y ago
    Well most jobs are actually on hourly wage already, so 80 percent jobs exist for the majority of workers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncaplan/2021/03/12/americas-hourly-workers/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncaplan/2021/03/12/americas-...
    - fakedang 3y ago
      Equating basic subsistence level jobs to 80 percent jobs just because of the hourly nature is a bad faith argument imo.
- defrost 3y ago
  Meanwhile, for the other 330 million people in the USofA who are not Olympic athletes or NBA superstars . . . It's nice that you address an unrepresentative teeny tiny micro sliver of the employed, but is there anything you can add for the majority?
  - j7ake 3y ago
    Please note that the majority of workers in usa are on hourly wage. So for the majority of workers, 80 percent jobs exist, but they are not desirable. The people on hackernews do not represent the majority, but rather people who enjoy programming and want to make it a high paying career. Such luxury necessarily means it is highly competitive. Therefore I used the extreme analogy of professional athletes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncaplan/2021/03/12/americas-hourly-workers/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncaplan/2021/03/12/americas-...
inferense 3y ago
more people does not necessarily correlate with higher productivity, quite the opposite in many cases. Larger headcount introduces more meetings, more processes, slower decision making and overall less agile teams. 80% jobs are maybe a fit for a large established orgs while unthinkable for small teams solving hard problems with limited resources.
bjarneh 3y ago
> You get the combined experience of 5 people instead of 4 Administration of 5 people instead of 4, is that really a pro from an employers perspective?
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  Yup...95% of "HR" is your Workday intranet, scales very well, new employees do not require linear growth in HR JIRA and Github automate/gamify work distribution and scoring, so even technical management need not scale linearly to rank-and-file AWS means resources scale out without increasing ops headcount Standardization of dev tooling provides pre-trained pool of workers Etc etc...rank and file developers are becoming a human autoscaling group
caturopath 3y ago
Many good points, but I think there are some major errors. > For the salary cost of 4 employees at 40 hours, you get 5 employees at 32 hours. The real costs of paying 5 people 80% salary is much greater - benefits, many overhead costs, etc. do not get cut by 20%. > You get the combined experience of 5 people instead of 4. At most margins, having more human beings is NOT a clear win. Communication overhead, diffusion of responsibility, etc. create major diseconomies of scale in the sort of office work that this post was framed to be about.
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  The communication overhead seems more than balanced by the extra redundancy you have when people do become unavailable (which they inevitably do) and people not burning out in quite as high a rate. But hey, I'm a Dutchman working 80%, so I'm sure I'm biased.
  - Communitivity 3y ago
    I'm all for an 80% week. In my career I've known six people who suffered burnout, one of whom committed suicide. Too many corporations push our IT and devs too hard, then replace them when they get used up. I don't see the U.S. companies going for an 80% week though.
  - readthenotes1 3y ago
    You might enjoy reading about Brooke's Law and Parkinson's Law.
- Communitivity 3y ago
  It's even worse in defense consulting. - I've seen people billed at 2x salary because overhead includes work area cost, management chain cost, passthrough percentage, etc.). None of that overhead is likely to be at 80%. - Defense consulting often involves combined staffing from different companies. For example, if BigCorp partners with ThreePhdsInABox on a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project, then the rules are often interpreted to mean 51% or more of the staffing has to come from the small business (usually). This is measured in terms of number of people on a project, not total cost of each person. - For classified efforts, the cost of a clearance can run up to $50,000 per person, depending on the clearance. This is the same whether the person is 10%, 80%, or 100%. If they are already cleared at the needed level then this isn't an issue. I don't see this happening in defense consulting until/unless the government goes to a mandatory 32 hour work week. That said many government projects have a mandatory 40 hour week, and some defense companies have an unwritten expectation of 50 hours per week, so the new unwritten will likely be a 40 hour week.
unwind 3y ago
Meta: has the friendly HN title sanitization system removed "80%" from the start of the title? I feel it makes little sense as it's worded now (just "Percent Jobs") so perhaps that warrants fixing. Thanks.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sgerenser 3y ago
  Yeah, “Percent Jobs” was a very confusing title. Typo or copy-paste error by OP seems more likely as I can’t imagine in 2023 HN is choking on titles that start with a number.
  - unwind 3y ago
    I believe it's to discourage stuff like "10 Ways To Get Rich" or whatever, i.e. list articles are considered below us or something. Failed in this case.
erur 3y ago
For any form of tech product work I'd rather work together with 10 very engaged people rather than 20 half-assers. Don't see why I'd wanna hire a part-time worker unless they're truly special and even then only for a consulting role. Not saying 32h hours is half-assing but I'd be surprised if the avg candidate pool for <=32h was as productive per hour as the others.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
sph 3y ago
Can we stop calling 4 days a week "part time"? It is not. Part time means I can have two part time jobs if I want, or have a lot of free time for whatever else. 32 hours a week is not part time. It is a less stressful version of full-time. Please don't dilute the meaning of part-time work. Sincerely, someone that is looking for 20h/wk part time contracts while bootstrapping a business.
hcks 3y ago
1/ each additional employee comes with additional costs: management, communication, onboarding, HR, office space, etc.. 2/ People in a 40 hours contract usually work more than that. Employers can try to seek out employees that don’t mind working more than paid for. 3/ People who’d look for 80% jobs are (from employers perspective adversely) selected to be people that will monitor their hours worked and not give away their time for free.
- rkangel 3y ago
  Your points (2) and (3) are presented as fact but I'm not sure the data would support it. Anecdotally, from talking to people in the UK, it's the people who work 4 days a week who work over their hours more. Sometimes they end up working part of a day on what would be a day off, or they work more hours on their existing days to try and "keep up"
cammikebrown 3y ago
Come on. Is every remote worker really working 40 hours a week?
nonethewiser 3y ago
I can see why companies don’t want this. I don’t blame them. It would be great to scale down work as needed. Instead of just completely retiring at some point. Especially given how high tech salaries are, it would be awesome to just start working half time at 40 or whatever. However, I personally find it very hard to limit my work hours that much. I feel like I would still end up working close to full time but just not get paid for it.
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  You should blame them. Some people do flourish with five days a week, some don't. Which is why it is great to have this as an option. I work four days, 32 hours, and I need that extra day off. Work is mostly out of my head when I stop on Thursday until I start again on Monday. I have a child to raise, a house to maintain, hobbies to pursue, and a partner with the same needs and, crucially, a job as well (also at 32 hours a week). My company wouldn't have it any other way either. There is no benefit in forcing everyone to work five days beyond a small availability benefit. Happy workers are good workers.
buro9 3y ago
1. there is a base load of meetings, admin, interviewing, chore, etc that is not reduced when total hours are reduced, and so what gets reduced is the high value work. you can't hire people to do this stuff as they can't make decisions for you, or interview for you, etc... this base load is part of your job 2. there is a base load of cost from each employee in the form of legal, pension/tax accounting, payroll, HR team, desk, office, equipment. whilst you could argue 4 people doing 40h weeks is equiv to 5 people doing 32h weeks you're also increasing the base cost by 20% across the company 3. hiring people is hard, now we've just made it that we have to hire 20% more people for the same effort, increasing the admin base load further too. (although the counter argument to this is that you're better positioned against low performers who have less impact, but then, maybe you end up carrying low performers longer as now they're less visible) 4. on-call... you probably can't reasonably construct an on-call schedule that works for all by mixing 40h and 32h people on the same team... so now you're starting to have the decision forced on the 40h people too, who now only earn 80% of what they earned and their circumstances may mean they do not want to. 5. RSUs / stock, you probably can't reduce the what someone already has, can't take it to 80% of what was in the contract, you probably only get to do this to new people joining (but see #4, you'd have to do the whole team at once and hire based on this, and probably can't mix it with the 40h people) 6. if you have offices, this forces you into a hybrid working situation as you can't seat everyone... you cannot even bring everyone in on any given day... unless you massively increase your office cost, or go fully remote (I'm in favour of full remote and it's what we do at where I work, but I know the World apparently does not agree) there's lots of reasons, but the biggest may simply be: change is hard, better to start with this... but starting with this is also hard as the chances of you succeeding with few heads and less effort (time) is against you.
saw-lau 3y ago
Several years ago the company I work for offered a 'compressed working fortnight' option, where for nine days out of ten you work an extra 45 minutes a day and then get every other Friday off. For me, this was an absolute game-changer in terms of quality of life. The majority of the company took it up and there's really been no issue in terms of overall productivity that I can see. If I ever change jobs, whether or not my new employer offers this will be a huge consideration for me.
rpigab 3y ago
I'm in France, I work 100% (35 hrs/week, 5 days), and there are more and more part-time workers among my colleagues. I think it's a nice option and that it should be a thing almost everywhere, and I might consider it myself in the near future, however there are drawbacks, a colleague is 60% and starts the week on Wednesday, but often parents take Wednesdays off, or half the day if 90%, or a full Wednesday every other week. Now let's add people like in the article, who like to enjoy Fridays off, at 80%. Why not, but now if you want to schedule a full team meeting, it's gonna have to wait until next Thursday. Even for little things, if you need it urgently on Mon. from the guy who starts on Wed., you're out of luck. Also, we have full-remote for a few people, 2-3 remote days a week for most workers, and full-time on-site for select jobs. Contract workers might work on-site some days, or from their company's office, or from their home, or they might be working elsewhere some days if it's not a 100% contract. It's a nightmare to manage calendars, as there is no single source of truth on whether collaborators are present today or not. For employees, HR software can give you that information if it's up-to-date, but I think for legals reasons you can't have contractors availability listed in HR software. People aren't used to communicating in an "async" way, it's not in the culture, it's not implemented well right now, and even if and when it's done well, projects tend to need longer periods of time to advance. Also, the housing crisis is hitting hard. I couldn't have bought a nice house on 80% income, and I know full remote workers who bought theirs in the center of France, very far from big cities, often way cheaper, so they can do 80% more easily.
crvdgc 3y ago
I like how people give many reasons about why 32 hour work weeks is a bad idea, but are somehow settled on the magical 40 hour agreement. Even if all of those are valid, the very same reasons can be applied to an argument for 48 hour work weeks or 60 hours like in many Chinese tech companies.
- prepend 3y ago
  For me, it’s not that 40 hours is a precise number so much as it’s the norm. So if the country settled on 41 or 39, it’s the same issue. It’s not the number of hours but variance from the norm that makes it difficult to recruit and retain people.
strangesmells02 3y ago
Thats weird thinking people work "hours". Many professionals work 50 to 60 hours a week in America or more. Their profession is essentially their life.
luka-birsa 3y ago
As a company that moved to 4-day work week for our development team I can share the following results: - Output per person per day increased compared to 5-day work week (throughput increased based on surveys, performance metrics and personal experience of leads) - Happiness increased - Fifth day remains as a reserve for extreme situations (eg. some unexpected thing occuring that requires additional capacity in the system) It is true that we're a dirty communist EU country, but so far this works for us. Btw: the fear of working less hours and doing more is real. Even internally some teams/employees do not want to move to 4-day work week saying it's not for them or that they can't cope with the time limit. And then they move and everything works out better... So implementing 32-hrs work for 80% of pay feels like a steal even with the overhead. You're probably getting better rested developers that output 100% of 40-hrs workweek.
goqu 3y ago
I've recently finished a handpicked list of 4 day workweek companies (4x8hrs), and off the top of my head, only 2 out of nearly 100 offer the option to choose between a full time 5x8hrs and a 4x8 with a 20% salary reduction. All the other companies listed only offer the 4 day week option + full pay - the 4x8 with the reduction in pay were an exception on the list. To my knowledge, the groups that lead the 4 day workweek campaigns on the international stage advocate for a 4 day workweek without a loss of pay, this could be one of the reasons why we don't see companies offering 4 day weeks with a pay reduction. For anyone interested: https://okjob.io/companies/ https://okjob.io/companies/
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Where I work, we had a guy who retired. We re-hired him, but at 30 hours/week. (I'm pretty sure it's with a salary reduction, but I don't know.) We don't advertise ourselves as a 4 day workweek place, but we might be open to it for any individual employee at their request. So I wonder how many companies would actually let you if you asked. I suspect it's more than publicly say they are 4 day workweek companies.
flax 3y ago
I've been on a 80% job for the last 2 quarters. My employer doesn't exactly advertise it, but they offer it as one of the wellness options that were introduced with covid: voluntary unpaid sabbatical for a few months, etc. I was initially worried that taking the option for personal, rather than health, reasons would be frowned upon, but that does not seem to be the case. We'll see how this performance cycle turns out. Subjectively, this is SO MUCH BETTER. I went from 2-for-me-5-for-them to 3-for-me-4-for-them which is a much better balance. I'm using the "extra" day for errands and to work on personal projects. I would not recommend it for people looking to climb the ladder and maximize corporate status, but for those of us whose jobs are not our lives, this is a great choice.
dial9-1 3y ago
simply because your wage will not keep up with inflation and would force most people to take a second job
sumuyuda 3y ago
Working less than 100% (40 hours) are common in Germany. My current software dev job and last one are 75%. I’m doing 6 hours per day. I get the same vacation as 100% and salary is 75%. I hope to never have to go back to 100%.

67 points by minicaionut 3y ago

I don't think anyone would ever follow such rules they would just say it's true. It will be like unlimited holidays meaning no holidays.

hunglee2 3y ago

I believe the Netherlands stipulates the requirement to offer every job as either part or full time, and a substantial number of job applicants go for the part time option, especially women. Interestingly, there have been some unintended downstream impact of this progressive law, such as lower women participation in senior level roles.

Okkef 3y ago
It is simply not true that all jobs are offered at parttime. There is some amount of part-time time available after getting kids, but it's not a general requirement for all jobs.
corethree 3y ago
>Interestingly, there have been some unintended downstream impact of this progressive law, such as lower women participation in senior level roles This isn't downstream impact. It's more of a choice. The women choose not to strive for senior level roles. They express this choice by choosing the 4 day work week. We shouldn't call it an unintended downstream impact because it's not something that should be corrected. If women choose not to work as hard as men, then we shouldn't try to equalize their participation in senior roles.
- hnbad 3y ago
  Interesting to see someone on HN of all places equate longer hours with "working harder" or being more qualified for senior roles. Speaking from personal experience with a cohort of Millenial dads: a lot of "women working less to prioritize family" comes down to women being expected to be caregivers and men typically not having experienced the same socialization from a young age and feeling overwhelmed, thus retreating into work to both avoid care work and be able to justify it by being "the provider". It's pretty telling when we chastise women for "not pulling their weight" at work when they're also typically expected to do most of the household chores, social labor (e.g. keeping track of birthdays, relationships and preferences throughout the family's social circles) and caregiving but don't call out deadbeat dads like Elon Musk who sire new children left and right while being completely incapable of maintaining a relationship with any of the mothers and abandoning any child that calls him out for his bullshit once they get old enough to form an opinion. And as a reminder: Musk holds several official positions including multiple C-tier ones and still spends an ungodly amount of time shitposting on Twitter. If you think that the time he spends on any one of his jobs on average accounts for more than the equivalent of a 4 day work week while also being this heavily distracted and spread thin, you're being ridiculous.
  - corethree 3y ago
    >Speaking from personal experience with a cohort of Millenial dads: a lot of "women working less to prioritize family" comes down to women being expected to be caregivers and men typically not having experienced the same socialization from a young age and feeling overwhelmed, thus retreating into work to both avoid care work and be able to justify it by being "the provider". It is not an expectation. It's been part of human behavior across all cultures since history. Men are the workers and women are the care givers and home makers. The behavior is seen so consistently across cultures that it's safe to say it's more then social conditioning. It's biological. Humans are flexible enough to behave outside of biological parameters but you are in utter denial if you deny the evidence that spans across ancient history and all cultures across the world. But this is besides the point. The point is if I run a business, my objective is to succeed. My objective is not to hire some women who wants to do a 4 day work week to support a child. It may be beneficial to the mother to give her advantages but it is not beneficial to me as the person who spent my hard earned cash paying her. >It's pretty telling when we chastise women for "not pulling their weight" at work when they're also typically expected to do most of the household chores, social labor (e.g. keeping track of birthdays, relationships and preferences throughout the family's social circles) and caregiving but don't call out deadbeat dads like Elon Musk who sire new children left and right while being completely incapable of maintaining a relationship with any of the mothers and abandoning any child that calls him out for his bullshit once they get old enough to form an opinion. As a person who risked all my resources on a business how the hell does house hold chores apply to me? If the woman demands to have the same pay and rank as the hard working guy who works 5 days a week because she spent a lot of time caring for some kid that has nothing to do with my business, how is that fair to me? It's asking for a handout. And sure if the government wants to force me to give a hand out to make society a better place than great. I support this. What I don't support is this lie that what was given out is anything but a hand out. It is extra help and it is not something that was earned with fair trade. The person who devotes the most effort and has the best results deserves the most reward. >If you think that the time he spends on any one of his jobs on average accounts for more than the equivalent of a 4 day work week while also being this heavily distracted and spread thin, you're being ridiculous. If you're asking me what I think is ridiculous I would say your response to me is ridiculous. Not being snarky here, your hypothetical implies ridiculousness and I respond with another hypothetical about your statement. What does Elon have to do with anything? If Elon sired 50 children and abandoned them, that's evil and wrong, but that's completely orthogonal to my business. I pay someone for results and Elon delivers. What he does outside of that is a completely different thing. In general Men spend more time and more effort at work so they tend to deliver better results and thus they get more senior positions. It's obvious if women choose a 4 day work week they're just not as into it as men and thus they get paid less and get less senior positions. Not all women make the choice to take care of children. A good number of women choose to do what the men do and when you control for that the data shows that the gender pay gap largely disappears. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender-pay-gap/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gende... I support equal pay and standards for the women who deliver equal results as men. Are you saying you don't support this? You support unequal standards? You support handouts for women when they raise kids? It's a valid thing to support. But don't call it what it isn't. It is a gift and not something women are entitled to.
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  > If women choose not to work as hard as men, then we shouldn't try to equalize their participation in senior roles This is a myopic, reductionist take. You're missing the forest for the trees. It is not a matter of women choosing not to work as hard as men, it is a matter of society being structured in such a way that men are disproportionately not involved in raising a family, and women being delegated to the task of caregiver even though they themselves would like more equality. Economically, women are pressured to stay out of the workplace for 6+ months, whereas men get a couple of days-weeks to stay at home.
  - corethree 3y ago
    Your the frog living in the well. Think bigger. For eons and millennia society has been structured this way since forever. It's only in the recent three or four decades has there been a cultural shift. Men have been taking home the income since they were hunting, farming and now programming. Women taking home the money is a new thing. That only happened in the last 50 or so years. And the social pressures aren't even forcing them to take home the money. To women, it's just an option. For men the pressure is worse. For men it's a social requirement... the survival of the family unit still rests entirely on their shoulders. But again this is besides the point. The main question here is, how does this new opportunity for women to make money suddenly make women deserve a hand out when they choose divide the time devoted to these new opportunities with care giving? You do less work and as a business owner I have to give you the same pay because you're entitled to it? How does that logic work out? It doesn't. If an employee works 4 days a week and obviously has his/her attention divided to other endeavors how does he/she deserve a promotion? Are you kidding? Maybe in her eyes she deserves a promotion, but as a business owner I'd rather promote the single guy who is 100% dedicated because he's the one that actually deserves it. That being said if society wants to make themselves better and give hand outs to women for caregiving... I'm all for it. But don't twist it any other way. What's going on here is a charity. A kind gift to caregivers who are not entitled to said gift in any way. Don't come to me as if women deserve promotions because they have kids to take care of or social pressures to deal with. That's just garbage. Also don't get me started on the pressures on men, it's magnitudes larger than it is for women, magnitudes and we don't go around screaming for a handout.
- HelloNurse 3y ago
  It can be considered an imperfect intermediate step towards gender equality: women that are more or less voluntarily burdened with child care are very likely to work part time, instead of quitting completely because part time is out of the question (which is a far worse discrimination than a "glass ceiling" with respect to high level promotions).
  - corethree 3y ago
    Yeah this is fair. It makes sense. Equality is about equal pay for equal results. Not handouts. People forget that although the handout might be good for society overall it is unfair to the person giving out the handout. I don't think this step is intermediate. It is the most fair step possible.
    - HelloNurse 3y ago
      Further improvement would involve a more balanced workplace culture than promoting only "dedicated" workaholics (and expecting those workaholics to be men).
      - corethree 3y ago
        No it makes sense to promote dedicated workaholics to the highest echelons. They have maximal impact to business. If those workaholics are women then those women very much need to be promoted as well. The data actually shows this is already happening. It shows that when you control for the choices women make about child care... the gender pay gap is largely negligible. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender-pay-gap/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gende... This is an interesting podcast about the topic if you haven't hear of this concept already. They interview a female statistical professor from Harvard about it.
        kuchenbecker 3y ago
        > Female Statistics Professor Claudia Goldin, the economic "Nobel" Laurette this year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Goldin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Goldin
isoprophlex 3y ago
I'm dutch and this is definitely not some stipulated requirement. Mandatory 40 hr jobs do exist. (Edit! A commenter above me shows that apparently it's difficult for employers to disallow requests for shorter workweeks, so take what i say with a grain of salt. All i know is that i often come across job openings for 40hr/wk contracts only) That said, taxation and society as a whole is structured such that it doesn't always make sense to work 5 days. Like the author mentions, in a certain tax bracket you effectively lose 10% of your income to go from a 5 day to a 4 day work week. Then, if you have kids, getting daycare reduces the benefits of working full time even further. To wit: I spend ~€1250/month after tax cuts on putting two kids into daycare, for 2 days. That exceeds my mortgage. Earn more? Less tax cuts. Work longer hours? Be prepared to fork over even more money.
WJW 3y ago
Explanatory page at https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/arbeidsovereenkomst-en-cao/vraag-en-antwoord/wanneer-mag-ik-meer-of-minder-uren-werken https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/arbeidsovereenkomst... (Dutch only AFAICT, sorry) Employers are almost required to approve a request to work less hours than full time. The reasons why it would not be allowed are fairly minimal. The only reasons allowed are: - Nobody else can take over the work (ie very specialized knowledge) - Insurmountable problems with work shift planning (simply having to hire another person is not considered insurmountable) - Not enough money or work (rare, would primarily occur for people wanting to work more instead of less) - No space in the personnel formation (would presumably also mostly apply for people wanting to work more rather than less) In addition this law only applies to companies with more than 10 employees, the employee requesting part time has to work there for at least 26 weeks and they need to file the request at least 8 weeks in advance (to give the employer time to hire additional people) That said, yes it is great and I agree completely with TFA. I fully believe that having 5 employees at 32 hours/week is better for a company than 4 employees at 40 hours/week, for the reasons stated in the article. It is better for employees too, because an extra day a week to do errands (while the kids are at school!) brings some much needed extra time in a household where both partners are working. Even if you are not married having more time for yourself can be a great choice if you already have enough income.
- bux93 3y ago
  It's a stipulated requirement in most cases but enforcement of rules for employers is massively underfunded, so companies that don't have to deal with a union aren't bothered that much by regulations. Government workers are well organized and don't notice that the rules they thought up (and are responsible for having enforced) actually are ignored by most non-government employers. In fact, government is usually calling for a more flexible labor market, even though the Dutch labor market is among the most flexible in the EU (if not the most flexible as, again, any costs to getting rid of employees in an illegal fashion are neglible in the first place. They are also not enforced at all unless the illegally fired employee has the wherewithal to sue. Which is not trivial for lower paid people as access to subsidized legal help has been slashed. And even if you have a fixed term/hour contract, no country has as many temps and contractors which can be shown the door by the people paying their fees, which leads to unhealthy power dynamics with their immediate employer as well.) So yes, in theory (and for government workers in practice) it's all nice.
nonethewiser 3y ago
> Interestingly, there have been some unintended downstream impact of this progressive law, such as lower women participation in senior level roles. The word “unintended,” while probably accurate, is bothersome. The intention should be to maximize individual choice. Are we supposed to force women into senior positions to please our sensibilities?
- hunglee2 3y ago
  I hear you, and you make a good point. However, I think the term 'unintended' is both accurate and non-bothersome in this case, as I am confident that when the law was designed, it did not factor in this downstream impact.

corethree 3y ago

Honestly everyone is just happier in Scandinavia. I feel most of the innovation comes from the US though, but this isn't a disadvantage for the Netherlands because technology developed in the US percolates to them as well. They get the benefits without the downsides. Heck I remember reading about how more people own Tesla's their then here.

sunbum 3y ago
The Netherlands are not in Scandinavia?
- corethree 3y ago
  Ok, I meant Scandinavian influenced or Scandinavian-like countries.
  - sunbum 3y ago
    What does this even mean.
    - eviks 3y ago
      it means it's somewhere around that part of the world
      - quickthrower2 3y ago
        Russia too?
        corethree 3y ago
        Again please educate yourself: https://nordicperspective.com/facts/netherlands-scandinavia-connection https://nordicperspective.com/facts/netherlands-scandinavia-... Thank you.
    - corethree 3y ago

oldpersonintx 3y ago

The endgame for something like this is purely-dynamic percentages....i.e hourly pay. IMHO this is where many rank-and-file dev jobs are headed...you will be paid by the hour to close tickets, and when there are no tickets, there is no work, and no pay. Employers will sell this as a "benefit" like "unlimited PTO"...but it's really not Be careful about pursuing that four day work week...

rkachowski 3y ago
This would require well defined tickets + work items with scope that is realistic, and an entire system behind the creation of these items which entails product + process understanding (not to mention designing tickets in a way which is minimally exploitable). If this could happen we would advance the state of project management into the sci-fi era.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  The number of devs is well on its way to exceeding available work, so none of what you stipulate is necessary Employers can simply say : "this ticket is three hours of work and that is all that we will pay", and your choice will be take it or leave it We are well on our way to most tech jobs becoming "McJobs", this is one more step...HN really has its collective head buried in the sand in this regard imho I already see this at my employer (well known HW maker)...more and more dev work falls to QA staff who are poorly compensated and have no mobility....QA has just become code for "low end dev" and they do nothing but pull from JIRA (advice: never take a QA job in tech if you desire good pay or mobility)
  - vasco 3y ago
    > The number of devs is well on its way to exceeding available work Is this something you've read or that you made up?
    - prepend 3y ago
      Seems like BLS is projecting programmer jobs to decrease by 11% by 2032 [0]. This isn’t perfect, but seems like a pretty reputable source for employment trends. Of course it also says median salary is $100k and I haven’t been able to hire a programmer at $100k in 20 years. So I think there’s a lot of variability. [0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

imiric 3y ago

It's borderline criminal that after decades of productivity increases due to automation and technology, people are still working 40-hour weeks or more, and their wages have been mostly stagnant[1,2,3]. Most of the benefits of this change is instead being reaped by already highly paid executives. Not only should people in most industries be working less, they should be paid more for it. Cutting my income by 20% for the privilege of working less is unacceptable. Especially when it's been proven that working less is an overall net positive for companies as well[4]. Stop being greedy, and treat your employees well. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_productivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ... [2]: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ [3]: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ [4]: https://www.businessinsider.com/4-day-workweek-successful-trial-evidence-productivity-retention-revenue-2023-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/4-day-workweek-successful-tr...

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lynx23 3y ago
I am totally fine with 40-hours a week. However, what I am not fine with is people like you speaking for everyone else. You can work less then 40 hours already, volutnarily. But you are not qualified to determine how long other people are supposed to work, or actually knowing how long they would want to work. This "we need to work less" attitude comes from people that dont like they work. That is sad. But it doesn't apply to me, for instance.
- abenga 3y ago
  The issue isn't the number of hours, it's the stagnant wages despite increased productivity.
  - hcks 3y ago
    Wages in the USA have not stagnated, actually

j7ake 3y ago

There are 80 percent jobs, but unlikely for highly sought after careers(note career != jobs) with nonlinear payoff functions. Think of the NBA, Olympic athletes, or movie stars. The performance difference between the top 10 people versus unemployed is probably much less than 20 percent. In the extreme case: a 100 m sprinter sprinting 12 seconds vs 10 seconds is the difference between gold vs unknown.

fakedang 3y ago
Why compare apples and oranges? Most jobs aren't as NBA athletes, Olympic athletes or movie stars. Those aren't highly sought after careers either. That privilege goes to whichever careers pay more as a median. It's only kids who want to become moonshot stars.
- j7ake 3y ago
  Well most jobs are actually on hourly wage already, so 80 percent jobs exist for the majority of workers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncaplan/2021/03/12/americas-hourly-workers/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncaplan/2021/03/12/americas-...
  - fakedang 3y ago
    Equating basic subsistence level jobs to 80 percent jobs just because of the hourly nature is a bad faith argument imo.
defrost 3y ago
Meanwhile, for the other 330 million people in the USofA who are not Olympic athletes or NBA superstars . . . It's nice that you address an unrepresentative teeny tiny micro sliver of the employed, but is there anything you can add for the majority?
- j7ake 3y ago
  Please note that the majority of workers in usa are on hourly wage. So for the majority of workers, 80 percent jobs exist, but they are not desirable. The people on hackernews do not represent the majority, but rather people who enjoy programming and want to make it a high paying career. Such luxury necessarily means it is highly competitive. Therefore I used the extreme analogy of professional athletes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncaplan/2021/03/12/americas-hourly-workers/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncaplan/2021/03/12/americas-...

inferense 3y ago

more people does not necessarily correlate with higher productivity, quite the opposite in many cases. Larger headcount introduces more meetings, more processes, slower decision making and overall less agile teams. 80% jobs are maybe a fit for a large established orgs while unthinkable for small teams solving hard problems with limited resources.

bjarneh 3y ago

> You get the combined experience of 5 people instead of 4 Administration of 5 people instead of 4, is that really a pro from an employers perspective?

oldpersonintx 3y ago
Yup...95% of "HR" is your Workday intranet, scales very well, new employees do not require linear growth in HR JIRA and Github automate/gamify work distribution and scoring, so even technical management need not scale linearly to rank-and-file AWS means resources scale out without increasing ops headcount Standardization of dev tooling provides pre-trained pool of workers Etc etc...rank and file developers are becoming a human autoscaling group

caturopath 3y ago

Many good points, but I think there are some major errors. > For the salary cost of 4 employees at 40 hours, you get 5 employees at 32 hours. The real costs of paying 5 people 80% salary is much greater - benefits, many overhead costs, etc. do not get cut by 20%. > You get the combined experience of 5 people instead of 4. At most margins, having more human beings is NOT a clear win. Communication overhead, diffusion of responsibility, etc. create major diseconomies of scale in the sort of office work that this post was framed to be about.

Freak_NL 3y ago
The communication overhead seems more than balanced by the extra redundancy you have when people do become unavailable (which they inevitably do) and people not burning out in quite as high a rate. But hey, I'm a Dutchman working 80%, so I'm sure I'm biased.
- Communitivity 3y ago
  I'm all for an 80% week. In my career I've known six people who suffered burnout, one of whom committed suicide. Too many corporations push our IT and devs too hard, then replace them when they get used up. I don't see the U.S. companies going for an 80% week though.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  You might enjoy reading about Brooke's Law and Parkinson's Law.
Communitivity 3y ago
It's even worse in defense consulting. - I've seen people billed at 2x salary because overhead includes work area cost, management chain cost, passthrough percentage, etc.). None of that overhead is likely to be at 80%. - Defense consulting often involves combined staffing from different companies. For example, if BigCorp partners with ThreePhdsInABox on a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project, then the rules are often interpreted to mean 51% or more of the staffing has to come from the small business (usually). This is measured in terms of number of people on a project, not total cost of each person. - For classified efforts, the cost of a clearance can run up to $50,000 per person, depending on the clearance. This is the same whether the person is 10%, 80%, or 100%. If they are already cleared at the needed level then this isn't an issue. I don't see this happening in defense consulting until/unless the government goes to a mandatory 32 hour work week. That said many government projects have a mandatory 40 hour week, and some defense companies have an unwritten expectation of 50 hours per week, so the new unwritten will likely be a 40 hour week.

unwind 3y ago

Meta: has the friendly HN title sanitization system removed "80%" from the start of the title? I feel it makes little sense as it's worded now (just "Percent Jobs") so perhaps that warrants fixing. Thanks.

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sgerenser 3y ago
Yeah, “Percent Jobs” was a very confusing title. Typo or copy-paste error by OP seems more likely as I can’t imagine in 2023 HN is choking on titles that start with a number.
- unwind 3y ago
  I believe it's to discourage stuff like "10 Ways To Get Rich" or whatever, i.e. list articles are considered below us or something. Failed in this case.

erur 3y ago

For any form of tech product work I'd rather work together with 10 very engaged people rather than 20 half-assers. Don't see why I'd wanna hire a part-time worker unless they're truly special and even then only for a consulting role. Not saying 32h hours is half-assing but I'd be surprised if the avg candidate pool for <=32h was as productive per hour as the others.

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sph 3y ago

Can we stop calling 4 days a week "part time"? It is not. Part time means I can have two part time jobs if I want, or have a lot of free time for whatever else. 32 hours a week is not part time. It is a less stressful version of full-time. Please don't dilute the meaning of part-time work. Sincerely, someone that is looking for 20h/wk part time contracts while bootstrapping a business.

hcks 3y ago

1/ each additional employee comes with additional costs: management, communication, onboarding, HR, office space, etc.. 2/ People in a 40 hours contract usually work more than that. Employers can try to seek out employees that don’t mind working more than paid for. 3/ People who’d look for 80% jobs are (from employers perspective adversely) selected to be people that will monitor their hours worked and not give away their time for free.

rkangel 3y ago
Your points (2) and (3) are presented as fact but I'm not sure the data would support it. Anecdotally, from talking to people in the UK, it's the people who work 4 days a week who work over their hours more. Sometimes they end up working part of a day on what would be a day off, or they work more hours on their existing days to try and "keep up"

cammikebrown 3y ago

Come on. Is every remote worker really working 40 hours a week?

nonethewiser 3y ago

I can see why companies don’t want this. I don’t blame them. It would be great to scale down work as needed. Instead of just completely retiring at some point. Especially given how high tech salaries are, it would be awesome to just start working half time at 40 or whatever. However, I personally find it very hard to limit my work hours that much. I feel like I would still end up working close to full time but just not get paid for it.

Freak_NL 3y ago
You should blame them. Some people do flourish with five days a week, some don't. Which is why it is great to have this as an option. I work four days, 32 hours, and I need that extra day off. Work is mostly out of my head when I stop on Thursday until I start again on Monday. I have a child to raise, a house to maintain, hobbies to pursue, and a partner with the same needs and, crucially, a job as well (also at 32 hours a week). My company wouldn't have it any other way either. There is no benefit in forcing everyone to work five days beyond a small availability benefit. Happy workers are good workers.

buro9 3y ago

1. there is a base load of meetings, admin, interviewing, chore, etc that is not reduced when total hours are reduced, and so what gets reduced is the high value work. you can't hire people to do this stuff as they can't make decisions for you, or interview for you, etc... this base load is part of your job 2. there is a base load of cost from each employee in the form of legal, pension/tax accounting, payroll, HR team, desk, office, equipment. whilst you could argue 4 people doing 40h weeks is equiv to 5 people doing 32h weeks you're also increasing the base cost by 20% across the company 3. hiring people is hard, now we've just made it that we have to hire 20% more people for the same effort, increasing the admin base load further too. (although the counter argument to this is that you're better positioned against low performers who have less impact, but then, maybe you end up carrying low performers longer as now they're less visible) 4. on-call... you probably can't reasonably construct an on-call schedule that works for all by mixing 40h and 32h people on the same team... so now you're starting to have the decision forced on the 40h people too, who now only earn 80% of what they earned and their circumstances may mean they do not want to. 5. RSUs / stock, you probably can't reduce the what someone already has, can't take it to 80% of what was in the contract, you probably only get to do this to new people joining (but see #4, you'd have to do the whole team at once and hire based on this, and probably can't mix it with the 40h people) 6. if you have offices, this forces you into a hybrid working situation as you can't seat everyone... you cannot even bring everyone in on any given day... unless you massively increase your office cost, or go fully remote (I'm in favour of full remote and it's what we do at where I work, but I know the World apparently does not agree) there's lots of reasons, but the biggest may simply be: change is hard, better to start with this... but starting with this is also hard as the chances of you succeeding with few heads and less effort (time) is against you.

saw-lau 3y ago

Several years ago the company I work for offered a 'compressed working fortnight' option, where for nine days out of ten you work an extra 45 minutes a day and then get every other Friday off. For me, this was an absolute game-changer in terms of quality of life. The majority of the company took it up and there's really been no issue in terms of overall productivity that I can see. If I ever change jobs, whether or not my new employer offers this will be a huge consideration for me.

rpigab 3y ago

I'm in France, I work 100% (35 hrs/week, 5 days), and there are more and more part-time workers among my colleagues. I think it's a nice option and that it should be a thing almost everywhere, and I might consider it myself in the near future, however there are drawbacks, a colleague is 60% and starts the week on Wednesday, but often parents take Wednesdays off, or half the day if 90%, or a full Wednesday every other week. Now let's add people like in the article, who like to enjoy Fridays off, at 80%. Why not, but now if you want to schedule a full team meeting, it's gonna have to wait until next Thursday. Even for little things, if you need it urgently on Mon. from the guy who starts on Wed., you're out of luck. Also, we have full-remote for a few people, 2-3 remote days a week for most workers, and full-time on-site for select jobs. Contract workers might work on-site some days, or from their company's office, or from their home, or they might be working elsewhere some days if it's not a 100% contract. It's a nightmare to manage calendars, as there is no single source of truth on whether collaborators are present today or not. For employees, HR software can give you that information if it's up-to-date, but I think for legals reasons you can't have contractors availability listed in HR software. People aren't used to communicating in an "async" way, it's not in the culture, it's not implemented well right now, and even if and when it's done well, projects tend to need longer periods of time to advance. Also, the housing crisis is hitting hard. I couldn't have bought a nice house on 80% income, and I know full remote workers who bought theirs in the center of France, very far from big cities, often way cheaper, so they can do 80% more easily.

crvdgc 3y ago

I like how people give many reasons about why 32 hour work weeks is a bad idea, but are somehow settled on the magical 40 hour agreement. Even if all of those are valid, the very same reasons can be applied to an argument for 48 hour work weeks or 60 hours like in many Chinese tech companies.

prepend 3y ago
For me, it’s not that 40 hours is a precise number so much as it’s the norm. So if the country settled on 41 or 39, it’s the same issue. It’s not the number of hours but variance from the norm that makes it difficult to recruit and retain people.

strangesmells02 3y ago

Thats weird thinking people work "hours". Many professionals work 50 to 60 hours a week in America or more. Their profession is essentially their life.

luka-birsa 3y ago

As a company that moved to 4-day work week for our development team I can share the following results: - Output per person per day increased compared to 5-day work week (throughput increased based on surveys, performance metrics and personal experience of leads) - Happiness increased - Fifth day remains as a reserve for extreme situations (eg. some unexpected thing occuring that requires additional capacity in the system) It is true that we're a dirty communist EU country, but so far this works for us. Btw: the fear of working less hours and doing more is real. Even internally some teams/employees do not want to move to 4-day work week saying it's not for them or that they can't cope with the time limit. And then they move and everything works out better... So implementing 32-hrs work for 80% of pay feels like a steal even with the overhead. You're probably getting better rested developers that output 100% of 40-hrs workweek.

goqu 3y ago

I've recently finished a handpicked list of 4 day workweek companies (4x8hrs), and off the top of my head, only 2 out of nearly 100 offer the option to choose between a full time 5x8hrs and a 4x8 with a 20% salary reduction. All the other companies listed only offer the 4 day week option + full pay - the 4x8 with the reduction in pay were an exception on the list. To my knowledge, the groups that lead the 4 day workweek campaigns on the international stage advocate for a 4 day workweek without a loss of pay, this could be one of the reasons why we don't see companies offering 4 day weeks with a pay reduction. For anyone interested: https://okjob.io/companies/ https://okjob.io/companies/

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Where I work, we had a guy who retired. We re-hired him, but at 30 hours/week. (I'm pretty sure it's with a salary reduction, but I don't know.) We don't advertise ourselves as a 4 day workweek place, but we might be open to it for any individual employee at their request. So I wonder how many companies would actually let you if you asked. I suspect it's more than publicly say they are 4 day workweek companies.

flax 3y ago

I've been on a 80% job for the last 2 quarters. My employer doesn't exactly advertise it, but they offer it as one of the wellness options that were introduced with covid: voluntary unpaid sabbatical for a few months, etc. I was initially worried that taking the option for personal, rather than health, reasons would be frowned upon, but that does not seem to be the case. We'll see how this performance cycle turns out. Subjectively, this is SO MUCH BETTER. I went from 2-for-me-5-for-them to 3-for-me-4-for-them which is a much better balance. I'm using the "extra" day for errands and to work on personal projects. I would not recommend it for people looking to climb the ladder and maximize corporate status, but for those of us whose jobs are not our lives, this is a great choice.

dial9-1 3y ago

simply because your wage will not keep up with inflation and would force most people to take a second job

sumuyuda 3y ago

Working less than 100% (40 hours) are common in Germany. My current software dev job and last one are 75%. I’m doing 6 hours per day. I get the same vacation as 100% and salary is 75%. I hope to never have to go back to 100%.