I was with the author up until I saw the "..for a 25% lower salary" part.
At my startup, I'm paying people a regular (8-hour) salary for working a 6-hour day. The company gets value out of mental focus, not in having an ass in a chair-- so, if people are more focused and motivated with an extra two hours available for other activities (family, friends, what have you) then it is a net gain for the company.
Do you have any data to back this up? I know 37signals yells about their workday all the time, but I haven't seen any real analysis of productivity between 8 and 6 hour days.
The problem I've seen is that most of the 2 hours of wasted time happen randomly throughout the day; it's not concentrated at the end. So when you simply cut the day off 2 hours earlier, how much real work are you cutting out?
Also, if it's a startup, don't you expect people to work until things are finished? Why create a specific time range per day?
No data, just anecdotes and my own sense of experience.
Note that I'm not arguing that there is 2 hours wasted in an average day-- rather, I'm arguing that a) mental clarity trumps hours on the job, and b) more time for personal pursuits will lead to more mental clarity at work.
As for the latter question, I expect people to get things done-- but in terms of deciding which things we expect to get done by which date, we need to take some "expected hours per day" into account.
Wow, someone who actually wants to succeed with a startup, eh?
The startup = sweatshop mentality really needs to end if we're to see a higher success rate among startups.
In every case that I've seen people working insanely long hours trying to get some piece of code working, it's turned out to be bad code.
Sweatshops provide the illusion of increasing the development pace, but the reality is the opposite. What you're doing in those situations isn't rushing to market, it's repeating the mistakes that lead to the term Microserf.
Most projects fail miserably. Microsoft's software succeed in spite of it's quality (that is, the lack thereof), not because of it.
Personally, if I were running company, I'd end up firing the people working the insane hours; I wouldn't want to be paying their technical debt down the road.
And incidentally, Joel Spolsky has mentioned this as well. People working insane hours do bad work. They rack up technical debt that the company will end up paying, usually indefinitely.
The 25% lower salary would be a weed-out factor for those who value a large paycheck over more free time. Also, for the career-minded, the projects would make up that 25% (or more, if a successful startup grows out of a given project).
You'd have to provide some great incentives to balance the 25% lower salary. Free time is nice, but it's also free. If I value free time over a large paycheck to the extent that I'd be willing to give up that much salary, I'm basically just looking for a part time job. It sounds like the only difference is that you're allowed to use company resources for a side project. Is that enough?
I'm uncomfortable with the idea that not paying employees what they're worth will have a net benefit. You should pay your employees well in whatever ways you can reasonably do it (money, benefits, stake in the company, perks, even softer things like respect, trust, etc.) Compensating them with free time doesn't make any sense. They have just as much time as you do, and it's theirs to spend.
For some jobs (e.g., assembly-line work, or being a receptionist), every hour that the employee is on the clock adds value to the company. For all other jobs, I don't think any rule of "you are expected to work X hours per day", whether X is 8 or 6, is really useful.
At the end of the day, er, performance-review period, either you've created value for your employer that justifies the salary they paid you, or you haven't. If you did, why should the employer care whether you did the job in 6, 8, or 10 hours per day? If you didn't, then some kind of remedial action needs to be taken, and the action is not necessarily "do what you were doing before, but for more hours". And if the employer can't gauge the value of an employee's contribution without referring to how many hours per week the employee showed up, then the employer has bigger problems.
While I think what you're proposing is the ideal, the question becomes, what are the tasks that can be reasonably done in e.g. a week? Would the average "good" employee finish them in 20 hours? 30? 40? That's why I think there should be a guideline in the number of hours.
> What is this, some theoretical guessing at some sort of work system that may or may not work...
Yes, that is exactly what this is, until I am able to put it into practice and see if it works. I say this as the author of the blog post.
>... and that has no bearing with a real workplace?
Well, in my experience (at least at the place where I work), everyone could be just as productive in 6 hours as 8 (or 9, or 10), if they knew they could go home afterwards.
Well, I'm not trying to put you down, but your thoughts on this subject are pretty worthless until you can put them in practice. "How to structure a workplace" is one of those extremely complex topics that require many years of practical experience to get right, and that present countless options that look alright at first glance but turn out to be disastrous.
This is very similar to the problem of scaling applications to millions of users. Would you take advice about that from someone who hasn't actually gone and scaled at least one, but ideally several applications to that kind of scale? No, because even though their theoretical solution might sound alright, it has no substantiation to confirm that it actually has a snowflake's chance in hell to work out in real life.
The problem with your article is that it is just day-dreaming, but you present it as if it was some sort of tested solution. In fact, it is just day-dreaming, applied to a subject that many extremely bright people have been studying and working in for about a hundred years. That subject is called "Management", for your information. Certainly there is room for improvement, but until you actually have experience of the subject and have proven that your ideas actually work, they are effectively worthless.
I think this is a bit harsh. There has been a lot of research on these issues, and the proposal of a 6-hour workday is pretty common among socialist parties in the Scandinavian countries, at least. It's not an unknown (or particularly novel) proposition.
I'm not the original poster, but I commented above my assent-- at my last start-up, we went with the traditional 8-hour day, but at my new one (where I am just beginning to hire people) I'll be using a 6-hour day (at the same salaries I used to pay people for 8.) Based on my practical experience in hiring and managing dozens of people at my last company, I'm making this decision-- I'll let you know how it turns out, once the data is in.
I'm not really criticising the idea itself here, more its presentation and backing. I'm a big fan of ROWE (Result Oriented Work Environment). In my start-up we don't have any such thing as working hours, and we don't intend to, ever, if we can help it. Ultimately, when we hire someone, we're not hiring them to sit on a chair for a certain time, I'm hiring them so they can do amazing stuff. If they can do the amazing stuff in half an hour before breakfast and spend the rest of the day playing computer games, all the better. Our start-up is still very small, but this is working for us at the moment.
This kind of system, in our case, is not the result of idle day-dreaming, however, but of about 15 years' worth of combined experiences working for other companies and seeing what works and what doesn't, and reading masses of literature on the subject. That makes it very different from simply saying "Oh, I think I'd work just as well with fewer working hours, and hey, it might even give some benefits" - which is just idle chatter and not worthy of an article, imho.
So, I should have kept my thoughts to myself for another 15 years, until I do intensive research on the idea and see what works and what doesn't? Nobody forced you to read the article.
Totally agree with the ROWE sentiment - I'm reading the book now and the stories from employees at Best Buy's corporate headquarters is just as inspiring as the ideas themselves. If you're in a small enough team to set work culture, then get rid of tracking hours, measure only results and milestones instead.
The vast majority of companies, particularly ones that would like to make as much money as possible, will say "If they can do the amazing stuff in half an hour before breakfast and spend the rest of the day playing computer games, they can do the amazing stuff in half and hour before breakfast and then spend an eight-hour day doing MORE amazing stuff." Any other proposition will always be the province of idealists, philanthropists, and "lifestyle businesses."
Um, not trying to put YOU down, but... What do you think the odds are that someone said something similar to Google when they started:
"Gosh, guys. There are 10 search engines out there with pretty good market share that have been iterating and improving their code/algorithms for YEARS. A "search engine" is one of those extremely complex businesses that requires years of practical experience to get right-- your "pagerank" concept looks alright at first glance but could turn out to be disastrous."
Dramatic innovation can come from iteration and experience or it can come from unlikely sources (as startups prove over and over again).
Personally, I think the OP's article is full of ideas that I decidedly don't agree with... But there are a vast pile of ridiculous ideas I didn't agree with in the past that turned out to be right.
Larry and Sergei where high-achieving CS students at one of the world's leading universities, which also happens to be known for spawning all sorts of ground-breaking entrepreneurial ventures. That gives them at least some credibility.
The concepts outlined in the OP are very basic, not ground-breaking at all. There is no hint of a reason why the OP should be even remotely believable. The whole thing sounds like puerile wishful thinking.
To me, what it sounds like is a child designing his ideal car with an ice cream dispenser, and seeing how oh-my-god, it could also be used as an ice cream truck - win-win!..
That's what I was criticising. Harsh, perhaps - maybe even excessively so - but fair.
maybe it's a slippery slope toward greater productivity, worker well being and company profitability? The 8 hour day was negotiated from unregulated work hours based on workers rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_hour_day)
I'd be surprised if any knowledge worker averages MORE than 6 hours work a day so why should they be bound to the office for eight?
humans value the power to control what other people do. few businesses will give up the power to tell you that you have to be at your desk from xAM to xPM.
At my startup, I'm paying people a regular (8-hour) salary for working a 6-hour day. The company gets value out of mental focus, not in having an ass in a chair-- so, if people are more focused and motivated with an extra two hours available for other activities (family, friends, what have you) then it is a net gain for the company.