I switched to a 4-day working week a few years back, taking a 20% pay cut in the process - and I haven't looked back!
There has been no drop in productivity - I guess I procrastinate less, and am more focused on doing things that need done.
I have an extra day for family and side projects - 1 day might not sound like much, but having that extra day off feels like my work/life balance is so much better!
If anyone else has the opportunity, and can afford the pay cut of course, I highly recommend it.
P.S. there was no way to negotiate less than a 20% cut; I work for a megacorp that has rigid rules and doesn't give half a crusty shit about individuals.
Edit: I should have also mentioned that I'm in the UK, where under EU law, employers have to consider reasonable requests for flexible working. I should have also mentioned that I work 7.5h per day, and the only time I work overtime is when I'm travelling to a customer site (which itself is rare, obviously not happening at all now!)
>I have an extra day for family and side projects - 1 day might not sound like much, but having that extra day off feels like my work/life balance is so much better!
That's because you increase your free days by 50% by cutting your work days by 20%. It's not a symmetric exchange. I did the same over the summer (just by using my excess vacation days) and it was a revelation. Highly recommend, especially now that it's so hard to travel.
Indeed. I realized some years ago that when trying to figure out how much my time is worth to scale everything with respect to the amount of discretionary free time I will have. If a new job will cut that free time by half then I expect double the pay.
And then I realized there are second order effects. Double my pay actually means much more than double my savings per year as my costs are more or less fixed.
So then I changed the formula to scale with respect to the amount I am saving versus the discretionary free time. Maybe a 30% raise would actually double my savings.
And by discretionary free time I am subtracting time spent doing chores. I live very close to work and even getting a job that requires a 1 hour commute each way makes a huge difference in my discretionary free time and should be compensated accordingly.
And then I took it one step further. I decided to take an Excel sheet and map out all the discretionary free time I think I will have for the rest of my life. And then I evaluated job offers based on which one will maximize that free time. So maybe cutting short free time right now is okay if it is more than compensated by having me retire a lot earlier. Of course then you may want to factor that free time while young is perhaps worth more than free time when your body is not that healthy.
And of course you may not live long enough to retire and you do want to take that into account as well and not put all your joy off towards the end.
> I evaluated job offers based on which one will maximize that free time
How can you tell which jobs will give you how much free time? Besides commuting (I hope to work remotely forever), at many big companies, amount of free time greatly depends on the team you land on. Either way, there seems little insight into true work life balance of a company.
You mostly cannot know. If you know someone who works there they may have some insights. Mostly it's useful as a retrospective and realizing that I may have regressed in this new job and maybe I should look for another one.
But there are things one can know such as the number of vacations you'll have.
But yeah commuting is where you have the most certainty.
I think it’s more complicated as a 40h/week could be around ~40% of your time during the working years of your life. Making sure working doesn’t make you unhappy for the rest of the week is a huge deal.
Similarly, having more money hits serious diminishing returns. Watching a 500$ TV vs a 5,000$ TV doesn’t actually change much in the moment. Jump all the way to a 500,000$ home IMAX and watching a terrible movie still sucks.
I think a better question would be:
"Do you want to enjoy your life while you're young, thus increasing your odds to live longer and better[1], or bet you'll live to an older age and, hopefully, enjoy life when you're old?"
Fantastic comment. I've spent some time on spreadsheets for task tracking, giving priorities, due dates, estimated completion time, and subjectively evaluating "payoff". A spreadsheet isn't the best UI for something that changes so often though, I'd like to write something better that works for me and maybe share it, or someone can share their preferred personal tracker with me.
I never thought about it that way. A few months into COVID, I started taking every other Friday off, and it's felt like a huge increase in free time. Using your metric, I've cut my work days by 10% but increased my free days by 25%, which definitely helps quantify the larger difference.
That's true, but in terms of 'fully free' days it does apply.
For example, I'd bet most people would be unwilling to smooth over their 40 hour workweek over the course of the full week of 7 days, working 5.7 hours a day. Of course that's nice in a way, but having no fully free days and perpetually working forever, is agonising.
In that sense you can't just compare cutting a working day to simply having more discretionary time (which you have after workdays, too). Fully free days count a bit differently.
True! Though on work days you do need to wind down and possibly commute. You also spend one less night possibly mentally preparing for the next work day. While not 100% of the working, work days certainly can feel overall very different in the downtime than days off.
I'm actually going to be working mostly 3 day weeks until mid-March (at which point I would otherwise lose my vacation). I kept holding onto it until there seemed like a good time to take it and that time never came.
For me, working from home these past 7 years has added this same kind of balance to my life. Chores and errands became easier to fit in, exercise at noon literally is a matter of stepping outside to bike, run, or hit the gym. It saves 10+ hours a week of travel, less stress and expense of commuting, and did I mention I don't need to shower until after my noontime workout?
Granted, at times I'm on the job until late at night, to get things done and, sometimes, to make up for an extra long shopping excursion etc.
A 4 day on-site job would feel severely disadvantageous by comparison.
Oh, I totally agree! Yet another thing I should probably have mentioned, is that I work mostly from home (completely now, of course!).
Not having to waste time commuting is fabulous, and in my case all my colleagues work in other countries. We do have a small office nearby, and I choose to go in once every 2 weeks or so, just for a change of scenery and a wee bit of socialising.
"Unit of work performed" is one of those concepts that sounds great in business books or when dealing with repetitive mass-production tasks, but doesn't translate well to creative work like software development or engineering.
From the management side, it's common for teams to get into routines where Fridays are basically lost. It starts with getting into the habit of leaving a little bit early on Fridays. Then people realize that they only have a few hours between lunch and leaving early, so they start checking out right after lunch. Then people realize that if they get in after 9AM on Friday, they don't have many hours to get anything done before lunch, so they don't want to get started on anything that requires focus. Eventually, Fridays are a short, laid-back day at the office where they catch up on stray e-mails before going home.
For those teams, going to a 4x8 workweek has no productivity drop because they weren't doing much on Friday anyway. However, for teams that actually get things done on Friday, going to 4x8 or even 4x10 can start to decrease productivity.
Productivity and hours spent working aren't the only things that matter, though. Going to a 4-day workweek is an easy way to keep employees happy, which is valuable in itself.
Also keep in mind that we aren't great at judging our own productivity. We tend to perceive percentage of busy time as productivity, and a 4-day workweek will naturally have a higher percentage of time occupied by work than a 5-day workweek. This increase in percentage of busy time can mislead people into thinking they're being even more productive on more time-compressed schedules, even if they're putting out less work on an absolute scale.
Frankly, a lot of companies switch to 4-day workweeks because they can get 80-90% of the productivity while offering employees a perk they can't usually get at big companies that pay higher salaries.
And, in the current situation in particular, I'm seeing a lot of groups adopting "no meeting Fridays." Though my experience is that many people sort of hesitate to schedule Friday afternoon meetings in any case. So, yeah, as you say Fridays tend to turn mostly into a clean up any little tasks for this week, come up with a plan for next week, and call it a day. If I'm honest, this tends to describe what I do a lot of the time.
Realistically, all full time employees are paid per work unit. Those who don't deliver the required work units in that time period are eventually managed out.
One unit of work independent of time taken. When you say "no drop in productivity", do you mean you do the same amount of work in 4 days now instead of 5, or that you do 80% of the work you used to do?
If I have an extra-productive day, where I accomplish more in 8 hours than I normally do, I don't expect to get paid more. I'm paid a salary, not per line of code.
The Thread Parent has cut down the hours that they are working, and cut their pay accordingly. But they also happen to be consistently more productive in those hours than they used to be. It wasn't a condition of their cut hours that they are required to work more productively, they just happen to be.
(Yes, ideally a good organization would reward this with a higher monthly pay. But that's a separate issue. I get paid the same as another developer in my position, even if one of us tends to be slightly more productive.)
I agree with you that getting paid the same hourly rate, working less and still maintaining job stability is a win.
It just didn't initially sit right with me when I heard Look at me I'm winning! I used to do five days of work and get paid for five, now I do five days of work and get paid for four.
They were doing four days of work and getting paid for five, now they do four and get paid to do four :)
I also went from 8 hour day to 6 hour day with a cut in pay and no loss in productivity and I feel it was a win. I've enough money either way and a lot more time.
Well, it's obviously a baked in assumption that the employer wants to provide as little remuneration for value as possible without alienating the employee. In theory our compensation is based on some combination of the value we deliver and our negotiating strength. If we deliver the same value in 80% time and take home 80% of the compensation, we've fully left negotiating strength on the table.
Your assumption is that they were doing 5 days worth of work in 5 days, and now they're doing 5 days worth of work in 4. But they're just more productive, they're not busier. So it sounds like before they were doing 4 days worth of work in 5.
I think it really depends on what the work entails. When I’ve worked on some particularly complex problems it’s often the case that I get “zero” days’ work done for four days, then “dozens” of days’ work done in one. My assumption is that a person has a fairly fixed productivity capacity over a given stretch of time, that we as a society tend to organize that as a week of seven days, and that it’s highly likely most people (again depending on the work and the person) reach that capacity in less than five days.
It depends on how much your time is worth to you. If you’ve got nothing better to do than hang out at the office and take it easy on casual Fridays, then you might as well get paid for it.
If, on the other hand, you’d rather go home and put your 3 day weekends to better use taking care of your household, spending time with family, engaging in a hobby, travelling, or relaxing at the cottage (if you don’t own one, you might try renting one), then your Friday is more valuable to you than the money you lose from taking the day off.
This is why I cut out all the political BS and just became a consultant a decade ago. Then you can cut hours and increase your hourly rate to accommodate. Funny enough companies are just fine with paying it.
At a minimum, you need to be reachable and possibly attend meetings. Even if I'm taking a day somewhat easy and running some errands, I'm not going to head off for some 4 hour hike.
I know trying to measure productivity is controversial and prone to issues but I wish there was an accepted way to measure it. At least then we'd be able to ask for a 4-day week and promise the same productivity.
I know I've spent half a day messing around before and then smashed out a piece of work in a few hours and still had the impression of being productive. Simply because the majority of employees aren't as productive as me. Being a very productive and capable developer will open lots of opportunities but some of us don't want to climb the ladder. I just want a comfortable job and be good at it.
I'd never take a pay cut though. If you kept the same productivity at a lower pay then you're effectively saying they overpaid you before. 20% less pay is 20% less work in my eyes.
Yeah it's anyone's choice, but it shouldn't be that way. They say they get the same amount of work done in 4 days as they used to in 5. The business gets the same work out of them by paying 20% less. It's not fair on anyone. I think we need to stand our ground and demand the same compensation if our output is the same. Otherwise while you may feel satisfied with a 20% pay cut for an extra day, you'd be even more satisfied if you could just take that extra day. That's what everyone deserves, compensation for their work, not hours on the clock.
Sure I didn't mean that they are not part of my duties but that they hid my "bad" endurance at coding.
Regarding meetings maybe half the time in meetings is of no use for me and I am of no use for the others at the meeting but I still need to be there is the topic changes. The single biggest productivity improvement in WFH is that I can just work during uninteresting parts of meetings without being rude.
If you're working in an assembly line or checkout at the grocery store, your productivity isn't as variable. Assuming customers/inputs are always lined up, you'll process a similar number every hour and the quality is somewhat static.
In cloud infrastructure, I notice quality of work is highly variable. Some engineers will bandaid everything to get the task done. It's easy to do that.
Other engineers create solutions taking into account the current technical environment, business requirements and future concerns. I don't think we should hide from this fact. Software engineering as a profession becomes worth more the more we realize there's a difference in quality and quantity dependent on the engineer's abilities.
While it's true that some software developers are way too confident in their own abilities, I'd wager that in the general case most of us need to do more and better "sales" (tactfully acknowledging our own accomplishments). Stigmatizing that with labels only serves to keep all the metaphorical crabs in the bucket.
100% seconded. I was expecting 4-day workweeks to be 20% better, but no, they're massively better. The weekend just drags on for ever and the workweek is over before you know it.
I had to use up a bunch of PTO and I took every wednesday off for several months. It was nice because wednesday is a great day to get anything that needs business hours done. Almost everywhere is open and not too busy like fridays usually are and mondays sometimes are. And it means the workweek is only two days (but there's twice as many of them)
I think working less than 100% time, even as low as 50% time, is sort of a holy grail for software engineers, and can be well worth the reduction in pay. Any of your extra time you choose to spend on education will pay dividends in the future. I've managed to pull this off on occasion.
I'm a freelancer and not an employee, so you'd think it would be easy to negotiate such. However, I keep running into the same issue: few people need just a little software engineering. If someone needs some software engineering, they usually need a lot of it. Several times, I've been hired by customers with the promise of "we just need 10 hours a week", but somehow get talked into working full time pretty quickly.
A parallel experiment would have been to do the same informally - just work four days a week and "work" from home one day a week refusing to take meetings/oncall on that day - and see if anyone really noticed.
The megacorp I have spent large amounts of time at actually seems to have a significant population of people with this informal arrangement with mixed opinion on the part of their management mostly based on how close they are to a realist position.
It has to be supported by the culture. If your culture is one where you must be in the office at all times this wouldn’t fly. When I managed large teams I allowed this on a few conditions.
1) Work/Delivery can’t suffer. No decrease in velocity because of some work/life balance. This is easily measured and padded with a +\- 5%.
2) Accountable. If you have things you are accountable for and they aren’t done yet, better get that homework done.
3) If your an engineer, we pay you to think, not to sit in a chair. The “office” benefits are communication, collaboration, and contemplation. If you can achieve that with cohesion with the team then +1 I’m all for it!
The ‘70s white collar management style doesn’t really work well for productivity in 2020. It makes unhappy employees which makes people leave. If you enjoy interviewing people by all means, continue that oppression. If you value your employees and their innovation they bring to your company (or your department, or team) then you should practice servant leadership and remove any blockers from them being able to bring their best work to the table.
In colorado it’s common for active folk to get a jump on the weekend. How I communicate this up is through metrics and reporting of progress and goals, not lack of bodies in chairs. Focus on the value. My above rules still apply but I also like to snowboard when it’s not crowded.
I guess corporate leadership methodology is a bit behind in germany (where i live), but I totally agree and think that results should speak for themselves.
They didn't say "don't work" - which believe me, plenty of people especially in COVID have gotten away with - they said "Don't take calls". And like the parent, my department has a similar take on it. The majority of the team avoids meetings and calls if their role at all allows it.
Rather than keeping all your other expenditures the same and reducing your savings outgoings by 100% each month, what about reducing all your expenditures by 20%?
Unless your income and outgoings have been fixed at their exact current levels for your whole life, there's nothing magical about their current values and they could change?
Having 50% more free time and ~45% (20% of each 2 day weekend and none allocated to the additional weekend day) reduced financial means to enjoy it sounds like a pretty bad tradeoff.
ok, but then your free time isn't +50% because you're spending that extra day on labour to now compensate for the lost savings.
Don't get me wrong, both myself and my wife are both working 4 day weeks after the birth of our son (culturally, that certainly helps the discussion), and that extra flexibility let's you choose the option that's best for you, but there is an opportunity costs trade off between them all...
Painting a garage door is very different work than staring at a computer screen and interacting with coworkers. Some people enjoy physical labor occasionally as a nice change of pace.
Technically, yes :) Of course, my employer would never see it that way. If I worked for a smaller company with reasonable people (e.g. nobody screaming "comply or face disciplinary action!" in daily emails), then I'm sure I would have some leverage, either before or after cutting my hours.
As it stands however, I work for a megacorp that offers nice projects to work on, but with a "system" that's like a dystopian nightmare, and a rulebook and HR staff that exist to waste your time, use you up and spit you out.
Technically, if they work 20% less with the same output, productivity has increased by 25%, not 20%. They are underpaid by 25%.
It's weird that owners are paid proportional to aggregate productivity (units produced and sold), but those delivering the results are most often paid proportional to costs (hours worked).
I get why the system is this way, but it's not a "good" system in my opinion.
I had a 32-hour/week contract position for a while. I'm pretty sure I was within a rounding error of productivity for full time.
The biggest thing about working fewer hours was I could shift my days around to optimize for tasks. When I sat down to write code, I was in the zone to write code.
I think some of this is because other people are working on your day off. Like if you're awaiting feedback (or code review), you find yourself aiming to enable all those people you're waiting on to do that stuff on your day off.
If they also worked 4 days a week, I bet productivity would fall.
It's something I could do, but I always think that as long as I'm able to earn that money, better get it as we don't know what tomorrow will be made of.
I have a young family, and your priorities change after that.
Still though, as a software engineer without a family and with money as high priority, you'd have a whole extra day per week to spend on side projects...
Yeah, they also recommend living life. I think the work thing kind of came up more/first just because one typically needs money to go do enjoyable stuff.
I get no substantially fewer calls or mail on fridays than on other days.
I can get my work done in four days, but I also get work requests with same-day deadlines, either a soft expectation that you can miss sometimes but not structurally, or a hard expectation that you simply can't miss.
This is especially the case for friday because clients will often work weekends on the high-priority stuff. Sometimes they rely on something that takes me 2 hours on a friday, if I don't do that, they're stuck till monday. It's just not acceptable in my line of work.
I've not really found a good solution.
I can get fridays off formally, but then you're not just cutting your salary, you're also cutting chances for promotions (which isn't just a matter of pay, but also a matter of career development, personal development, keeping work interesting and dynamic, status/ego). There's a strong preference for employees with full-availability such that clients have one point of contact, instead of multiple parttimers across the week. And leadership positions are expected to always be working during regular working hours.
It depends what kind of company. The company I'm at is a consultancy, so you're (ideally) mostly working on billable customer projects - you are not going to get away with disappearing for a day. And when you're not on a customer project, you are on a 7-week countdown to termination, and are constantly asked by random people what you are doing.
I’m guessing you’re in EU somewhere? If so you should probably mention that, because very normal and humane things like these (and others like healthcare, 25+ paid holidays, unemployment policies, maternity/paternity leave, etc.) are unimaginable for our HN fellows from the US ;)
edit: I’m teasing ofcourse forgive me :) But like I mention in another comment, you have to agree employment in the US is generally very different from the EU with regard to working hours etc.
I've spent a little time in the US in the past with work, mainly in Texas, and the hours everyone worked were crazy - 60h weeks with unpaid overtime seemed to be the norm.
US is a big place though, and with my limited knowledge I'd expect places like CA to be more progressive, sensible even.
I don't think employers would mind "20% less pay for 20% less work" much, but then again I've always had a contracting working relationship due to the fact that I don't live in the US. It might be more complicated if you're an employee.
I worked 4 days a week for 10 hours a day for a while. It was really nice. We’d often end up working late anyways, so even though the days were long it still felt normal, but then you also got a three day weekend every week. One of us would take Friday off and the other would take Monday off.
10 hours a day is a personal nightmare. That's very much not what the best part of a 4 day week is about. Fuck this obsession with junk productivity as measured by hours - some weeks you can get more done in one day than five, but nobody would ever entertain granting such flexibility.
If you move to the EU from the US as a developer you'll be taking a 50-80% pay cut to do so. Fresh grads make more money than senior engineers in the EU.
London and Switzerland are the only places in Europe with decent salaries.
A common misconception is that EU somehow works out better because of free healthcare. Fact is, the US is the better option the vast, vast majority of the time even including additional cost of living and healthcare costs.
Spending $1.5k on healthcare a month in exchange for double or triple the salary is worth it, by a long shot.
This isn't a religious debate, it would be great to be a developer in a friendly and beautiful EU country for me personally, but not if my salary is slashed to the bone to do so.
The EU is not competitive in the tech market at all, and especially not for senior level contributors.
According to Payscale, Senior Developers in Sweden earn roughly the equivalent of $70k USD. That's the biggest shafting I've ever seen.
I live in Sweden and make $70k / year. Full stack dev. I was recently in the Bay area and the absolutely only thing that is better is the weather. Cities are dirty and filled with homeless people. Infrastructure (roads, bike lanes, walking paths, Internet, 4G, electricity, water) is all worse. Standard of living feels more like eastern Europe in 80s. Traffic is insane. Getting around by walking felt really unsafe. Public transport is pretty bad and outdated. I wouldn`t want to sacrifice the lifestyle we can enjoy for 3 times the money. Free health care is only one tiny thing. For example we just had a baby for which we were invoiced around 130 usd. I wonder how much that would be in the US. Now my wife will be on paid maternity leave for around 10 months, and then I will also take around 10-11 paid months off. I wonder how many dads do that in the US? I would guess the ones that asked for it got fired. After summer, if the corona situation is ok, me and my wife will be off together with the baby for around 3-4 weeks. Not a problem since my wife has 5 weeks of vacation and I have 6-9 (7 for 2021). My sister and her husband are doing the same and together with my parents we are planning a long trip to Turkey. And you accrue vacation days during parental leave. Right now I am also thinking about taking 6 months off as unpaid leave of absence to start my own company, as is my legal right.
$1.5k / month was my total cost of living as single! That was owning my own condo with 15 minutes bike ride to Stockholm city center. The rest I mostly used for vacation trips and did 4-5 (one week each) every year. No need to save for unexpected health care bills, your unborned kids college education, grandmas retirement home, that car you need to buy to commute 1 hour to your job etc.
That 3x salary comes with a really high price! In reality I would probably not make more than 120k / year in the US though. With that said, I can understand that some people really enjoy spending most of their lives working for the man, and getting a high salary and skipping out on vacations and work life balance. But not for me.
I work for a big multinational co that grants me 15 days off in a year, but bigco does not celebrate most holidays. The next holiday we will have, that does not count towards PTO after New Years Day, is July 4, 2021... 5-6 weeks off sounds amazing.
I've got colleagues in EU, China and other places and they all seem to have better benefits (mandated by the govt) compared to how things are in the states. US corporations seem to only see humans as resources.
US pay is certainly higher for the top 5% earners than virtually any other country's top 5% earners. But the litmus test of a country's system is whether you'd want to live there, not knowing what person or in what family you'd be born to. If you know you'll be a top 5% earner, of course the US is a better place than say Sweden. If you don't, the US doesn't look so hot.
350 hours is equivalent to 8.75 weeks (or more than 2 months) of 8 hour, 5-day workweeks. That's a massive difference.
Second, Sweden has free education. Being a top 5% earner in the US sometimes comes easy, but often times you're looking at medschool, lawschool or CS or whatever, that can set you back anywhere from 30k to 250k, with 7% average student loan interest rates.
Stuff like this can put a massive weight on your shoulders from age 18 til 38 or so, constantly climbing a corporate ladder, working crazy hours, and paying off a massive debt. All the while fearing that an economic crisis or some kind of disability leading to unemployment, can ruin you. In a country like Sweden there's no such weight on your shoulders, subsidised, and a massive social safety net. Quality of life is quite stable, and you can both very much enjoy student life, and your life right after, all the way til old age, with a healthy work/life balance.
You also don't have to live in a city that you share with an extremely poor underclass, homelessness, crime, drug addiction, while paying a million for a single bedroom.
Of course I'm not saying everyone in tech is working 80 hours and getting crushed by debt while working in an overpriced city with some minor dystopian undertones. But when looking at these things, Sweden and the US are certainly on opposite sides of the spectrum. And it must be taken into account when looking at pay.
I'd love to move to the US for some time, the natural parks are amazing, I like the culture and the vibe. But work/life balance, the lack of safety net if you're unlucky and the general state of the country for many of its people, are repelling me. I've never thought of pay as something that attracts me to the US, it's really not worth it for me because I'm not lacking anything (although I do make about $100k equivalent in western Europe, but even at much lower salaries when I was younger I loved it here).
70k is according to my anecdotes low for Stockholm, and not something that I’d expect a senior to accept. Senior front end developers go for about 90k.
Becoming a contractor is the way to go if you want decent pay (175k+).
Are working conditions generally more progressive/sensible in California than elsewhere in the US? I've always had that impression (I'm in UK), but would be interesting to hear in actuality.
Sorry about the slow response. I can’t actually address your question because I work remotely from Canada. However, the four day week policy applies to everyone, including all US employees, so I guess in that respect at least things are pretty much the same for everyone.
Another poster made this point, but I think this explains the different feel: you've dropped your working days by only 20%, but you've increased your free days by 50%. Even though it's still 4-work/3-off, it feels like a lot more.
This is very common in Germany. I worked (and work) with several people across different employers that worked 2, 3, and (this is the most common variant) 4 days per week. All folks that worked 2 and 3 days, in reality though worked 7 days, because they were working on their personal project.
the law (or a more employee-friendly change to the law) came to pass last year (2019). The law gives employees much better chances to follow through, because it's now up to the employer to prove that part time is economically unfeasible for the employer. Before, if you wanted to go from full-time to part-time it was much more about hoping that your boss was understanding and having to argue etc. (although women with children usually had very good chances and usually in Tarif-Verträgen it is included that they can do part-time, so in big industries/companies it was easy for women already, at least those with children). I think in the Netherlands part-time is even more common; I've read somewhere that 50% of the people do part time - and most of them (unlike in the US) do it because they want to (80% of women there work part-time; 20% of men work part-time, so as a whole 50% do).
In the Netherlands (where I'm from) I know loads of people on 4 day workweeks. It's often an option, and there's very few drawbacks for employee and employer.
The 20% paycut is pre-tax, so the real cut is a lot lower. It also lets employers hire a 5th person for every 4 80%s, so total productivity is likely higher due to people being happier, and there's more jobs total.
It's hard for me to imagine why tech companies wouldn't want to offer this to all their employees.
Over here in the Netherlands there is a law that makes it compulsory for the employer to agree to this kind of request, unless they can prove it is impossible to keep the business going otherwise (ie, "but we'd have to hire more people" is not a valid reason). There are a few minor restrictions like having had a permanent contract for at least six (I think) months, but otherwise any employee can request this.
You must offer your part‑time staff the same employment conditions as full-time workers, including pay, leave, notice periods and other rights and benefits linked to their employment.
Modifying working arrangements
Whenever possible, you should try to accommodate requests from your employees if they want to change their working schedules, such as:
- transferring from full-time to part-time
- transferring from part-time to full-time
- increasing their working hours
You cannot dismiss an employee if they refuse to transfer from part-time to full-time work or vice versa.”
Europe is big and varied. Where I live (Croatia) I only know of one person who did it and it was only because he practically already accepted another job offer and the current company said "Alright, what can we do to keep you?" (and the salary scaled accordingly).
I'm sure there are other similar cases, but overall it's pretty rare here.
I'm in the UK, and have yet to come across anyone else doing it, though several of my European colleagues seem to be.
In the EU, employers have to, by law, consider reasonable requests for flexible working. If you work for a large company, that should mean most will have the option.
Since being mandated to work from home, my team has switched to seven hour days (including an hour for lunch, ie, 10:00am - 5:00pm). My dream was a four day work week but this was my second choice! It’s so much easier to stay focused knowing the day is shorter and our productivity has shot up. There are, of course, other factors as well like. It having to commute and working remote, but still, the shorter day makes a huge difference.
Half my team do 4x10 hour days, I've done it in the past myself too, now I just flex my time over 5 days though. Perhaps helps that the larger department work shifts (the department we work most closely with are 16/7/365, but others are 24/7/365)
I think changing the calendar is much, much more complicated than making the work week 4 days long. There's countless systems that depend on the current calendar. It would be a herculean undertaking
This. And you won't have a consistent tracking mechanism anymore. You would have a month shift every decade. As a child the season in January might be winter, but as an older person it might be summer. The laws, customs, etc would need a drastic overhaul.
I'm not sure why lengthening the months got folded in with lengthening the week.
Months and weeks are completely independent, we could have an eight-day week and keep months precisely as they are now.
I think it's way too weird to actually do it, but it's less weird than having a cycle of months that's longer than a year.
Islam manages, somehow, to have a cycle of months that's substantially shorter than a year, and doesn't throw in an extra month from time to time like Jews do. I've always found that exceedingly strange, but I guess you get used to it.
That's not what I meant by laws need to change. I mean that we use calendar dates for laws that are tied to seasonal attributes. As a simple example, dates are set in law as a beginning and end date for when you are allowed to use studded snow tires (eg 10/15 - 4/15). Now you would have to go back through all that legislation for every date in law to see if it would need to be subjected to a shifting scheme. Stuff like tax day might not need to change, but school years would need to adjust every year, because the main purpose of it set the way they are is for agriculture labor on family farms (although that is a shrinking concern).
But again you can still have a 3 day weekend by simply shortening the work week. It also has the added bonus that your ratio of days off to days on is 3:4 instead of 3:5.
Meaning you get more days off by shortening the work week than you do by making all of society adapt to adding an extra day to the week.
People care about seasons and regularity a great deal. I know that it’s warm in the summer, so I’ll book a beach holiday then. Moving my vacation plans by a few weeks every few years to ensure they’re still in good weather would be a nightmare. Not least because people would probably want school holidays to match that time period.
The calendar feels very illogical and made up compared to most measurement systems but there’s a reason why they are what they are! A much more realistic proposal would be to just give people every other Friday off. Or work one Friday a month, something like that.
The French First Republic[1] and the early Soviet Union[2] both briefly reformed their calendars, but in both cases the changes were reverted after a couple of years. There's also a whole bunch of proposed calendar reforms[3], each with its pros and cons. But again, it looks like historically there's been too much resistance against calendar reforms.
That would uncouple the months from the location of Earth in its orbit. If you're going to do that, you might as well go full-bore and just adopt a calendar that counts days, 8-day weeks, and years and forgo months entirely.
If you're going to keep months, but have an 8-day week, I'd rather see something like: 9 months of 5 weeks each (40 days) with an extra 4 days at the end or beginning of the year. Leap days could be appended to the extra week. This has the added benefit that the 8th is always Blernsday in any month.
In any case, I think there are advantages to only working 4-days in a row; and 4/3 is a better ratio for workers than 5/3; and I think you're just moving the goal posts, really. People 50 years from now would be arguing about going to a 4/4 week...
Eh, i think i'd prefer 4-3 more than 5-3. For the same reason that i'd rather not work 60 days straight and take an extended period off.
As it is, lately i've been working longer chunks of days in a row, 14+ days without breaks and it drains me. It feels like each day after the next really compounds.
It's also why i dislike longer vacations. I get super antsy after day 3 or 4.
I think people value working to the same work day schedule as everyone else so your time off is aligned. That is how Friday night drinks and Sunday brunch works with friends.
If %20 is too much (in terms of hour reduction for the employer or salary reduction for the employee), perhaps one could negotiate a 4-day work week by proposing four 9-hour days for a %10 reduction in pay.
Honestly, not sure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ One of the reasons I wanted to remain in the EU was because of things like people-friendly labour laws - I trust the EU far more than I trust the government (regardless which party is in power).
AFAIK we are basically keeping everything from the EU at the time of severance, and I think the Brexit trade deal means we can't make any significant degredation of labour laws going forward. If anyone reading this knows different, please do correct me.
You know the name, yes. I'm using a pseudoname, but I'd still rather not say which company exactly.
I can narrow it down to a handful of Indian outsourcing companies though (I'm British, working out of the UK tho), since I've talked about them all in the past.
It's a megacorp (100s of thousands of employees) known for outsourcing. It calls itself a USA company (but it's not; it's mainly based in India).
Definitely maybe, but I won't be drawn further, especially since I just made another comment elsewhere in this thread about how much I hate the company :D
From my other post, you should easily be able to narrow it down to about 5 (which includes the horrible company you mentioned), and TBH, they are all about equally horrible.
I wonder how his compensation works. If it's based on performance reviews, is he now only expected to do 80% as much work? If so, him doing 100% as much work should lead to better performance reviews and maybe allow him to reach back up to his previous salary.
Even though we have many luxuries, modern life does require a lot of admin. Most of which needs be be conducted during business hours. I recently took a two week vacation and spent half of it catching up on BS life admin that I had neglected over the last 6 months / year due to a hectic work schedule.
I'd imagine many of us are not wealthy enough to afford a personal assistant but live complex enough lives to warrant it. Modern life kind of requires a 4 day work week, if you are salaried slave.
Yeah, I think this is a good point that doesn't appear often enough in discussions about work in modern life. For example, when talking about work week length or women joining the workforce, people rarely stop to debate about the historical evolution in the time required for other tasks. On one side nowadays we have some nice appliances like washing machines that save us a lot of time. On the other we have increased bureaucracy to deal with. We need more complex machines like cars and smartphones and computers. There's more to choose, and also more to decide. There are some mixed elements, like food delivery. It can save us time, but it also lowers the quality of life for most people. If you have kids, the modern expectation is that their time should be 26 million times more structured than it used to be 30 years ago. And as clothing and other goods are more readily available, there are also higher expectations around that, and around the food they eat, and around pretty much everything. The activities they do, the activities we do, the related requirements, keeping in touch with the news, etc. Sure, you might not care or ignore some of those, but in general, there's an inflation in life complexity and decisions unrelated to our jobs. And even inside jobs, there's this trend of ever-growing expectation of productivity and inflation of expected education and whatever. When we discuss work, we need to discuss it in the context of the current world, not compare it naively to a part of what we did in the past. And we often make silly comparisons that don't really account for how much the world has changed in a few years.
The fact that I'm a salaried slave means I'm expected to work more than 5 days per week sometimes. I swear, half the time I take vacation I either need to work extra before/after it or even log in while on vacation.
So at least in my situation, if I had a four day week I would probably be working more than just those 4 days. Hopefully it would be a reduction from current levels.
This is the #1 reason I have not entertained the 4-day week idea myself. While I'm confident my productivity per day worked would be at least as good and my post-tax finances would be fine, I don't trust my colleagues or customers to respect the boundary.
In some cases, no. In most cases, it is more accurate to say that I don't anticipate other people in the org being considerate, due to a lot of the interactions we have being one-off rather than an ongoing relationship.
Well, if I may be blunt, environments like that typically aren’t good to work in. Sounds like too little trust for great work to happen. Any thoughts about going elsewhere?
You’d be surprised how affordable and effective a virtual personal assistant can be. Mine handles almost all of my life admin stuff and it’s the best $500/mo I spend.
What kind of stuff is that? Don't think I can come up with anything I do that I could see someone else handle for me or that would be worth paying for.
The sort of stuff that feels silly to delegate but 10min here, 10min there adds up fast.
Big ongoing thing is that she helps with my inbox, deals with ordering stuff online, random annoying tasks like booking travel, some customer support, stuff like that. Oh also makes calls for me when I don’t wanna deal with it like booking appointments and such.
Kinda wishing I could afford someone in the same city so they could help with physical tasks but maybe later.
The reason I spend time booking travel is either because I want to save a few bucks (and then paying someone makes no sense) or because I'm exploring options to know what I want (again, makes no sense having someone else do it). If it were pure business travel as in "I have to be at a conference in city A from X to Y" I could see the value, maybe. But for personal? No.
I spend literally a minute with customer support a year, I think it would be easier voicing my issue directly than having to explain it to a third party and having multiple follow ups..
I don't get this at all. I'm so at the opposite I would almost pay money to be able to do this myself instead of having others in control. Can't fathom paying for the hassle of having others do this.
This is kind of like Visa Concierge, although they don't handle your inbox :)
I find I have to constantly tailor my requests with additional details, otherwise it's a back-and-forth email tag which rapidly diminishes the usefulness of the service. But I suppose that's to be expected when each time you contact them you get a different agent helping you..
Yeah this only works if you have your person not "some person". A fantastic example recently:
Some newsletter sent a book recommendation list. Instead of clicking links, finding the right format, and dealing with all that, I just slacked my assistant "Hey can you get me all the books from X newsletter on audiobook". Feels silly to delegate, instead of a task I put off and think about and finally waste time on eventually, it's a 5 second thing and I can move on right away.
The "not have to think about it" part is the bigger benefit imo.
It’s been the same person for almost 5 years. Trust was built over time.
She doesn’t have direct access to my money, only credit cards. Those are easy to cancel or chargeback if things go screwy. She does know my SSN which is a bigger concern, but then again you give your SSN to all sorts of people and services in USA, it’s very not actually a secret.
Oh and she doesn’t know passwords to anything. LastPass sharing only.
I struggle with this concept. Suppose a password manager's password sharing utility allows me to login to a web service in my browser. Couldn't I open the Network tab and observe the network request that displays the plaintext username and password?
Probably. It’s not meant to be bullet proof I don’t think, but most people who aren’t developers don’t know that the network inspector is even a thing let alone how to use it.
This was a major plot point in the movie "Where'd you go, Bernadette". Wife of a Microsoft executive hands over all the family information to a virtual assistant that is actually a Russian identity fraudster.
For me, it’s usually house stuff. If something breaks or needs maintenance that I can’t handle, it’s often a chore lining up contractors to get it surveyed and repair. Other than that, I’m also curious what people’s life admin stuff is.
I think if applied globally, a large number of things that I want to do on extra free day will also be closed. If everyone gets friday off it will be just like saturday where I can't to bank, dr, therapist appointments and so on because they also closed. This new holiday must be mandatorily floating
The other reply was on the money (i.e. people would take different days), but also don't let the threat of "if everyone did it, something bad would happen" stop the immediate gains during such a transition.
If your scenario was to happen, it would be 10 years at least, even with a quick change in habits. That's a long time before such problems come into play.
Similar arguments are made against the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement - if everyone stopped buying things wouldn't the economy slow down? Sure, it probably would, but such large changes in behaviour take time, and adjustments would be made during that time if the trend continues.
Something funny is happening in my native Belgium. Some people drop their fifth formal working day to become bicycle couriers, Uber drivers or whatnot in the "sharing economy". The reason is taxation regimes.
80% or 100% gross wage as a median income employee will hardly make any difference in net wage around there. A friend for example recently got a promotion from an entry level job (with tax discounts) to something more in line with her qualifications (without tax discounts). 600€ gross salary increase translated to 155€ net salary increase. All the rest got eaten by tax and social contributions increases.
Belgium combines high formal job taxes combine with a low tax scheme meant to formalise "sharing economy" jobs. These enjoy super low 10% taxation up to 500€ per month. Many people actually do the math. They switch to 80% formal jobs hardly losing any income. Some actually increase their income by becoming pizza couriers or Uber drivers in their 20% time...
UPDATED: corrected the net wage delta from 100 to 155€.
Triggered by your comment, I triple checked with the person in question. The difference was ~155€ net from 2000€ gross to 2600€ gross. I updated my original message accordingly.
Can you elaborate further? I'd be quite interested.
In the Netherlands the tax rate is 36% and then caps out at 52%. There's no scenario in which you will net less than 48% on an increase.
But, if you look at it from a more holistic perspective, there's not just taxes on wages. When you earn little you get rent and healthcare insurance subsidies. You lose these once you earn more, so there are income ranges where extra income leads not only to a tax rate of 36 to 52%, but also a loss of subsidies which can be the equivalent of a tax rate. The marginal net income can therefore be < 30 cents per euro earned.
But that isn't necessarily tax related. Further, there's some non-tax consequences that are left out of the story. (e.g. social housing subsidy is only possible for social homes, which you typically don't want to live in if you don't have to).
- Gross to net includes 13.07% employee side social security contributions. The state somewhat lowers those for the lowest income earners. This increases the gap.
- Progressive taxation. Under 24k gross, you pay 40%. Up to 41k, you pay 45%.
- A large part of the bottom 25% tax bracket is actually 0% (~9k tax free base).
- Local taxation (usually about 7%, but 0% in the richest enclaves) gets tacked onto the tax amount.
I did some calculations because it seemed strange to me.
Gross | Gross New | Net Delta | Total taxation
2000 €2600 €155 31.00%
3000 €3600 €262 38.00%
4000 €4600 €253 42.00%
It is possible to pay more for an increase on the lower levels, but you will still pay a lower tax rate overall. Yes, taxes are high in Belgium but to add some nuance, you get a lot in return. (Free healthcare, free university education, pensions, social services, no capital gains tax)
Interesting, did you take these from a calculator? I'd love to see a graph of the marginal tax rate from 1k till say 6k.
Because here it seems from 2k, 3k or 4k, an extra 600 is taxed consistently by more than 50%, and sometimes even 75%. That's a very high marginal tax rate. I wonder if that's cherrypicking something and the x600 to x000 range looks better.
I also wonder what the taxes break down into, I think it's always good to separate pure taxes (going to the government for the public good) from various social safety net contributions (some of which go to a general fund for the public good, but some are also individually-accrued benefits by paying a monthly premium, e.g. unemployment insurance of your particular salary).
When making cross-country comparisons, I find there's a ton of apples to oranges comparisons like this, where taxes and other things aren't properly separated and just lumped together.
Another example: in some countries healthcare is arranged as a benefit on-top of gross income. In others healthcare is subsidised by 80% by the government, and paid for through a tax on gross income. It could very well be that compensation in both these countries is the same, but that the former looks like you're earning more because you get paid out more of your gross income.
For any earnings over 41.060€ gross per year, net is approximately 1/3 of gross:
- 13.07% employee side social security contribution. The ~35% of gross salary employer side social security contribution comes on top of this, so is not included.
- ~53.5% taxation. This includes national and local tax, but excludes regional tax.
Note that from about the top tax bracket, you receive no extra health, unemployment or pension rights in return:
- Health care is universal.
- Unemployment compensation is not limited in time. It has recently become degressive with time though, and it's capped at a relatively low maximum.
- Pensions are repartition based as opposed to individual capitalisation based, meaning current employees pay for current pensioners. They're also capped at a fairly low maximum.
Confirmed this is correct with an online calculator. Strange, you'd expect it to go up with a lower wage and not down!
EDIT: Ah, i figured it out:
Gross | Gross New | Net Delta | Total taxation
2000 €2600 €155 31.00%
3000 €3600 €262 38.00%
4000 €4600 €253 42.00%
It is possible to pay more for an increase on the lower levels, but you will still pay a lower tax rate overall. Yes, taxes are high in Belgium but to add some nuance, you get a lot in return. (Free healthcare, free university education, pensions, social services, no capital gains tax)
wow, that taxation is horrendous. And I thought German wasn't too good (compared to whatever paradise I had in mind in scandinavia, france or whatever). To clarify: i don't really mean high taxation is the problem (I'm pro high taxation). I just think someone who earns 60% of the median income shouldn't pay nearly 50% taxes [numbers not representative, those come now]. If I can trust this calculator[1] then someone who earns 24k€ in Belgium has to pay around 40% in taxes (Germany: 30%). That's really tough. And here I am sitting in Germany waiting for my opportunity to protest that the marginal tax rate is over 50% for people above the average income (income class 1, single, between 3800 to 4500€/month I'd have to pay taxes of over 50€ per 100€ raise) but if you get above a certain threshold (especially after you don't have to pay any additional taxes for healthcare) you're good... as I said, compared to what low income earners in belgium have to pay in taxes, I now see that my complaints are negligible.
Wow, I can’t believe there’s such a harsh and early tax, I must surely be missing something? Why would anyone care about doing a good job?
In Sweden you get to keep at least 450 of those 600.
So I’m curious if you’ve built clear criteria for walking this back if it doesn’t work out?
At my last employer, productivity was suffering and schedules were slipping on a 9/80 schedule. When management tried going back to 5 day work weeks, there was a near mutiny. Leadership eventually caved.
I suspect the leadership is a core part of making this work. E.g., communicating clear expectations, holding people accountable etc.
I worked a 9/80 for years. It was awesome. I think the trick to this working well is for everyone to get the same Friday off. Companies who didn't do that saw serious productivity hits.
Where I worked, everyone had the same Fridays off. Unfortunately, that meant Thursdays became the new Friday with people taking long lunches, leaving early etc.
As I left, they were integrating into the larger corporate structure to make sure everyone has the same Friday off beyond just our campus. It will be interesting to see if this helps productivity or if there aren’t enough projects that cross those org lines to make enough impact.
9/80 can be great if there’s a cultural fit with a mission centric focus. Ironically as the c-suite was considering going back to a 5 day schedule, people lower were pushing to go to a 8/80 schedule. I always got the impression people weren’t terribly mission focused, rationalizing why that would make them more productive when the data from the 9/80 switch ran counter to their claim. Honestly, they were one of the least productive orgs I’ve worked with
I think in that particular case, a normal 5 day work week would have been more productive but less popular. The biggest glaring weakness was that there was a lack of accountability. I (and others) knew we could let projects slide, show up late for work regularly and never be confronted. (I tried my hardest not to take advantage of that fact). If one is only externally motivated, that’s a difficult culture to be productive.
Long term, I think it can benefit. Former coworkers will never leave because they don’t want to lose their long weekends. However, that can be a double edged sword. I’m reminded about the quote of executives discussing whether or not to pay for staff training. One says, “But what if we train them and they leave!?” To which another says, “What if we don’t train them and they stay!?” If you’re hiring the wrong people and incentivizing them to stay, it may not be good long term. That’s why I think clear expectations and accountability are key.
I think in the right organization, with the right leadership, a shorter work week can be more productive and more popular. While defining amorphous concepts like leadership and culture can be hard, I think they are integral to the issue. Low trust, low accountability organizations would struggle, I assume
Great question! I guess we were optimistic and didn’t think about a rollback?
We work in 6-week cycles with flexible scope. This is stolen from Basecamp. I think we’ll have to wait and see if the experiment matches results longer term.
And yes, I’d say the co-founders enjoyed this freedom as much as (or more than?) our small team, so we’re all motivated to make it work!
While I’d be careful of an optimism bias, I think you’ll be ok if you’ve done well hiring the right kind of people. I hope it works out well so it can encourage others to do similar
In terms of salaries they’re not too bad, but not amazing. We’re not a “real” startup or a tech company though. We hope to bump salaries as well next year...
My first job out of college in 2008 was with Lockheed Martin, which supported flexible work schedules. You could work the traditional 40 hour week M-F, 9 hour days with every other Friday off (9-10), or four 10 hour days with every Friday off. Most people enjoyed the flexible schedules. Since Friday was the one day in flux, everyone knew to avoid scheduling important meetings on Friday. Being young and naive, I assumed most tech employers offered flexible schedules. I now know that this is regrettably not the case. I hope more employers will embrace this in the future. The costs to the firm are negligible, but flexible schedules can be a huge benefit to employees.
I worked at lockheed for my first job as well. I found the flexible schedules to be great but less productive so I understand why others don't support it. Most of the engineers I worked with seemed to not be great at staying productive on 9 or 10 hour days any more then they were at 8 so I'd call it a net loss for the company. Honestly though there is so much bloat at defense contractors it doesn't really matter for them.
It's appalling, but not surprising, how little of the world cares about taking even ONE day off every week, let alone two, and laughable to suggest mandating three days off.
In the UAE, for example, most people work 12+ hours every day, and barely get just Fridays off. Almost every one I know was working on Christmas, and they'll be working on New Year's. Vacations etc are unthinkable.
They don't feel it's odd or that it's "over"working or that having more free time would be rewarding; this is dominant mentality in the the Middle East and most of Asia and Africa (and I bet in other "poor" regions like parts of South America and Eastern Europe too).
Being idle in these societies is seen as a sin at best and the difference between survival and starvation in practice. Besides, even if people were forced to take 2 days off every week, they wouldn't know what to do with their time anyway (which manifests as the generally low output of creative arts from these parts), or have the disposable income to indulge in anything beyond a stroll at the mall or a meal at McDonald's (though KFC is more common round here I suppose).
Holidays are a first world luxury.
If everyone took them more often in every country, your Samsungs etc would be a lot more expensive.
I think up through middle or high school while you still live in that bubble, yes. Afterwards, the playing field is likely tilted towards higher earners and higher savers. I haven’t done a survey but afterwards some people just had bad outcomes but were given the same opportunities when they were younger. They would say, do well in school and you’ll get a merit scholarship no matter your race, parents, background, or anything; Just your GPA. In some family households, grades and learning just aren’t important and in others, they are.
I switched to a three day week (and then worked for two years on this basis before retiring). Overall it was successful and I was glad that I did it. My work-life balance was great and the pay cut was expected and manageable. I usually worked Mondays to Wednesdays so that I could get two contiguous days (Thursdays and Fridays) when children would be at school (so that I could go on child-free visits). Monday mornings were just as bad as they had always been, but Wednesdays were suddenly Fridays!
One thing that convinced me that the company would tolerate it was that women returning from maternity leave often worked a three day week, so there was good precedent from a management perspective. And my female colleagues also persuaded me that it was doable.
The biggest challenge I found was having to work on projects that had frequent and unpredictable interactions with customers / stakeholders. I didn't mind occasionally swapping my days around to accommodate interactions, but there was one project that I would have enjoyed in terms of the work, but which I stepped back from because its timings were so unpredictable. This was probably the main problem with non-standard hours.
I think one thing that really deserves emphasis in this conversation is that the notion of a 40 hour/5x8 work week is not something that was developed scientifically or based on any kind of evidence. It was developed by people who were working 80-100 hour/11-14x7 work weeks literally putting themselves in the line of gunfire to establish a 40 hour week. There's nothing sacrosanct about the 40 hour week or the 2 day weekend at all except the value we give it (or the value we let employers extract from it).
I used to do 4/10 hour days a week, and like it much better than 8/5. Between the commute, meal prep, grooming/getting dressed, etc., it feels like the day is gone anyway because I didn't feel like doing anything resembling work when I got home. 4/10 felt like getting a free day off. The only downside was when some sort of mandatory meeting would get scheduled for your off day, and you ended up having to do the whole morning routine and commute just to come in for an hour.
I'm trying to set this up at my current job and my expectation is that those extras hours get to be 'focus time'. As I become a more senior developer and have to take on more managerial responsibilities my time to actually get my own work down is disappearing.
I started working ~1.5hrs early in the morning just so I could get my coffee/hackernews routine out of the way and really get my head in to the work, then by the time stand-ups and meetings start I'm ready for a break and helping my team. Do an extra 30min at the end of the day wrapping things up and there's your extra two hours being used productively.
I'm actually already working this schedule (5 days/week) due to lack of senior staff at the company, I just want to formalise it and get Mondays off...
If I was purely coding my own tasks all day I would probably not get as much use out of the extra time, but my work is varied enough now that it's not an issue.
I did it many moons ago (in the US even!). My role was largely operational at the time so it was pretty much just close more tickets. I kept telling myself that I worked ten hour days anyway so this was just one extra day off, but it really was more tiring. I still liked it.
I had to move to 4days week due to covid. Must say that, unexpectedly, it was very good experience. It felt almost like 50/50 work/free days. I was more focused at work. I was more productive. Although, honestly, I don't think I was able to deliver same output as 5days week. The way I see it, you have only a few hours per day where your output is at the highest level. When you cut off 1 day you also decrease that hours. You can't just squeeze them into other days, because it doesn't work like that.
I actually learnt two lessons:
4 days a week is something I'm looking forward when I have a profitable side project.
5 days x 6 hours imo is better than 5 x 8 hours, better to be less tired and maximize next day's most productive hours than to be tired and burn out eventually
I feel like most office jobs are fairly accommodating about flexible time for chores these days. I work a 5-day week, but I don't think I've ever used vacation days to go to the DMV or the dentist either (~15 years as a white-collar worker in various parts of the US, multiple industries and levels).
What the hell do you do at the DMV? I honestly can't figure it out, but it seems like Americans are always going 'to the DMV', this side of the pond I think the equivalent (authority handling driver licencing, road tax, vehicle registration, etc.?) is the DVLA. I have and would never 'go to the DVLA', I have no idea where that would be, I assume it's just offices. It's all online and other than changing address when I moved I haven't even needed that.
Whereas in normal years, for all the jokes you'd like to make about British teeth, I go to the dentist every 6/9/12 months (according to ~how short of cash he is~ his recommendation) - but going by HN comments and films et al. 'the DMV' seems an even popular day out!(?)
There are differences depending on which state you live in.
In my state, I need to have my vehicle inspected (to pass air quality tests - DEQ) and re-registered (pay tax and get a sticker) every other year. I don't think people really make it clear what 'going to DMV' means, it probably includes an inspection like this - despite being a distinct location. Yes, every other year I must drive to two locations to complete this process.
Many American families have multiple vehicles. Usually both parents work, and when children are old enough they get a hand-me-down car. So, it's not unusual to have to manage 3+ vehicles. Depending on when registration is 'due' one could visit from 1x to 3x a year.
There are online resources, but to pass the air quality tests you must appear in person. The only way around this in my state is own vehicles which are exempt (pre-1974, and motorcycles), or be in a county which is exempt (most of the land area of the state, but not where most people live). I only know this because my project car is from 1972: I just pay taxes online and they mail me my registration and stickers.
Add into it that DMV visits are common-denominator and tend to be unpleasant (long wait times, confusing processes, having to start over if you mess up... then wait in the line AGAIN) and I think that's why you may see so much talk about it. FWIW, I think there are very few people who enjoy this. It's a past-time, but not one we choose.
When you switch state residency, or have to get a title/registration for your vehicle, or get a new photo (every 4 years or so). You have to go to a place that is open from 8:30 to 4:30, get a ticket number, wait a long time for your ticket to be called, go to a teller with various paper documents: lease agreement, cable bill, title, birth certificate, etc. Also the new thing people will need is Real ID, so yet another trip where the hours are even more constrained. And sometimes your documents will be rejected for various reasons, and you have to start over.
In California, the DMV is becoming increasingly automated, and efficient. I haven't had to wait in line except for the time it was completely ad-hoc, then I waited like 30m. Most things you can renew and request replacement online.
Obviously passing a driving test etc requires an in-person appointment.
It's often said along the same lines of "I need to go to the mechanic", where it's something that you need to do, but is miserable.
The DVLA does appear to fill the same role, but more efficiently. Many of the things it appears you can do online require you to go in in person (Well, pre-covid at least. I don't know about now.), even better, the DMV got caught selling data about people who had to use it.
For a comparison, last time I got a license change I waited in line 10. freaking. hours. On a Saturday.
Can painfully confirm that all the clerical bullshit that takes place in person at the DMV is still taking place solely in person at the DMV in a pandemic.
One of my COVID projects was getting a car that had been sitting in a garage for a few years back on the road and ready to compete in motorsport. This took several trips to the DMV and a local mechanic to resolve lapsed emissions and registration, and each time I had to wait in the drive-thru line for a long time while a single employee tried their best to handle multiple people at a time.
Had to get a driver license, then register the car. I went like 5 times to register the car, gave up 3 times because the lane was too long (once after waiting for a very long time) and twice after because we were missing some papers the first time. The DMV is really a horrible thing. They yell at you for no reason, treat you like shit, are just useless when you have questions, etc.
In addition to what everyone else has mentioned, it's worth knowing that American driving licenses expire every few years and you usually have to go in person to get a new photo taken at the DMV. Many Europeans I know have had their same licenses since they were young, including the thirty year old photo.
If you go at a bad time, the waits are like what Americans assume communist Russian bread lines were like. And you just sit there doing nothing. Then you're name is called, the government employee corrects you and tells you that you did it wrong, you fill it out again...and wait more. It's just the single handedly most boring chore the average American has to do in their life.
I have never worked for an employer that didn't let you casually pop out to handle these things, provided you don't miss a previously scheduled meeting.
At my current company, we are explicitly allowed to schedule work hours off for these.
I worked at a job where I was paid an annual salary and they made me make up hours when I had to take a relative to the hospital (I also lost that job for, I suspect, this reason in part...I have learned that sick parents and sick children obtain different levels of sympathy). It does happen.
It was as stereotypical as you can imagine: small business, wasted inordinate amount of time and resources doing pointless things, insane processes, run by a husband and wife who were largely intolerable (the highlight was hearing the wife tell me that she didn't let her daughter participate in sports at school either because she thought it would turn her into a homosexual or was a plot by homosexuals to groom her), one of my co-workers started the day two hours early and finished at the same time...I have no idea why, and (ofc) the people who ran the business disappeared frequently (for some reason, the husband went somewhere every Friday afternoon...it wasn't work-related, and he repeatedly brought up the fact that he was allowed to do this unprompted...no-one could work out where he went)...
If you work shift work not getting time off is typical. A lot of people can scarcely afford to take a day off without pay to go vote or stand in line at the DMV. Working people are pushed to the limit in this country.
It really boils down to trust. My manager trusts I will make up lost time after my doctor's appointment, as they generally know if I've been falling behind work or not. We also give daily standup status updates so its obvious if work isn't progressing after some time.
This also works in reverse. If I work on Sat/Sun for some system maintenance then my manager tells me to swap time off during the week. But in my experience, What usually happens is I work my full week anyway because something important arose and I push that "time off" to the next week until I forget I had it.
In practice, are the last 8 hours of a workweek as productive as the first 8 hours? Would employers actually be losing 20% of a worker's productivity in many cases? Or would it be more like 10%? Maybe even less, if productivity improves on the four working days?
Hard to generalize of course, but my gut feeling (based on my company’s experiment for 13 weeks) is that it’s less than 10%. Potentially increasing longer-term productivity. Emphasis on long-term because it might seem like a drop in the short term. Longer term job satisfaction and general well being can increase, focus and just being able to recharge more effectively. Yes, completely anecdotal. FWIW My company since decided to switch to 4-days all year in 2021.
For myself, I find I'm more productive in the last half of the week. But my employer (and team) tend to front-load the week with meetings, so by Wednesday my schedule is clear enough to be heads-down and get stuff done.
I guess the impact is quite small since deadlocks (meetings, approvals, other peoples' code etc) you need to wait out is much of the work hours anyway.
You know what other societal paradigm shift could be really amazing but nobody seems to have brought it up yet?
Working in the evening instead of daytime.
Specially in hot ass countries/cities.
I mean really, do most modern jobs really depend on sunlight anymore?
Right now most people's daily cycle is "Rest -> Work -> Leisure -> Rest"
We should give "Rest -> Leisure -> Work -> Rest" a try.
Some other radical ideas: Let people alternate between 2 jobs every week. Like say being a waiter one week then a store clerk the other week. Most professions like cashiers etc could easily handle this. The benefit to workers would be the option to gain more experience/networking/mobility and a safety net of always having a backup job if you lose one.
In countries with relatively high progressivity in taxes the equation becomes even more attractive. You lose 20% of your pre-tax salary, but you lose much less on your post-tax salary. In europe the marginal tax can easily be close to (or even over) 50% so in practice you work 20% less hours and lose 10% of your post tax salary. The thing that amazes me is why people do not push for this more.
> 50% so in practice you work 20% less hours and lose 10% of your post tax salary
That's not how the math would work out.
Suppose you make $100k in 5 days gross and pay 40k tax, keep 60k net.
Suppose you drop to 80k gross, and suppose that the 20k you lost would otherwise have been taxed by 50%. That means you'd drop to 50k net, from 60k. That's a 16% drop, not a 10% drop.
But agreed, your argument still holds on principle, due to the tax rate the drop in net income will be smaller than the drop in time, which is a great argument!
However, there are other perspectives you can take as well. One is favorable for your argument, e.g. the drop in net salary (16%) comes at an increase of 50% of your weekend (from 2 to 3 days).
But also unfavorable, for example, perhaps your 'fixed' living expenses (e.g. rent, insurance, basic food selection etc) comes out at 30k net a year. Dropping from 60k to 50k, means your disposable income for recreational expenses (or deferred recreational expenses, through savings) drops from 30k to 20k, or 33%.
That's the downside of the whole story I haven't seen anyone mention in this thread yet. Particularly at lower salaries, fixed expenses can swallow up almost the entire paycheck leaving very little for savings, trips overseas to explore the world, fun things like hobbies, gaming etc. A lot of people spend 70-90% of their paycheck on rent, healthcare insurance etc and have 10% left over, taking off 1 day a week can really cut into that disposable income much more than 16% or 20%.
One reason folks may not push for it is that they worry their career progress will stall if they opt for reduced hours. Whether that’s actually true or not, I’m not sure, but I’ve first hand seen the perception influence someone’s decision.
Definitely get the sense that's true for me. Although at the same time I see a lot of people in mid-level management / senior positions, making quite good money, and working parttime. But I guess you have to get there first.
I also feel it'd be looked down upon when I (30) would do it. If I was say 53, or say I had kids, it'd be much more normal. But if you're taking time off without kids at 30, you're really kind of signalling you value leisure more than work and more than money. That's a very normal thing of course, but for a corporate environment looking to execute on a long list of deliverables, they'll not be keen to put their trust in such a person to drive that process.
I'd think inertia keeps a lot of people staying with how they've always worked and what they know, and what all/almost all of their colleagues do; they've never even considered it, or even know it might be an option.
And of course, it must be recognised that purely for financial reasons it's not going to work for everyone.
I have been working four six hour days a week for the last two years. It’s life changing. I can wake up and lay around the house in a tired stupor for an hour if I didn’t sleep well, and then start getting ready for work and leave an hour later. If I did sleep well I can go outside for a hike around the neighborhood trails or finish whatever software project I started for fun the night before. The weekends feel long. My personal project game is off the chart and I feel like I’m on the path to monetizing personal projects via YouTube. I am learning so much. I’ve started a computer vision project for my off road robot and I’m learning all the stuff required to make a self driving vehicle using only cameras, inspired by what Tesla has done and the lectures Andrej Karpathy has given on that architecture.
I don’t think I can ever go back to the Silicon Valley corporate churn. I’d rather be careful with my cash than be flush with RSUs and dream of living my life. I’m 36 and I’m living my life NOW, not in some far off dream after two decades of churn.
I feel bad that most people don’t get this opportunity. I really think we need to change our work norms to allow for this. What is the point of life if we spend it always working? I’ve been very productive at work. I’ve designed and built a whole solar powered farming robot vehicle (no tools, just the autonomous vehicle so far) in 18 months working 20-25 hours a week. Does one individual really need to be more productive than that? (You can if you want, but do we all NEED to?)
My employer has an unlimited PTO policy- you simply make the arrangements with your manager, which are almost always approved as long as your on-call/customer-facing shifts are covered.
We most often use this policy to take a few hours off during a day when needed to take care of errands. It's nice to be able to schedule around doctor's offices, bank and school hours.
My sister worked a 9/9s schedule at a previous job (9 hour shifts with every other Friday off) and also found it very useful.
9/9 is common in defense and everyone either likes it or isn't complaining about it.
In my experience most white collar businesses do a "wink and nod" sort of arrangement for the sorts of things where you need to be in late or out early so that you don't burn sick time on them. IMO the real benefit of PTO is that you can do things like take the mondays/fridays surrounding holiday weekends off without worrying about whether or not you will have the requisite hours to take a week of vacation in summer and around the holidays.
Something that seems to be missing here is retention. By giving this sort of flexibility to employees you will improve it. This will offset losses in producitivity, assuming a 4 day week created any (which is a moot point), as people become more productive the more they know about the company / domain etc.
Poor retention and high churn is a HUGE problem in most tech companies as half the people generally know very little about what they're working on.
I moved to a 4-day week at the beginning of the pandemic due to a salary reduction.
it was so good for my productivity and mental health that when we returned to full pay i negotiated to continue the pattern but switch from 4/8 to 4/10. No objections.
My eldest just started her career in nursing. They do three 12 hour shifts a week. She's exhausted at the end of the day, but she's loving having four days off each week.
I spent 2-3 months in the hospital over the course of 2 years with a family member. Shift changes were always stressful...lots of commotion, doing the introductions, getting the entering staff up to speed, making sure that issues/incidents during the previous shift were communicated, etc. etc. I personally think 12 hours is the sweet spot as long as there aren't too many in a row. Even if the error rates are slightly higher, I personally would not be surprised to see better patient outcomes overall than with shorter shifts.
My company always worked half days on Fridays, which was a pretty good balance. I occasionally worked in something fun or recreational, but was mostly a good time to get a chore of some kind done without interruption or taking time away from the family over the weekend. My wife works and kids would be in school until later in the afternoon.
We are now off entirely on Fridays and we may stay that way. But currently that is my day to help kids with at-home schooling. It's still a blessing, but not currently useful time to get much else done. Hopefully schools can reopen here safely in the coming weeks and months.
My brother works as a paramedic, and instead of the typical 24 hours on, 48 off, his station works 48 hours on and four days off. It's a sleepier town, so they are able to get in sleep as needed while on shift. He seems to end up with one to two month-long stretches of time off each year just by taking a few shifts off.
There are some downsides, like working some holidays or some full weekends when others are off. But many of his co-workers have second jobs or own businesses to fill in their time.
Most of us have to heavily plan to get one or two weeks off in a chunk, and are usually used for vacations away that seem to add more complexity to life.
Having just that extra weekend day can help alleviate the rushed feeling of the weekend.
I would work 4 days for 80% pay. I would work four 10 hours days for 100% pay. I’m not sure that those solutions will provide the best business outcomes though.
Given the diminishing returns of hours worked in a day, I'm guessing business outcomes would be somewhat worse for 4/10 schedules, at least in fields where productivity varies.
I also bet, business outcomes would be improved on a 4/8 for 80% pay system. At least some of that work output on the lost day would be shifted to the other 4 days--since work tends to expand to fit the time allowed.
> Given the diminishing returns of hours worked in a day,
Without a study of white collar productivity decrease from a 4/10, I cant accept the statement as a "common sense" premise.
I do better remote sitting on my coutch until dinner programming away and write off fridays...because nobody notices that most of the organization becomes nonresponsive after standups at the end of the week.
I recently started a new job and it goes a bit like this: the 5 weekdays I average about 11 hours per day (office time only, no commute). My commute is about 45/50 minutes in total (2 ways). I usually spend at least 2-3 hours on each weekend day, but sometimes it can be as much as 7 hours. When I am on holiday I usually login 2-3 times for a few hours (2-3).
I work definitely more than the average in my company, although not by much, and the weekend/holiday bit not many people do, although some do it. I find it that I am extremely productive the whole time: I constantly create new things and I get a lot of ground covered. It often happens it is 6pm, I have an idea, and instead of going back I push it. 2 hours go by but the idea is finallized and I know tomorrow I can start something new.
I don't feel burn out, but genuinely interested in my job. I read a book every night before sleep, exercise for 30 mins after work, and spend time with my partner. I thoroughly enjoy weekends, I often work on side projects and hobbies, and I do chores with my partner, and also speak with relatives.
The only reason I would ever need more time is if I have kids one day. But otherwise if I had to work 9 to 5 I would feel like shit because I will be watching netflix for like 3 hours in the evening, which is what I used to do in my first job. So constraining myself actually is great for not wasting: I am direcrly converting my time for knowledge and money, until I need to have kids.
Long story short, some people find extra free time pointless unless they have something meaningful like kids to spend it on. I do believe a lot of people are not willing to work so much, but to those that want free time, I will tell you this: be honest with yourself if you are making the most of it.
I used to do 4 days, with 80% salary, until I lost that job just before Covid hit. Best decision I have made. I used to hate Monday mornings, suddenly I loved Mondays, and hated Tuesdays instead. Loved the long weekends, especially that one day when all shops and offices were open. I don't think I will ever go back. This in Denmark, in a small but very international company.
back in the mid-2000's we had a very hot summer and the company I worked for allowed us to switch to 4x10s for the summer. Gas prices were very high at the time too so that was the main benefit from the company point of view.
But we had to take either monday or friday off and we had to work together with our teams to make sure we weren't all off on the same day.
It was great! 3 day weekend every week, the ability to do chores and errands that are much easier to do on a weekday than a weekend, and cutting out a 1/5 of the commute made a big difference in both sanity and money.
But the best part about the whole thing was that because there were some people out on mondays and fridays all meetings were scheduled on tuesday, wednesday, thursday - and you knew that if you had fridays off then your monday was free and clear to get actual work done. It made a huge difference to productivity and morale.
I have tried to convince every company ive worked for since to do it and none have, but I will keep trying.
Other people would be out on mondays, so meetings that needed "everyone" would have to be scheduled on other days, leaving everyone free to concentrate on mondays (or fridays).
I had a 4-day working week at one job, and one of the highlights was that it was flexible enough that I could move my "day off" around - which meant I could have a 4-day weekend pretty much any time I wanted.
That same job had a two hour commute, but the 4-day thing meant it worked out fine. A two hour commute 5-days a week would have been miserable.
I worked 30-hour weeks (nominally) for a while several years ago. That extra time was invaluable. If we wanted to go on a weekend ski trip, for example, it meant that we could leave early to beat the after-school rush and I could be all caught up on everything around the house so my conscience was clear. It was a much bigger difference than it might seem, lifestyle-wise.
The reason I nominally worked 30 hours/week might also be interesting. It was supposed to be less, but it turns out that none of the systems at work - payroll, insurance, PTO, stock vesting - were set up for a permanent salaried employee working less. I get the impression that many companies in the US are like that. You're either salaried, full time (or close to it), full benefits, or you're hourly with no benefits at all. We need to get better at supporting work arrangements other than those standardized in the early industrial era.
These four day work week anecdotes are great. The pandemic may just kick off a renaissance for alternative work schedules. But these conversations seem to be stirring up the reality that so much of compensation calculation and productivity measurement is really, really arbitrary.
It still seems to come down to circumstance and whatever an employee manages to negotiate with their employer. "I'll take a 20% pay cut to work 4 days a week!" could just as easily be met with "No, our investors won't be happy with a longer roadmap."
Joining a company with unlimited holiday soon (in the UK). My first action after the probationary period will be to book every friday off for the following year. Plus, other regular holidays.
I see posts like these upvoted every so often on HN, HN is tech centric community but the rest of the world is not. 4 days work at same productivity as 5 day makes sense in tech centric community but doesn't make sense in factory work environment where more number of hours mean more work done. In factory work environment the only way to reduce number of days is to increase number of hours worked per day which might have other undesirable consequences.
Well after reading all these discussions, I feel I am working too much! Most of the IT "service" companies in India mandate 9 or 9.5Hrs a day and there is no overtime if you work more (which is always needed to match some meetings scheduled in client's timezone). Worst some companies do not even have paid sick leaves so I hardly imagine here we will get such 4 day week option in near future.
I've been working a 32 hour a week schedule (in exchange for a 20% reduction in salary) for years, and I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't take that option if it were available unless they really need the money, or they're highly motivated by career advancement and think working a shorter week is incompatible with that. Or they really like their job.
in college I interned at a consumer electronics company. there was an urban legend of this brilliance-worth-commanding-ones-own-schedule engineer who lived a couple hours away by the beach and only worked 2(!) 24 hour "shifts" per week. the rumored schedule was:
- arrive Monday 4am, work 24h
- rest for 24h tuesday, stay at nearby hotel
- work 2nd 24h shift wednesday, crash at hotel for a couple hours Thursday morning
- drive home Thursday, recouperate
- friday, saturday, sunday off
assuming one wasn't anchored to the usual 9-5ish type schedule of other life things (childcare, personal relationships, etc) and having the ability to physically pour ones self out to this extent, this has always stuck in my mind as the ultimate "deep work" type of schedule. enough time to focus on work challenges, time away from work to recharge, time for beyond cursory pursuit of personal interests, time to do personal admin type things requiring weekday time, etc.
Many of these types of articles (and the comments discussing them) seem to focus on the increased productivity of those 4 days, without talking too much about the reason _why_ they're (perceived) as more productive, or why that time off might be beneficial in its own right.
So firstly, a lot of this is incredibly subjective (so far) and somewhat difficult to measure accurately (again, so far), however based on past history of movements to decrease work days (probably most famously Ford), I'd wager to say there's a good chance that this is true now, as it was then. My personal bias would definitely lean on the side of it having a positive effect on productivity.
With that said, while the jury is out on the actual productivity increases, I don't think there's any doubt about the benefit of the extra weekend day. For example, it would probably be difficult to find anyone that would find positives in Saturday being a work day again, and having to work 6 days instead of 5.
Anyway, that being said... There are some subjective and anecdotal observations from my perspective that I feel are important to consider in this discussion, and to me even more important than the elusive "productivity" aspect. What I've observed is that taking time off to distance from the daily issues, especially during times of stress tends to have a positive effect on being able to solve problems effectively. The instinct while faced with a problem is to keep hammering at the problem until it is solved, and while that works for a while, over a longer period of time, or over prolonged periods of working without a break, I've usually witnessed either myself or collogues get frustrated and less engaged in their work, or making poor decisions that wouldn't otherwise be made.
My intuition based on this tells me that it is important to give the brain time to rest and disconnect from a problem in order to come up with better _quality_ solutions. So my hypothesis would be that if you want better _quality_ results, it's better to give people more time to rest and disconnect.
But that's just based on what I've read and observed so far. I would love to see more research into this, especially more nuanced takes on it. We need to be clear about what we mean by "productivity" in these discussions, and also realize that sheer output does not give us a full picture of this subject. _Quality_ matters just as much, if not more in some circumstances.
I've worked a 14-day-on-14-off schedule for about 3 years now and what I've realized is that we adjust to it no matter what. I'm still productive even though they are 12 hour days. I don't think resistance to alternate work schedules is well founded unless it's in retail or in-person services for small teams.
My mega Corp (US) employer started offering 4day weeks for 80% pay this year. But it seems to not have really gotten much traction. Just a couple of people I’ve heard a of. Not sure why? We’re busy with projects so I’m wondering if taking 4days/80% is seen as not being dedicated enough to the cause?
Is the 4th off day separate for everyone, or is it Friday all the time? If everyone takes Friday off, then we end up in the same situation as before where no chores are possible on Friday. Can one pick any day from Mon-Fri as the off day.
I work somewhere that does 4-day work weeks in the Summer... I can't speak for everyone, but I quickly adjust with increased leisure time and still end up cramming in "chores" the same way as usual.
It is frustrating as fuck when you can't get into a bank, or a post office, or whatever else, because your work hours align with their work hours. Who wants to take a day off for that bullshit because otherwise it is impossible?
I noticed this when I started working after college. If there was a dentist, or a bank, or something that stayed open until well after business hours every day then I would go there because of the convenience.
I once walked into a mall (pre-pandemic) in the middle of a weekday and all the retail stores were open...but empty. It seemed like a massive waste of resources just to keep the stores open when customers were all at work.
Even the ones which require personal attendance. Taking time off for dentists, doctors, barbers, etc, all really quite irritating. I realised in the end a three hour "lunch" was permissible and didn't require a half day of precious holiday time booked off.
Most people I know would just come in late, leave early, or take a "long lunch" to get their errands done. Now that everyone is "working from home", you can basically do whatever, whenever.
The irony is many companies would benefit from this in terms of productivity, employee retention, morale, etc — but the culture is such that it’s a heavy lift at this moment to do this.
In my particular case, I loathe the company I work for; I get to work on and lead interesting projects and work with good teams and customers, yes - but the system behind it all is absolutely rotten to the core, laden with bureaucracy, brimming with ludicrously rigid rules, and filled with daily demands to comply with this or that, making life difficult for developers in particular, and never, ever valuing individuals. Yep, I'm a little bitter ;)
Truth is, aside from inertia, I stay with the same company for 2 reasons: I'm fully remote (or near enough), and have a 4-day week with 7.5h days.
Typical day is 9-5 or maybe 9-5.30, with an hour for lunch, so I assume '7.5h/day' would be 9-5.30 with 1 hour lunch.
Personally I'm on a '7 hour day', lunch isn't counted (they changed it a couple of years ago, some shenanegans over overtime and extra holidays or something). My actual worked hours are somewhat different, it's outcome based and self scheduling.
There has been no drop in productivity - I guess I procrastinate less, and am more focused on doing things that need done.
I have an extra day for family and side projects - 1 day might not sound like much, but having that extra day off feels like my work/life balance is so much better!
If anyone else has the opportunity, and can afford the pay cut of course, I highly recommend it.
P.S. there was no way to negotiate less than a 20% cut; I work for a megacorp that has rigid rules and doesn't give half a crusty shit about individuals.
Edit: I should have also mentioned that I'm in the UK, where under EU law, employers have to consider reasonable requests for flexible working. I should have also mentioned that I work 7.5h per day, and the only time I work overtime is when I'm travelling to a customer site (which itself is rare, obviously not happening at all now!)