In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution.
It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model? I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week...
So much so, I'm about to launch a website listing remote software jobs with a 4 day work week:
Some of it is a quirk of the American health care system. Your health care costs the same regardless of your work hours, and it's a significant fraction of compensation. If you were working 80% as much, they would probably only be able to pay 70% of your salary.
(Assuming you were linearly productive, which it's not, but it's the same assumption you were making and is good enough for this illustration.)
There are other fixed overheads, like your manager, human resources, the office itself, and even the cost of hiring you in the first place. It's possible that to make all things equal, they might have to change your salary to as much at 60%.
Of course all things are never equal, so these numbers have really wide error bars. And after all that, you might well decide that 60% salary for a 32 hour week would still be a good deal. I know I'd consider it. But it's important to note that it's going to be rare to find a job that will pay you 80% as much for 80% of the work.
I don't think that's a quirk. In Germany the public health insurance is based on your salary, but private insurance is not -- and independent contractors (such as everyone working for Gumroad) are required to use the private option.
From the private insurer's point of view, it would be crazy to charge more or less based on how much someone works or earns. The public insurance does so out of a solidarity imperative coming from the government, and is subsidized as needed to make that possible.
In the US, there is no public option. Feature working as designed, for better or worse.
Contractors can buy the public option are actively discouraged from doing so because they are on the hook for both the employer and employee contribution. Also ofc there is the "if you have ever been privatly insured you cannot simply go back to public". But for contractors with 2-3 kids public might still be cheaper than private.
It wouldn't have even occurred to me to switch over to private if I became self employed, just assumed you would price the employer contribution into the day rate. Is switching to private widely expected? I would've thought that Germans were more biased towards the social solution.
Since the day rate varies wildy I wouldn't say that you can't compete if you stay in the public system but your baseline cost will be 5-7% higher than someone who switched to private. Also private insurance is typically considered "better", at least wait times are often reduced.
All of this being said I think the German private/public hybrid is pretty bad. Sure, they make it harder to go back to public when you get older but you can always accept a part-time job for a while and be "forced" to buy public.
>If you were working 80% as much, they would probably only be able to pay 70% of your salary.
...why? Unless there's an implication that they'd need to hire more people, why would they need to pay you less? If you're generating the same amount of revenue, just working fewer hours, their fixed profit should be able to cover your fixed healthcare whether you work 80% of the time or 10% of the time. As long as they aren't incurring additional expense by hiring multiple people to do the same job to facilitate fewer hours.
A shorter work week obviously can't work for all businesses, but there are plenty that have tried it and found that workers spend more time working and less time socializing with a shorter work week (which would seem to be a win for everyone).
>Unless there's an implication that they'd need to hire more people
I think you hit the nail on the head. IF the company needs a someone M-F for 40 hours of Bug-fixed/widgets/ect, they will have to hire to fill the gap.
If the last 20% of the worker's time is truly non-productive, then the company is already over paying and the worker is wasting their time.
> If the last 20% of the worker's time is truly non-productive, then the company is already over paying and the worker is wasting their time.
I think it's a misconception about worker productivity: you need to optimize the overall system, which will require having slack in some places that are not a bottleneck. "The Goal" by Goldratt is a good explanation on why that's the case. Any attempt to locally optimize to keep everyone busy sooner or later kills the overall productivity of the system.
How this slack is used by the workers is a different question, but if someone wants to use it to improve the system, to improve themselves, or simply to recharge, I think it's up to the worker. The goal is not to keep everyone busy; the goal is to provide optimal results using available resources.
if you worked only 80% but is able to generate the same revenue as working at 100%, then surely one of the following must be true: you either slack off the 20% of the time, or the company is overpaying you for the work you do!
Therefore, it must be assumed that if you worked only 80% of the time, you're only 80% effective. So the fixed cost of an employee doesn't decrease when they work only 80% of the time - so it becomes more expensive than just cutting the salary by 20%.
> Therefore, it must be assumed that if you worked only 80% of the time, you're only 80% effective.
This is the exact logic that is causing the issue. I would posit that a statement like this could only be true in an environment such as a factory line, where the output of widgets is truly linear over time.
Study after study have shown that for information workers, there's a strong trend of diminishing returns as workers clock more time.
Modern offices are truly an exercise in Parkinson's Law.
Further, I would speculate that the way companies encourage employees to optimize for duration of time on task leads to an insidious effect of individuals adopting less efficient methods to complete work, as there is no incentive to finish tasks more quickly within a timeframe when any time saved isn't recovered to the individual.
Depends on the type of work you do and what the company pays you for. It is the means (your time)? Or the outcome?
Had quite a few clients and employers asking and haggling over trying to get it both ways.
If you consider a creative job where you only care about the output, then the more creative it is, the less (above an undetermined threshold) time spent working and output are correlated.
The means (again, time spent) not being an accurate predictor of the outcome, they don’t matter much, and there is no reason to tie the salary to them.
If you consider a non-creative (factory / fruits picking) or vaguely creative (low-level factory-style coding, data input) job, then the less creative it is, the more time spent working and output are correlated (up to a physical / mental exhaustion threshold).
Here, the means are a good predictor of the outcome, hence the salary being tied to the number of hours spent working.
And it really comes down to what most of the IT/Software people are. I have a feeling though most of them have are closer to fruit picker but a lot think of themselves penning great literature when writing 10 line comments on 2 line function summing a pair of integers.
I currently work in a pretty rote software job, and I personally feel that even the most basic things can be very taxing on the mind and requiring of excellent focus. There are very few systems one can engage with where small changes can't have large ramifications in these environments, and great care must be taken.
You are confusing time spent with productive work done. Those two are not necessarily related. You also don’t take into account skill demand and supply. There is a very limited pool of good software developers.
> If you were working 80% as much, they would probably only be able to pay 70% of your salary.
You mean they would only be WILLING to pay 70%. I'd wager the vast majority of people with salaried jobs don't spend 100% of their work time working. Many jobs can be done in a fraction of the time. I don't doubt that most people could lose a day and probably gain productivity on the other days.
No country is in a vacuum... popular movements spread across borders and as the population of one country achieves something, their neighbours start demanding the same and so on... according to Wikipedia, the huge decline in working hours seen in the 20th century was mostly due to unionisation and legislation in response to popular demand.
Today, the US and the UK seem to be pretty typical compared to other countries, which is to be expected:
In all honesty, I would have though reduction of hours was due to automation and the advent of machinery, but I found this quote interesting...
When a labourer,” said Mr. Ashworth, a cotton magnate, to Professor Nassau W. Senior, “lays down his spade, he renders useless, for that period, a capital worth eighteen-pence. When one of our people leaves the mill, he renders useless a capital that has cost £100,000.” Only fancy! making “useless” for a single moment, a capital that has cost £100,000! It is, in truth, monstrous, that a single one of our people should ever leave the factory! The increased use of machinery, as Senior after the instruction he received from Ashworth clearly perceives, makes a constantly increasing lengthening of the working-day “desirable.”
> There are other fixed overheads, like your manager, human resources
Are these fixed costs, or would these employees also be working 80% as much? I think only the healthcare / office space for these people are fixed costs, but that would be factored in calculating their new salary.
And more importantly above all, in my opinion, is the profit. A portion of the revenue generate by an employee becomes profit. Lower the revenue (since lower hours) means lower net profit. Giving up net profit is not somthing a business owner thinks about lightly.
But if you pay lower salaries, you can hire more people.
There is very little difference (imo) between 3 employees @ 40hrs per week vs 4 employees @ 30hrs per week. There will be more administration and onboarding admittedly, but this should be balanced by more productive employees (i.e. less burnout)
The bigger issue to me is that there's no diversification of risk. If your company goes under, you lose 100% of your income all at once. From that perspective, it'd be a lot more rational to work say ten jobs at a single time.
You're never at serious risk of losing more than 30% of your paycheck in any short period. You could even get smart and balance your portfolio of jobs between pro and counter-cyclical industries. Plus, it's a good way to let people gracefully transition between careers. Want to move into machine learning? Take a low-paying junior ML internship for one of your 1/10 jobs to build experience.
It'd also be good from a societal perspective, since jobs at small, fast-growing, but high-risk companies would become comparatively more attractive. It'd be harder to sustain toxic workplace environments, since any given employee would have plenty of other options. Managers would be less hesitant to shutdown money losing divisions or fire underperfomers, since you're not leaving the employee destitute.
Maybe it's just me, but I find it difficult working on more than 2 projects at one time. Lots of wasted time trying to remember what I was working on / how my code works.
For your example's sake, if the work for one job is just a tenth, then it means that for a 5 men job, a manager would need to hire 50 people. The manager would be overwhelmed and add cost to the company by asking for a colleague. It's not easy to manage 50 people. But maybe the manager wants to diversify himself, so instead of 2 manager for 50 people, you'll have... 20 managers for 50 people. You need a managers' manager. Where does it end? :)
I think they're implying that the majority of current working time isn't actually work, that those jobs could be done with 1/10th the current man hours and still be just as productive.
In that world you don't need to hire anyone else because all you've done is cut back all the bs idling time that we all know exists in many jobs while keeping output the same.
FWIW I'm not sure I agree on the 1/10th but like 1/3rd or 1/2 absolutely from my position.
We'd need to radically change the system with which education happens to make this real, otherwise teachers and the infrastructure of teachers (administrators, social workers, counselors, janitors, IT people, etc) would still need that workweek + parents who have to follow that workweek.
It doesn't mean that some companies shouldn't exist to fill the demand from people who want 4 day work weeks though. Not everyone has kids, plus, not everyone in the company needs to be employed on the same terms imo.
Also, given how difficult it is to recruit developers, offering roles on a 4 day week will ease this process as it's a "USP" that few other companies offer.
Totally agree. Due to COVID most of my company worked only 4 days per week last year. The improvement in quality of life was amazing and productivity didn’t drop noticeably.
There was a time when 6 days per week were normal. People thought the world would go under if people worked only 5 days but things were ok. The same will happen with 4 day weeks. Once people get used to it it will be hard to imagine working more.
Exactly - the productivity boost employees gain from not being burned out, combined with a slightly lower wage bill. I see it as a win / win for both parties tbh.
Ye, I've also heard that in the Netherlands there are laws which say a company must accept an employees request to work part time if they have been there for 1+ years.
Curious how being laid back in regards to work opens up opportunity from countries such as China that have some companies working 996 schedules (9-am - 9pm, 6 days a week) to overtake and make obsolete European global companies. I guess the only way EU can compete is protectionism, no?
Your underlying assumption is that companies where employees work more hours are more successful on the market place. I would say this is a deeply flawed assumption.
If two equally capable entities are competing, the one who puts in more time will almost always win. The Chinese may be lacking the (social and physical) infrastructure that the Europeans have a head start on for productivity, but they are catching up or have already caught up.
This probably applies less to big conglomerates who exist and will continue existing regardless of what happens (honestly most of their employees can just not show up and they will be fine), but more to technical innovation.
I can guarantee you that in general in software engineering, you will produce the same result, whether you work 30 or 40 or 60 hr a week. The productive hours will be the same as you just have so much focused hours inside of you.
Yep you are 100% correct. Most super productive software developers only really focus/work a few hours a day. Software development is about thinking not typing.
For building infrastructure or manufacturing, probably yes, but not for innovation.
Anyone being forced to work under the conditions you describe is probably too terrified to do anything more than iteratively replicate existing foreign designs.
You can't force innovation by locking people in a dungeon and screaming "INNOVATE!" at them until they succeed.
They even fail at protectionism. They try to take on American tech but get swatted away in the courts when they realize they need American tech to be remotely competitive again. There's a reason America is launching Teslas into space while the EU bickers in court
Right. So nobody in the US drive European cars like BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Ferrari etc.? Really? And nobody in the US use mobile phones with European ARM chips in them? Really?
Nope. Number of hours worked have very limited impact on productivity when it comes to high-knowledge/tech work. Laying bricks and designing a high tech robot factory are two very different jobs.
Fair enough, it's not for everyone. After 10 years of being a developer in a country which is relatively cheap to live in, however, I'd be more than happy to take the financial hit.
A B2B business has two choices if they want to institute a 4-day week. They can be closed 20% of the week, when their competition is likely open, or they can be open 5 days and spread 4 days of work out among their staff. So now if your coworker takes off Tuesdays, and you take off Wednesdays, you better not have a question for him on Tuesday morning.
I think if managed correctly the second option is more than achievable for a software development team. I agree it doesn't work for all industries / jobs (e.g. support staff etc), but for the majority of technical positions, I think the gain in productivity and saving in salary will more than make up for these inconveniences. I also think it will make the recruitment of developers easier as you'll be offering a benefit rarely seen.
And ye, a few people have mentioned the point about 28hrs - I'm going to rebrand it as "4 day week".
I'm sure some people will disagree but working less for less money isn't seen as a benefit to me, especially in the US where there may be healthcare implications. And as others have said, given static overhead you're more likely to earn less per hour. You're likely better off going contract and having a higher hourly rate and just billing less, but that has its own set of difficulties.
The real benefit I've seen very few places implement is a 36-38 hour week, over 4 days, with no decrease in salary. Productivity is the same or slightly higher (quite a bit higher if it's a set schedule, e.g. everyone has the same day off so there's no communication latency). Satisfaction is through the roof because not only are people getting paid more per hour, but it's a benefit that they're extremely unlikely to find anywhere else, so retention goes up as well.
I both agree and disagree. Disagree as this implicitly assumes working 40 hours won't produce relatively more negative feedback on one's personal life than a 32 hour week would. Once you start accounting for that, the "net loss" story becomes a lot more vague.
Given if the requirement was "you really have to work this number of hours to get that total income", I would prefer longer days + fewer days over the 9-5 mentality most countries have. Unfortunately, the last time I requested 9x4, it got denied. Let alone more extreme variants, 4x10, 3x10 or 3x12. Ironic, since 4x10 would also have less overhead, despite still being a 40h workweek.
For all the companies I've worked at, the developers are all full-time so I envy your industry / location if part-time is common.
More generally though, I feel employees almost need an
"excuse" to work part time (i.e. some reason such as childcare). I wish for a time when a significant % of developer jobs are advertised as near-full time and that I'm not stereotyped as lazy for applying to them. There's more to life than reviewing pull requests...
Completely normal in most European jobs. And you don’t need to have an excuse, especially as a developer, which adapts perfectly to part-time work (harder for a PM or PjM or EM)
But don’t envy us too much, the counterpart is that our salaries are much much lower than the US (even at 100%).
Most want/need the full check. And the company wants full “value”/40 hours. So what you end up seeing more often is the 10x4 model or every other Friday off. It’s just a reallocation of time.
It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model? I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week...
So much so, I'm about to launch a website listing remote software jobs with a 4 day work week:
https://www.28hrworkweek.com/