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.
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.