
Ask HN: Why don't companies hire programmers for fewer hours per day? - maythrowaway
Hello<p>Maybe this question doesn&#x27;t properly apply to USA programmers since labor laws are a little different there, but let me try.<p>Rationale: we always discuss how programming makes us tired and stressed, how often we spend hours and hours per day just procrastinating or being completely unproductive while still trying to be. Also, we often discuss how programmers get paid nice salaries in comparison with most other professions. This leads me to the conclusion: I&#x27;d probably be very happy to take a 25% (or more) salary cut if I had to work 25% (or more) less. I mean, 8 hours per day is a lot and it&#x27;s very rare for me to have a fully productive day. If I moved to 6 hours per day, I&#x27;m not even sure if I&#x27;d become less productive, I&#x27;d probably just spend less time chatting at the coffee room, and have a smaller chance to get burnout. Maybe a little less productive, but the company would be saving some money with me, and if they did this to other 3 people they would be able to hire another 6h&#x2F;day programmer to balance things, maybe making the result even positive for them.<p>But, considering that no company does this, it looks like this isn&#x27;t a good idea for employers. Why? Why do companies try to squeeze all the possible juice from employees instead of the alternative where they pay a little less, require a little less, and the employee becomes much more happy?<p>And the question to the workers: wouldn&#x27;t you accept a proportional salary reduction for a proportional time-spent-inside-the-office-doing-whatever reduction?
======
dustingetz
Mythical man month says that even if longer hours have diminishing returns,
the organizational overhead from adding people to the team is worse - fewer
people with longer hours is the better alternative.

Here I will quote a HN post which quotes a secondary source which analyses
mythical man month

 _" From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to
profitability. Suppose that a programmer needs to spend 25 hours per week
keeping current with new technology, getting coordinated with other
programmers, contributing to documentation and thought leadership pieces, and
comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Under this
assumption, a programmer who works 55 hours per week will produce twice as
much code as one who works 40 hours per week. In The Mythical Man-Month, the
only great book ever written on software engineering, Fred Brooks concludes
that no software product should be designed by more than two people. He argues
that a program designed by more than two people might be more complete but it
will never be easy to understand because it will not be as consistent as
something designed by fewer people. This means that if you want to follow the
best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only
way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer
hours. Finally there is the common sense notion that the smaller the team the
less management overhead. A product is going to get out the door much faster
if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-
hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure
comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net
of 180 hours per week). The 12-person team will inevitably require additional
managers and all-day meetings to stay coordinated._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547965](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547965)

~~~
Piskvorrr
Quoting TMMM as a justification for product death march? Wow.

A programmer who works 55 hours a week will produce twice as much code - but
for how long? Once fatigue settles in (a few weeks in), you're back at the
40-hour productivity levels, just paying it at 55-hour rates (and
organizational overhead for overtime, oooh boy!), plus burning out the
developers (and organizational overhead for employee churn).

Your assumption is that 55 hour weeks are sustainable: just change this number
in the spreadsheet from 40 to 55, and voila! And while we're at it, why not
80? Why not 200? Very PHB-ish, in my unhumble opinion.

~~~
sintaxi
> A programmer who works 55 hours a week will produce twice as much code - but
> for how long?

By my experience I would say around 18-24 months.

~~~
Ma8ee
Maybe it's because I'm a little bit over forty, but for me only a few days
working 10 hours a day (plus a significant commute) decreases my productivity
significantly. That is at least if I have to work on more that one project at
a time. If I don't have to switch tasks and it is relatively straightforward
work I can probably manage for a few weeks, but not much longer and I know
that I'll definitely hate my life.

~~~
Mikushi
I am thirty and I find the same. More than two weeks of heavy days and my
productivity plummets until I get proper time off.

~~~
ferentchak
If the project is fun I can work two times as long without fatigue. For
example if I think this is important and my effort personally can make the
difference. Or if I am using a new technology or something that feels like a
"portfolio" piece.

------
dangrossman
Salary is only roughly half the cost of employing someone, so while a 25%
salary reduction for 25% fewer hours is fair for you, the employer is not
seeing a 25% cost reduction. They're not saving 25% on payroll taxes,
benefits, workers comp, PTO, training time and management overhead. In fact,
more people working fewer hours increases most of these costs.

~~~
ruler88
Not to mention, for most engineering jobs, the onboarding/training process is
long and expensive. Generally I think an engineer has negative productivity
within the first 3 months of employment. So if an employer is willing to put
down so much effort upfront for you to work there, you better to willing to
work 100%.

~~~
flukus
Not sure about engineering in general, but I find places that expect 3 months
for a programmer to become productive are a huge red flag.

A programmer should be able to checkout, build, run in minutes and then to
start fixing bugs on day 1.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _A programmer should be able to checkout, build, run in minutes and then to
> start fixing bugs on day 1._

I have never met a programmer who could do that. I'm sure some of them can, in
specific domains. But I'd consider expecting _that_ to be a huge red flag:
I've worked at exactly one place that expected a day 1 hire to match their
veteran coders, and I wouldn't work there again.

~~~
flukus
To be clear, I wouldn't expect them to match the veterans, or even to fix
anything, but they should be able to get started on a simple issue given
decent reproduction steps.

My main objection was that there shouldn't be 3 months of negative or near
zero productivity. Or there should at least be a good reason for it.

~~~
wastedhours
Whilst being helpful is one thing, if you can't afford to give people a proper
amount of time to bed in (3 months doesn't seem unreasonable), then you might
hurt your chances of retention going forwards as well - depending on the size
of the org of course, but there's plenty of places where to really understand
the business needs to make informed decisions, it takes a long time. If you
fail that step, then staying for any reasonable amount of time becomes
untenable.

------
majewsky
I'm living your dream. I'm on 70% part-time, originally because of the CS
degree that I'm working on in parallel (I originally majored in physics bevore
pivoting to IT), but I plan to continue on part-time (maybe 80% instead of 70
then) after I have my degree.

When I originally reduced from 100 to 80%, during my next annual review, my
boss was surprised that it didn't impact my apparent productivity in the
slightest, which supports your theory: More hours have diminishing returns,
but cost the same from the employer's POV, so it would be better to spread it
out to multiple people.

Indeed, the part-time model has been gaining traction within my circle of
colleagues (in Germany). Many of them are taking a day per week off to work on
their private projects, or cutting away some hours to spend more time with
their children.

~~~
axx
I basically do the same. I work 4 days a week and I feel that I'm not really
less productive. The fact that I have one day per week off, gives me a reason
to procrastinate less and do more with the time I have.

I remember the time from an old job, were most employees did nearly nothing on
Friday afternoons. They were burned out from the week and waited until the
time was up to finally go home.

I work 4-day weeks for a few years now and I can say that I don't want to
change this anytime soon. Having more time for friends and family makes me
much more happy than a bit more money. And of course, I feel much more relaxed
on Mondays since every weekend is a "long weekend".

~~~
majewsky
I observed a similar productivity drop on Friday afternoons, although in my
devops-y team it's mostly due to reluctance to deploy any changes right before
the weekend.

------
daef
Living the dream here too:

When applying for my current job I made my salary proposition. My future boss
to be told me that he had an more or less fixed absolute upper limit he tries
to keep employees payroll below - so I told him that if the amout of money he
is willing to pay is limited we can simply adjust the hours, and decided to do
only 6hrs a day. I work from my 'home office', in the back yard under a roof
beyond the sun, dont have to waste time every day to travel to some cramped up
office, get food delivered by my wife, and have the rest of the day to spend
with our son.

And since there is quite some time left I still have time to run my startup on
'spare time'

[Austria]

Dont give up - there are employers that honestly care about emloyees
wellbeing.

I hop in the car and drive to the office (3hr drive) every month or so, stay
for 2 days, do some meetings and go home then. I guess it's important to have
a beer with your git-mates now and then.

~~~
solipsism
Out of curiosity, what do you use for communication tools? Something like
Slack or IRC? Do you do a lot of video chat?

~~~
daef
irssi, mutt and pidgin

if i want to shortcut communication i simply call mates via dialthrough, on
their mobiles or skype (w/ video sometimes, w/ screensharing a lot, also
teamviewer comes in handy sometimes)

~~~
TACIXAT
I would just like to note, those all had initial releases in the 90s.

~~~
daef
and skype got _really_ bad over the last time

a team in my co just started using slack, i want to give mattermost a try...

------
beefman
A lot of good responses here, but I think the main reason is being overlooked:
someone willing to work more would take your job. They'd take your work by
'helping' with 'emergencies' that came up while you were out, then you'd be
marginalized and you'd fail.

It would take a powerful credo from above to preserve such a position amid
such politics. Most management probably doesn't even have enough power to do
it. They already have problems getting people to take vacation for the same
reason.

And it's the same reason you're probably already working more than 8 hours
once e-mail and Slack hours are included (if not outright spending more than 8
hours at the office).

~~~
mdip
This is precisely the thing I was thinking because I'd be that guy.

I've been writing software since I was 13 years old and have been lucky to be
writing software in the language I want to write in, and with code that is
challenging enough to keep it interesting. Here's the thing: Since I got my
first "real gig" (the one that can be called "a career"), I have averaged well
over 40 hours/week.

During that time, except for one brief period[0], I had never been _pressured_
to work an hour over 40 hours. In fact, the only time at my _last_ job that I
was _actually_ had some moments where I was unhappy was during a year that I
worked for a manager who gave me a hard time because this manager believed I
was "working too much"[1]. If a job involved a "powerful credo from above to
preserve such a position amid politics", it'd be a job I wouldn't make it at.
Or I'd just work the extra time and shut up about it, giving the appearance
that I'm some sort of super-hero with code.

I _love_ what I do and work extra hours because I enjoy the challenge and the
specific work I'm paid to do. And there are a lot of us like this out there. I
have some side projects that keep me from spending all of my free time working
on "work stuff" but my job is my hobby as much as it's my career.

[0] There was a period of time that I reported to a manager on a team that was
entirely made up of operational support. The expectation was that the salary
paid to the support guys included a stipulation to work at least 45
hours/week. He made it a point to mention this during every staff meeting. It
pissed me right off, partly because I can't stand managers who hyper-focus on
"hours worked" and ignore "work completed" but mostly because my salary was
low for what I was doing and couldn't, objectively, be considered to be taking
into account a 45 hour week. I mentioned it to this manager and was told to
ignore the statement because it was meant for a couple of guys on the team who
barely handled 40 hours and being the only developer on the team, he knew my
job was very different.

[1] I'm not knocking this manager. This individual ran a very effective team,
and part of that was their deep investment in staff. It was done out of the
same caring nature that caused this person's team to _be_ so effectively. I
told my manager that I felt pressured to falsify my time sheets, which was
something I would _never_ do, because of the grief I was getting and that put
an end to the grief since they were now aware that I knew there was no
pressure to work the extra time and that being in control of the time I put in
is _important_ to me.

~~~
divbit
>And there are a lot of us like this out there.

Red 5 standing by - I can easily work 80/week on an interesting project

~~~
taneq
Enjoy this while it lasts! Once (if) you add a partner and a couple of kids
(especially ones who don't sleep through the night!) and your life will be
very different.

~~~
mdip
That's assuming quite a bit about the OP and myself, so I'll speak for myself:
I'm married with four children.

I love what I do and directly sought a partner that would fit with my life and
a job that is flexible. I work from my home for a team that is located
entirely in the United Kingdom (I'm in the US). I don't regularly do "80 hour
weeks" \-- it happens and it's almost always by choice -- but there are ways
to work more than 40 hours and not have it affect your family.

First, I eliminated the commute by working from home. This allows me to start
work the instant I wake up, which I do _every_ morning. A while back, I
followed something I'd read on HN about 'how to wake up at 5:00 AM'[0] and
have been doing it for so long now that I get up around that time every
morning without effort and find it hard to sleep in at all. But I enforce an
average 7 hours of sleep/day over a 5-day period[1].

When I work and where I work is flexible, but I'm always working until my team
goes home. I also work entirely from my laptop, in the living room, all day.
That means I'm basically with my family nearly all of the time in the summer
(my wife usually sits next to me the entire day). I can close the lid when
circumstances warrant. After that, it's a mix of day and night working
(usually both). During downtime (which would otherwise be wasted by being
dedicated to watching TV), my laptop is on my lap. My wife has her phone in
her hands. She's always been like this and I've always been like this. I got
lucky in that my wife and I share a brain on these sorts of things.

When there aren't plans on the weekend, I'll work during the downtime.

My wife is a full time mother, as well, so she handles the cooking (which I
hate doing, anyway), grocery shopping and household related things. We both
participate in homework, teaching, and enjoying our children. There are times
when work is long and difficult and she's understanding that she needs to hold
things together when those rare moments occur--I'm the only source of income
for our family of four.

[0] The short version of the technique is "force yourself to go to bed when
you're tired (even if it's at 6:00 PM) and force yourself to wake up by 5:00
AM". The former is easy, the latter isn't but I added another technique: I did
several dry runs the night before where I set my alarm 5 minutes in the
future, laid myself down and jumped out of bed when it went off. For the first
several days, I physically got up out of bed and ran to wake myself. Now I can
grab my laptop off of my side-table and sit in bed feeling perfectly awake. I
drink a reasonable amount of coffee, as well but no alcohol (I gave it up a
while ago because my sleep was affected negatively when I drank and I didn't
enjoy it much, anyway).

[1] I've never been one of those people who can handle little/no sleep. I
_need_ 7 hours a night or I start to feel _miserable_ and get crabby with my
family, so I aim for 7.5 hours/night and enforce an average 7 over 5 days. I
have bursts of creativity most often at night and if I'm having a particularly
good time with code, I allow myself to stay up until productivity is affected
by exhaustion. To make up for it, I will go to bed early the next day or grab
a nap in the afternoon. As far as the whole "there's no way to make up sleep",
that's not been my personal experience. I am right back to normal after a
4-hour evening if I put in a 10-hour night and I'm able to do it if I force
myself to bed a few hours early. Because of "0", I haven't been able to
reliably sleep in, so that's my only option left.

~~~
taneq
Thanks for sharing! It sounds like you have a great system going there.

My wife and I both work full time (me from home with flexible hours, her with
a ~1hr commute) and we have two young kids. We have a nanny who looks after
the kids during weekdays.

What makes it hard is that one of the kids is almost always up multiple times
during the night. My wife and I take turns doing the night shift, so every
other night has me up at least 3 times (last night was a 'good' night, I was
up at 11pm, 1am, 4am). Like you, I don't function well at all if I don't get
enough sleep - I can crank out boilerplate code OK but if I have to think then
even 4 productive hours is a battle. Combine that with the fact that, working
from home, I'm the default person to handle any number of work-time
shenanigans and I almost never make it to 40 hours of work.

The biggest factor here is the lack of sleep due to kids, so hopefully it'll
be a whole different situation in a few years' time.

------
niallwingham
We work 20-hour weeks (remotely) at Apsis and it goes fine for us. We're a
small consulting company with very little overhead, but I imagine it could
work in other contexts as well. It certainly encourages you to eliminate
unnecessary meetings!

I'm earning about 2/3 of the salary from my previous job, where I worked 60-80
hours a week. In practice this has meant a more-than-doubling of my free time
outside work with only a small change in living standards, so I'm very happy
with the tradeoff.

The company gets a pretty good deal too -- our work hours tend to be quite
productive -- but I don't know if there's a purely economic argument on the
company's side. Part of it may require looking at the company as a vehicle for
employee benefit rather than an opposing force trying to extract maximum
value.

[http://apsis.io/blog/2016/03/14/work-and-
passion](http://apsis.io/blog/2016/03/14/work-and-passion)
[http://apsis.io/blog/2015/04/23/work-
sustainably](http://apsis.io/blog/2015/04/23/work-sustainably)

PS: Apsis is a U.S. company, though I personally live and work in Toronto,
Canada.

~~~
wkirby
Apsis co-founder here. I think there's an excellent economic argument from the
employer's perspective for what we do: we can attract top-tier talent that's
technically outside of our budget, without having to come up with the money to
pay for it.

Not every 10x-employee* is looking for non-monetary compensation, but there
are plenty out there who are happy earning "enough" without sacrificing their
life for a bank account. We get the best engineers, and the best engineers get
to stay happy at work, which makes them even more productive.

\--

* I actually don't think there's such a thing as a 10x employee. Honest to god we hire for 1x employees; finding an additional head that doesn't reduce team efficiency is an extraordinary challenge.

------
maxxxxx
I think especially in the US people are being paid for 8 hours, but in reality
most of them work much more. So the overtime is essentially free. If you take
a pay cut for working only 6 hours your employer loses much more working time
than just the two hours.

The fact that overtime is free also accounts for the number of useless
meetings. The time wasted is free for the employer. When I worked in Germany
the bosses were much more conscious about wasting time because they had to pay
for overtime or the union simply wouldn't allow it.

~~~
ivan_ah
I think you hit the nail on the head. I recently had to explain to a friend
working on immigration papers that "full time" doesn't necessarily mean
40h/week in the software world.

The person I was talking to was like "they are trying to abuse this foreign
worker with 60h work weeks" and I was like "no everyone gets abused like
that"...

Here in Quebec we have a clear policy that any work over 40h/week is overtime
(paid at 1.5x), but somehow this doesn't seem to apply to software jobs.

------
preek
In my startup (voicerepublic.com) everyone works part time. Technical and
operational side are incredibly complex, yet with a part-time team we managed
easily. In fact, I could have been a 100% CTO (which of course means 180%^^),
yet I chose to bring in a good friend and split the workload. In my experience
2 * 50% of good programmers that know each other and their stacks well, is
much more than 1 * 100%. The rationale being that you can do architecture and
reviews together, teach new traits and go on vacation at different times so
that someone is always available. We are still a smallish team of about 12,
but work from Switzerland and Germany and so far this methodology scaled very
well for 2 years.

~~~
Encaitar
Sounds great. I'd be worried about how this could scale but it sounds like a
very civilised way to work.

------
cjg
Some of the many reasons:

1) inertia - that's how it's always done;

2) it's easier to make your good employees work harder than it is to recruit
more of those difficult to recruit developers;

3) they would rather you work more hours than you already do - not fewer -
after all they make money hiring you, they can make more money if you work
more (in some twisted linear productivity logic);

4) some people wouldn't be interested, they don't want to work shorter hours
and earn less money, and that reduces the opportunity for discussing this /
rolling it out;

5) understanding how productive developers are is very difficult - did that
bug take a week to fix because it was challenging or because you were
slacking;

6) larger teams are less productive than smaller teams.

~~~
taneq
(2) is the big one. It's hard and expensive to find software devs who are
actually good (ie. smart, skilled, motivated, effective.) Once you do find
them, you take another big financial hit to bring them up to speed, which can
easily take 3+ months during which they're not only not productive, but
they're taking up your other devs' time too.

Once they're up to speed, you have to get as much work out of them as quickly
as possible because smart, skilled, motivated, effective software developers
don't sit still. Even if your company has enough internal career progression
opportunities to keep these people around, your team will still be losing them
before too long.

Another significant factor is that if you're doing something for more than a
certain time per day (varies per person, for me it's 6-7 hours) then it gets
permanent head-space and you'll find yourself mulling over algorithms in the
shower, pondering your caching policies while you lie awake at night, etc. So
if you let your devs only work 5 hours a day, you're not getting their shower
thoughts for free.

------
Chinjut
In response to many of the comments here:

There is a frequent pattern which concerns me of primarily justifying the
desire for reduced work hours in terms of the alleged increase in productivity
this will bring about (by allowing recharging, preventing burnout, etc.).

I worry that this already concedes too much. This allows for just as much
stressful dominance of work over the rest of life, and shame over any
deviation from this script, as maximizes productivity.

Even if my shorter-work-hours productivity doesn't match my longer-work-hours
productivity, I'd still prefer shorter-work-hours, with no guilt over having
those preferences. My goal in life is not to optimize everything I do for
maximum benefit of my employer; I have my own priorities and trade-offs to
worry about.

------
juiced
Why don't companies hire programmers for 6 hours a day, but keep paying for 8
hours a day? As a company you will probably attract the best in the field -
programmers who are 4 times as efficient - and the programmer is not able to
keep his/her concentration for 8 hours a day anyway.

~~~
ruler88
I think the principle is happening already, just shifted over - companies like
Facebook and Google are hiring programmers for 9 hours a day and paying 12
hours a day.

If a programmer is really good and want the lifestyle of 6 hrs work, she is
better off freelancing.

------
jrbapna
This also begs the question, why don't companies hire more part-time
programmers? In my experience it's literally an order of magnitude easier to
find a quality full time gig than a part time gig. As many of us enjoy working
on side projects and don't want to work 40 hours a week for somebody else, why
is nearly every hiring post for full-time?

~~~
audleman
As the technical lead for an 8 person startup, my needs are for team members
who can take on responsibility for part of the operation. Part time employees
don't usually do this; instead you pass off well-defined projects that they
can complete mostly independently. That work of carving off projects in a
well-defined manner is work! Work that I have to do and I've got more than
enough other work to keep me busy.

TL;DR I need a dedicated team, not low-investment part timers

~~~
dwaltrip
Why is the assumption that someone working 3-4 days a week can't take on a
large project or won't be dedicated? That seems completely non-obvious to me.
Sure a project might take a week longer, but it also might not. A lot of my
best work comes after extended periods of letting my subconscious mull things
over.

One possible compromise I could imagine is something like three 9 hour days
with an hour of emailing/communication/brainstorming the other two days. And
maybe once every month or two they come to work an extra half day for an
important meeting.

With a 30-50% pay cut, this setup will be positively affecting the burn
rate/payroll expenses and it could easily be a better investment than the
standard work arrangement. Obviously not every potential team member would be
the right fit for this, but I think many would.

~~~
Retra
>Why is the assumption that someone working 3-4 days a week can't take on a
large project or won't be dedicated?

This is because those huge projects tend to require a high degree of
coordination and planning, and that means the people involved need to be
available to the rest of the team. And if they're not available, they aren't
involved.

~~~
dwaltrip
This is a starkly false dichotomy. Less that 40 hours a week does not mean
"not available".

~~~
kmike84
It may be true for "less than 40 hours", but 3-4 days a week literally means
they are not available 1-2 days a week, right?

~~~
dwaltrip
In my above post, I mentioned an idea where they work for an hour on those 1-2
days, focusing on communication/team stuff.

~~~
kmike84
makes sense!

------
SatvikBeri
A lot of companies do, informally. At many tech companies programmers set
their own hours, and high performers who have a lot of career capital
sometimes use it to work fewer hours.

Personally as a manager I often work fairly different hours from my team, and
try to avoid knowing when/how many hours they're working, since I consider it
irrelevant.

~~~
dasmoth
One concern might be... Could you spot someone who was working well past the
point of diminishing returns? That's the one reason I can think of for a
manager to pay some attention to working hours -- other than that, results are
everything.

Somewhat similar to the question of unlimited vacation.

~~~
SatvikBeri
That's a good point. I'll have to think of ways to notice that–if there's a
sudden drop in someone's productivity, or they seem obviously really tired,
those should provide some early warning signs.

~~~
kzisme
For me personally I try to get up and move around during the day rather than
sit and spin my wheels on a problem. Otherwise I could waste 3x the time on
something blindingly simple.

------
0xfaded
I for the first time have an understanding with my employer that I have about
5-6 useful hours in me. I am not someone who paces well and will go into a
coding frenzy until I drop, at which point I know I'm done.

After that I go home and do other things (piano, study languages, etc.), but I
couldn't write another line of decent code if I tried.

Working a 30h workday with a typical salary is awesome, I have approximately
the same output as I would working 60+ hours, leave the office during daylight
and have time to explore other interests.

~~~
Splendor
I believe you meant "Working a 30h work week..."

~~~
mywittyname
Don't knock the 30h workday until you've tried it.

------
sjm-lbm
I have almost no data to back this up, but it's my suspicion that the current
workweek is something of a lowest common denominator: across all job types,
company needs, etc., it maximizes productivity while keeping most HR polices
identical.

I mean, imagine the administrative overhead to create a system like you
propose: you might want to work 25% less, but I really think a decent number
of young and single software engineers could actually work something like 40%
less and be OK at a 40% reduction in salary. Somewhere there is someone that
is working on an interesting problem and, in spurts, wants to work 30% more.
This variability increases as you look at, say, the sales team, the accounting
team, etc, and all other positions that have different optimal working styles.

Now, imagine creating a system to make sure you pay people fairly in that
world (remember, not even everyone with the same role/job title starts with
the same "100%"). Or a way find out who your _real_ best/most essential
employees are... and so on. I honestly think that the workweek, as it is,
exists mostly because as a company becomes sufficiently complex a few
assumptions need to be made in order to keep it functioning properly, and '5
days, 8-10 hours a day' (or whatever) is an assumption that everyone can more
or less stomach - even if they don't enjoy it.

~~~
franlupion
"The eight-hour day movement or 40-hour week movement, also known as the
short-time movement, was started by James Deb and had its origins in the
Industrial Revolution in Britain, where industrial production in large
factories transformed working life. The use of child labour was common. The
working day could range from 10 to 16 hours for six days a week."[1] [1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-
hour_day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day)

------
ne01
Most managers don't understand that a company is a group of people
(employees). for it to succeed you have to make sure employees are happy and
productive.

If you are not productive (tend to procrastinate) it's because you don't have
enough incentive to work.

People you hire have feelings, hopes, and dreams too. Like you, they want to
become extremely successful (and if they don’t you have hired the wrong
people). Embrace other people’s feelings and help them fulfill their life with
happiness.

How? Simple.

Instead of hiring 3 people and pay them average wage or god forbid minimum
wage — hire 1 person and pay her 3 times more.

When you fulfill someones dream and help them achieve happiness you have no
idea how much they become more productive and it requires zero effort to
manage them.

Most managers run their company like dictators.

When my startup gets to a point where I have to hire someone besides hitting
the right person I'll make sure I have the resources to fulfill his dream life
and I'm sure he will be more productive than 3 programmes (just like me) and
would never submit a question like this on HN

~~~
e_proxus
What if their dream is to work a bit less, have a nice work-life balance, see
their family more and travel the world a bit?

Those people are still productive employees (because of the factors you
mention). They just don't generate the same ratio of riches into your pockets
(but of course also cost less).

I think your view as an employer is just looking to your own self interest.

~~~
ne01
You are right I too believe that hours of work is not correlated with the
output and work output is not everything.

People should be free to work as many hours as they are pleased, remember the
ultimate goal in this life is happiness (not money).

Hire the right people, give them total freedom while paying them extra and
watch the results!

I hate companies that treat their employees like assets. Even Google, they
just think because they make work environment fun they have the right to take
most of your useful time from you.

------
a_imho
Whenever I offered working 66% of the regular office hours for 50% of my
salary, my employer refused. Whenever I brought up I prefer other
compensations than money e.g. cut working hours in interviews, I was promptly
reminded that I will work with others and need to fit within the schedule,
like off days, flexible work hours and part time work never existed. I only
worked at one company that allowed parents to negotiate an early leave when
they need to take care of the children.

edit: it applies to small local shops and 1000+ SF based companies too

------
mahyarm
Also there is a communication synchronization issue. If people have
overlapping patchy schedules where people are not available for questions,
talks or whatever, it slows the company down. By having a consistent core
hours where everyone is working then you solve this issue.

Also if your still fucking around and not working super productively, your
still available to answer questions quickly, meetings and other low energy
tasks. While if you're not working and doing stuff at home, it's significantly
harder to talk to you.

~~~
developer2
If you need that much sync in communication, either your methods of
communication are wanting, or you have employees who can't figure out what
they should be doing without having their hands held through every detail.

Nearly all necessary communication should easily take place in project/issue
trackers and documentation. Developers should be able to operate without the
constant need to bother others with questions - or being expected to drop
everything and communicate with someone every time they are prodded without
good reason. Office-dwelling employees need to train their discipline to work
independently, and management needs to expect employees to learn that
discipline.

If I have a burning question that absolutely needs a teammates' input, I can
wait up to 24 hours for a response. If I can't independently work out an issue
without assistance, and I also can't put that task on hold for a day to work
on something else, I am failing at my job.

Managers should also operate under the assumption that every unnecessary
meeting is detrimental to their business. Each block of 15 minutes spent in a
meeting should be calculated as a loss of 2 man hours of productivity per
attendee. Most meetings can be replaced by a single email or post in Slack or
similar; so use those avenues instead. A meeting should only be considered as
a last resort. The world would be a better place if everyone stopped and
thought "Do I really need this meeting?" before clicking "Send".

~~~
dasmoth
>>> The world would be a better place if everyone stopped and thought "Do I
really need this meeting?" before clicking "Send".

Should be a Google Calendar mod that does this? Getting the people who need it
most to install it could be... interesting, though.

------
kwhitefoot
It depends on your circumstances. Now that i am 60 I would quite like to cut
my average hours per week, not because it is too tiring but because I have a
lot of other things I would like to do. But thirty years ago I was able and
willing to work a more than eight hour day and then spend three or more hours
at home learning more about my trade.

But as others have said, it gets complicated when you consider pensions so
I'll probably keep working full time for another couple of years and then ask
my employer if they would be willing to to let me drop to 70%. My net income
at 70% hours will be a lot more than 70% of my current net because of
progressive taxation.

Another option that can work for some people is to work longer hours for fewer
days, instead of 7.5 hours per day for five days a week work 9.375 hours a day
for four days a week. You save 20% of your commuting time as well.

------
jacobr
I work 80% and have been doing so for the last 5 years. In Sweden you have
that right until your child turns 8 years old (so until they've finished their
first year of school), with reduced pay of course. This lets you be available
to pick up your kids from school when they still have very short school days.

I rarely play ping pong or do non-work related stuff at work now, because I
feel I want to make the most of my working hours. I go home around the time I
often get a slight down time around 15:00 anyway, so I feel I'm very focused
when I'm at work.

I think I will have a hard time adjusting back to 100% when my youngest child
turns 8, but I know people who have negotiated down their working hours to
play more video games so it will probably be fine.

------
kayman
The Quaker mentality lives. "Idleness is the hands of the devil." Work hard,
long...it's the only way.

I also get a "I work long hours why don't you" feeling I approach the subject.

~~~
xyproto
That sounds completely different from what I've learned about Quakers. Source?

------
rejschaap
Programmer salaries are quite low as it is. I think there is a good case for
reducing working time without reducing salary. I would like to see more
companies experiment with 6 hour work days (like in Gothenburg, Sweden). I
don't think there will be a huge drop in productivity. Maybe it is wishful
thinking but I think there is a good chance it will increase productivity.

One of the problems with a 6 hour work day is how to organise it. If left to
the employee they might choose to have no break. Which is really bad for
productivity. There probably has to be some agreement that you can only have a
6 hour work day if you have a good lunch break somewhere in the middle.

~~~
dasmoth
Isn't this quite individual? Were I on such a schedule, I'd probably pick
"early lunch then get to work". Flow generally comes easier in the afternoon,
especially if I've been outside in the morning. But I know others have a bit
of a lull after lunch. Flexibility is valuable.

------
cperciva
_But, considering that no company does this, it looks like this isn 't a good
idea for employers. Why? Why do companies try to squeeze all the possible
juice from employees instead of the alternative where they pay a little less,
require a little less, and the employee becomes much more happy?_

Tarsnap does this. My employee (yes, just one so far) submits semimonthly
timesheets, and he gets paid for however many hours he worked. He likes the
flexibility, and I know that I'm getting a good deal because productivity is
correlated with motivation -- the hours when he feels like working are the
hours when he'll get the most done.

------
k__
Funny thing is.

If your output is good, people don't care how much of that fulltime work you
actually spent working. The only additional thing they care for is that "you
are at the office at 9!"

------
delinka
"...hire programmers for fewer hours per day"

It takes time for me to get my head around the problem my employer wants
solved. They can't plan to the tiniest detail the precise class hierarchy that
I should produce, the exact procedure I should write. If they could, they'd
only need a typist. They need someone who can comprehend the problem,
formulate a solution, and then slice that solution thin enough to implement
each layer in code. This process is necessarily creative and often does not
involve producing code. Why don't they hire for fewer hours? Because they'd
get less 'productivity' out of me.

Further, as a company grows, it takes time to communicate, to get everyone
headed toward the same goal. Just because the founder said "protect data"
doesn't mean that everyone automatically comes to the same conclusions about
how that should be done. So there are meetings for communicating verbally,
followed by documentation to solidify understanding of the problem and the
solution, followed by more meetings to clarify intent in the documents...

After all that communicating, when I get time to focus on creating solutions,
I've got to take the time to reconstruct state in my head so that I can be
productive.

"...programming makes us tired and stressed, how often we spend hours and
hours per day just procrastinating or being completely unproductive while
still trying to be."

All those meetings make me tired and stressed. But more to your point, I'm not
unproductive while I'm defocussed. While writing part of the solution, I hit a
wall - how do I implement this so that it's readable, so that when I come back
to this part of the code in six months I'll still be able to understand wtf I
was thinking? This operation isn't permitted, so what's another way to solve
the problem without creating a security issue? So I defocus - walk the floor;
walk the block; look out the window; operate the flippers on the pinball
machine - and let my subconscious work it out.

Between attempting to understand the problem, interruptions for communication
and time required to find an acceptable solution, I'm left with little time as
it is to actually implement the code that solves the problem. I'm already
averaging about two hours of "programming time" per day. Any less and I
probably can't even write the code.

------
segmondy
If you work for 20-25hrs, you are going to put exactly just that and go home.
If you work full time which is 40hrs, they are going to expect 60+hrs from you
to show that you're a team player if you want to rise in the organization.

~~~
SteveNuts
I don't follow the logic, if you work 20-25hrs why wouldn't they expect 40-45
out of you following your reasoning?

~~~
kevinpet
No, because by asking for fewer hours you're indicating that you're going to
prioritize going home at quitting time.

------
kartickv
Or entitle people to take a quarter or two off between projects, at loss of
pay. Not, "the manager and HR may or may not approve", but as a matter of
course.

That gives you more or less what you want, that too in a form where you do
other things with the time (travel, take on a personal project for a month,
etc).

And it eliminates the concern of "But if we had him work full day our project
will get done sooner."

~~~
k__
People in the lower wage range don't get enough hours to pay their rent and
people in the higher range, who don't need to work that much don't find a job
that is only part time.

I mean who hires a developer for 20h a week?

I have the feeling that feelancing is the only way to this freedom these days.

~~~
kartickv
I didn't say 20 hours a week. I said a quarter or two off between full-time
projects.

------
ankurdhama
Productivity is a tricky word in case of programming. The usual definition is
how much you produced and also the produced thing should be tangible in some
form or other but we all know that good programmers spent a lot of time
thinking about things, trying various alternatives etc until they make a
particular decision and then implement the decision. In such cases it becomes
very hard to justify the productivity. Also when I am working on some
particular problem, the problem is always with me in my mind. Whenever I get
some free time I tend to think about the problem, no matter where I am or if I
am at office or not. This leads to this idea of "working for fixed hours"
being dumb in such cases.

Of course this doesn't apply to all programming jobs, specially where you are
given a requirement and you just go ahead and implement it without thinking
too much about the big picture of the whole software system.

A thought can come anywhere anytime, it doesn't care if you are in working
hours or not :)

------
pyoung
I did 75% time for six months. In my case I was approached by an old employer
because they really needed the extra help. I originally asked for a
contracting arrangement, but according to HR they couldn't do that, so we
settled on the 75% (w/ benefits) arrangement. A few thoughts on the subject:

1\. Everyone I know who has managed this schedule has done so by negotiating
with their existing employer (in my case a former employer). Doing this at the
interview stage seems a sub-optimal (unless you are really in demand) because
they will probably just go with someone else. After you have been working for
a while, you are a known quantity, and so it's easier for them to stick their
neck out for you. If your current employer is not receptive, you can apply
pressure by threatening to leave (worked for a buddy, but you have to be
prepared to walk). 2\. For this arrangement to make sense, you really need to
be good at setting boundaries. I was pretty bad at that, and as such, I often
put in more hours. Part of the reason they took me on was because they were
having trouble finding people to handle all the workload, so I should have
realized that it would be a struggle to keep the workload manageable on the
75% schedule (when I used to work full time I put in a lot more than 40/week).
3\. For me personally, I would much rather have a (very) flexible schedule
than a shorter work week. I don't mind cranking out 10-12 hour days if needed,
but I like the option to get some of that time back, whether it be taking part
or most of a day off on short notice, or coming in late to the office in order
to enjoy the outdoors in the AM or do some chores.

Due to 2 and 3, I think an hourly consulting arrangement would have been much
better (for me at least). If you charge enough, you will make up for the lost
benefits, and because you are charging hourly, you don't have to stress too
much if the workload spikes from time to time because you will get paid for
those extra hours.

------
fimdomeio
Because if you have more free time from a job you don't enjoy doing, its a lot
easier to find another job.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Really? At a job I emphatically disliked, all it took was one phone call.
"Looking?" "Hell yeah!" (Yes, I consider myself lucky that the demand for
developers is so high)

------
VLM
Someone should provide some military perspective. They have a bit of
documented experience with extreme working conditions and hours and
responsibilities.

On one hand in the reserves we were butts in seats about 1/10th the time of
active duty soldiers so you'd theorize we did 1/10th the training of active
soldiers, but I can assure you by the time you're done with semi-annual weapon
cleaning, range qual time, aids briefing and test (do they still do that?),
semi-annual review of DD214 and SGLI beneficiaries, PMCS the vehicles every
saturday morning, group PT every sunday afternoon, once a year holiday party
and once a year summer picnic, NBC training and mask cleaning, semiannual
company wide PT tests, by the time you're done with all that we didn't really
train in our MOS at all. Lower enlisted don't go to annual training they go to
various classes. Somehow I never went to AT with my unit, somewhat unusual,
but "most people" only go once or twice at most anyway. At any rate my point
is if the BS load is a fixed amount of time, dropping the percentage of time
you spend can have an extremely dramatic effect on the ratio of work to BS. I
will admit that unlike a standard American 60 hr/wk workplace, when we worked,
we actually worked, not goofed off while present. I would theorize that office
cooler BS talk is a very fixed cost of not working remotely, people are going
to goof off a minimum of 10 hours per week no matter how many hours of butt in
seat you force on them.

Another thing to keep in mind is the military has an enormous amount of
experience with having young people get no sleep or rest and therefore require
two months to accomplish about two weeks of learning, its called basic
training. If you're attending one of the more cerebral post-basic training
schools they force you to spend less than 40 hrs/wk in classroom thinking. And
after you graduate aside from deployment / emergency / wartime events you
spend less than 40 hrs/wk in office actually working. I can assure you the
army does not care about your happiness or long term health, they simply have
billions of human-hours of experience that you can get butts in seats any
arbitrary number of hours up to near 168 hours per week, but you can only get
working brains in seats maybe 30 to 40 hours per week and maximum total brain
productivity regardless of IQ is around 30 hrs/wk. And this applies from the
lowliest E1 doing accounting audits and sysadmin duties all the way up to the
officers flying fighter planes, so no "I'm special because I'm smart and/or
highly trained" BS.

------
throwaway092343
I used to own a business and I did this with an employee. I was just starting
out and had only 1 employee. I had a contract job that was paying my salary,
and a lot more, which I was banking. But it wasn't enough for 2 salaries. So I
hired someone part time to help with products I was writing to sell directly
to customers. It worked out fairly well for a few years. He got to do other
things (he might have had contracts of his own or been studying something at
the time - I don't remember), and I got additional work done without having to
pay a full-time salary. They're rare, but if you look for them you can find
them.

------
ci5er
I have to imagine that economically there are fixed per-employee costs. There
are, additionally, coordination costs.

When I am a "boss" \- I try to be empathetic and treat others like I would
like to be treated, but that starts with knowing how I work.

Recognizing first that I am not normal, I never ever really have "down days"
\- preferring to work a little every day of the week, month and year, but I am
fortunate in that I can switch up what I am working on -- sometimes it's just
reading, which I can do at the lake, sitting in the sun.

In any case, when coding, some days I am "on", and some days I am not. On the
days that I am not, 3 hours of coding is too much, and on the days that I am,
12 hours isn't enough.

I don't think I am alone in this.

For me, working 6 hours a day would be the perfect amount to be ... completely
not working for me. I would rather have 3 16-hour days, and the rest off. Now,
I realize, that's just me ... and everyone else is different.

But, for a group of 5, 10, heck - even 1,000, how are employers supposed to be
able to keep up with the coordination cost of knowing all of this and keeping
everything smoothly functioning? It's kind of like throwing a barbecue in
Texas and making sure that there are kosher and vegan and gluten free choices
for people (or something).

For myself, when I have to wear a team management hat, I try to build an async
remote-first kind of environment where every employee is supposed to work away
from the office 40% of the time just to make sure our systems work well enough
for our truly remote staff, but ... gosh! This is a lot of work and
experimentation that can simply be avoided by bosses that have other things to
worry about by saying: "You know what? Everybody. Here. 9. to. 5. done."

I am sympathetic to what you are saying - but mapping it to my own self, I
would have to make adjustments. Then there are adjustments for everyone. Which
sounds great (like a 100% flat organization), until, you know, it really
doesn't. Because we do not have the tools and the generations of know-how on
how to manage it. We'll get there. It will be 40 years.

------
nathan_f77
I'm doing this now. I've found a contract job where I can work 20 hours per
week (4 hours per day). I don't think I ever want to go back. At least, not
for someone else. I'm actually spending the rest of my time working on my own
projects, and that doesn't really feel like work at all. My own projects are
anything from mobile or web apps, to short films, art, music, electronics,
inventions, etc. etc.

I wish I didn't have to spend any time at all on contract work, but
unfortunately I'm not yet able to pay the bills with my side projects.
Hopefully one day.

~~~
magicbuzz
Similar to this, I work as a freelancer and I would never go back to a "full-
time" job. When I'm working, I'm getting paid - no expectation for unpaid
overtime. I can alternate between a busy week or a kicking back week
completely at will. Or just spend time unpaid working on side
projects/interests. Not being in the US means I don't have to fret about
health insurance.

------
timwaagh
No I would never accept that. at least not now. I get a below-average salary
(not just for programmers but across the general working population). I have a
mortgage which needs to be paid. And that should be enough explanation. if
rich programmers started to demand this kind, companies would just open an
office elsewhere and there would be plenty of people willing to work fulltime
at a fraction of their salary. Actually, my preference is the reverse. I would
gladly accept working 60 hours a week if they could paid me for 60 hours.
however this is illegal.

------
Spooky23
For exempt employees, it makes things more complicated and creates liability.

A friend of mine worked for a .gov that made a big political display about
employee last voluntarily reducing their workload. He went to 80% and took
every Friday off.

It was hilarious... The HR people were so crazy about him potentially working
81% that his remote email was shut off, his boss had to log any calls made to
him after hours, etc.

So he basically paid 8 hours to get about 20 hours off -- and the punchline is
that he got a major promotion explicitly to make him ineligible to work part
time.

------
anupshinde
If you are feeling stressed staying productive 8 hours a day, try comparing
your productivity with others in the team. If yours is higher you deserve a
better pay.

1\. Everybody doesn't have similar productivity. There could be a Nx(or 10x)
programmer who would finish off his work in say 2 hours. And there would be a
1x programmer who would finish the same task in a 8 hours. Both programmers
are good - but the 10x programmer will get tired, burnout and eventually
become less than 1x if made to work 8 hours every day. For employers and
management - this is pretty hard to figure out (or understand)

2\. "Wouldn't you accept a proportional salary reduction?" \- Yes, only if
everybody in the team exhibited similar levels of productivity. Unfortunately
that is rarely true. I have faced this scenario as a freelancer when I worked
32 hours a week. Some team members have worked much much slower than me,
wasted my time in meetings outside my work time, asked for help on simple
things that were well documented and still got paid higher than me. I almost
doubled my rates for that client.

3\. One needs few hours to get-in-the-zone and task-switching costs are higher
with lesser hours per day. At least that is true for me. Once I am in the
flow, the outputs are much faster. I would work one 80-100 hour workweek and
finish the work. If I were to do the same work in 40 hour workweek, I might
finish it in 3-4 weeks. And if 20 hour week - that same work would finish in
7-8 weeks. That is simply because of the switching costs. Obviously, I cannot
do 100 hour week consistently

------
ahazred8ta
It actually costs a business money to have an employee, over and above the
amount shown on a paycheck. If you hire a lot of employees who work 20 hours
per week, the HR department has to screen, hire, monitor, discipline and/or
fire twice as many people. Training costs also double. Part time employees
usually quit sooner and turn over faster, which again means higher onboarding
and training costs. It's also harder for managers to keep track of twice as
many people. YMMV

~~~
cpfohl
You vastly overestimate how productive your employees can be past about 20
hours anyway. Hiring twice as many people would be a mistake since the ones
you _do_ hire should be more effective during their "at work" time.

Also, if you pay these people closer to full time employees, give them
benefits, and make them _want_ to stay they should turn over _slower_ than a
full time employee.

------
candu
I would accept such a reduction, provided the reduced salary was still enough
to live comfortably on while continuing to save money.

That said, there is another approach: work remotely, and avoid companies that
insist on installing time / activity trackers on your work machine. This frees
you from "seat time" metrics of productivity - if you can get the same thing
done in 4 hours at home vs. 8 hours in the office, you gain 4 hours. (Versus
an office environment, in which you'll either a) be expected to sit around
doing nothing but looking productive for that time, or b) be "rewarded" for
your efficiency with useless bullshit no one else wants to touch.)

Know that this will limit your opportunities for "career growth" within a
company. The next level is to not care about that, and instead switch to
consulting. Once you're doing remote work anyways, this is an incremental step
where the only major difference is that your tax returns are now a bit more
complicated. As a consultant, your "career growth" is being able to ask for
higher rates over time.

If you have a good relationship from remote work with your previous full-time
employer, you may even get them as a client! Just make sure that, when
calculating your rates, you don't just divide your previous salary by 2000
hours - remember that you now have additional overhead that you didn't as an
employee, like health insurance (in the US, at least), client development, and
all those mini-breaks that employees take during the day that are now unpaid.
The usual rule-of-thumb is 2x your previous hourly rate.

With the right setup, you can reduce hours without reducing salary ;)

------
dustingetz
Try freelancing, I've had several clients who are fine with weird arrangements
and have worked less hours for less money on two different occasions.

------
softwarefounder
For those looking to find such a job, I'd recommend going independent. Though
I usually work 40+ hours a week, given my current client base and
relationships, I could easily setup the contract to be such that I work for <=
20hrs a week. Also, I really think that this model only works at an hourly
level. We all know that being on salary always equates to 40+ hours a week,
emphasis on the +.

~~~
ams6110
Salary actually equates to "getting a job done" without really counting hours
at all. That's why they are "exempt" positions.

~~~
analog31
"Exempt" simply means exempt from some provisions of the labor laws, notably
overtime pay.

If "get the job done" were really taken seriously by employers, then the OP
could offer to get his job done every day in 6 hours rather than 8, and take
no salary cut. In reality, that employee would get laughed out of the office.

------
mancerayder
The comments below about productivity are interesting. One person works 30 and
not more, another is happy to do 55 hours a week for years. For others, it
depends on how interesting the work is.

You salaried folks are fun to watch. The reason why the debate between 30 and
55 hours continues, and from the perspective of the bosses, how to steer you
(in the U.S. at least) towards 55, or even higher, is because you don't get
paid in proportion to what you work.

I'm on 40 hours a week in my current contract and (with full consent)
soliciting more work on the side with other clients. I promise you, when
you're paid hourly, putting in longer hours and doing more work is far more
'rewarding' because the rewards are less philosophical, psychological and
political - they're material.

Edit: come to think of it, I am FAR more productive in my 40 hours now than in
the 50, 55, etc. hours I was 'putting in' in my salaried years. But maybe I'm
just an old cynic who doesn't drink the same kool-aid as those who run the
company or own significant shares in it.

------
iopq
How about this: hire people to work 32 hours a week for the same pay. Offer it
as a competitive advantage to decrease employee turnover.

------
penguat
The answers already here address the direct effect in terms of company costs -
there are fixed costs of an employee as well as variable costs.

I am more interested in what it does to your typical team in your something-
like-typical corporate environment: I think it would tank team productivity.
Instead of programmers getting up to maybe 6 hours' writing software done,
programmers would get significantly less time doing that. And we would all
hate it.

This effect would happen because a) there are interruptions, and
communications overheads to being part of a team; and b) because you need a
bigger team to cover the reduced productivity, all of your things that scale
poorly with the size of a team mean you need an even bigger team, with each
person therefore doing less development.

I think companies which are smart about this whole building software thing are
more interested in teams and their capabilities than individuals and their
capabilities, and I think many of those would look at this in the same way as
I just did.

------
bcoates
Nobody in a position to make the decision gains anything from lowering your
salary. Reducing your pay doesn't solve a problem they have, but explaining
how you don't work 10 hours a day like the employees of $BADMANAGER creates a
problem they don't have.

Letting your devs goof off/work on the side while keeping the seat warm is
easier for everyone.

------
ebbv
On the fatigue issue: try pair programming. The day goes by a lot faster and
with less fatigue for me. I was skeptical of the idea for many years, but once
I really tried it I realized it was much better.

On the time issue: employers in the US could hire part time developers. But I
think good devs are so hard to hire in the first place that if you find one
you want to have them work a full 40 hours per week to maximize their
productivity (in theory.)

It is unrealistic to expect 40 hours of dev time out of a developer who is
working 40 hours a week, there's a lot of book keeping, meetings, emails, etc.
to deal with. But if you cut the dev's time by 25% you're not reducing the
amount of that non-dev stuff that needs to be done, so you're not making the
time more efficient. Other than, as you said, perhaps reducing burn out. But
that's what vacations are for.

------
mydpy
Exactly. This pains me all the time. I would love to take a 25% salary cut for
a 25% reduction in working hours.

------
louisswiss
As a startup founder with a technical team I've never understood the obsession
with #hours worked.

Perhaps it is because we originally started off working remotely and logging
hours worked wasn't an option. With our current tech team, # hours worked is
nowhere near top of mind. We evaluate performance based on output, team
dynamics and (perhaps related to # hours worked) availability.

While admittedly vague, availability is a measure of how the employee in
question's work schedule negatively impacts our ability to work quickly and
effectively as a team. It doesn't necessarily correlate directly to # hours
worked, however, as more often than not other factors such as 'willingness to
take part in group discussions' or 'prefers to work at night' have a bigger
impact.

------
beat
Just because I'm procrastinating doesn't mean I'm being unproductive. Quite
often, my brain needs to shove problems back into asynchronous batch
processing in the back end.

Or, as someone once told me, "That's not programming. That's just typing!"

------
dboreham
Programmers are usually salaried employees therefore (in US and other western
labor markets I'm familiar with) are not hourly paid. So they are paying you
for the 10 minutes in the shower when you figure out the hard problem.

Also: fewer, not less for discrete quantities.

------
JamesBarney
Companies say it is hard to find good developer talent, but if they were
willing to switch to 4 days a week I'm certain they would have a long line of
great developers lined up outside their door. I imagine it would quadruple the
applicant pool and double* the talent of the average developer applying.

Also I think if anyone wants to convince some employers to allow for a 4 day
week focusing on attracting and retaining talent is more important to
companies than the 20-25% pay cut.

*Because the average developer who applies to a position is probably in the bottom quartile, but the large number of dev's interested in a 4 day work week would bring the quality up because these would be closer to median developers.

------
JDiculous
Mostly unwillingness to challenge the status quo. It's the same reason why
despite all the incredible advances in remote communication technology (eg.
Google Hangout/Skype, Slack/HipChat), most companies haven't embraced remote
work.

~~~
Retra
My employer has been pushing remote work for a while, and they've recently
recanted and are telling everyone to come into the office. Why? Because for
all the benefits you imagine those tools to provide, they are not actually
helping people be more productive than they would if they were working face-
to-face.

~~~
GFischer
I work semi-remotely, and yes, it has several downsides, which can be
mitigated by the company actively taking action.

On the flip side, companies get access to a deeper talent pool at a cheaper
price. My current position used to be based in the U.S., but they couldn't
manage to get developers to stay. In my case, for the price of one U.S. junior
developer, they got two senior developers.

I do believe some face to face communication would make things smoother (at
least two or three times a year).

A lot of great articles have been written on how to manage a remote team. It's
definitely not for every company, and tools are not yet there (and probably
will never be 100%, but they'll get "good enough" for the normal use case).

Edit: some of the articles -

[https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/why-we-still-
believe-...](https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/why-we-still-believe-in-
working-remotely/)

[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BeingARemoteWorkerSucksLongLiv...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BeingARemoteWorkerSucksLongLiveTheRemoteWorker.aspx)

------
biot
If your day is only 50% productive, then clearly working only 4 hours a day
would make you 100% productive! Only it doesn't work that way. Unless you have
laser focus, most people can't pick and choose the times that they are
productive. Rather, they show up for 8 hours and warm up getting into things,
then are productive for a while, get interrupted, think about that whole lunch
thing, eventually get back into a productive mood, then gradually wind down
and think about leaving work. Net result might be 4 hours of productive work,
but it's interspersed with unproductivity.

------
monort
Company has a constant overhead per programmer, so you will see a larger than
25% cut and most people are not ok with that. The solution is either
freelancing or taking extended unpaid vacations when switching jobs.

------
lew89
I've already seen that 3-4hrs/day is much more productive than 8. For me. I
guess it seems impossible to management people. Sadly it's hard to find
employer with this dose of trust. But relax. You go to work, do your job, put
8 in time sheet, quit and enjoy your free afternoon. It works for me (probably
for any skilled engineer). Just think about it, who's gonna fire you for good
results? I wouldn't like to work with this kind of fools, so who cares?

------
thallukrish
More than programming, often a lot of time goes in discussions and meetings. I
feel the best thing that can happen is, if you hire a programmer who does end-
to-end and releases a product all by himself/herself. This whole job of
parallelizing, scheduling and managing looks so artificial and thrust upon
unnecessarily just because we were not able to slice and dice the problems in
a way they can be addressed completely individually.

~~~
ugh123
>slice and dice the problems in a way they can be addressed completely
individually.

So microservices.. err.. "microdevelopment"? Yeah screw teamwork, that never
worked. Goodluck with that.

------
robterrin
There's some truth and wisdom in your question and also, the replies that
people have given. Likely, there is no one answer. A short incomplete list
might look like this:

\- coordination problem \- organizational overhead \- micromanagement

David Graeber wrote a good piece on bullshit jobs that you might enjoy:
[http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

------
toomim
> Why don't companies hire programmers for fewer hours per day?

My companies all let programmers choose when they work, and for how many
hours. It works quite well.

------
Leisureguy
This proposal for a shorter work-week (with pay adjusted accordingly) actually
has been tried, but corporations killed it for various reasons, as discussed
in an article in Orion magazine: [https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-
gospel-of-consumption/](https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-gospel-of-
consumption/)

------
randprogrock
Here's an idea: Don't worry about programming, worry about negotiating better.
I was obsessed with programming in my 20s and 30s and put in god-knows-how-
many hours and all-niters and it never really got me anywhere. Nowadays I work
about 40 hours, and I make a sh*t-ton more money. Oh, and full benefits. Also,
I'm the best at what I do.

Intelligence in programming isn't the only kind.

------
jack9
Having the programmer available for communication (changes, updates,
confusion, immediate maintenance) with the people that do work the full day is
more productive than having them unavailable and paid less. This is eyeroll
territory. When I don't have a set deadline for Problem A as a contractor
(this has happened), I work intermittently on the Problem A and bill
appropriately.

------
stefs
i used to have a 40+ week with fixed hours at my previous employer and it got
me close to depression and a burnout in about two years.

now 30h/week (fixed salary). my current company hires a lot of university
students to work part time, so this wasn't a problem. we have mostly flexible
work time (this might differ between projects). i get comp time but no
overtime pay.

in practice i usually work as long as i feel concentrated and productive. this
means that i usually work longer hours if there's a lot to do and i have a
clear vision what and how to do it and fewer hours if i'm distracted, tired or
have urgent stuff occupying my mind.

we're required to be flexible though when it comes to projects - so generally
your choices are respected, but there might be occasions where we've got
standups at fixed times or longer hours. in my experience those are rare.

imo this benefits both me and my employer and i'm very happy with it even
though i earn at bit less than i could. on the upside though i'm usually
motivated, well rested and concentrated.

------
lrem
Programmer working hours are a fiction. I'm contracted to work 8-17, actual
requirements (schedule-wise) are for 11-19. Many days I might either crunch
11-21, or slack 13-17, not mentioning all the time spent in office but
resting. And this is all fine, as long as both me and my manager don't
perceive a problem.

~~~
GordonS
This is not standard practice everywhere, particularly in Europe

~~~
lrem
I am actually in Europe, even in the EU. Virtually every company I've
worked/interviewed with was like this, in four different countries.

------
pinouchon
I work 4/5 days with a 4/5 salary. I had this idea for a while. The key for me
has been to negotiate it before taking the job.

It's been a year, and it has worked fine for me, no tensions with fulltime
coworkers or anything like that. Just the occasional "yeah I'm working part
time" when meeting new hires.

------
1_800_UNICORN
> ...it's very rare for me to have a fully productive day. If I moved to 6
> hours per day, I'm not even sure if I'd become less productive, I'd probably
> just spend less time chatting at the coffee room, and have a smaller chance
> to get burnout.

I'm not sure I follow here. You want 75% of the salary to do the same amount
of work? That doesn't really make sense to me. You also have to take into
account that companies have to manage the overhead of having more employees
(more mouths to feed at events, more HR costs, at certain thresholds it
triggers new legal requirements for the business). I doubt you're going to
find a lot of takers from either employees or employers.

It sounds like you're dealing with a personal issue, which is that you feel
like your company is "try[ing] to squeeze all the possible juice" from you.
This sounds like you're burned out on your job. Maybe it's time to find a new
company, a new position, a new work environment, something that will make you
happier than you are now. I'm not sure that less hours and less pay is
necessarily the problem here.

~~~
aninhumer
>I'm not sure I follow here. You want 75% of the salary to do the same amount
of work? That doesn't really make sense to me.

They want 75% of the salary to do the same amount of work... _and then go
home._

~~~
rycfan
If you deliver the same value to the company in 6 hours as you do in 8, then
you should get paid 100% of your salary. You (should) be paid to deliver "X"
value.

Auto mechanics have this figured out -- we (developers) should be able to as
well. They get paid a certain amount for a certain job (say, 3 hours for a
brake job on a certain model of car). If they can do it faster/more
efficiently, they still get paid the same amount even if they work fewer
hours.

~~~
Retra
The problem with this idea is that programmers generally never do anything
'correctly', so if you go home early, you're leaving the job unfinished.

This is far less applicable to an auto mechanic who simply has to replace a
part with another stock part and let a customer walk away with it the same
day.

~~~
bbcbasic
There is some truth in this. Programmers are generallynever finished. You can
always refactor or polish it a bit or squeeze in another feature.

That said in agile you have a definition of done so at least you can agree as
a team when the job is done and then it's like the car mechanic example

------
magoon
While you're a good developer, you can spend 6 hours coding - why not use that
other two focused on business, building your team, improving process, and
researching new tech strategies? Then you don't feel burned out coding all
day.

------
intrasight
Somewhat depends what you mean by "hire". I've several consulting clients. For
one I work ~4 hours per day. At the other extreme is one for whom I work ~4
hours per month.

------
dschanoncanon
In my opinion, 2 developers doesn't make 2 times results of work. This mean
that if company hire more 6hr/day developers the result of work does not
absolutly paralleled.

------
burgerguyg
Meanwhile Amazon has posters in its elevators all over campus for an info
session next week about new part-time SDE roles with full-time benefits.

~~~
shady_nastys
Only for sde 2's and up apparently...

------
sqldba
I'd accept it. Management is not interested however.

I'd also rather it in 4 days on 3 days off.

------
Spooky23
A: the ill effect of working long hours us is overstated.

------
anotherhacker
Agreed.

Fewer hours forces you to focus and work.

------
aaron695
I dont believe it's directly beneficial for the company as others have listed.

But its actually because programmers are mostly men.

Society doesn't accept the benefits of men working part time yet so a mutually
beneficial system like many female/equal ratio oriented positions have has not
been pushed in IT.

~~~
elliotec
That is a very strange assumption. I don't know any part time female
programmers either, and I think you might've just created that societal
stereotype out of nowhere.

~~~
jacalata
I think they're trying to say that stereotypically female industries are more
on board with part-time positions, which is an interesting suggestion. I know
I had a couple of years in elementary school where the teachers were job-
sharing, but I don't know if it is actually common.

~~~
aaron695
Very common. Also very common in nursing. Also very common in admin work from
my experience.

I can't think of any male dominated industries where it's common.

The USA might be different, as OP mentioned.

[edit] Random citation - [http://www.citylab.com/work/2016/03/the-gendered-
effects-of-...](http://www.citylab.com/work/2016/03/the-gendered-effects-of-
part-time-work/473091/)

------
vumgl
If you work 8 hours a day, you are productive 4 hours a day, (So you are
basically paid double salary for your 4 hours or productive work). If you work
6 hours a day, you will most likely be productive 3 hours a day.

~~~
paulrpotts
At the risk of outing myself as "sometimes unproductive," I have found this to
not be the case at all.

I had a really clear example a number of years ago where I had been working
full-time, but changed things up from salaried to strictly hourly and started
coming in exactly six hours a day instead of eight to "however long it took"
hours.

It made a remarkable difference -- I arrived rested and with most of the
things that can be distractions (errands, paying bills, dealing with other
personal issues) already taken care of. I was able to get down to work and
focus hard for six hours, and my own productivity on the project increased. It
was kind of surprising actually.

I doubt I'm the only programmer who ever experienced something like this.

