Parts of US Department of Defense and their contractors do what they refer to as Compressed Work Schedule (CWS) wherein employees work 9-hour days and get every other Friday off. Some people opt to split their off day and make every Friday a half-day so that they can be on the links or at the riverside bar and grill by lunchtime. While in college I worked 10 hours a day Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Saturday was fairly productive on account of nobody being in the office to bother me.
Ever since I've taken remote jobs that have unlimited PTO I haven't missed these arrangements at all. No commute and the ability to take time off with reasonable constraints means that I'm able to catch up on chores and personal obligations much more easily.
Being able to step away for a couple of minutes to start a load of laundry, empty the dishwasher, carry out the trash, or perform some other bit of household maintenance is a seriously underrated benefit of working from home! Baking bread, for example, is an hours-long process consisting of quick tasks separated by long waits; I used to bake several times a week, last time I was working from home, but I haven't done it once since I resumed the office commute.
IMO: I have never worked in a job where I would have been like "heck yeah, four day work week lets do it". Part of that is, there's kinda two distinct and separate camps, and sometimes its unclear which camp people are in and what we're fighting for. Is it "I work ~40 hours in four days" or "I work ~32 hours in four days"?
And my take is, I don't like either of these solutions.
I've never worked in a role where I feel like working 32 hours a week would deliver meaningfully similar results to working 40 hours. You're just gonna deliver less. That doesn't mean I'm coding for 40 hours a week, not even close, but there's so much admin and meetings (and even just finding availability for meetings!) that reducing net hours worked by 20% isn't going to have market success.
Increasing the hours worked on each day by 20%, but getting an extra day off, also sucks. There's more "things I gotta do every day" than "things I gotta do every week". I need every hour I've got most nights. Cooking, working out, reading, entertainment to keep the sad away, some types of shopping, these aren't by and large things that I can just say "lets wait and do them all on my extra Friday off!", they need to be done ~every day.
What you say is 100% my feeling as well: I am comfortable working 38-42 hours a week, and I want to by-and-large choose the hours and days I work to hit that. That is the best solution. If I need to schedule a dentist appointment for 1pm two weeks out, I want to do that without thinking even for a second that I need to check with "work", file PTO, etc. In exchange, I'll make up that hour by working until 6pm, or going to a coffee shop for a couple hours over the weekend, whatever feels like it makes the most sense for where I'm at and where the business is at. And, sure, there's core hours, there's meetings, we work around those; I'm talking policy, not the day to day.
This pattern of handling time off is so important to me that I have quit a job within the first month because they misrepresented how they handled PTO. I was told "oh yeah you can take off for a doctors, whatever bro no big deal", which turned into "oh no you've gotta file PTO, any time off throughout the day costs a full day and needs to be approved". I quit on the spot. Policies like that, four day work weeks, limited PTO, attract cogs, not high performers.
> I've never worked in a role where I feel like working 32 hours a week would deliver meaningfully similar results to working 40 hours.
It may be my neurodivergency, but I'm the exact opposite. There's rarely a job where I'm *actually, butts-in-seats working* for 40 hours a week where I would deliver, over a study period of months, more good, correct and helpful work than if I spend less time at work.
I could probably technically vomit out more code; but it would be more buggy and have more design decisions that would bite me later (and more possibly sink the company).
Of course 20 hours is better than 10 hours; and for most people, 20 hours is better than 30; but is 40 hours better than 30? For a lot of people, I __don't think so__, but I also think those same people have been tricked into a system where they're forced to go beyond their own comfort and maximum operating efficiency just to show their presence and willingness to work.
And I think they're harmed in the long term for it.
I've rarely met anyone who can get more than four useful hours a day. Sure, there's lots more time when you are thinking about work, writing code in your head, prioritizing, and planning. That stuff can and does happen when you sit at your desk, or while you are biking, running, doing laundry, or watching tv.
> I could probably technically vomit out more code; but it would be more buggy and have more design decisions that would bite me later (and more possibly sink the company).
So: Very generally speaking: I disagree.
You've conflated "productive" with "coding", which is something software engineers do quite often. There are many, many ways to be productive beyond just writing code, that even software engineers should consider within the realm of their responsibilities. I call out a couple in my original comment; admin, meetings, organizing information, documenting, writing tests, small chore-like tickets, mentorship, learning about some part of the system, etc.
Part of gaining seniority is, I think, that ability to recognize "I'm not gonna be able to write more code today; but I think my brain is in the right place to make some meaningful progress on {whatever}". Going steps beyond that; planning your days by predicting what your mental state will probably be, to maximize the things that need to be done when you are at your best to do them, is how you start going above Senior.
> there's so much admin and meetings (and even just finding availability for meetings!)
So I moved to a four day week just over a year ago. It's been crucial to get really strict about reducing the amount of time spent in meetings. It's not easy always being the awkward person that's often telling people to take tangential discussions offline, demanding agendas, or challenging whether a call is required.
> Policies like that, four day work weeks, limited PTO, attract cogs, not high performers.
Or high performers who've recently become parents, or whose own parents are nearing end of life, or who have some other reason to want to spend more time with family.
> Or high performers who've recently become parents, or whose own parents are nearing end of life, or who have some other reason to want to spend more time with family.
I don't feel this is a fair assessment of what I'm proposing.
I haven't personally met a parent who would choose "8am to 6pm, Mon-Thu, strict, in an office" over "core hours of 11am to 2pm, Mon-Fri, more lenient, but put in 40 hours a week". I have met two parents who have left jobs that were more like the former, for jobs more like the latter. So, N=2, YMMV, etc.
Everyone wants freedom. Less freedom benefits no-one.
Choosing between "9am to 5pm, Mon-Thu, strict, in an office, paid 20% less" over "core hours of 11am to 2pm, Mon-Fri, more lenient, put in 40 hours a week" is hazier. I think depending on the nature of your responsibilities parents/caregivers might be pretty split. On the one hand, that 20% pay-bump is significant; but on the other hand, the freedom to be able to e.g. take a 90 minute lunch with your kids every day is priceless.
My point is stated very clearly in my first paragraph: These discussions get so damn hazy because when people hear "four day work week" many will think "32 hour week", many will think "32 hour week, paid at 100%", some will think "40 hours compressed into 4 days", there's no standard way to talk about this.
Choosing between "9am to 5pm, Mon-Thu, strict, in an office, paid identically" over "core hours of 11am to 2pm, Mon-Fri, more lenient, put in 40 hours a week" is obviously the most hazy. Its also not what most 4-day-a-week outfits do. Have you ever had a sick kid, the doctor has an opening in 30 minutes, its 9:30am, and you want to worry about also asking your boss "pretty please boss-man let me go take care of my family"? I still think there's be a good split between the two. Is your childcare hourly or daily? Is the second job remote or not? Lots of variables.
It sounds like you're assuming that 4-day weekers are necessarily trading in flexible hours and independence. The impression I had from your original post is that high performers do not like working fewer hours per week, all other things being equal. I didn't realise that you were talking about trade-offs.
I'm currently working reduced hours, coming in 4 days per week, with the same core hours on those days as everyone else, and the ability to shift hours into the evenings or weekends if needed. My boss is happy for me to take an hour or two extra at lunch to deal with house or family stuff. Sometimes I work a shorter day to go to the gym before dinner, then work slightly longer the following day. It's because I'm high-performing, valuable, and trusted that I was able to negotiate such a position.
Another thing worth mentioning is UK government childcare provisions. Parents get 15-30 hours of free childcare per week (depending on age). That's up to 3 days per week free at a nursery or childminder of your choice. Reducing fromm 5 to 4 days in childcare actually halves your outgoings. Given that nursery places can cost in excess of £100 per day, this is often not a bad deal even if you take a pay cut.
I do love my job, and once the kid is at school I'll assess whether I want to return to 5 days. I agree that you can get more done in 5 days, although I think in reality it's not a huge difference since I'm less incentivised to be strict about things that waste time.
"reducing net hours worked by 20% isn't going to have market success."
The forty hour week also wouldn't "have market success" (i.e. allow many individual firms to move to it unilaterally). But it happened because organized workers compelled a few employers to adopt it through labor stoppages. This in turn created political momentum for the standard forty hour week in the legal form of collective bargaining agreements and/or working hour legislation.
Because 40 is sustainable, and the standard we've mostly all agreed to (with some fuzzy room in there for heavy versus light weeks/etc).
This sounds like a reductive answer, because it is: Capitalism is social, zero sum, and reductive. There are people out there who will put in 50, 60, 70 hour weeks. If you do 40, they'll probably beat you, plain and simple. Fortunately, we've all mostly agreed that 40 is enough, so you aren't regularly competing with the people who are willing to destroy themselves for shareholder value. There's nothing all that magical about the number 40. There are numbers greater than 40 that approach "ok, humans can't physically sustain that"; but fortunately we've pushed the number to 40 through years of positive labor movements.
The problem is that typically the burden of work is much more than 40 hours, even if you only work 40 hours. Because those hours are calculated in the most ungenerous way possible.
Your lunch doesn't count. So that's now 9 hours at work. Your morning commute doesn't count. So that's now 10. And your evening commute doesn't count. Now up to 11. And those after-work meetings don't count, but you kind of need to attend them because of the implications. And so on.
While you may "work" 40 hours a week, you certainly contribute to work much more than 40 hours. For me, it's over 60, and from what I've seen that's fairly typical.
Why not split the difference and do four 9 hour days? I am reasonably sure most people will get just as much done as they would have with eight 5hr days after a couple weeks of adjusting. But then they may be to happy with their lives, and that is not something that upper levels like to see, I think.
Aldous Huxley imagined in the '20s we would automate most things and work less in the future. Today we work more than ever together with increased automation, and women work as well instad of being home to take care of the household.
On paper it looks like progress, but I'm not so sure about the quality of life.
It's not progress. Every organization has "load bearing" employees that do the brunt of the real work, and everyone else just creates a cloud of confusion about what they actually do and why it's important. Most people are doing fake work. But unfortunately "fake work" jobs are the only way to fight back about the ever-optimizing, ever-extracting process of the free market. My job is needed because fuck you, I'm not going to be homeless. It's all a big game.
And with women, employers still haven't figured out how to afford women time for traditional responsibilities, like caring for their children, while still providing them with "equitable" workplace opportunities, while not being unfair to everyone else. Likely because it's just not possible. If I don't have kids and grind harder than women who take time to raise kids, why should we have equal opportunities? Makes you wonder if traditional gender roles were onto something. Yes we can do the same things, but no it is not wise to do so on a societal level.
It's all well and good to pretend that this is the case, but it isn't. Most jobs involve some obvious measure of progress. Especially under the umbrella of "service." Women disproportionately choose these jobs: nurses, servers, etc. Women are more educated, hell the last time I went to the doctor there was a resident, a nurse, and a doctor, all three where women.
There could be some jobs where it's hard to measure progress, like quality assurance, but these jobs have been looked at with ire by management for so long it's an old wives tale at this point.
What is likely more true, is that productivity varies between employees somewhat, and perhaps there are 2x employees. But, measuring relative productivity is much, much harder.
As someone who has done fake work knowingly, what do you say to me? That I was actually providing real progress, just that it was difficult to measure, and I am fooling myself? No, it was fake work, and I've seen many peers do the same over the years.
I would say your experience is your own but I am unable to judge the "usefulness" of it without specifics, and that is a subjective thing. What you might have decided is useless I might decide otherwise. What can be said for sure is the person paying you either thought it was useful or didn't care
You’ve slipped from “equitable opportunities” to “equal opportunities” - they aren’t the same thing, and we run the risk of setting up a strawman if we’re doing so.
No one who’s advocating for employees with children with benefits like subsidized childcare, flexible schedules for driving children to and from things, etc., is suggesting that everyone should somehow get “equal opportunities”, or is proposing an actual concrete definition of how that would work. (Would you require that all promotions be internally posted and limit the amount of opportunities people can apply to? No one would call that equitable - that would disadvantage people with, say, racist bosses wanting to switch orgs.)
> If I don't have kids and grind harder than women who take time to raise kids, why should we have equal opportunities?
they're not comparing vs people who are grinding. I think they just want some guarantee that they won't be discriminated against because of maternity leave. And that they'll have some kind of on-ramp for getting back into the workforce
Which is entirely doable and reasonable, just a question of whether corporations are held accountable here or not
I'm not sure I'd say the QoL for the ultra-rich has been improved that much. They have a lot more money, but end up spending it mostly on updated versions of the same stuff rich people have always spent money on. There is a serious diminishing returns on how much money can improve your Quality of Life. It can even become a burden as a level of extreme wealth can start to become its own obligation.
And you have a not insignificant number of 1%ers in Saudi Arabia and China, and scattered around the rest of the world as well. Wasn't the CEO of Alibaba the richest person in the world for a minute circa 2020?
That's it's not about how much money they use for their lifestyles, it's about how much of the economy you control. The more, the more interesting projects you can do - see Elon Musk. Of course he could live just as well with a fraction of what he owns now, but his control over so much is what allows him to do "cool stuff".
Being ultra-rich is more about controlling society's destiny, not about how one lives.
Whether that's hood or bad is hard to say without checking what a specific person does with all that control, and what would the others do if the control was not so centralized in so few.
At least part of it is that we put the gains into increased complexity.
For example, it used to be that you had a printed schedule on each tram, train and bus stop, changed twice a year (summer/winter schedules).
Now we have electronic displays that display the time until the next tram or bus arrives in minutes.
Just imagine the gigantic difference in infrastructure to support either of those options. My dad (East Germany, 1970s/80s) used to hand-write train schedules for one or two stations twice a year - and that was all. Now you need an entire server infrastructure, massive electronics, daily maintenance, software, etc. etc.
Of course we gain something, but I think the difference in effort far outstrips the gains. Especially when trams and busses are mostly on time.
We have also massively increased our human and business networks, both global and local. Speed and throughput requirements are up for almost everything, from just-in-time deliveries to communication.
It seems either us humans ourselves, or our systems, immediately swallow all gains and put them back into increased complexity of the system(s).
I venture to guess that, in addition to most people's fascination with some form of "progress", another part of that is our capitalist financial and work system: Everybody has to do something that makes money. You just can't simplify away your own job. Well you can, but you would be stupid to do so. Competition is supposed to be the counter-force, but that does not seem to work all that well overall.
Few people want to sit idle and just do nothing. We have, in fact, automated almost everything. Dishwashers, laundry machines, Amazon delivering to your door. People have a natural instinct to fill in the gaps and so they take on more activities, responsibilities, and work.
The lie of our society is that the alternative to work is to "sit idle".
That's more time with your family, your friends, your loved ones. More time smiling, more time laughing, more time being creative. This is the "good" time - the part of life you actually care about. The parts of life you will remember when you're close to death. You won't remember meetings, or a commute, or even a project you did really good on at work.
Not a lie at all. Plenty of people remember, and are proud of, their professional achievements.
Time with friends and family is important, sure, but everyone reaches a point of diminsihing returns. There's a reason most parents eventually want their kids out of the house. Or why Thanksgiving is only once a year.
Personally, I think being proud of your professional achievements, unless they're extraordinarily impressive, is pathetic. I can guarantee you, nobody else in your life shares that pride. Being proud for the money you earn is another thing all together, people do appreciate that.
> There's a reason most parents eventually want their kids out of the house. Or why Thanksgiving is only once a year.
Right, because people hate their lives and hate their families because they got married without putting much thought into it for financial incentives and then built a life with the intention of ignoring it as much as possible just to satisfy some perspective of white picket life and numbing heteronormativity.
I know many people - both men and women - who don't even like their partners. Forget about love. And they still committed to marrying them and settling down and then they like to work. Not because the work is good, but because it means they get away from their family.
Also, most adults eventually have no friends because nobody likes them, and they waste all their time on work. And, somehow, we're just supposed to be okay with the idea that nobody likes you and nobody is your friend. I mean, if you wanted to, could you even make a friend in the next year? For most, the answer is no.
We, as a whole, have destroyed any sense of community for the promise of a nuclear family and stable job. The end result is people being sad enough to pat themselves on the back for sending an email and hiding in a "man cave" to avoid the reality of having to make small talk with the person closest to them in their life.
Sorry, maybe this is harsh, but it's what I've observed. I mean just ask an older person what the best time of their life was. Most of the time they say college or high school. Sure, being young has something to do with it, but that's not it. Having friends, laughing a lot, doing activities, having a community... these are the parts that make life worth living. My father could recount countless stories from when he was in college, decades and decades ago. He couldn't tell you what the name of the dude hired 2 years ago at work.
Agree. In my observation people have a natural tendency to float towards a self determined 'busy'. Which is generally not that busy. As in there is a plenty of time to watch shows, indulge in frivolous pet household projects, go to wine tastings, etc. Note that some of these indulgences are what leads to the self determined 'busy'. But the point is they are discretionary.
Pascal, in his "Pensées" book, wrote about this: humans keep getting busy, because otherwise they would understand how pointless their existence and suffering and reality is.
And so, in order to avoid the inner void that lurk behind everyone's mind, we run, we act, we play and we do thing, because even the useless is better than the nothing.
From the customer's point of view, yes, it's automated. The task of shopping is mostly eliminated. Instead of spending all afternoon at the mall, a customer can purchase everything they need in a few minutes without ever leaving the house.
Sorry you need things to be explained to you in such great detail.
I’m sorry you don’t consider truck drivers as human beings.
But you only care that stuff is automated from your point of view, right? Other can sweat, suffer and keep slaving away, as long as you don’t have to lift a finger, right?
Yes the customer can click a button and have stuff delivered within minutes… as long as someone else is doing the delivery.
Your lack of empathy really shows the sadness of your soul, and the short sightedness of your mind.
You can be sorry for me if you want, but I pity you.
The main point here lies in the definition of "work". I do not think we work a lot, these days. If anything and from what I see on IT, work is really scarse.
What has increased a lot is the time spent "on duty" (on the office or whatever).
This is not work per-se. But this is time retrieved from your life. This is not progress.
There's different types of work, the on duty time you describe is what I would call being paid to be available to work during certain hours. My work is like this, I do 9-5 or similar hours, any jobs come into during that time, I work on them as needed. Some days are quiet, some very busy, work is somewhat elastic while time and hourly rate is fixed.
This applies to a lot of jobs these days, even from something like retail or hospitality worker or at the more extreme end you have the likes of an on call engineer or firefighter, mostly being paid to be ready to respond to the need to work, but not being guaranteed that it will happen. This type of work doesn't really respond to more hours being more productive. It may to a certain extent that if the shop is open long maybe more customers will come in but it's not guaranteed and there may be diminishing returns as you are paying employees for their time so you need to be making or saving more money having them available to work.
Most people still conceptualise work as something more like factory work or mining or labouring even something like legal work to some extent, where you have a set amount of output each hour and so more working hours should mean more production output to a certain extent. In this case work, hourly rate and time is fairly fixed and not that elastic.
Then there the type of job where the work is fixed, but the time and hourly rate can be very elastic, this is more contractor, startup, even parts of the military, where you need to complete a task or objective maybe to a deadline but the the time or cost can vary significantly depending on what's important. This is more the business owner, sole contractor or equity earning employee where they can potentially get a bigger payout by putting in more effort or else working more efficiently.
> Today we work more than ever together with increased automation,
I don't think we work "more than ever", not at all.
This is something that's really hard to quantify, but even harder to get an idea about "anecdotally" (cause what're you comparing to, when you were working 100 years ago?). What makes you think it's true?
I’ve worked a 4 day week for a few years now. Best decision I’ve had the chance to make. I feel more productive on those 4 days, and my time away from work is more fulfilled too.
I always recommend it to people who may be lucky enough to afford and choose it.
Same here. Almost 4 years now. Feel good at work and what I accomplish. Got steadily promoted with significant pay rises. Fridays are amazing. Drop kids at school, do some errands and code a little and then pick up the kids and spend time with family.
My job nowadays is not programming but managerial. I'm lucky that a company offers a lot of flexibility, the main one being office not mandatory, so there are no issues when personal matter comes and you need to go out or something. Good companies like that are out there.
I work four eight-hour days (with a concomitant 20% pay cut), and I'm never going back. I did try a five-day year, after six or so years of a four-day week, but that just made me cement my decision to not work five days.
A two-day weekend is too short, a five-day workweek is too long. 4/3 is the perfect split.
This is true in my opinion. But if you worked the fifth day and invested all your fifth-day earnings, you could retire/become financially independent a decade earlier.
I'm not sure it's so clear cut which of these is the better option.
I agree that there are upsides and downsides to both. What tipped 4 days in my favor was having one free day to schedule annoying errands in that would have otherwise Swiss cheesed my schedule or taken up my evenings between work days - seeing the doctor/psychiatrist/vet, getting your oil changed, reviewing my monthly spending, etc.
There is a genuine trade off for me: I don’t make as much money, and concretely I’ve noticed that travel far less than my friends do, and unlike my friends I don’t own a car that I have to make long-term payments on. But I do get more focused work in during weekdays because of that, and time to explore my city during weekends, which scratches my traveling itch.
That fifth personal day can be quite lucrative with various one off projects. You can also be quite selective as you're covered financially and can choose those one off projects carefully to align with your values or whatever matters to you.
To be honest, it probably depends on (a) how much you value your sixties over your twenties-thirties and (b) how much you trust the market to not take a barrel roll
A 4-day work week at 80% pay is the dream for me. I had the chance to work a 3x12 week for a year and it was the best year of my entire life. There’s nothing more valuable than time.
"Employers saw benefits, too: 70% reported that recruiting workers was easier once they went to a four-day schedule—a boon in a country where many industries complain that intense competition for talent drives up costs. A dozen participants reported details of their financial performance, showing revenue and profit were stable overall."
The exact same things have been shown for WFH as well, but that data is being overridden by the emotions and gut feelings of CEOs. When investors are pressuring you to make more money, doing RTO is a big, highly visible thing that feels good and is much simpler than analyzing and improving a business's fundamentals.
It's not about productivity, profitability, or anything measurable like that. It's about control, about keeping "us" different from "them". "Us" being the better, more worthy people, who deserve to enjoy life, and "them" being dirty lowly workers, who should be happy they have jobs, keep their heads down and not grumble.
A measure could up productivity by 1 bajillion percent, but if it grants employees more happiness, mobility, and control it's dead in the water.
The business world is not rationale by any means. The people in positions of control to make these decisions made it there because they LOVE being in control. They will often hurt themselves purely to maintain a delusion of strength. This self-destructive nature is an inherent flaw of humanity. Very few people have the ability to even recognize their own self-destruction, let alone fix it.
I mean, just about every trend encounters an equivalent amount of pushback, but there does seem to be a (very gradual) shift towards WFH happening. My guess is it'll follow demographic lines, with younger people working half- or even full-time remote and older people sticking to mostly in person work.
imo life is filled with too much these days to handle in 2 days. the rest, administrative and maintenance required to keep things moving takes 2 full days.
I agree. I feel like I need at least a full day to just decompress from work and work on anything I want to, then another day to manage chores, house maintenance, etc. I end up feeling like I work 5 days for 1 day off.
I think the point being made is it's hard to go back for the organization as well, considering that 35 out of 45 of the companies participating chose not to go back to a 5-day workweek.
So this is fewer hours as well, right? Not just the same 40 hours but compressed into 4 days?
It doesn't seem unreasonable it could work for some jobs and people. Too many hours and people tend to get stressed, tired, worried about home matters they can't attend to, etc - and their performance suffers as a result.
For me, I work 4x 10hr days, and it's the best work situation I've ever had. Having every single weekend be a 3-day weekend is something it would be very hard to move away from unless I was doubling my salary or something.
I think that should be an option everywhere it's feasible for those who want it - but damn I will never take a 4x10 schedule. My performance drops quite a bit past the 6 hour mark if it's been a strong day - I'd definitely get nothing done in the remaining 2 hours of a 10 hour day.
I did a schedule of four 10 hour days for a few years in the military (with every fourth week being an extra three six hour days because someone had to be there at all times).
It was absolutely amazing for actually being able to get things done. I hated going back to the regular five day week after that.
I used to work 4x10 hour days, Sun-Wed, 2nd shift. It was OK, but I was ecstatic when I was finally able to move to a normal 9-5 Mon-Fri schedule. It's so much nicer to have society's expectations of when you are meant to be working to match when you are actually working.
Working that schedule? It was great for some stuff (going out Fridays) but bad for others. For example I was taking night classes at the time and constantly had to beg for help with coverage because 7pm is not early enough release to make it to most night classes, which tend to begin then or a little earlier. I also didn't get to see my wife as much because she worked first shift, so only we had breakfast and an hour before bed on M-W.
It was definitely much better than 11p-7a Sat-Wed which I had worked immediately before that.
One of the aspects that has never been discussed in those studies is the competitor's offset, which wouldn't adopt the 4-day work week.
Local companies in Germany have a very defensive business due to the nature of the market (not so internationalized, highly consolidated, a lot of small businesses that no big corporation would try to enter, and low competition in mid-sized businesses due to bureaucracy).
For local SaaS companies or local companies for sure, it can work since no big competitor can rise. Still, the real test would be Germany placing that in their industrial base (e.g. cars, industrial instruments, chemical industry, logistics), or in some other businesses where the entry barrier is low.
Yes. Those are the specific conventions that the betriebsrat (Workers Concil) decides, but this varies from company to company and state.
My point is, considering this specific arrangement of 7 hours a day/workday (35h), what would be the offset comparing this same company with 28h/week (4D) with another company not in that arrangement in scenarios where throughput per hour matters?
Everywhere I’ve been interviewing at recently has told me upfront that they expect a 50-60 hour workweek with a few outright stating they work half the day on Sunday. I’d love a four-day workweek, but right now I’m just hoping for a five-day, 40-hour workweek to start.
> Employers saw benefits, too: 70% reported that recruiting workers was easier once they went to a four-day schedule—a boon in a country where many industries complain that intense competition for talent drives up costs.
I mean, that's definitely going away if all other employers also move to four-day workweeks, so it seems like you shouldn't factor that in as one of the benefits of this schedule.
I mean, that's definitely going away if all other employers also move to five-day workweeks, so it seems like you shouldn't factor that in as one of the benefits of this schedule.
This sort of snarky response fails to consider the actual benefits - for both the employer and the employee.
Often by the end of the week, people in complex positions are well past the point of diminishing returns - pushing them harder may work in the short-term, but it's a recipe for burnout.
It's better to have someone operating closer to their peek performance for longer - even if you sacrifice a day overall.
As I've been working for myself, this is exactly what I've noticed. The exhaustion and stress of pushing myself "another day" for "just another feature" is absolutely not worth the burnout that comes immediately after.
2 days off for the weekend just isn't enough to fully recuperate once you're in the burnout zone.
I think if I were to be fired I would like to take 2-3 months off to build up before I started looking for a new job, but that's only possible due to having some savings I could tap into.
Back of the napkin calculations say I would need about $4,000/month liquid cash to not be in danger. Add another 1 month barrier in and I would need $16,000 on hand to take 3 months off assuming that I got another equally paying job almost immediately.
I know this is HN and most people here heavily support WFH. But as this article shows, people will support whatever benefits they can get, even if it is very likely come at the cost of productivity. With WFH, it is a mixed bag of whether that would affect productivity or not but from a risk averse management perspective, it is understandable that they don't want to risk it and go back to the traditional mode.
In my (likely very controversial to HN) opinion, software devs are already heavily compensated compared to other professions and adding more benefits on top of that in the form of WFH just make it even more unfair. What is fair? It is what the employers are willing to pay and if most are demanding RTO then that is just what the market is willing to bear.
Most jobs do not have the luxury of WFH. Not for a doctor, a biologist, a chemist, a civil engineer, a lawyer, etc. They are required to come to office to work and they are often paid less than a software dev.
I don't see what fairness has to do with WFH. Its in the company's best interest to maximize employee productivity. If an employee has to travel three hours per day to sit on zoom meetings, they might not be motivated to perform as well as they would for a company that treats them better.
I guess by using the word "fair" I may have caused the discussion to focus on the wrong idea.
It is about what is acceptable to both the employer and the employee. The employee would like the freedom to WFH but the employer consider it a benefit that come at their cost and thus do not want to grant it. As shown by other professions, the idea of WFH is entirely new and rarely if ever granted or expected to most professionals. Software devs are in a unique position to demand and potentially getting it does not make it any less exceptional and a huge ask for the other side of the negotiation.
Whether it is really good or bad is not the point I am making.
Employers only consider it a benefit because workers like it. If we all banded together and just lie and say WFH sucks, we'd then get it. Because that's how these things work. Often the metric to optimize for is employee control, and therefore a field I like to call "misery management".
The objective world does not always, and in fact rarely, intersects with the world of business management. In reality, WFH is cheaper across the board. In time, space, money... every aspect you can think of.
But a mutually beneficial nature makes is undesirable from a business perspective, because they don't want the implications of that word - "mutual".
Employees advocate for themselves because they have to. If you are not selfish in that manner, you are ONLY hurting yourself. Employers have discovered the art of selfishness thousands of years ago. You must push, you must be entitled. And, remember, the only reason you have what you have is because a lot of workers before you were very entitled. So entitled they often got what they wanted via violence.
You define "fair" as "whatever the market for a particular sort of job will support," but then throw in a comparison to other, very different lines of work and note some differences. What's the connection?
The comparisons are to show how other professions have a common level of benefit. On the overall market, RTO is not exceptional and it is understandable why employers for a particular field would be hesitant to grant WFH as an added benefit on top of already provided ones. As it turns out, even for the software field, this is not something easily granted.
One could also say that your opinion is very American centric. Only US devs get "heavily" or extra compensated, the salaries in Europe or India are comparable with other professionals, specially when you are getting started. What's more, if you stay in the IC role the salary will hit a ceiling after some years and management salaries are again comparable with other positions.
> people will support whatever benefits they can get
Not true.
There are many people who fought against the choice of WFH despite the flexibility being generally good for everyone. There are many reasons for this e.g. they are extroverts and need the social interaction, have a poor home life etc.
It seems like you're comparing jobs to other jobs. If you reverse your logic, "Software jobs should have to go to the workplace, not because they need to, are more productive, but just so that other people feel like it's fair."
You stated correctly when you said "most jobs do not have the luxury", and some people have specifically chosen these jobs for this luxury.
Fairness related to other professions seems to be a very odd metric. I fail to see why software engineers should feel guilty about WFH because others can't.
I mean I'd love to be able to enjoy a nice sky or a beautiful view of the sea while I'm working but alas, my work tool is neither a plane nor a boat.
Any comments like this seem disingenuous when even 1 billionaire exists.
It reminds me of people complaining of why are train drivers striking, when they're already paid more than nurses, thus how dare they.
Wealthy inequality isn't between us common folk, it's between them (the ultra wealthy) and us.
If there truly was fair compensation, there wouldn't be anyone with that much money. We're already doubtful of the 10x engineer, let alone the 1,000,000,000,000x engineer.
Ever since I've taken remote jobs that have unlimited PTO I haven't missed these arrangements at all. No commute and the ability to take time off with reasonable constraints means that I'm able to catch up on chores and personal obligations much more easily.