The aha comment that made me realise why this probably won't take off by @claudeganon [^1]:
> "The whole arrangement is about control, preventing workers from having the time or energy to build competing enterprises, develop skills beyond a certain level, or organize against their employers. It’s the same reason why most big corps oppose a national healthcare system in the US: it keeps people locked in to their current positions and has the knock-on effect of putting downward pressure on wages and turnover expenses."
[^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21434297Is this... true?
Why there is no national healthcare - money, someone makes a ton of it by preventing nationalization of healthcare system.
Everything that doesn't make sense, has better alternatives (somehow not adopted) always boils down to money :(
Your most powerful tool in negotiating with your employer is to threaten to resign. Even with COBRA, paying for your own health insurance can be a substantial burden for many people in the US. If resigning from your job poses substantial risks to your health and life, your employer holds all the cards.
A workforce that does not have mobility and security in the essentials of life creates negative externalities for society as a whole. If workers are unable to leave or report workplaces containing unethical or illegal behavior out of concern for their lives, that unethical or illegal behavior is tacitly rewarded with competitive advantage for the business.
I know lots of other people who are petrified of losing their job because they aren't as healthy as I am.
You mean in general or only in the context of this article? because the BBC is certainly not a channel devoid of bias (just check this: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-BBC-called-British-Bullshit-Cor...)
Or, more realistically...entrenched systems evolve slowly.
Yikes, that sounds depressing.
> A report commissioned by the Labour Party in the UK suggested a four-day working week would be "unrealistic".
The report seems to be missing the point of most 4 day work week initiatives which is that we spend a ton of time not actually working because people feel like they are expected to always be in the office between arbitrary hours. Just because people "work" less doesn't mean their output is changing. Unless your definition of work is warming a chair.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/videos/comment...
Meanwhile, if you’re building on shoes in a shoe factory, there should be a very predictable output for people working on 4 days vs 5 days.
I don’t condone people to be overworking but that’s just my take.
Long days of dull and repetitive work, day after day, week after week, month after month, can be super exhausting mentally as well as physically. And it does show in terms of productivity. You're right, the output might be very predictable but it doesn't mean people aren't more productive and motivated when they feel more rested and less exhausted/tired/bored.
I'm a skilled machinist. And I couldn't even pretend that a full day of work didn't make me feel exhausted or that I didn't get tired and feel productivity & attentiveness taper off with time. Observing the coffee breaks when managers aren't around is enough evidence that most employees seem prone to feel the burden of long days at work. People find ways to avoid working too much -- coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, etc. I don't think it's just laziness. I would prefer to spend less time doing more focused work, stretching out a long day is always painful.
Now I work an IT job and am generally more energetic, but I would still prefer to have more time & energy left for my own life and ambitions (which work probably won't ever satisfy).
"The name 996.ICU refers to "Work by '996', sick in ICU", an ironic saying among Chinese developers, which means that by following the "996" work schedule, you are risking yourself getting into the ICU (Intensive Care Unit)."
Breaking news: Electrically heated seats puts millions out of work.
Perhaps - but more depressing is losing a high paying job and earning a minimum wage with no hope of living a comfortably life, in that local context. Taken it out of context makes it further apart from the true meaning.
Success has no shortcuts - it requires 100k+ hours of hard working and perseverance. Working leisurely is for the folks that are already prosper (read: take a look at Microsoft employees' avg. salaries.)
Working less and living a good life? No, you can't have it both ways, unless you're already rich.
Working leisurely is for companies that have a culture that encourages it and nothing more.
I don't consider myself rich (although this is kind of a relative measurement), but I definitely work leisurely and make enough money to buy a house, car, etc.
I also took a lot of shortcuts, like dropping out of college. People CAN and DO have it both ways without already being rich and that should be the standard for society going forward. We should always strive to improve the experience of workers.
As someone else said... why not? This isn't some immutable law of the universe.
You can absolutely have it both ways
It's just that they don't come into the office on the 5th day.
This is actually probably the key result from this experiment. Working at home that 5th day, allows workers, especially in Japan, where people feel a huge obligation to just hold down a chair even if there isn't work to be done, to work flexibly in a manner that works for them.
Even if they are still working the 5th day from home, it’s still a better trade off than having to be in the office 5 days per week.
That being said, 4 day work weeks would be great and I’m sure people would be just as productive, if not more so, as they are now.
At one company, I noticed Fridays were probably the least productive day as people would take breakfast breaks immediately upon showing up, extra long lunch breaks etc. Everybody was itching for the weekend. When they moved to 4 day work weeks, that same mentality just shifted to Thursday. Leadership wasn't good about holding people accountable and then suffered enormous backlash at the mere idea of moving back to a 5 day workweek to help meet the mission goals.
I guess the moral is to ensure there are at least good management practices in place. Shorter workweeks aren't necessarily a productivity panacea.
I was part of a similar test at a previous employer. We switched to a 4-day workweek for a few months. We were warned that management would be watching our productivity closely during the trial period.
You bet we worked incredibly hard during that trial period. Everyone was working long hours to get everything done early. Ironically, some people even worked Saturdays during the trial period. No one wanted to be the person who fell behind and ruined the four day workweek trial period for everyone else.
Employees are smart. If their management says they can have an extra 52 days off each year if they nail productivity during a 4-week trial period, of course they're going to be ultra productive for those 4 weeks.
And if it's going to tend to happen informally anyway, it's probably fairer to make it an official policy for everyone.
That said, I personally mostly lean towards more vacation days I can take together rather than every week being shorter.
As I understand it the only reason we have a 5-day, 8-hour work week is because North American rail workers' labor unions struck for it. Because workers, over tired, were losing limbs and dying on the job. It's not because it's the optimal work week for managing teams of knowledge workers.
What I am surprised by is how long it has taken the MBAs and suits to realize this.
I think this is because the impact of an error of commission is low. The worst that happens is people work a bit later, and since they're always working later... well, it's fine to build things that don't need building and have meetings about things that aren't happening. Nobody worries about wasting time because it's just pushing work into a buffer that is treated as infinite. But with limited incentive to select high-value work, it's easy to fall into a trap of working 12+ hour days entirely on low-value stuff.
"Go home on time" cultures are forced to prioritise to be effective. If you know you're going to shut down the laptop with tasks unfinished, you have to make a choice on which tasks you're willing to accept not getting done today. In this situation there is a significant impact of an error of commission, because it means something more important not getting done. IME this results in higher-value work overall, because the organisational instinct tends toward scrutinising everything to see if it's worth doing, not just the things which will take you past 5pm.
I've not been fortunate enough to work somewhere with a 4 day week, only places with generous working hours, but my feeling is it would be a further improvement on this. (Especially since with more free time, people are not going to assign such a high importance to doing their finances, keeping track of Reddit, daydreaming about DIY or any of the other thousands of things people in long-hours cultures do on company time).
There's no reason to rely on imperfectly controlled-for studies when we can generally predict a compounding chain of essentially true things.
Furthermore, less work is more freedom and is preferable, whatever the rationalization of the era is.
We'll probably all be better off when we see tenacious belief in "work ethic" as Stockholm Syndrome's cousin, and realize we're still getting things done because we want to be creative and useful.
I'm pretty sure I'm making more right now compared to how much I was when working full time.
I explain this by having had more time to become a better engineer, as I've been able to spend time on side projects (learning new things), distancing myself from my professional duties (thus avoiding unnecessary/inefficient work), and recovering better during the weekends. Exercising more probably helped a lot too.
Overall, I deeply think that more small tech companies should start offering 4d/week positions, as it will make them able to compete against bigger companies that can offer bigger compensations. Most of the best programmers I know would happily trade a 15% net income reduction for an additional day off. This is also reflected by how popular such articles get on Hacker News or Reddit.
As a side note, part time work for white-collar positions is already very common in the Netherlands[1], and the country if one of the richest in the world.
---
[1] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2015/05/11/...
I sorta "steal" (do without asking permission) 10% of time to work on what I want (stuff not PM sanctioned bugs/features), and not only is it GREAT for mental health, it often turns out to be greatly appreciated by others at work. There's always stuff that many people wish for but never gets prioritized. Or just me cross-training myself in other languages and frameworks so I can support a larger set of code-bases also provides a lot of value.
But not everyone works like this. Many people just take any extra slack they can get and use it to chill. :shrug:
I hear Japan has cultural practices where workers are supposed to remain in the office until the boss goes home. Was it like this at MSFT before they tried the 4-day a week experiment? Or were they doing a Westernized 9-5 gig? Which in that case, would probably already be viewed as a 'dream' lifestyle to normal overworked Japanese citizens.
IE: Did you sprain your ankle/fall off your bike during work hours or private time? If it was during work time then it's a working accident and you get all necessary treatment and long term recovery paid by the insurance. If it's during private time then it's on you and your insurance covers standard treatment but some lengthy recovery and physiotherapy costs may come out of your pocket.
Yes, this is how it works. When I moved from California to the Midwest while working at Microsoft, I had to be paid out accrued vacation because California requires employers to keep accruing vacation time, while other states allow companies to put a cap on it.
Given the benefits to the organization, wonder why the repeat experiment will not have the "special leave" benefit.
For those of you who own businesses with employees -- how do you feel about 4-day work weeks? Would it be practical for your own companies?
By 2030 all "baby boomers" will be older than 65. These people will need to be cared for on a scale that we have never encountered before.
Companies will need to find a way to continue to conduct business while the workforce contends with caring for the aging population. Work-at-Home, Flex Schedule, and 4 Day Weeks and other things that are currently seen as perks can all become part of a core solution to that problem. Companies can essentially beta the potential solutions as a perk today.
I wouldn't be surprised to see elder care benefits start to appear in company benefit packages as well. Currently parental/birth benefits are a distinguishing factor in HR circles and gaining traction. I expect elder care benefits to take a similar course as caring for the aging population increases in burden.
For me often my day is just busy. Update that library, write test, ask for review, start updating deps for if/when review passes. review passed. put in CI queue. Made through que. Submit deps version bump for review. Review approved, add to CI. Oh oh something broke. repeat. Entire days are just busy work. Working less hours would not remove the busy work or make it more productive. Maybe it's a bad workflow.
In any case yes , would love to work less hours but still questioning where the optimum is. Why 4 days? Why 8hrs? Why not 2 days for 2hrs etc... Is 4 only special in relation to 5? Is it 4 on 3 off or would 2 on 1 of 2 on 2 off be better? Or On Off On Off On Off Off. Is 6hrs better? 4? 10?
And how do they differ per industry? I can tell you right now, the vast majority of jobs do require the current hourly investment (and then some). Are there industries that would see productivity gains from a 6-day or 7-day workweek (not that we want to change to that schedule - but it's worth a contrast)? Many businesses will pay out over time even though it means paying out 1.5x or 2x or even 2.5x base pay - they aren't stupid. Clearly, there is SOME benefit.
The situation is still a win/win for the employer, since my increased productivity makes more profits and therefore salaries can be kept equal (or increased, if sales go up)
It would also boost internal tourism so would have that advantage as well
Oh I think MS didn't say that. [1]
Paper and electricity was compared to August 2016, as far as I can see from the image.
Actually they look like on the trend line.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1189857355908833280/Pz8s9574?...
I'm helping out aging parents. I can do that, and keep my skills up, and have a life, if I work 4 days a week or less. That's what I negotiated at my last gig — but it was with a great small company and not one of the typical major employers where 40 hour workweeks are a baseline requirement.
Selling products by low price is meaningless. Productivity should be measured by profit per employee, not sales per employee.
I vaguely remember seeing articles, that I now cannot find, that claimed that the forty percent reduction in days worked resulted in much less than a forty percent reduction in production.
Here's a government pdf on productivity. The three day week doesn't stand out on any of the graphs, it's just lost in the regular variation.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06...
Why aren't smaller startups already using this tactic to lure away "talent"?
Fuck everything about 5 day work weeks.
I'll gladly switch to any job that offers a 4 day work week. It's one of the best perks.
As someone with ADHD, work days are entirely spent getting work done. There isn't any extra slack or allotment for personal tasks. They're 100% owned by the employer.
Weekends offer barely enough time to catch up with chores. There isn't enough time both to catch up and still have fun. I use vacation time to catch up on chores, so that's spent too.
I don't want to spend most of my life working. I feel like a slave, and now my youth is almost gone.
I don't care if it's a 10hr/4day schedule or a 9hr/4day 8hr/4day with less pay, I want an extra day for myself. I'm an excellent engineer aside from my ADHD quirks, and I'll go anywhere that offers this where I live.
My own startup (I almost have the capital for a long runway) will be 9hr/4day.
Fuck everything about 5 day work weeks.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Although, sometimes we wish we could.
Similar to Microsoft, we only have one 45-min meeting each week and then everything else is heads down work.
To maintain efficiency, we also have strict Slack protocols in place to keep everyone in deep work throughout the day. (No @ or DMs, everyone checks Slack at 11am and 4pm).
The major downside so far has been customer support, which the founders still manage to maintain our response rate.
Oh and we're hiring! If you're frontend engineer and like 4-day weeks + side projects, reach out directly moe@monograph.io
A 6 hour x 4 day work week is 75% the regular work day and 80% of the regular work week, but I bet it gets a lot more than 60% of the regular work done. That is largely cutting out the unproductive "slack time", and giving it back to the employees so they don't have to look busy when they are already spent for the day/week.
If you need to squeeze more out of the workforce, please hire more employees, and worry less about their specific "qualifications". Instead, spend more on management recruiting. Get managers who can coordinate the efforts of people working together asynchronously. Just like asynchronous programming, it takes a little bit more skill than just managing everyone together in the same office location, at the same time, doing the "manager walk" and demanding status reports and status meetings. And employees are universally happier with managers that are more skilled at management.
People who want to work more should be able to, but we generally need a massive reevaluation of what work in America is worth, in favor of labor. We're giving up way too much because we're afraid.
We also need a reevaluation of what work is worth, in terms of self-worth and position in society. We're too far on the side of "you are your job" (and its less-savory friend "your net worth is your worth").
I think we (as a society/industry) need to start publicly having this discussion.
In my 10+ years of office experience I never even come close to 20 hours of actual work in a week, even if I was there for 40-60 hours. Usually, half the time or more was dedicated to office politics and making people who need to constantly socialize feel good about themselves with various meetings and team-building exercises and chit-chat. During one particularly bad period of time, work often only happened the little gap between morning meetings and noon because certain people would come back from lunch pissed out of their minds and make it impossible for anyone to do anything. I never had a problem with the actual work, but the non-work I was putting most of my time and effort into was exhausting and lead to long bouts of depressions.
Now that I'm freelancing from home, with no commute and no babysitting egos, not only am I spending most of my work time on work, but the time I do spend is about 10x more productive, due to lack of office (and commute) stress.
It could be 9hr/4day, and you will do that until you run out of capital after 1800 work hours.
Only because you've surrounded yourself with people that don't know any other way to do it. Find more creative people to hang out with.
I've never understood this line of thinking. Providing for yourself is being a contributing member of the species, work is a means of providing for yourself. For all of human history you've either had to get up every day and go be productive bringing resources in or you had to depend upon someone else to do it for you.
I see this "working is slavery" attitude constantly in /r/leanfire and other personal finance subs and I just don't get it. Every single thing you use required labor to come into existence. Your phone, your computer, where you live, the clothes you are wearing, the food you eat, all of that required human labor to produce.
Worse, I often seen the 'work is slavery' form 6-figure salary types (at least in /r/leanfire) that have great benefits and are griping they won't be able to retire by 35 or from people that are on their first job (usually retail) and think it is unfair they can't sit at home playing video games and having all their needs met.
This sort of mentality can't be good for the future of mankind. Sitting in an air conditioned building, listening to spotify, while you decide if you want to go get the catered lunch or sit in your cubicle while you screw around on HN/reddit and pretend to work is NOT slavery.
If you genuinely feel this way, go get a job throwing trucks/planes in the dead of summer or go get a landscaping job for a few weeks. Seriously, go get a manual labor job part time on the weekends and realize there are people doing that 40, 50, 60 hours a week all year long.
Go tell someone from the 1950s, 1850s, 1750s, 1650s how hard you have it and how bad it is having to sit at a computer all day in a climate controlled building. They'd look at you in utter disbelief and beg you to tell them how to have such a wonderful life.
I've had a job since I was 12 and working full time since the day I turned 18. I'm grateful that I get to work, grateful that I am able to provide for myself, grateful that I do get to sit a desk and am no longer humping a backpack full of diesel weed eating and digging graves. I'll take sitting at a monitor over getting sunburn to the point of blistered skin from being outside working all day with no cover any day.
However, I can't truly pick when I want to work. There are no jobs in my area that pay 80% of my current rate for the same task done 4 days a week.
If a job was truly an even exchange of value between employer and employee, I would expect to see some people working 7 days a week and making 40% more than me, and some people working 3 day weeks and making 40% less. But aside from service workers with work on nights, weekends, and holidays, everyone in my city went to work in the dark this morning and will go home in the dark tonight.
I am not against trading labor for money - that's the point of a job. I am against trading freedom plus labor for money.
That's how it is for most people anyway. Sure there's other options like starting a business or whatever, but those are restrictive in their own ways and aren't possible for most people.
There's no reason work needs to be structured in the tyrannical matter it is. Work could be democratic, but it's not.
Obviously work is necessary, but not _all_ work is, especially in today's world. Society as a whole is taking the path of working more in order to consume more, instead of working less and having more free time. It's hard to escape this. Most part-time jobs are minimum wage type jobs.
I don't know if you've met tribes people or those living in agrarian societies, but while they do tend to have excellent work ethics and do a lot, they also tend to have _more_ down time and family time than someone working a 40 hour week, tilling fields is hard fucking work, maintaining all your own equipment and making things by hand is slow and laborious, but you do get to finish. Sometimes there's weeks that you're working every single day, but there's also seasons where you aren't.
Fuck this.
In the United States the benefits of full time employment are mandatory if you want to live a much less stressful life. Tying benefits to employment has given employers far too much control over their employees lives, without a huge savings or secondary income source anyone without insurance is one bad day away from bankruptcy (and too many people /with/ benefits are as well).
If a 4 day work week lowers stress and increases productivity that much, I don't see why many industries shouldn't adopt it. And don't tell people that "You have a choice, just get a part time job instead". Thats not a choice, thats a financial death sentence.
If I've contributed my maximum amount in 4 days rather than 5, it should not be called part time. Part time should be reserved for instances where you are indeed contributing less than a full amount per week, such that you could hold two part time jobs.
So the question is really why some employers insist on the full 40 rather than being open to a range from 30 to 40.
It makes no sense that everyone gets the same two days off. It is such a hassle scheduling doctors appointments, receiving repairmen, going to the DMV, etc. on a weekday.
The only reason we have the same two days off is for historical religious reasons. And a rolling schedule could still accommodate that for those who care.
For everyone else, just put them on a rolling schedule of five (or four) days of work per week, any days, with some predictability.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar#Five-day_weeks :
"Eighty per cent of each factory's workforce was at work every day (except holidays) in an attempt to increase production while 20% were resting. But if a husband and wife, and their relatives and friends, were assigned different colors or numbers, they would not have a common rest day for their family and social life. Furthermore, machines broke down more frequently both because they were used by workers not familiar with them, and because no maintenance could be performed on machines that were never idle in factories with continuous schedules (24 hours/day every day). Five-day weeks (and later six-day weeks) "made it impossible to observe Sunday as a day of rest. This measure was deliberately introduced 'to facilitate the struggle to eliminate religion'".[25]"
See also https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/why-don...
A 2-day weekend, with one day/half day off during the week for appointments, would be a much better system. The employee could select the day themselves to suit their preferences.