Unpopular opinion: Weekdays/weekend split isn't for everyone

https://twitter.com/meseali/status/1322860064974274560

by mese848 • 6 years ago

62 74 6 years ago

colmvp• 6 years ago

I tend to agree.

There are some days in the week when I'm not checked in mentally and very unproductive. During those days, I'm better served to either sleep more or do something light to recharge for the next day/later in the week.

And then there are some days including the weekend where I can code for the entire day non-stop and feel energetic.

I still think having standardized days for working and rest is best for the sake of having multiple hours of operation overlap (e.g. schools, most businesses and government operations).

amelius3• 6 years ago

But perhaps you feel energetic during the weekend because there is less pressure. Or less distraction.

If we standardize on seven day work-weeks then some of those benefits may be gone.

User232• 6 years ago

When I was at Big Tech Company I would just tell my boss if I was having one of those days and make it up on the weekend rather than using PTO. It was never a problem. It's amazing how much a good professional relationship with management helps.

ghaff8• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what issue people have with this statement. Sure, if you have collaborative work you need to do that you're just going to blow off. But in general?

There have been a number of times in the current situation where it's been a nice day and the weekend has a lousy forecast and I didn't have any meetings or only had them in the morning. I've just told my manager I'm taking the afternoon off and would make it up on Saturday. TBH, I didn't even really need to ask. I'm not sure why this would be controversial.

skohan3• 6 years ago

I currently work a 4 day week with Wednesdays off and it's like magic

ghaff8• 6 years ago

And to show how much of this is personal, during normal times, I'd consider a singleton day in the middle of the week an incredible waste relative to 3-day weekend (or even better a 4-day weekend once every two weeks) so that I could travel places.

skohan3• 6 years ago

The Wednesday off is not so bad for this; 2 vacation days and you're looking at a 5 day holiday

zepto2• 6 years ago

Have you actually tried this?

I’ve tried both, for extended periods and I ended up much preferring the Wednesday off.

brw• 6 years ago

Same here! Wednesday used to be the day I had college while working four days a week but when I quit college it just became my day off. I find that it works quite well for me while most of my colleagues seem to prefer having a three day weekend with either Friday or Monday being their day off.

I suppose there's pros and cons to either approach (which I haven't really researched at all yet) but to me right now breaking up a continuous stream of work days makes total sense (while still fitting for the 9-5 custom, which I, like many people, don't prefer but I haven't had any better opportunities yet).

ghaff8• 6 years ago

It probably depends on whether you tend to favor a midweek break or whether you want to take trips or do other activities on weekends that benefit from a longer block of time. (If you just hang around the house or otherwise do short local activities I'm guessing people are more likely to "waste" that extra weekend day than if it's a midweek break.)

lucb1e• 6 years ago

Having every second week a Friday off (or random other weekday, if I announce it ahead of time) gives me an amazing amount of breathing room and flexibility compared to my girlfriend who has to be on the clock 10:00-16:30 ("key hours") every day of the week without fail (well, holidays, but those are planned months ahead and not flexible at all). It docks 10% of my pay but it's so worth it.

AlwaysRock2• 6 years ago

I love 4 day work week with Wednesdays off. It makes life so much better. The main issue is that not everyone is on this schedule so people try to plan mandatory meetings on Wednesdays.

tolbish• 6 years ago

That is an unpopular opinion in the same way that saying "The 40 hour work week isn't for everyone" is an unpopular opinion.

User232• 6 years ago

Especially since it's observably true that for knowledge workers, almost nobody actually spends even close to a full percentage of their work hours doing the work in their job description. The productivity loss from requiring say 30 hours a week a week instead of 40 would be significantly less than a 25% decrease. In fact I wouldn't bet against a gain in total productivity.

maxerickson2• 6 years ago

I've been furloughed down to 32 hours a week for 5 months (mostly taking 3 day weekends). It has had a noticeable (downward) impact on tempo, but we aren't necessary looking for ways to make it the permanent way to organize the week either.

It would be hard to sell me on taking Wednesday off, but I can see where people with more obligations would get a lot out of an arrangement like that.

saberdancer• 6 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if % of effective hours remained the same, regardless if you are working 40 or 30 hours a week. I especially doubt it would increase total productivity, I could accept that it would improve efficiency.

Any short term study will observe effects of people wanting to "reward" shorter working week and aren't really representative. This type of change needs a long "stealth" study period.

maxerickson2• 6 years ago

It's pretty edgy to cast 'isn't for everyone' as an unpopular opinion.

Only a very small group of people are going to have a strong opinion about how other people should organize their work life. They mostly won't care. I suppose lots of managers will be in that group, but work is organized around weekends for lots of non-arbitrary reasons.

Zhyl• 6 years ago

This was the topic of a video [0] posted by CGP Grey on the 25th August.

Not mainstream, but I think the idea has been popular for a while [1].

6.4
A manager went to his programmers and told them: "As regards to your work hours: you are going to have to come in at nine in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon." At this, all of them became angry and several resigned on the spot.
So the manager said: "All right, in that case you may set your own working hours, as long as you finish your projects on schedule." The programmers, now satisfied, began to come in at noon and work to the wee hours of the morning.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALaTm6VzTBw

[1] https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html

marketingPro2• 6 years ago

Of course people want flexibility, but there are cons-

Much more difficult for collaboration especially for small questions
Bad workers exploring nice policies

Pros-

I can sleep/think about code without being paid. Making my solutions lower cost and higher quality
Happier employees
Potentially less micro management needed

ardit33• 6 years ago

You can make 1pm to 5pm as mandatory, so both the 9-5 folks and 1pm to 9pm folks have some overlap for synchronization, meetings and such.

As for people exploiting it, you should measure relative performance and not but time

One of my first startups I worked had a noon-4pm core hours. You had to be in by noon, and should stay until 4pm, the rest was flexible. I thought it worked really well for both early risers and late owls.

amelius3• 6 years ago

More cons:

- the company restaurant closes at the normal time (or all good stuff is taken)

- you still get that condescending look from early-birds

peruvian• 6 years ago

So another way to filter out or alienate older employees or those with families.

chillacy2• 6 years ago

I wish people stood up for night owls when I had to suffer the sleep schedules of the elderly or 9-5 schedule in public school.

malux85• 6 years ago

And what about us who are night owls and are non-functional until about 12 / 1-2PM, the current system filters out all of us.

The solution was literally “come in any time you want as long as your projects get done” - what’s your objection? That everybody who wants to come in at lunchtime, and work until the small hours force themselves around your schedule because you have a family?

mkl95• 6 years ago

I worked for a startup that had an internal "story point meter" that would go up as you closed your tickets. The goal was to pressure employees into completing a certain number of story points per week the CEO considered a good number for a productive employee.

Needless to say, this didn't work as intended, and the workforce was split between those who didn't care about it (higher ups) and those who maxed up their meter by overestimating their tasks' story points.

steelframe5• 6 years ago

As a software engineering manager, I put a story-point-based method of task size estimation and team velocity measurement in place about two years ago. A stipulation of this was that at no time would any one developer have their story point velocity assessed.

The purpose of this system is to provide the team with a powerful tool that it needs in order to set a realistic timeline on team deliverables, such as a launch milestone or a new feature. The ability of the story point methodology to have predictive power is destroyed when people are incentivized to gamify it.

sidlls2• 6 years ago

I’d argue the predictive power of story point methodology has not been established. There are simply too many variables to make estimates more accurate than “best guess”:

1/ the team’s composition at a point in time (and all the variability that comes with this)

2/ the team’s dependencies (a kind of exponential effect is at work here: the team’s dependencies also have all these issues in variability and so do their dependencies)

3/ the type of work being estimated in the context of the product (even “basic” things like “CRUD” can be quite intricate in some cases)

Basically unless the estimation is literally for a known change (e.g. modify source code files X, Y and Z with code changes A, B, and C) its predictive power diminishes substantially.

It’s not a powerful tool, it’s a micromanagement technique disguised as a tool to empower ICs.

jniedrauer2• 6 years ago

Have story points been useful to you, even when incentives are aligned? I find that they're often orders of magnitude off, in either direction.

Fire-Dragon-DoL3• 6 years ago

What about replacing story points with time ranges?

That gives you both time (min, max, which is the information you need) as well as the risk (distance between min and max).

Then countermeasures could be taken to reduce the risk, until min and max are reasonably close.

Sometimes max is +infinity when there is 0 knowledge, but even that information is useful: missing a role or need research.

docdeek2• 6 years ago

Absolutely agree but it would be darn hard to manage with kids. I might be more productive on a Saturday than on a Tuesday, but hard to explain to the kids that you'll miss half the weekend because I wrote better on Saturdays than on Tuesdays.

the__alchemist• 6 years ago

This is one of the bigger effects of the general downside that social interactions may become difficult, depending on your circles.

Jabbles• 6 years ago

Well you don't need to optimize for productivity, you can optimize for enjoyment, stress-levels, ability to do admin. And presumably on Tuesday you would have the energy to do something fun with your kids.

Also, huge numbers of people have to work at the weekends. From highly-paid doctors to fast-food employees. Presumably their kids understand.

docdeek2• 6 years ago

I guess the point is that schools aren't going to adapt to a schedule that isn't Monday to Friday (at least where I live). Spending time with the kids on Tuesday is going to be about 8 hours less time than I could spend with them on a Saturday when they are always free.

You're right that kids understand but it's far from ideal when their schedules are so firmly fixed M-F with weekends free.

kevinventullo• 6 years ago

I think this is something every grad student already knows.

dgaudet2• 6 years ago

i would prefer sunny days off, and bad weather days for meetings.

boulos2• 6 years ago

(Hi Dean!?)

But how would you synchronize the poor weather days of Seattle with the nice days the Bay Area?

Then again, it’s definitely something I miss from doing research at school. Nice day, go for a hike. Bad day, time to finally rerun those experiments. Sadly, I have way more meetings than those days...

dgaudet2• 6 years ago

yeah i dunno how people live in the PNW, i was totally depressed the 8 months i spent in vancouver BC!

it would be kind of cool to have calendar software which has a "bad weather" feature: correlate the 10-day forecasts of the required attendees, and pick the least sunny timeslot. mind you i'd also want the software to keep track of how frequently i've hiked, because even a sunny day of meetings is OK after a couple days of hiking. gotta mix it up. i'm sure this bin-packing problem has a reasonable enough solution :)

awinder• 6 years ago

Beware of history when mucking with weekends: https://www.history.com/news/soviet-union-stalin-weekend-lab...

erikerikson• 6 years ago

What are we to beware? Most of the discussion here is about how increase individual choices over work time. That article details how individual choices was eliminated to increase control over workers.

xwdv• 6 years ago

By prefixing a title with “Unpopular Opinion” an author is essentially applying for a license to say something unpopular and not get too criticized for it. This is cowardly, people should just state their opinions and be open to whatever reaction it spawns.

dqv• 6 years ago

Whenever I hear people propose "radical" ideas about work shifts and weekends, I always wonder how they expect it to work at e.g. nuclear power plants and 911 call centers. Most people, given the opportunity, would opt to take the day off whenever they felt like it and come in and leave work as they please. Creatives seem to propose these ideas as universal, but never give even a passing mention about work that is necessarily shift-based. The handwavy answer is "oh we'll incentivize that" or "oh we'll automate it so they don't have to do shift work!" They should just be honest and say that they want special privileges for work and aren't concerned about putting any further thought into it.

Anyway, this tweet is really someone trying to turn the thought "I don't really like my work schedule"/"Some people don't like their work schedule" into something profound.

chillacy2• 6 years ago

The author says "isn't for everyone", not "is for no one".

Your point about 911 call centers is true, but the principle is just that the work schedule needs to mesh with the job role itself. E.g. restaurants have to be open for meal times, customer service needs to be around when customers are around.

travmatt• 6 years ago

I assumed this argument was restricted those industries that have 9-5 and weekends & holidays off as the status quo: most b2b and some b2c.

I can see how this issue would come up for creatives though. Some jobs have their hours or shifts dictated by the complexities of the profession: for doctors and nurses, handing off patients to new caregivers can be complex and it’d be easy to lose information in the process: the marginal utility of keeping the same person in charge vs the marginal risk that they’re too tired and would make a mistake is something that’s being studied. For creatives, the 9-5 seems to be much more akin to a vestigial organ than a system driven by first principles.

Volundr• 6 years ago

Well, I can say as someone who supports flexible scheduling and has run a team that way it's not so much that I ignored or didn't think about jobs where it didn't work so much as different jobs have different requirements.

I ran a team of software developers, system administrators, and a help desk. The software devs had near complete freedom of scheduling, the sysadmins had a little less, and the help desk had almost none since they needed to be there when the people they were helping were. Everyone had as much flexibility as their job allowed and it worked great. It sucked that the help desk didn't have the flexibility, but they understood why, and I tried to find ways to provide other perks. Plus on the flip side they'd never find themselves trying to resolve an outage at 1 in the morning on a Sunday.

franciscop• 6 years ago

I commented on this before and I will again. The popular alt schedule shared in a reply (Wed off) is great if your life's purpose is to maximize your work performance in detriment of personal time. That is, if you don't have a work-life balance already. It is not surprising then that people who try to maximize their work come with schedules that are worse for personal time.

Instead, especially in our more privileged profession, you should be pacing yourself so that you are not utterly broken by Saturday. Then you can take a full two-days off and do whatever you want, there are so many more things you can do with a two-day off in a row that you cannot do with single days, from simple organizing dinners with friends to weekend getaways.

ghaff8• 6 years ago

Wednesday off wouldn't be for me; I'd prefer long weekends. But comments about how Wednesday off is great because it limits the stress buildup in the course of a week really makes me think something is off. If things are so bad that you can only work two days straight before crashing, something's wrong.

DenisM• 6 years ago

On a tangent: I derive significant amount of guilty pleasure by slacking for a whole day mid-week. Much more than I do from a "proper" weekend.

I believe that's because as time rolls we assign minor duties to ourselves for the weekend, and that weekend becomes just another time of work filled with worry and a sense of obligation. An unplanned day off, by contrast, has no duties.

Now if only I could replicate the same sense of freedom on the regular weekend I would be the happiest man alive.

boulos2• 6 years ago

I’m currently shifting my schedule to work Saturdays and take off Mondays (I don’t have children, and my partner is flexible). Before the pandemic, I tried to block off time for deep work by booking multiple hours on my calendar each day.

The shift to Saturday has been mostly great. I get a full day of deep work when nobody else is willing to work (Saturday), and neither Monday nor Friday had meetings I cared much about. Being able to walk around on a Monday is way nicer during the pandemic. Again, I get that others can’t replicate it if they have other commitments — importantly, both partners would need to have this flexibility, and most children’s’ schools probably wouldn’t be up for it :).

The main thing as many are highlighting below is about overlap (and predictability for recurring meetings). I mostly work with people in US/Pacific, but also US/Eastern and somewhat less often Europe (London and Warsaw) and Sydney. So that’s already unschedulable anyway. People have been reasonably receptive to “oh, I see, yes you don’t work that day” though a good chunk ask “Do you really work on Saturday?” (to which I not only really work on Saturday, I probably get the most useful things done on that day).

Unpopular opinion: Weekdays/weekend split isn't for everyone

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