Eidos-Montréal Offices shifting to the 4 day work week

https://www.eidosmontreal.com/news/eidos-montreal-and-eidos-sherbrooke-shifting-to-the-4-day-work-week/

by uglygoblin • 5 years ago

265 123 5 years ago

eidosmontreal.com

TwinProduction• 5 years ago

Will their salaries be lowered to match the new number of hours per week?

tomstuart• 5 years ago

No:

In the next few weeks, the Montreal and Sherbrooke studios will be officially closed on Fridays, without changing the working conditions currently in place nor the salaries of employees, thus switching from the 40-hour week to 32-hour.

sdf1313• 5 years ago

They’re likely earning ~40-70k so the shift isn’t very significant

The real question is: are they changing the deadlines? Studio already suffer from crunch and all the meetings you had on Friday are now spread throughout the week

djmips3• 5 years ago

They live in Canada, their salaries are already lowered. This will help them from leaving for better $ elsewhere.

slothtrop2• 5 years ago

It's the game industry, these salaries aren't generally high in the U.S. either.

christkv2• 5 years ago

Probably 4 days of 20h instead of 5 at 16h if it’s anything like other triple A publishers.

juice_bus• 5 years ago

Come on man, its in the article:

without changing the working conditions currently in place nor the salaries of employees, thus switching from the 40-hour week to 32-hour.

christkv2• 5 years ago

Sure but one thing is saying it and the other thing is living it. The hard deadlines of peak sales periods like Christmas seem like are still constant drivers of death marches in that industry.

Sentiments seems good but I’m skeptical.

nohr• 5 years ago

You can't expect them to release how much they're actually working their employees. Games is a notoriously vicious cycle of work.

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

I wouldn’t be quite that cynical, but gaming is known for tons of extra hours.

All companies I have known with bad hours have also officially had 40 hour weeks.

nottorp• 5 years ago

Yeah right. More likely it's 32 hours/week unless it's less than 2 years before a deadline and then it's 80 hours/week.

akersten2• 5 years ago

In the spirit of always starting your negotiation high and working toward a palatable middle, I'd like to propose a 2-day work week and 5 days off.

You may think that sounds crazy, but how many hours of dedicated, actual work do you do in a week? If you work a "9-5" and are reading this comment at work right now, I can give you a hint: it's not 40 ;)

I think we'd all be less distracted and more focused if we forced the "week's work" to happen in 2 , 8-hour days, and we could feel less guilty about not being perfectly-oiled constantly productive machines for the remaining 5/7 days of the week.

dont__panic• 5 years ago

I wonder if the increasing shift toward remote work (often in disparate timezones) will end up pushing teams to eventually adopt 1-3 "core hours" 2-3 days per week with team meetings and collaboration sessions and a more laissez-faire attitude toward working the rest of the usual 9-5 day; I would love to just focus on getting my work done any time I feel like it, attend meetings during core hours, and have the ability to get out of the house and go do things during the normal workweek.

UnpossibleJim• 5 years ago

Except for meetings and deadlines, why is anything measured in hours. Why aren't things measured in amount produced? (I hope it's obvious I'm speaking in terms of coders and manager's teams - I have no idea how this would work for directors or above.) The majority of coders are employed on salary (so far as I know), so just pay their salary and expect tasks to be completed. This mandatory 40 hours in a seat ritualistic adherence seems dated and unproductive. Different people will work better in different situations, and it is one of management's tasks to see that their team's potential isn't impeded when trying to complete their tasks as a unit, even when that means working as a coordinator between separate individuals on the same team, working towards the same goal. The work should be what's valued and not some myopic adherence to a past life of offices and collared shirts.

BitwiseFool• 5 years ago

In the 9-5's defense, a good chunk of my "downtime" at work is due to waiting on other people and/or not having something I can make progress on.

I would love less than a 40 hour work week where the effort is more concentrated, but after a certain point you just can't expect full productivity in a shorter space of time.

packetlost• 5 years ago

This. If I'm chest deep in code (or other deep technical stuff) I can get about 6 hours of real work a day before my productivity nosedives. But that's maybe a once a week occurrence. The rest of the week is shorter bursts of productivity sprinkled between coordinating with teammates, other teams, etc.. I don't think actually shortening my work week would allow me to meaningfully be as productive with what I currently do. That being said, I WFH some of the time and I took like 30-40 min to vacuum my apartment and it had basically zero effect on my productivity.

vkk82• 5 years ago

I guess the answer to these problems depends a lot on the job. I don't know why we would expect all sorts of different jobs to nicely fit into the same 9-to-5 5-days-a-week model anyway? For sure there are jobs where that works just fine (manual labour, etc.), but also jobs that would benefit for less working hours and more rest time (many cognitively heavy jobs) or jobs where the best model would be 24/7 readiness to work, but only small number of hours doing the actual work.

endisneigh• 5 years ago

that's an interesting idea, but wouldn't work.

my personal theory is that all uncertainty ultimately is derived from the weather and cascades down. that is, even if you eliminated inattention, carelessness, tardiness, and laziness and what not, the weather would inevitably cause accidents and other unpredictable things.

as a result much of the time people spend is actually just waiting around for other people.

poetaster• 5 years ago

I have a frame. 28 hours. M/W/F I do 8 hours, am available. T/T I do 2, alone. Sometimes I do more. I have the good fortune to say when and where, but this gives me modalities and no one has to wait too long and I get quality work time in both parts. Pay is not that good, perks are.

jstx1• 5 years ago

You can only compress things so much though. You can't just tell people to show up and do only the productive n% of the hours. You can't force 2 days of perfect productivity out of people. That's not how any of this works. When you cut hours, you're cutting productive and unproductive hours at the same time, you don't get to cherry pick.

Or if you can cherry pick, go into management consulting - you'll be able to squeeze so much more out of everyone who still works full time by telling them to only do productive things at work.

While we're at it, we can tell people who gamble to only go to the casino on the days when they win.

akersten2• 5 years ago

My hypothesis is that most of our "unproductive time" in the 40h workweek is just filler time spent warming seats, a direct result of there actually not being all that much work that a human can consistently accomplish in a week.

So, by removing the expectation that you have your butt in a chair 8 hours a day 5 days a week, the new model is "get everything you were already painfully stretching across 5 days done in only the time it actually takes (2 days), and let's all go home and enjoy the free time we otherwise would have spent scrolling on our phones under florescent lights and quickly tabbing back to Excel when the boss walks by."

I truly do believe 95% of office-based business would get the same "amount" of work done in this system.

rtpg• 5 years ago

"You're cutting productive and unproductive hours at the same time" is perhaps true, but it's about the ratio. Obviously at the extremes (cutting the last day of work vs going from a 7-day to a 6-day) there's going to be differences.

Acting like unproductive hours are some random result goes against loads of companies who have been doing actual trials of 5 => 4 day weeks. Having time off is actually helpful, and the sort of procrastination from dissatisfaction/exhaustion/whatever that leads to this can be helped by this kind of stuff!

"Why is it 4 and not 3 or 2 or whatever" I mean it probably depends on people but TGIF is a saying for a reason

vkk82• 5 years ago

Depends on why those unproductive hours are unproductive. My hypothesis is that human brain is just incapable of doing the sort of forced, focused work that modern work requires for more than a small number of hours. I.e. the hours worked are just not randomly productive or unproductive (like your casino analogue suggests), but you spend the productive hours and then you move into less productive mode, which could just as well be skipped completely.

A related question is does the working capacity "charge" over the course of one evening + sleeping or does it require more time? If the answer is "more time", as I suspect from the fact that most productive days of the week usually are after the weekend, a good strategy indeed would be to just do all the work we can do (which is maybe 10-20 hours) in two days and then recharge for five days.

bserge2• 5 years ago

Coming soon, the 0 day work week. No one needs lazy meatbags when 10 robots can work 24/7.

throwaway889900• 5 years ago

Not until the robots can build themselves. Hah!

Waterluvian2• 5 years ago

Personally I don’t want compression. I want five days a week of 3-8 hours of work each day. I fill the rest with family stuff, piano, hobbies when they pique my interest, chores, etc.

That is, I think the flexibility is more valuable than concentrated time off. It enables me to follow the flow of life.

echelon• 5 years ago

How can you enjoy life after work? I have ADHD, and all the time before and after work is dead.

I'd be happier working 40 hours in 3 days.

eloff• 5 years ago

I work 40%, so I do this, just spread over 5 days. I've also tried one week on, one off. It's heaven. I hope I don't have to go back to working full time ever again. I'm currently working and travelling without a permanent address.

legostormtroopr• 5 years ago

If you work a "9-5" and are reading this comment at work right now, I can give you a hint: it's not 40 ;)

I don't like this attitude as it implies "reading" isn't work. The role of a "knowledge worker" is to find and generate new ideas and implement them. Hacker News is regularly filled with good articles and commentary about the tech space - and is something I encourage my team to follow.

Its not uncommon for there to be articles directly related to our tech stack. So yeah, even if you aren't pushing code for 40hours, doesn't mean you aren't "working" that whole time.

zeroq• 5 years ago

I appreciate the irony, and to some degree I agree with the argument but you have to keep in mind that in the real world employers like to see their cogs working.

I'm a night owl and I really hate getting up early. Early in my career when I was working in digital advertising I had a job where I tried to argue with my employer that while I'm coming late to work I never refuse to stay late hours or work through weekends when jobs needs it. Unpaid overtime mind you. They didn't understood. Instead they preferred - at least they thought they preferred - seeing me at my desk from 10 to 6, because that's what they were paying for. After 18 they were leaving the office and not knowing what I was doing they just assumed no work was done. Probably. Actually couple of jobs like that. Those were small shops. Recently I worked for bigger corps and (un)surprisingly the patter repeated. Instead of agreeing on me showing late to the office but willing to stay late if there was actual work to do without getting any compensation my managers preferred me to get to my desk by 9 and sit there till 5 even if there was nothing to be done. Another recent situation was when I was responsible for architecture and setting up a team for a fairly complicated project. I like to think on my feet so I was spending a lot of my time in quiet corridors of the office or in cafeteria trying to figure out how to make things going. My managers were furious at me for not sitting in front of my desk and I repeatedly failed to convinced them that neither my job description, nor my current position requires me to sit in front of my keyboard at all time to complete the tasks I'm facing.

I agree it's stupid, but we can't deny that it's sad reality for many people out there.

simonh• 5 years ago

An awful lot of jobs are about being available to do that 2 days fo work as and when it has to be done, and that work is split up into random chunks of a few minutes to a few hours throughout the week and aren't compactable. Any job that provides an available service to others is like that.

There may be some jobs that are slugging away at a big block of work and you could do it any time during the week. Part of some of my jobs have been like that, in fact that was software development which was part of the role, but not all of the job.

wastedhours• 5 years ago

Was coming here to say exactly this - you're not really being paid for the work itself, but to have access to you for a certain amount of time. Sometimes there's as much value to the company in your 2 minute Slack response to a query at 17:58 on a Friday evening as there is for a 6 hour coding block.

Not saying it's valuable in a world sense, but for the objectives of the machine you're working in, it often is.

ladyattis• 5 years ago

I think over-asking for that sort of work week isn't productive to be honest. And I'm an anti-work kind of person. The real problem is that modern work doesn't reflect the actual labor involved. I don't know how many hours I've wasted on meetings where a simple email and a 15 minute follow-up for questions would've been sufficient to get any issues out of the way. I'll grant that some labor is just meetings to debate the course of a business but beyond that as a software developer my job really should be about what is getting priority and then doing that priority queue. The meeting schedule for me should be 1 or 2 meetings a week total (not exceeding 45 minutes total) to set the work queue for said products then the rest should be me doing the work with some time to get help from other developers who have expertise in something I'm unfamiliar with. The total hours for that? Probably 30-40 a week tops. Anything past 40 is just screaming for contractors.

janandonly• 5 years ago

All my working life I've worked 24 hours/3 days per week.

Once or twice a year there is an "all hands on deck" emergency, and I will work a day or two extra. But those are the very rare exceptions.

My take is: I see colleagues do almost [1] the same amount of work, but because they are in the office all week round they are far more visible. I on the other hand am much more awake and energetic, and cost the company less € too...

Also I'm personally happy to work less. More time for side projects, hobby's, my family and people in general. I'm less stressed.

[1] (hard to compare myself with others in any case)

imtringued• 5 years ago

Instead of mandating that everyone should work a fixed work week why not just let people decide how much they want to work? The 40 hour work week is just a "social construct". Let the unit of labor be half a work day (4 hours) instead of a whole person. If people want to work 24 or 32 or 44 hours let them.

The labor market isn't much of a market if you can't even do something as basic as decide how much you want to work.

sokoloff• 5 years ago

There’s a market for people who want to work shorter workweeks. It’s not as crowded with employers as the “more common” market, but it’s there.

I can offer 0.5oz beers and if no one buys them, do I conclude there’s no market or a broken market for beer?

onion2k• 5 years ago

Why base it on time at all? If I can be as effective in 20 hours as my coworker is in 40 hours, why not just pay us the same salaries for the same value produced?

The fact I get stuff done twice as quickly shouldn't be a factor unless I choose to work 40 hours and do twice as much as him. Then I should be paid more.

bserge2• 5 years ago

That's called being a freelancer.

bosie• 5 years ago

Do you work in a silo? never have any meetings, answer questions that might span over a 40 hour time frame? How do you figure out your value vs your co-workers value?

aeyes• 5 years ago

Because it works both ways, there are a lot of companies which offer "unlimited vacations" on paper. In theory you could use that to only work 3 days per week. In practice the employer will just argue that you don't meet expected performance goals (even if you do).

I work at a company which doesn't have any hours in the contract. People are active from 10-7 in general. This is the time where you have most overlap with your team and usually you have some dependency on others. If you aren't available you are letting your team down and again - you'll be flagged for not meeting performance goals.

__turbobrew__• 5 years ago

I have went down to about 20 hour work weeks since I started working from home (1.5yrs ago) and am about as productive as 40 hour weeks in the office. In that time I have been marked as a top performer and promoted to lead a team.

The trick is to start working the shorter weeks and not ask for permission. As long as you fulfill your duties and are flexible when needed nobody will notice. No where in my employment contract does it say my ass needs to be in a seat for 40 hours a week so I have no moral problems with my arrangement.

LandR• 5 years ago

This is tough when your time at work has to be entered on a time sheet, and any allowance for down time is maxed at five minutes a day.

I have to put down 7.5 hours a day, five days a week, and what I was working on for all those hours.

strken2• 5 years ago

It's a gigantic pain in the buttocks when you need someone to give you AWS credentials and you have to wait three days for them to be back in the office. Add in a few other people with multiple days off and you can spend an entire week waiting for a combined 10 minutes of labour to be done.

If there was some kind of common arrangement where employees could go to the beach or attend piano lessons or whatever, but check their phone once an hour and unblock everyone else, and always be in the office for the official meeting day, it would be a lot more palatable.

falcor842• 5 years ago

Well, I suppose we could compensate people for being on call for this sort of stuff separately from "heads down" work.

tremon• 5 years ago

It's an equally gigantic pain in the buttocks to be the only someone who can give out AWS credentials. Why does that have to be one person? Why isn't that role spread out across a team?

What you're describing is an organizational failure, even if that person were working 168 hours a week.

dbbk• 5 years ago

People still need to be able to collaborate.

wly_cdgr• 5 years ago

Progress! Bit by bit

glonq• 5 years ago

Age 49 here. I'm seriously considering that my next job should be 3 or 4 days per week, even if that means a somewhat proportionately reduced paycheck. Would fight for 4+ weeks vacation too.

I need quality of life more than I need cash right now.

lm28469• 5 years ago

I'm in my mid 20s and I'll never go back to 5 days workweek, definitely go for it, it's a life changing move, no amount of money makes up for time lost

autarch• 5 years ago

I'm 47 and I just left my last job. I'm going to take some time off, but I'm committed to only working 4 days per week or less when I look for my next position.

luxurytent• 5 years ago

Do it!

I'm 36 and my current gig offers 5 weeks vacation, and I just came back from 3 months (topped up) parental leave.

Life is too beautiful to work 5 days a week

whichdan• 5 years ago

Oh I would easily take a 20% paycut to have Fridays off forever.

philmcp3• 5 years ago

Me too - but there are now companies offering a 4 day week with 0% drop in salary

https://4dayweek.io/

erinnh• 5 years ago

Depending on how tied to the USA you are, you could also consider a move to the EU, where 4 weeks vacation are basically the minimum everywhere.

xdfgh1112• 5 years ago

6 weeks standard in the UK.

satvikpendem3• 5 years ago

Rather than a 4 day work week, I always thought that a 4 hour work day was far superior (or at least, a 4 day work week of 5 hour work days; 20 hours a week total). You're not truly doing 8 hours of full work a week, so why not focus the time down to only productive hours? Here's an interesting article about it [0].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/05/28/the-future...

IshKebab• 5 years ago

You're assuming that by working fewer hours you'd magically eliminate only the unproductive hours. That seems extremely unlikely.

I read an article years ago from someone that tried it, expecting exactly what you're expecting, but they found that proportional of their working time that was productive was about the same.

breuleux3• 5 years ago

It might depend on how you organize your time. I could see how working for 4 consecutive hours might have proportionally the same amount of unproductivity, but maybe splitting it in two blocks of two hours with a two hour pause in-between would work better?

satvikpendem3• 5 years ago

I have not found that to be the case, referring to your 2nd paragraph. In fact most of the evidence I've seen wrt <8 hour work days have been that people get as much or even more done than they thought [0].

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3063262/what-happened-when-i-mov...

kevingadd• 5 years ago

That's not much of an improvement for people who have a long commute - eliminating a work day eliminates 2 commute stretches (plus the cost of the commute).

satvikpendem3• 5 years ago

It would be remote work, forgot to specify.

throwawaysea• 5 years ago

There is probably an inflection point we've silently passed, where increased consolidation, high standards of living, and diminishing value in additional productivity mean that we can reduce the amount of work we need to do. However defending it will also require bold coalition building and trade policy. Countries that want to give their citizens a better life through shorter work weeks cannot do so if they're competing against other countries where workers are willing or forced to commit to 996 hours. Defending a better work week means enacting tariffs or other controls against trade partners that don't share the same policy, just as we should with offshored environmental violations.

ekianjo• 5 years ago

If they really believe in this they should stop half ass it and work only one day a week for optimal productivity.

999900000999• 5 years ago

I’d prefer we completely get rid of work hours.

Just tell me what we need to get done, I’ll do it, remotely of course. I’ve had various companies expect me to work extra hours for no additional pay , while never offering an extra day off.

Hell , I’d be down to do a 80 hour week if I know my average week is only 20 hours

treve• 5 years ago

Many people do this, it's called freelancing! It's not for everyone, but if you have the right personality type you can have this kind of freedom.

yissp• 5 years ago

because management usually has no better way to determine how much you're actually contributing than how many hours you put in

marcodiego• 5 years ago

Looks like, at least on IT, the world is starting to slowly change or experiment with 4 work days a week. I wonder how it will be influenced by job automation that is happening in parallel.

daxfohl• 5 years ago

I'd really like a 4/2 week. It's just annoying to have an odd number of days. You can't maintain a schedule of something every other day.

didibus• 5 years ago

without changing the working conditions currently in place nor the salaries of employees, thus switching from the 40-hour week to 32-hour

Yes please!!

m0zg• 5 years ago

Even as a conservative, I strongly support the normalization of 4 day work weeks, if for no other reason than to create more competition for domestic lower skill labor (which will over time result in rising wages). A job is the best social program. This will create more jobs while at the same time allowing people to live better lives. 40 hour work weeks have outlived their usefulness long time ago. It's ridiculous that people have to neglect their kids to make someone else rich.

hypeatei• 5 years ago

Yep, although I'm living in a very conservative state and workplace, many people are questioning the 40 hour work week. Hopefully this becomes a reality in the next 5 to 10 years or so.

maroonblazer• 5 years ago

My hypothesis is that most people doing knowledge work already work 4 days/week, if not less. Call it "the shadow hours".

It's not possible or practical for managers to monitor how much their reports spend time thinking. Also, most managers understand how much secondary work takes up people's time and gets in the way of the primary work. I.e. Managers aren't really in a position to question how much time it takes someone to complete their work.

Shifting to a 4 day work week is simply codifying a practice that has been routine for some time now.

ygjb• 5 years ago

Competent managers in technical companies managing highly skilled professionals do. The rapidly growing corporate surveillance market says that incompetent managers and companies that grind people until they burn out are still a a major force out there.

someonehere3• 5 years ago

I wish my office would switch the four days. Nobody really works on Fridays anyway. I’ll look at calendars and meetings with other employees where I’m at. People have maybe one meeting for the whole day.

falcor842• 5 years ago

Just to clarify - you're implying that the amount of work getting done in a day is _positively_ correlated with the amount of meetings that day?

someonehere3• 5 years ago

Yes. My role in the company is dealing with employees directly. It’s really slow for my team and I on Fridays.

I’m almost at the point where I’ll give them alternating Friday’s off individually. One person will get a Friday off, then the next Friday the other employee, etc etc.

It’s slow for us.

pferde• 5 years ago

If your office switched to four days, nobody would really work on Thursdays instead.

someonehere3• 5 years ago

Correct. It’s a cycle I know they will adjust to if that happened. I don’t make the rules there.

NetOpWibby• 5 years ago

One of my favorite game studios on HN? I assumed a new Deus Ex was announced.

Glad they’re making this change, looking forward to reading an update next year.

edzillion• 5 years ago

If Eidos Montreal is the same as the game companies I have worked for they'll all be doing a ton of unpaid overtime. Work hours as stated on the contract meant nothing

Eidos-Montréal Offices shifting to the 4 day work week

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