Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/11/15/1136039542/these-companies-ran-an-experiment-pay-workers-their-full-salary-to-work-fewer-da

by akeck • 4 years ago

160 142 4 years ago

npr.org

lapser• 4 years ago

The arguments against 4-day work weeks are slowly eroding, and I'm here for it.

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

I genuinely think it will be met by the same kind of resistance as remote work. People simply wouldn't know what to do with the new freedom. Some will miss spending more time “socialising at work” while others will complain they feel “useless”. Just watch it happen.

everdrive• 4 years ago

I’m a bit skeptical of the study, however I’ve long suspected that a lot of what happens at work is simply part of a set of special social expectations, and actually pretty disconnected from productivity.

ShaneMcGowan• 4 years ago

From my personal experience Stress free 5 days > Fire fighting for 4 days

ntp85• 4 years ago

Yeah, but Fire fighting for 4 days > Fire fighting for 5 days.

cassianoleal• 4 years ago

Also stress free for 4 days > stress free for 5 days.

zach_garwood• 4 years ago

I'm reminded of Parkinsons Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

MEMORYC_RRUPTED• 4 years ago

This won't be valid for everyone, but I'm getting more and more convinced that most (a lot of?) people don't "work" work 40 hours anyway. I'm not even mentally capable of doing 40 intense hours of focussed work. Not saying I don't have other tasks besides coding/thinking in that time, but honestly not for the full slot of time.

It just feels to me like some sort of secret we all share and pretend like it's fine, but being honest and just doing the same stuff in say 32 hours and cutting out the cruft in between would be great.

Or maybe it's just my add that likes a bit more pressure, I don't know. But what I do know is that, even with a very relaxed employer that allows you to take your time and chill, go workout or play a game for an hour, I can't fully relax or disconnect knowing that I'm expected to do those 40 hours, regardless of how often they say it's fine.

lucasyvas• 4 years ago

Most remote jobs I've worked at, I can't reach anyone on Friday. Probably not a coincidence.

Even years ago when I was in the office, everyone would go on insanely long lunch breaks on Friday instead. If you work an office job, I can assure you that the number of people actually working on Friday is statistically irrelevant.

vidanay• 4 years ago

"Never buy a car built on a Friday or a Monday."

thenerdhead3• 4 years ago

You're probably not wrong. The data supports it.

In October, the average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was 34.5 hours for the fifth month in a row.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm

vjk8002• 4 years ago

And this is the time they at least pretend to be working. The amount of hours they actually do something productive is going to be much less.

Arrath3• 4 years ago

The pessimist in me has to wonder how much of this is employers manipulating schedules to keep employees from classifying as full time?

I see the report calls out part time workers at 3.7m yet still I wonder.

welshwelsh2• 4 years ago

That doesn't mean they actually work for 34.5 hours, that's just how long they get paid for.

A UK company did a study which showed the average office worker, who is in the office 40 hours a week, is only productive for less than 3 hours a day.

https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-product...

I would guess the average workweek, only counting the time people are actually productive, is 10-15 hours a week. The rest of the time people waste procrastinating, posting on social media etc.

Tyrek• 4 years ago

If we "actually work" 32 hours out of 40 (80%), what is the likelihood that if we shift to a 32 hour max week, that the average person will only "actually work" ~26 hours (80% of 32) in this hypothetical future?

What if at least part of the 20% is spent doing social activities, water cooler conversations, etc. that enable the remaining 80% to flow more efficiently?

tnel77• 4 years ago

I’m all for a shorter workweek, but I definitely expect that the social aspect of a job is good for overall productivity. Maybe I’m weird, but I enjoy asking my coworkers how their weekend was prior to a meeting starting or (back when I was in the office) as we ran into each other in the hallway.

dustedcodes• 4 years ago

Reduce the hours in the day.

Most people structure their days based on what they want to accomplish (goal driven), rather than how to spread out work evenly across a fixed number of hours (time driven). So if someone knows that they are expected to deliver task A + B in one day then they will do it. If they have a 4 hour work day they'll do it in 4 hours and then happily clock off. If they have to do it in an 8 hour work day they'll do it in 4 hours and then waste time for the remaining 4 hours.

eurasiantiger• 4 years ago

I don’t think that would happen if there is actually a job to be done.

sam0x174• 4 years ago

Because burn-out is the main driving factor behind the productivity changes, not the hypotheticals you are talking about. In engineering, people are burned out by friday, and even outside of engineering, people tend to phone it in by that point in the week because they are just done. They are operating at less than 50% mental or physical capacity. If you instead just give them that time to recharge, they'll get that much more done early in the week the following week. They'll also be in a better headspace because although you are only decreasing the days they work by 1/5th, you are increasing their uninterrupted weekend/family time by 1/3rd. In a more egalitarian society, you might imagine that ratio to be more like 1:1 to be fair.

At my previous startup we saw an 8% productivity _increase_ from moving to a 4-day work week, and this was across a variety of metrics like issues closed, lines of code, etc. We don't even know if 4 is optimal, it could be 3. Only way to find out is to try it.

wil421• 4 years ago

Because I’ll have a week day to do everything I need to do. Also I would push back or not attend meetings where I’m not needed. Team meetings and collaboration would still happen. A lot of people have to do late or weekend deployments and it would take the stress off of a lot of IT workers in all areas.

fourseventy2• 4 years ago

Exactly. The whole modern trend of working less hours will somehow equate to more work being done is ridiculous.

diffeomorphism2• 4 years ago

About 0% probability.

They will work more than 80%, less than 100%, say 87%. And that is what you want: keep some off time for conversation, recovery, etc..

You don't want 100% (very short hours) and you don't want too low a percentage (long hours). There is some balance in between and no slippery slope.

ericmcer• 4 years ago

I mean someone could gather this info, the average working hours in China are ~10 more than the US and some European countries average lower.

Given humans are highly adaptable I imagine we will adjust to the new normal and keep finding time to mess around at work.

mc32• 4 years ago

I agree we don't put in a full 40 hours. Unless someone is working a 1950's style assembly line (meatpacking plant for example) few will put in those 40 hours even in manual labor ---you're chatting, playing around, etc. for some time.

White collar work, is of course, way worse. There is a lot of slack time in between tasks and meetings and so on.

So during those 40 hours, let's say a person delivers 100 work units. If we were to say, from now on you only have to work 32 hours, some people will still deliver 100 work units, but many will deliver an approximation to 80 work units. Many people will automatically adjust. People have a "pace of work" that is like breathing.

devmor2• 4 years ago

So during those 40 hours, let's say a person delivers 100 work units. If we were to say, from now on you only have to work 32 hours, some people will still deliver 100 work units, but many will deliver an approximation to 80 work units. Many people will automatically adjust. People have a "pace of work" that is like breathing.

Perhaps in manual labor, but I don't think this applies to white collar work. The limiting factor in output for this line of work seems to be intellectual exhaustion/burnout, not pacing.

_cenw• 4 years ago

My pace of work is burn myself out in the first 1-2 hours of every day and then procrastinate / go to meetings.

I'm so happy to be out of the office. Being able to work whenever works for me (and my ADHD brain) has probably given me at least 50% more output on average. Hours don't mean anything to me and nobody has ever complained about my work pace (rather the opposite).

Pretending to be busy in an office was torture.

treeman79• 4 years ago

Wife’s a teacher. 40-60 hours at school. 10-30 hours outside of work doing lesson plans, report card comments etc. Always responding to emails from parents.

She Has collapsed before when total was getting above 80 for several weeks.

They want to promote her to VP. They work even more hours then she does.

I make more then triple what she does.

wollsmoth• 4 years ago

I'm at least online 40 hours. Actively doing effort is harder but it's easier if I'm doing something interesting. I try to not beat myself up if I'm having trouble focusing some days. Some days it just ain't happening. Get a coffee read a magazine and try again a little later.

newbYhrly3• 4 years ago

Musk posted screens of his Elden Ring progress a couple weeks after launch. Given other players had to sink 60-80 hours in to get to the same point Musk was broadcasting, he was working 48 hours a day at his companies and on Elden Ring.

Bezos has given interviews about his habits. He works maybe 10-20 hours a week.

Billing 40 hours every week to run scripts that generate a Github repo structure in minutes has been profitable for me though. Not going to knock Musk and Bezos optimizing for themselves by gaming others agency.

ITB2• 4 years ago

Picasso offered a drawing in a napkin for $1M dollars, even though it took him 1 min to draw it. You know the gist. Bezos might do 20 hours a week of “work” because he scaffolded a giant organization around his brain, so he only needs to provide certain input. Besides, much of the non-work time, such as public speaking and so forth, is actually work.

Also the ultimate test is whether after confessing to your real contribution, people are ok. I don’t think any amazon employee was annoyed after hearing this so called interview, whereas is your company knew what you were charging them for, they would fire you.

jghn2• 4 years ago

My most recent job is billable and time is tracked in tight increments. Because I now pay much more attention to when I am and am not 100% engaged, it's been eye opening how much 40 hours really is. I've found that I'm about 2/3 efficient. So if I designate 6 hours for "work", I'm really working (and thus billing) for about 4 hours.

jermaustin1• 4 years ago

I would bet those 2 hours you aren't billing for are still actual work. You are available, you are probably thinking about the company/the job/the work. That is all WORK, and should be billed.

I used to do a lot of walks (before I moved from Upstate NY to Houston) where I would escape the code and think about the product. That was all billed time, and understood by my clients. Just because my fingers are not furiously typing, doesn't mean I'm not actively engaged in my work.

badrabbit• 4 years ago

People don't work for 40 hours but they are available for 40 hours, being available is also "work".

vlunkr• 4 years ago

It just feels to me like some sort of secret we all share

Yeah this is a pretty interesting phenomenon. I feel like as a kid I had no idea it would be this way, but every job I've worked, blue and white collar, has involved a lot of "time wasting." It's very surprising at first.

fourseventy2• 4 years ago

Cruft will build back up in the 32 hours though. In 10 years people will be saying "does anyone else feel like they don't work the full 32? We should cut it down to 24!" There is always going to be some percentage of working time that isn't fully productive.

kelseyfrog• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what the problem with this is. It sounds like utopia.

diffeomorphism2• 4 years ago

Eh, diminishing percentages.

40 -> 32 -> 30 -> 29.5 -> 29.3 -> 29.2 -> really, we are talking about minutes(?). Just keep 29-ish and check again in a century.

willio58• 4 years ago

This is why Remote is great. You have the flexibility, and as long as you get the work you say you'll get done done, who cares if you're literally sitting in a chair from 9-5?

AuryGlenz• 4 years ago

Which is exactly how salaried work was supposed to work, not “40 hours is the minimum and we won’t pay you if we pile so much work on that you need to work 60 hours instead.”

gilbert_vanova• 4 years ago

The more your work is in creative output, the more likely you are to be working 100% of the time you're on the clock. Cognition is complex and most of it happens under the covers. Once you wake up, you load up your brains with concerns and don't stop thinking about it just because you aren't in meetings or actively coding. Your conscious thoughts are only one layer in a dense system.

Arguably, you can't turn it off when you clock out either. It's why I argue for a retainer model on intellectual workers.

urthor• 4 years ago

Spot on.

Do you have any books you'd received recommend that have any additional tricks?

elvis10ten• 4 years ago

I disagree based on personal (anecdotal) data.

When I get into a “flow” on a project I can work 12+ hour days. My productivity dwindles as the day gets old for sure, but I don’t think it ever gets to zero or close. I dream/think about the project and the first thing on my mind in the morning is the next step on the project.

Last time I was in flow, I single handedly built the next generation of a tool in 2 months. It’s currently taking the other team about 6 months to do the same but for another platform. The complexity is roughly the same and I think the engineers are as smart, if not smarter than me. I think the difference was that I did 12-16 hours for 2 month (including weekends).

This is not sustainable of course. I developed my back and wrist pain at the end of the 2 months. This is something I consciously stop myself from doing ever again because health is all you got at the end of the day.

suralind• 4 years ago

Very realistic, I one had a different idea of how we would build a retool-like tool for a company I worked at. I spent 4 days to reimplement our app from scratch, I didn't include even 10% of what we had, but the framework was much more powerful.

I typically code for like 3-4 hours a day, maybe 6-7 when I'm super into what I'm doing. BUT, I very frequently think about my work when I'm not working.

banannaise4• 4 years ago

I've also done this before. After I was done, I couldn't focus properly for several weeks. Turns out I was largely just pushing back rest that I desperately needed, and I had to pay that back in the end.

mouzogu2• 4 years ago

why would a company agree to pay the same salary for fewer hours of custody?

it reminds me of the macchiavelli quote:

“How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.”

productivity study is interesting but that's not how the real world incentives are aligned.

socialismisok• 4 years ago

Because the workers produce as much (or more) in that arrangement.

mouzogu2• 4 years ago

more is never enough in the capitalist system

WastingMyTime89• 4 years ago

Most companies in my country pays developers by days and not hours and this contract situation means that by law you have no fixed schedule and can do the hours you want as long as you deliver.

Of course, it means that you are actually working more hours than what hourly workers do but on the flip side no one can tell you anything if you disconnect for an hour in the middle.

pwinnski• 4 years ago

Why do companies pay for people to work "only" five days each week? Or "only" 40 hours? Why not seven days, and 84 hours each week? Surely there are people willing to work those hours for even less than companies are paying now, eliminating the deadweight loss.

Once you have the answer to that question, the answer to your question seems very straightforward.

robertlagrant2• 4 years ago

The answer is that both parties have agreed that 40 hours of work a week is worth that much money. And if there are people already willing to work 84 hours for less money then they would be employed already for less at 40 hours.

kalcode• 4 years ago

I get it is a strange idea. But putting a quote that doesn't really have any substance isn't really an argument nor adding value against it.

I think the idea of 4 days work week is asking to work outside the box for a moment on what benefits this could entail for different industry.

To work all week is to surrender your will, working less is the core of motivating man

(see this quote disagrees!)

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

^^ here they come. just like the anti remote crowd, they actually want less rights and freedoms. i am fascinated by this. i really am.

thenerdhead3• 4 years ago

What’s interesting to me is that I’ve seen many colleagues and general sentiment towards using your own time off to make work sustainable in this fashion of 4 day work weeks. They sacrifice the ability to disconnect from work with regular 1-2 week vacations however.

Also the increase of sabbatical years tends to show just how unsustainable this can be over a long period. Especially in a stressful position.

I don’t think productivity is the right word to use. I would say efficiency is better. Output vs outcome is important in knowledge work.

philmcp• 4 years ago

Over 200 companies have now made the switch to a 32hr work week: https://4dayweek.io/companies

The benefits for the employee are pretty obvious, but there are also many benefits for the company:

- Staff are more productive (for previous pilots: output almost always hits 100%)

- Job listings get (way) more applications

- Staff are happier

- Staff are healthier i.e. off sick less

- It's better for the environment

- Staff turnover reduces

- It attracts experienced candidates

- Costs reduce

- It's better for gender equality

Most of these companies on the site offer 100% salary, some offer 80% (but I hope to remove these in the future)

Gene_Parmesan2• 4 years ago

This is one of those situations where it's a clear documented (via study and real world experiment) benefit to both workers and employers, so you wonder why it's taking so long to spread.

One problem is I genuinely believe it has to be mandated. Every company has people who will take any action purely to make themselves look attractive for the next promotion cycle. And if even just one person is actually putting in 50/wk at a company that's supposed to be 32/wk, everyone else is going to feel pressured to work 50.

kipchak• 4 years ago

I think to some degree the people making these decisions to some extent are more likely to be those who enjoy the external approval aspects of work - the "clueless middle management" in the Gervais Principle framework, who enjoy doing more work and want to see those below them do the same.

marcosdumay2• 4 years ago

This is one of those situations where it's a clear documented (via study and real world experiment) benefit to both workers and employers, so you wonder why it's taking so long to spread.

Since open floorplans became universal a while ago, and are only getting partially replaced by work from home because the rent is cheaper, what I wonder is if that is the rule, instead of the exception.

banannaise4• 4 years ago

The farther people are from the front lines, the more they seem to prefer the stick to the carrot. Government officials, upper management, etc. are typically far more worried about enforcement than encouragement.

Shorter workweeks are an encouragement tool. Longer ones are an enforcement tool.

thebigspacefuck• 4 years ago

For me the real productivity benefit would be the 5th day when nobody is “working” but I log in and have an entire full day to focus without interruption.

kwindla• 4 years ago

We try to nudge towards making this possible by having a "soft rule" discouraging scheduling any standing or cross-team meetings on Fridays.

kingofheroes• 4 years ago

We tried this several times, specifically banning meetings on Friday, and it never sticks. Some manager or executive always winds up ignoring the rule and setting a meeting anyway, which throws the whole thing out.

dagw2• 4 years ago

Only works if everybody agrees on which day is the '5th' day. My wife has chose to work 4 days a week (80%) and she has to constantly fight to keep her free day actually free, since people keep trying contact her or book stuff with her on that day.

vjk8002• 4 years ago

I already work (remotely) much less than my contract says. I simply can't stay engaged to cognitively demanding tasks for a full day. The rest of the time I just feel kinda bad for slacking, which increases my stress levels for no good reason. If I got the permission to actually work less, I wouldn't feel so bad about it, which would probably lead to less stress and higher productivity.

I work in finance and I can attest that 90% of the work people do in my office could simply be left undone and no harm would come to the world or even the company. The industry just has a culture of "being very productive" which leads to people doing something all of the time, even when they don't have a clue what should be done.

SV_BubbleTime• 4 years ago

I already work (remotely) much less than my contract says. I simply can't stay engaged to cognitively demanding tasks for a full day. The rest of the time I just feel kinda bad for slacking, which increases my stress levels for no good reason. If I got the permission to actually work less, I wouldn't feel so bad about it, which would probably lead to less stress and higher productivity.

How do you know it wouldn't just allow you to slack down to working 24 hours a week and feeling the same degree of guilt you are accustomed to now?

I have no idea. It just reminds me of the saying about lottery winners "If you weren't happy before you won, you won't be happy afterwards".

ITB2• 4 years ago

A lot of people have a goal to minimize work and maximize income, and for those people, no matter what flexibility they are given, they will continue to minimize productive work. It’s sad in my opinion, and it leads to hedonic pursuits instead of the intrinsic satisfaction that comes from doing good work. But for too many people work is about man vs “the man”, instead of our individual quest to do something interesting.

arcturus17• 4 years ago

A lot of businesses have a goal to maximize work and minimize wages, and for those businesses…

toomuchtodo• 4 years ago

“Darling I told you several times before. I have no dream job, I do not dream of labor." — James Baldwin

Not everyone wants interesting work. That’s just a hobby you get paid for.

vsareto• 4 years ago

It's hard for a stoic mindset to pave over the fact that you're only working a job because you have to. You'd see less of that if we have a society that gives a decent standard of living without having to work (ever), but even then, there will always be people looking to game any system for the thrill of it. That's the intrinsic satisfaction they get.

marcosdumay2• 4 years ago

If you keep people stressed, they become useless. Stressed people get no intrinsic satisfaction from working, or almost anything really.

throwaway675309• 4 years ago

Why does it inherently lead to hedonistic pursuits, that's a bit of an oversimplification.

Minimizing work and maximizing income (aka minmaxing) is what you should do as the employee in the equation, just as the employer will try their best to set up a contract where and they maximize your work while minimizing your income, to do otherwise is just blind naïveté.

And for some of us less hours spent on the job means more hours we can spend on the cultivation of hobbies, physical health and overall improving ourselves. Working as a software engineer is but a small facet of who I am.

mike503• 4 years ago

Compensation should be based on output. If hours translates to more output (like an assembly line worker or something) - great. Simply pay hourly and require minimum amount of hours (like 40) with options for "go-getters" to work more if they want.

Plenty of jobs (like a lot of tech) should be based on "if you're producing what we need from you (or more if you want) we're happy" regardless of the hours.

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

I am always fascinated by people who want to earn less, pay more in tax, have less rights, etc.

Curious, why would want to be paid by the hour instead of getting the same pay for less hours as this experiment would want to do? Technically thats a pay raise and better for your quality of life.

banannaise4• 4 years ago

It's the cult of the entrepreneur, with a splash of anarcho-capitalism. Worker exploitation is impossible because employment is a mutual agreement, and individuals should be empowered to agree to work in arbitrarily bad conditions for arbitrarily long hours, because that preserves the meritocracy for those who work the hardest for the longest.

cdkmoose• 4 years ago

How would you measure output? How do you measure "what we need from you"? As a software engineer a fair percent of my time was spent in collaboration that sometimes manifested itself in someone else's "output". Not advocating that hours are the best measure, but there does need to be an accounting of my time being available for others and not focused on my "output"

welshwelsh2• 4 years ago

You need to negotiate and agree upon output metrics as a team.

Story points can easily be translated to dollars. If an engineer and a product manager can agree that a story is worth 3 points, they can agree that it's worth, say, $1,500. Whether the work ends up taking 30 minutes or 30 days, neither party can complain because they both agreed on a price.

nottorp• 4 years ago

Except in tech you get metrics like lines of code instead then ;)

Although it would be nice to be paid by line of code. Except in python or any other language where line ends are significant.

sam0x174• 4 years ago

At my previous startup we tried this with engineering and actually saw a productivity _increase_ from 4-day work-week.

Arrath3• 4 years ago

I will say the morale improvement on my team when we switched to 4/10s was worth it alone. We couldn't swing the reduction in hours unfortunately.

Maxburn2• 4 years ago

This is a bit different from a 32 hour week.

But yes you will see productivity go UP with 4 10s. That's a full days worth of break and lunch interruptions that isn't there.

I switched to 4 10s a couple years back and it's nice, but the days are quite long so anything else you plan to do probably isn't happening. Like gym time, which is going to cost long term.

kazanz• 4 years ago

Curious, was this increased productivity sustained? If so, for how long?

edmundsauto• 4 years ago

How did you measure this? I'm convinced that I will be a multi-millionaire if I could just measure end productivity across a wide range of contexts.

dagw2• 4 years ago

Did everybody take the same day off or could everybody choose?

rr888• 4 years ago

Even with 5-day weeks lots of colleagues were running side projects. Honestly a 4-day a week job WFH I'd probably try to run two jobs at a time. I'm here to work and get paid, not have a good balance.

Brian_K_White2• 4 years ago

I think I personally know many people that will simply use the extra time to work another job, thus erasing the intended benefit to the generous company.

They work you less so that you will have better morale and energy and loyalty while you are there. But you use the time to collect a 2nd paycheck, and the gets the same tired employee they would have had if they just worked you fully the old way.

I don't know what could practically be done about that.

It also seems like a 6 month trial where the participants are still the exception not the rule, doesn't really predict what would happen if it became the rule. If most companies adopted this as a norm, surely simply the average salery would just inch down over time until it became essentially necessary and the norm to work 2 jobs, since the 4-day job won't actually be enough by itself except in theory, like how minimun wage is supposed to be enough in theory.

There will always be huslters aggressively trying to maximize every minute, and they will always set, or at least perturb, the going rates for things. I think this experiment can only really exist as a special bubble experiment where the ceos just wanted to do it, and all employees were convinced to voluntarily play along and not just fill the gap with a side job. Maybe there can always be some few companies that can do it as their particular distinctive policy just like there already are different companies with different cultures and norms. But across the board? I think the hustlers and hungry scrappers will just set the going rates.

christkv• 4 years ago

This mentality is less prevela t in Europe so that might be a factor to keep in mind.

dbsmith83• 4 years ago

Not sure why you are getting downvoted. I thought your reply was at least a lot more thoughtful than the average one here. It seems like in this topic:

<personal anecdote or opinion> pro 4-day workweek = upvote

<personal anecdote or opinion> skeptical of 4-day workweek = downvote

I guess it is human nature to dismiss skepticism of an outcome when the outcome is strongly desired

stavros• 4 years ago

I've been working four-day weeks for almost a decade now, and it's been amazing. I briefly switched back to a five-day week at some point, but I had enough of that after a few months. The weekends felt way too short and the workweek way too long.

Four-day weeks are just the right balance, though I wonder if I'll like three-day weeks even more.

joeman1000• 4 years ago

That’s not an experiment, that’s a rise in pay-rate… it’s very much past due in a lot of countries for a lot of job categories.

mbrodersen• 4 years ago

There is nothing magical about 40 hours. It just happens to be the number of hours that most companies (in the west) happens to choose for historical reasons:

https://www.okta.com/au/identity-101/40-hour-work-week/

rolenthedeep• 4 years ago

I work at a startup that has mostly unstructured time requirements. The attitude is "as long as you get your work done, work the hours you want in the office or at home"

When I get tired and unable to focus, I go home and rest. That might be 2:00 or 7:00. If I go home early, chances are that I'll end up doing more work in the evening.

I work as much as I want and am able to, which turns out to be an order of magnitude more work than when I was trapped in 10-12 hour shifts 6 days a week.

I find that I'm very rarely "killing time" at work. I'll pop open mastodon for a few minutes now and then, but I've never had to waste multiple hours waiting for my shift to end. If I'm done working, I just leave. If I have a doctor's appointment, I just throw a note in the group chat.

At this point, I don't think I could ever go back to a traditional workplace. You'd have to be some kind of idiot to pay people per hour to waste time on their phone just to tick off the requirement of being in a chair for 8 hours in a row. This is just clearly the wrong model for many industries.

SergeAx• 4 years ago

As an SWE I know that my brain works on problems 24/7, and not only 9 to 5 Mon-Fri. Lots of times when I stuck with some debugging or corner case or architecture problem - I just put it away and next morning the answer is just there in my head, ready to be typed down.

As an engineering manager I can regulary see the same in my reports. Moreover, best ones are doing it on the vacation: coming back they just start typing and don't stop for 2-3 days. Normally typing/thinking cycle is at most 50/50, usually 40/60.

There's one exclusion. All said things are not working if an engineer is working for two employers. When COVID mandatory WFH started, I initially thought that some of my direct or indirect reports just can't adapt to it, but it always turned out to be a second job or a personal project.

I am 100% sure that 4 day workweek will lead to a lot of people in IT taking second jobs/side gigs, and it will severely impact their performance.

Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

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