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When I first graduated college in 2008, I got a job at Lockheed Martin which offered flexible working schedules. I loved it, but was so naive to think this was commonplace. Adopting flexible working arrangements seems like an easy way for organizations to improve morale.At Lockheed, they let you pick if you wanted to work the standard 5x8 days 40 hour week, 4x10 days 40 hour week, or the 9x9 80 hour two-weeks with every other Friday off. This worked great. Everyone was aware that not everyone on the team could be counted as being available on Fridays depending on their schedule. Unfortunately for me when I left there, I realized how unusual this working arrangement is. | |
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> but was so naive to think this was commonplace.Been there, got the t-shirt, had it signed. Over the years it has been a bitter pill to swallow to discover that the majority of my first ten years was spent working at places that were exceptionally forward thinking in ways that matter to me but it turns out don't matter as much to loads of other people. I've spent a lot of time butting heads with people who are 5, 10, 15 years behind where I empirically observed 'standard practices' are at. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. All of the Agile Manifesto signatories had been doing their own thing for at least 5-10 years before they tried to compare notes in 2001, and it was another 10 before most of us accepted half of XP as de rigeur. 15 years is a long, long time to wait for 'rain'. > At Lockheed, they let you pick if you wanted to work the standard 5x8 days 40 hour week Boeing was also once that way, and that survived the MD merger, though I don't know if that's still true. | |
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I have friends at Lockheed and they all love the flexible schedules. What I find interesting is that a company as large as Lockheed does this, but it hasn't picked up much steam. | |
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Fwiw these schedules seem to show up in a number of large organizations (both private and public). | |
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This is nice, but I find it disappointing that they didn't offer 4x8 32 hour weeks, when the company's culture seems to have already been set up for it. They could have let people opt in to reduced pay. | |
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That is very likely an option, but probably not used a lot. I have worked with several people that had a similar schedule, but they did not start at the company with that schedule and of course took a pay cut due to the lower hours.It is very difficult to argue for hiring someone that is not 40 hours. HR and management thinks in terms of full time (40) or part time (<30). The 30-39 hour schedules seem to be used to keep someone they really don't want to lose and not offered to new people. I have seen it with people getting close to retirement and people caring for someone sick or small. | |
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LM does offer part time arrangements, but it is not well known. | |
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I find the 9x9 80 hour two-weeks option very interesting. How common was this choice among employees? | |
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I'm in the public sector, and a number of my coworkers do it. I had that schedule in the before times too - the entire day being off was advantageous for going out and doing things and eliminated an entire pair of commutes.Now, I have a 9x4+4 schedule where Fridays are half days. The reduction of the commute isn't as valuable when its "put on pants and down the stairs" and the full day to "do things" is reduced. The trick with the 9-80 schedule is to define the week starting at Friday at noon. Week 1: F: 0h; M: 9h; T: 9h; W: 9h; R: 9h; F: 4h (8-noon) = 40h Week 2: F: 4h (noon - 4); M: 9h; T: 9h; W: 9h; R: 9h; F: 0h = 40h
And thus, for the defined 7 day period, the work doesn't exceed 40h. Additionally, no day is more than 9h (some places have requirements when 10h is worked within one 24h period).https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/80-w... https://gusto.com/blog/people-management/9-80-work-schedule https://www.zoomshift.com/blog/9-80-work-schedule/ | |
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As was mentioned in the public sector I feel like it was the norm. People liked having their every other Friday off (or other day they chose). When we were always in the office I chose to come in because fridays were quiet and I could work uninterrupted. Now almost all of my employees work a flexible schedule. They send me their schedule prior to the pay period starting. They have the ability to flex and violate the “core hours” one every two weeks (working less than 6 hours and can be outside the 10-2pm period). So for instance my one employee works about 2-4 hours every other Friday and has the other one off, just picks up the slack on some other day. And if they want to adjust their schedule more they just need supervisor approval (haven’t had a time yet where I had to deny a request). I personally stick to a mostly 8-4:30p schedule but if I have a big project coming up I shorten a day and put in extra time another day. | |
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Now that my kids are grown I would absolutely love this. You can stay in the pocket, get a quieter few days over the working weekend and it would help enforce good comms/docs when you wrap up your week.The only issue is that I would try to pack too much into the 5 day 'weekend' and be exhausted when I start back up. | |
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I may be mistaken, but for this 9x9 they may mean five 9 hour days, the weekend, four 9 hour days, three day weekend. | |
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Could be. My step-dad was just telling me about his night shift at AT&T in the 70's doing operations for switching sytems. They would to 10 8's in a row b/c it was hard for them to stay on the night shift schedule over the weekends, so this just let them stretch the weekend. He really liked it. | |
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That's right. Often called '9-80' and was pretty popular in aerospace. | |
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It seemed useful at first..Afaik the non-union folks were all switched to 4x10 without choice when working from home over pandemic. I have to drive to the office and put on pants so prefer 9x80. And it was never 9x9,but that's close. It was 9-80, the Friday in between were 8hours. (2x40 hour weeks, week just shifted early to split the first Friday). Its a nice option, but harder to make up hours, if you have to shift them. Hr suggested we could get our non-work things done on every other Friday off, but my dentist doesn't work Fridays. 10x4 are tough for me, when I have to make up hours, hard to concentrate. And no one else other than my dentist has (every other) Fridays off, and he doesn't invite me on his boat. So no extra socializing. | |
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9-80 used to be extremely common in the oil and gas world. It's started to go away now that it's not just a "good ol boy" industry but plenty of supermajors still offer it. | |
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I used to work with different Oil&Gas companies in Houston, and one of the things that enabled this was that they started work at 6AM and ended at 3PM. Part of the reason was to have time overlap with other Oil producing countries (e.g. the Middle East), and part of this was to avoid Houston rush hour traffic.I think it's easier to do 9 hour days when you start that early. It's nice to end your day at 3 and still feel like you have some daylight hours in the winter. | |
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That was one thing I hated about my regular job in the winter: driving to work usually in the dark and driving home always in the dark. | |
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The 9-80 as we called seemed like the most popular option in my building. Ten hour days was too long for some. It was nice getting every other Friday off. | |
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The 9-80 schedule is one of the things I miss most about working for LM. Along with the great coworkers I had.Now I work for a typical software company, and I realize I took the flexibility of the 9-80 for granted. I got so much personal stuff done during that extra day off. And, for the rest of the days, I didn’t really feel like going from 8 to 9 hours a day that difficult. | |
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You and me both. It was such a nice perk. | |
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And the shutdown week at Christmas. Few companies do this either. | |
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We (bit.io) do a 4 day work week, and have since our founding. It's the 32-hours get paid for 40-hours kinda; our salaries are competitive with companies of the same stage & size who do a 40-hour work week.I was skeptical at first (I'm the CEO), but my co-founder showed me the data and we've been doing it since the start with no regrets. Happy to answer any practical questions; we're about 10 full time folks right now, work monday-thursday, all remote. | |
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Can you tell us more about the data that convinced you? | |
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Had a chance to read it, but it doesn't really say how you decided that your company is just as productive with a 4-day workweek as before. How did you measure? | |
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Who responds to customer issues on Fridays? | |
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Great question. The sad fact of the 4 day work week is that the rest of the world doesn't do it, so external support is a challenge. Right now, my co-founder and I try to do any external customer _meetings_ that have to take place on a friday. But for support we have an on-call rotation (like we do for engineering), and that does cover fridays. So, the support on-call person handles friday support requests. | |
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do they take a different day off in the week or do they have an occasional 5 day work week?Not a comment out of the side of my mouth, I am legit curious. at any rate, an occasional 5 day week is better than an occasional 6 day week | |
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It's oncall, like any engineering on-call rotation, so there's an SLA for responding to support requests; currently our oncall is 6am-6pm Pacific time (weekdays). So, it's as much as work day as any on-call rotation is. | |
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The same people who respond on Saturdays presumably? | |
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There is usually a decent difference in support volume between a customer weekday and a customer weekend. I would like to understand how they are thinking about this. It's especially perplexing since their site has no support info that I could find, so maybe they take the Google approach of not providing support. | |
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We have a chat box that pops up for all support, and offer support@bit.io. Both get routed to our Intercom instance, and both generate opsgenie alerts for some cases. We do an on-call rotation for answering the support requests.We don't _yet_ do support on-call on the weekends. | |
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He didn't say that everyone works the same 4 days. | |
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At Lockheed when I worked there, everyone worked M-Th. Friday was the one flex day that was in play depending on which working arrangements an employee chose. | |
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>work monday-thursday, all remote. | |
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He did, but he mentioned later there was on-call. So it's a 4 day facade, similar to unlimited vacation. | |
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I wouldn't call it a "facade". It's 4-day weeks where in some weeks you have to be on call on Friday. If there's enough people that means being on call every month or two.As long as they're up front with us when hiring it seems fine to me. If you don't want to be on call, that's something you need to factor into your job search. I've always factored it in for my searches! | |
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How do you manage the temptation to think you'd get more work done if you worked an extra day? Do your stats show an improved retention of staff?Do employees take into account the reduced hours when comparing salaries or is it disregarded similar to benefits like pensions? Does the company rely on a sneeky bit of work done on an off-day, or is it a true, tools-down, have fun, day? | |
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As a founder, the temptation is real, but anecdotally (anecdataly?) I'm so much more motivated on the work days I don't think the extra day matters. But, my company is not big enough to have enough sample data to prove it one way or the other.Employees do take the extra free time into consideration when comparing offers, since we make offers that are competitive to a 40-hour offer. Re: sneaky bit of work on the off day. We don't rely on it, or ask for it. We do have an on-call rotation that covers support and site issues on Fridays, but you're in that rotation once every 5 weeks or so. | |
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FWIW, I love places that actively prevent you from working too much, I over worked at a young age, it took two good bosses to teach me being effective limiting my work hours. This stopped me from hurting myself, never going back to forced 40 hour weeks. Thanks for being part of that.Warning though, forced on call can be hell as an employee. We are an group of five and can handle on call every five weeks if there is more we would start to get attrition. | |
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we’re encouraging employees to set the following out-of-office email notification of Fridays: “I’m out of the office today because we’re working consciously here at Bolt and are currently testing out a four-day workweek. I’ll be back in touch with you on [Monday].”Ugh. Just say "I'm out of the office today and will respond on Monday" no need to tout your experimental company philosophy. | |
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Disagree. While the "we're working consciously" bit can be left out, you have to let the people you communicate with know that it's not just this Friday, it's EVERY Friday. Just saying "I'm out of the office today and will respond on Monday" implies it's a one-time thing. | |
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You only have to do that if you're in a situation where your correspondent expects same-day responses. Mostly you should try to avoid creating that expectation -- or where you do want to provide that level of service, eg for customer interactions, that sort of email should be going via some kind of role address or internal ticketing system so that it gets reliable rapid responses that don't depend on individual employees not happening to fall ill and so you can ensure cover during holidays or whatever.(I work a four day week personally, and I never set an out-of-office response.) | |
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Not necessarily just for that. It's also useful for people knowing whether they send you something Thursday towards the end of the day that's somewhat time sensitive whether to expect/hope you'll get to it, or if that's something they shouldn't expect any more than sending it towards the end of the day Friday. It's useful in the same way as knowing when holidays are and not estimating when someone might get something done while including a Monday they will not be working.Not required, but useful. | |
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I feel like many or most places already have the "be cool late Friday" mindset. Emergencies or critical things can still happen, but if possible maybe don't schedule a long meeting end of day Friday. Don't ask for something that needs turn around after the morning as people already are going to likely be in a wrap-up mode. It always feels like a very implicit "can this wait till Monday?" attitude permeates the day. And it's not just being nice, splitting a task over a weekend can lead to things being forgotten or missed or just the context being lost. Hell, I've seen places operate more in a "be cool all of Friday, it's the pseudo-weekend".All that is a long way of saying that that group feeling now exists a whole day before and it's important to communicate that. | |
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Why would that matter? If it comes up again next week, the person will get the same message. If I have a one-time interaction with you, all I need to know is that you're out today and back Monday. | |
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It helps parties coordinate in the future.For example, if I need X done by Friday, and I know Y company doesn't work on Fridays, I have a better idea of how much workload there is per day. It saves me from sending another email asking "hey, I know you weren't here on Friday, but is that every Friday or a one-time thing? And does that affect Joe from marketing and Sally from DevOps, or is it just you?" | |
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Plenty of people in my country - where part-time-by-choice work is normalized - is to set your message to "I don't work on Fridays". | |
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No, they don't need to know your policy at all. They only need the "I am not here..." message regardless of how many times you use it. | |
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IMO it is much better to be transparent and predictable. Makes things easier for everyone. | |
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"when to expect me to be here" is often worth communicating. "Why" less so. Avoids confusion like:> I tried him last Friday, and the one before that, and the one before that. He's never available. | |
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Ugh. Four day work week trials have proven very successful in Japan, Iceland, Spain, and now the US. It absolutely makes sense to tout this proven benefit to others. The only folks complaining are the ones who don’t believe data driven evidence or have an unhealthy relationship with work. No need to denigrate positive, no cost efforts to drag forward work life balance and quality of life. | |
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Disagree, if I have to interact with someone only on Fridays and I’m getting back an out of office notification literally every time I email them, I want to know what’s going on. | |
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"I'm not available on Fridays" wouldn't suffice? | |
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Think this begs the question, Why? Saying it's company-wide is fair. But honestly I think people have their own cases and can make the judgment on too much/too little info | |
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Definitely not. Childcare, company policy, focus time on development, playing darts - it doesn't matter. All that matters is they're not reachable on Fridays and that they've chosen not share the why. | |
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Exactly - or you might try emailing someone else, and get some other strangely worded auto-response. | |
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> if I have to interact with someone only on Fridays> I want to know what’s going on Why are you restricted to interact ONLY on Fridays? What's going on with you? | |
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How do ideas spread if you don't tout them? | |
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They made a blog post, we're currently commenting on it. | |
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Audience for a blog post and HN link is minuscule compared to the total set of people Bolt employees interact with over email. | |
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The blog post touts the idea. If they didn't tout the idea, we wouldn't be here commenting. | |
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Why would you want to spread the idea of the “experiment” before gathering results? What if you conclude the experiment was a failure? | |
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Pre-registration of studies is a virtue ;) | |
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So people can learn about what other people are experimenting w/? Seems pretty straightforward to me. | |
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Here in Holland many e-mail footers will read like:- Name - Company - Department - Mon-Wed-Thur Or something like that, to signal when a person is working... | |
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Just broadcasting this will ruin "testing".I genuinely don't understand how HR/higher handle these things. Are they just extremely out of touch or something? | |
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I read the related "conscious culture" manifesto and came across this "gem":"When hiring a new person, wait until their official start date to onboard them, which includes granting access to email and internal documents. Avoid letting a new hire start early because: [...] Information in Slack or Google drive could tip them away from your company" | |
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That seems like a silly reason -- there are lots more perfectly reasonable legal/security reasons to not have "early access" though. | |
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Oh dear, they're really telling on themselves aren't they?I mean not giving them access to e-mail and internal documents until their formal start date is pretty normal, unless they sign an NDA that kicks in earlier. | |
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It's quite possible that they're a dubious organization, but this note hardly proves it. It's really hard to get a read on internal company docs without any context whatsoever, they weren't written for an outside audience and it doesn't seem surprising that they could cause major confusion for someone unfamiliar with the local jargon and so on. | |
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My new gig does a 4days x 8hr work week. It was a major reason for joining the company and has proven to really help reshape how I work and how I think about work. Interestingly, we take Wednesdays off with the ability to trade that day on an as-needed basis. This gives us 2x 2-day work sprints per week. I find that I roll into Thursdays having had a day to reset a little bit, tackle personal projects, cook a huge meal, or go for a long bike ride. Friday comes and I haven't once felt the "Thank god it's Friday" feeling, but rather "Oh, it's Friday already?" in the same way that I used to feel it after a 3-day weekend.Here's a bit more on our operating philosophy from our CEO: https://www.fastcompany.com/90501241/my-companys-always-had-... | |
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Damn, that's an S-tier company. I just looked at the job description and the interview process is extremely good as well. I hope multiple options for the tech portion of the interview process will become commonplace soon. | |
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Much like microservices provide a defined enforcement of system component boundaries, a 4 day work week is a way to force the removal of 'theater' work.Neither should be required to achieve the end goal, but then there is reality. | |
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Yeah back when we lived in Sweden, Swedes are kind of known to "take lots of breaks" and "pack up when the clock strikes 5". Between coffee breaks, lunch, and fika, people barely worked... except during those precious hours they did work — they were very productive. The idea was that you get your stuff done as much as you can, up until the next break, which was always right around the corner. | |
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So is this "work 32 hours, get paid 40" kind of four-day work week, or a "you can decide how many contract hours you have" kind of four-day work week? I feel like it's important to make this distinction, because not working 40 hours / week is normalized where I live (about half the working population works part-time), with lots of people opting for 36 hours (then 4x9 for one day a week off, or 5x8 and 4x8 for one day per two weeks off), 32 hours (4x8), or less (e.g. two parents alternating work days to look after the kids, or minimize day care / grandparents).Anyway that's a long-winded way of saying, flexibility in contracts isn't too challenging. It's maintaining decent pay at the same time that the US seems to have trouble with, with some people having to balance multiple different jobs simultaneously because none is offering a stable 40ish hour contract or decent pay. 32 hours / week at 40 hour pay would be interesting. | |
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All through the dotcom collapse I kept trying to point out to employers that while they felt that I deserved at 10% raise that they could ill afford, that I would be happy reducing my hours by 10% for the same pay and they would hardly notice the difference in my output.Specifically I was thinking about how hard it is for me to get going on Monday mornings, and how often my weekend plans were curtailed by trying to make sure that I was absolutely back in town by 8pm at the latest on Sunday night. It doesn't take many experiences getting bumped from -or to- the last flight on Sunday to grow wary of trying to take a quick jaunt out of town. Not being expected until noon on Monday would have opened up a whole lot of options. | |
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A four day week is going to get my attention next time I hop jobs. Before that it was remote work but now that dam has well and truly broken.The shorter work week has the chance to be a major differentiator between employers. I'll let employers in on a little secret. A lot of us will take more than a 20% pay cut in return for that day. | |
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> A lot of us will take more than a 20% pay cut in return for that day.Can't agree with you on this one, losing that money would meaningfully limit what I could do with my new-found free time. While I totally agree that a 4-day week would make a lot of folks respond to a recruiter's email, I think the vast majority would balk at the pay cut. | |
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For a lot of us, it wouldn't be a paycut. We're already on the bottom of the salary range. It'd be pure upside for me. I think there's room for both models to exist. But I can't imagine not being envious of the guy that has 3 days off a week. Keep your 20%, I could die next year and want to feel good while I'm here. | |
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Or a cut for more vacation time. I've had to threaten to get a labor lawyer just for the right to actually take my 2 weeks off consecutively. They responded by letting me "purchase" a few more days off... but of course if you don't take them, you don't get your money back. | |
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> I'll let employers in on a little secret. A lot of us will take more than a 20% pay cut in return for that day.Absolutely. Really wish the industry would move in that direction. Total comp has gone up up up in the last decade, but truth is free time is a lot more valuable than money. Reward me with time, not more money. I'd very happily work half the hours (say, 2x 10hr days per week) for half the salary. | |
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No, we won't take a pay cut to work less! It's time American employers realized that we don't want to be wage slaves anymore. Pay us a good wage, let us relax and enjoy life. A 4x32 work week is just a start to that... | |
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> No, we won't take a pay cut to work less!Who are you speaking for when you say "we"? | |
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I would say all of us, but you do you and take that pay cut if you want...weirdo | |
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thats a dangerous idea for greedy business owners | |
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Note that in California, hourly people will be getting two hours of overtime per working day. About a decade ago the unions got a law passed that overtime was after 8 hours in a day not 40 hours in a week. This ended up screwing people who had been able to move their schedule to four ten hour days. | |
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Does this also apply to those on salary/exempt? | |
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No, those people don't get overtime at all. | |
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The article says they're testing it, but it must be old. Bolt has apparently gone permanent on the four day work week now. | |
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Seems to be from September. I couldn't find a published date but there's this: <meta property="article:published_time" content="2021-09-27T16:29:51+00:00" />
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I've been working a four day week for over a decade, so can share some personal experiences.I'm basically outputting the same amount of work at the same quality as before. As the article hints at, the consequence of working one day less is that it forces you to more aggressively reject distractions. Which not only was much easier than I expected, it's in fact enjoyable. The deal is simple. We have sprints where it's clear what needs to be delivered every two weeks. Output-based work, not presence-based work. I generously reject or ignore anything else. The way to do this is to dismiss meetings that do not contribute to your core tasks. Meetings are the true productivity killer. They cut up your day into useless snippets where you can't get anything done. The trick to get rid of them is stupidly simple: flip the script. Right now, it's common culture that people can start as many meetings as they want and it's common courtesy for the invitees to attend, and if not, explain why. I simply stopped complying with the expectation. I may not at all respond to the invite or give it a decline without reason. The default is no, and it's on you to convince me how the meeting is needed for me to deliver. Because my job is to deliver, not to sit in meetings. My time belongs to me and my manager, and nobody else. If you want a piece of it, have a good story. I'm serious when I say this: not once in my decade of making this change have I ever been frowned upon, got into issues, had negative feedback or reviews due to clearing crap from my agenda. In fact, it earns respect. That is the key lesson: don't be afraid to defend your time and do not forget what you're at work for. I'm effectively only helping my employer by being more productive in the time that I work, how can anybody complain about that? Same for overtime culture and managers sending emails at night or in the weekend. Their problem. Send a million, I won't read any of them. Has this ever gotten me into trouble? No. Have they ever asked why I don't respond to weekend emails? No. But if they would, I'd tell them I couldn't read them because I was f*cking my wife, and recommend they do the same. Get this: work is making your manager look good, and never bad. That's the job. When you do this, you're already a top performer, as the standard is really very low. You can do all of this by rejecting nonsense, which is in your interest as well as your manager's interest. | |
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I've stayed on much longer at the business I work for because of my 4 day week arrangement. Definitely golden handcuffs; I recognise that I probably wouldn't have this anywhere else. It's my life admin day mostly: chores, going to the dentist etc and when it isn't I make time for fun. Generally I feel much more rested in the week. | |
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$250k base salary. That's not top of market if the other $550k are illiquid options with no clear liquidity horizon. | |
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I have a close friend who got Sr Engineer offer from Bolt. The 500k yearly TC is somewhat misleading because it’s assuming more than 2x growth in evaluation. While they may very well achieve that, you’re not gonna see the full 500k for an uncertain amount of time. More people should be aware of the nuances in these compensation figures. | |
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Wow, I imagined stock comp would usually be based on current valuation. | |
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It is, if they're offering RSUs rather than options. With options there's no meaningful "current valuation" since they're granted with a strike price that should be equal to their last valuation, there's only a potential distribution of future outcomes based on expected multiples (incl. 0). | |
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I know of this org pretty well; they just did a massive round compared to their size and any rational business metric. They've convinced a big group of investors that they can basically disintermediate almost all ecommerce transactions, but this is a very frothy/competitive space, with really big players like Apple and Amazon, plus your paypals and a bunch of other unified checkout players. I'm skeptical but have my popcorn & I'm ready to watch. | |
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If that's not indicative of another dotcom bubble I don't know what is. That's an insane amount of money to be paying, especially for a pre-IPO company. | |
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So, maybe next they will experimentally employ someone over 40? | |
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As an FYI to others who might jump to conclusions... my experience as a VC involved in several tech companies as well as a founder is that older people generally do not like to apply to work for early stage startups. The compensation and risk profile of early stage startups often does not appeal or work well for older developers.Second to that, the number of software developers doubles approximately every 5 years, meaning that developers 40 years and older make up only about 20% of the workforce [1] [2]. The end result is that it's not unusual that older developers are not well represented at smaller tech companies and one should not jump to the conclusion that there is age discrimination on that basis alone. [1] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2004/2004.05847.pdf [2] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019 | |
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that's pretty optimistic/naive thinking when you see they have seven(!) open postings for Crypto developer roles. | |
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I've worked a four day work week in a construction related job for years now. I do 4 10 hour days. I figure the company saves money because they cover site travel time when I'm not in the office. Mostly it's sort of difficult for others to understand I'm not available at all any Friday and weekend rates apply then. A 10 hour day isn't too bad but it's definitely the sort of thing where I'm not really doing anything else those days, work eat and sleep.The weird thing I run into is I try to schedule things like dental cleanings or tax work etc on Fridays (when I'm off) and I run into all the other people that also take Fridays off. 4 Day work weeks aren't that uncommon. | |
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4/10s is better than 5/8s, but I think the 4 day workweek movement is trying to reduce the hours worked to 32 hours as a matter of principle. The idea behind 5/8s was 8 hours work, 8 hours leisure, 8 hours sleep. For that lifestyle to work it assumed a wife at home doing a similar amount of work to keep the household running.Now most families have both parents working 40 hours a week. Which means they're working for 8 hours, coming home and doing a bunch of chores, then going to sleep. Leisure activities are often done at the expense of sleep. A 32 hour work week would give people back some of the leisure time they lost. | |
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I think I'm allowed to drop down to 36 hours without any problem. Under that consistently and we run into full time classification issues and maybe insurance gets dropped. | |
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I read on Blind (You can stop reading here, I don't blame you) that even though they have a 4-day workweek, their KPIs essentially require you to work Friday anyway. You officially have 4 days off, but few are able to do it. | |
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How about just "work," and whenever it makes sense? I've always figured that if I achieve what I'm supposed to achieve, why does it matter how or where that happens? | |
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Alas, this isn't sufficient. For the same reason that unlimited vacation results in people actually taking less vacation, if you say this to someone without a ton of security in their position they will work approximately as much as their boss.If the boss keeps sending emails on Friday there is no way that other people will really feel secure disconnecting. | |
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Bingo. People are social animals and we take our cues from other people. "Unlimited vacation" sounds good but is not great in practice. | |
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Unlimited Vacation is great if there is a base guarantee of vacation given to the employees. That is, give them their usual 2 weeks (or more) of PTO in their contract. Then anything on top of that is unlimited.But companies know full well what they're doing. They know that if they replace guaranteed PTO with unlimited, not only does the employee take less vacation (more bang for the company's buck), but they also get to skirt around state laws on paying for unused PTO when the employee quits. Plus, without any guaranteed PTO, companies can just decline your request for vacation any time. They can say they're in busy season, or they need office coverage, whatever. Whereas with guaranteed vacation, the manager would have a harder time declining those hours you earned due to bad optics. Unlimited vacation without a guaranteed PTO base is a scam. | |
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Unlimited vacation is, like you said, dependent on social cues.Plenty of places with unlimited vacation cue or even pressure employees to take a minimum amount of vacation. | |
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How much vacation you have is how much the company is required to pay out as earned income when you separate from the org. Anything else is generosity that can be rescinded without notice or recourse.Edit: u/babycake's comment says it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29879742 | |
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Yes, this is extremely easily solved. We have unlimited holiday, but you must take off at least 28 days (the statutory minimum in the UK). | |
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I work for a small org, joined when it was like.. 7, now we're ~50, and fully remote. The where doesn't matter, but the when does for us. We still exploit synchronous communication quite heavily.Yes i know some orgs can async everything. Some people prefer it. You could argue many cases on why async makes for a more mature interaction process, more efficient, etc. However we have not managed it. I'd say largely 50->80% of our communication is sync, and i don't see anyone advocating for changing that with us, despite having basically fully flexible hours and a global team. | |
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Even if most communication is async there is a part of "somewhat async" and a part of "mostly sync" communication. And then there is the social aspect of not being alone, but "seeing" that others are working as well.On the semi-async stuff: If I am stuck with a task I probably can grab a coffee and eat a snack or check mails, but I would like to get some feedback soon, while I'm in the state of mind of that task. Else I switch completely to a different task, which has effort to come back on speed on the initial task on e the feedback is there. And if there is some clarification needed, it is good if all parties focus on that topic for a while, till key questions are cleared and everybody is unblocked. Of course it is a balance. | |
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I agree. Async communication is hard. Humans are not equipped for this. We are limited in our focus and prioritization ability. It is the same reason calling someone on the phone gets you results and information 10x faster. | |
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Fully async is hard; I prefer it however a lot of people do not. So I adapt to the timezone of who I work with as I am usually the most flexible (no children and enough space to not disturb my wife or dogs). I overlap significantly with Asia now and in other years with the US. Works well enough to not risk too much change. | |
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I think the issue is coordination costs. In fact, Coase's entire theory of the firm is predicated that they exist to minimize coordination costs. I think it is interesting to think about this shift (and the remote from work phenomena as a whole), as adaptations that are essentially following a drastic reduction in coordination costs. More of our work can be asynchronous, done from disparate places, communication tools are infinitely better, etc. If you take the theory seriously, all else equal, you'd expect smaller company sizes, remote work weeks, and more generous time off. But that you'd still have a sense of needing to know "when it happens" equally makes sense given that coordination costs for a lot of these scenarios haven't reached zero (i.e. I can decide to work Tuesday but if I need Bob and he's decided to not work Tuesday that's a problem. Yes, maybe we could work something out individually, but if this happens enough times, and with enough people, its more efficient for the company as a whole to dictate a schedule when we can reasonably expect folks to be available) | |
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How much are you "supposed to achieve"?----- Edit Since some of the replies seem to have missed what I was alluding to, I want to put here what I replied below: Sprint goals are based on capacity, which is loosely defined by how much your team works. Defining how much you need to work by basing it on how much you should achieve, which is based on a number defined by how much you roughly work, is circular reasoning. | |
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> How muchSome jobs are process oriented in which the value contributed is in volume and efficiency. >> achieve what I'm supposed to achieve Other jobs are development oriented in which value contributed in defining the process or the end result of the process. It seems like the former is more amenable to "regular hours" and the latter to great swings in hours spent in effort directly related to a specific purpose. | |
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Incredibly difficult to quantify, but there are heuristics.Look at what your peers with a similar level of experience are doing. Look at what you're committing to do during sprint planning or 1:1s with your manager. (Assuming you're in a reasonable organization with a healthy workload.) Anything above that is deserving of a raise or promotion. | |
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Hence the need for good managers to set expectations and manage timelines. | |
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Sprint goals are based on capacity, which is loosely defined by how much your team works. Defining how much you need to work by basing it on how much you should achieve, which is based on a number defined by how much you (and your team) work, is circular reasoning. | |
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World Without Email by Cal Newport talks a bit about the challenges here.Specifically, Peter Drucker advocated for autonomy in knowledge work. However, this often leads to a lot of creep around meetings, Slack pings, and other context-switching activities. Cal, in the book, talks about the need to have good, organization level policies AND org-level processes to actively align to the work traits that the org needs. | |
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Not switching yet, but evaluating the switch. Will be interesting to know how it goes. | |
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I love working hard. I actually do. 16 hours a day for 30 days straight doing meaningful stuff -- bring it on. (I'm exaggerating the actual numbers slightly here, but you know)But when I am in "the office" for 7 hours every day for a month doing chore sh*t or nothing, I get absolutely bored and my efficiency drops to perhaps 5% of the optimal. The only way to get past that is a vacation where I do not think about work (in the office sense) for 1-2 weeks. 4 day work week might postpone how fast that getting bored happens, but it does not fix this. So, what I need and I suspect perhaps some other people need also is a society where one can say "hey people, it seems like I'm in the 5% zone. I'm gonna go away for two weeks, see you then." and everyone will think "he's a good worker/person/human because he knows how to keep himself in optimal working condition". | |
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I like the idea of having a four day work week that everyone is expected to work and one day that is a flexible optional deep work type of day. No required meetings and no shipping etc. The idea being that people can choose to take it off if they want to or work half the day etc. | |
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Former and maybe future startup CEO here. It’s funny because I’ve always subscribed to the notion that I’d rather work 6 days a week than 4, so long as I can pick when and where I work.And likewise, to trust the team to make decisions as to how they approach work, so long as they fulfill their commitments and remain sustainably ambitious. That is, I personally have always enjoyed a lot of autonomy. I work harder when I have flexibility. I feel happier and healthier when I don’t try to construct huge brick walls between personal and work, but rather accept the two ebb and flow. But to each their own, and I certainly support companies sending more time back to people. Heavens know software has given us plenty of productivity gains in the last 30 years. | |
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The four-day workweek is intriguing. I worked for the American Red Cross for a year shortly after college. My boss there was excellent and flexible with my work schedule. I was able to leave early to run track with a coach, and then come back in and finish up any work I still had. It made me much more productive and they got way more work from me than if I had to be there all day, every day. More companies should trust their employees to get the work done. | |
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I would just like to say that in a world of SaaS SLAs, remote-first, and the specter of a 4 day work week, that what we actually need is a better way for people to collaborate when not colocated in time and space.I shouldn't be limited to banker's hours for doing things, especially if that now means a 3 day weekend. What really should happen is that some of us should be working on Saturday but not Monday, or at 8 am versus 8 pm. Otherwise 4 day work weeks just become 32 hours + permanent on-call, which is worse than nothing. | |
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I don't want to work more, I want to work less. The 4x32 would be a start, but I don't want to spend my life "working" when I could be "living". | |
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I hope this change is 4 days, 8 hours per day, no pay cut. | |
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Maybe it's just me but it seems as if a four day work week would almost have to come at the expense of a larger basket of time off that you can take when you want to. Which, in general, isn't a tradeoff I would like--nor, I imagine, would many people who prefer to take trips rather than having more free time around their home. | |
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I get 5 weeks of PTO (25 days, or 200 hours) now*. If I worked 4x10 weeks, I'd expect the most fair equivalent amount of PTO would be 5 weeks (now 20 days, still 200 hours).On one hand, that is fewer Mondays or Wednesdays that you could take off, but it seems a more than fair trade, given that you don't ever have to take a Friday off. Indeed, if the employer said "now that we have 4 day weeks, we're taking away 10 days of PTO, leaving you with 15 (150 hours instead of 200)", I'd then view that as something taken away. * It's possible that it's actually 24 days, not 25, and I'm too lazy to chase it down in the employee handbook. For this post, it's 25. :) | |
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So is it 4/10 or 4/9 or 4/8? | |
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I'd take any of those over 5/8 | |
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With two small kids I'd much rather have 5/8 instead of 4/10 so I can spend more time with them every day. I don't know how I feel about 4/9. | |
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Why not 4x6? Seems much nicer and I'll get just as much done as 5x8. | |
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4 day work week is the new remote. | |
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Do they work more hours per day? | |
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Honestly why not just drop a day and make it four eight hour days fully remote. | |
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Smart move – Bolt just jumped to the top of the work-for list for me. | |
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This is basically like the famous "20% time" but way better | |
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Why is the 4 day week always talked about but never the 9 day fortnight? I feel like that would be far easier to pull off | |
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The amount of earned media for this company is quite amazing for something that really isn't that novel imho. | |
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It's perfectly fine to ask the same question to a new audience. There might be different answers. Not everyone saw it the first time.My answer to op, assuming they're not being facetious: - We need time to recharge and let our brains work asynchronously on problems. - We need more coordination and integration points with colleagues. If we're steamrolling ahead, there's little chance to coordinate. - Quality of work begins to suffer after a certain point and reaches diminishing returns. - Expending that much effort at once, repeatedly, likely leads to incredible burnout. - Personally, the will to do Herculean tasks isn't a renewable resource you can tap into week over week. It happens, but it depletes. There have to be breaks. | |
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I think that over time, the Overton window of what's acceptable will slowly shrink to 4 hours a week. But it'll be the optionality of work, like the 4-hour-work week, rather than a work-to-survive model we currently live in | |
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What would help me at my job is just having the benefits/money to feel appreciative of the job. Instead I feel exploited. The easiest way is 4-10s. Working 8-6 daily and having a 3 day workweek would make me so much happier with my life. I would LOVE to have 3 days with my family, and would likely never leave the job. | |
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I didn’t even know anyone responded. Thanks | |
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Why five ? why not a seven day week? | |
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I'm sure people said the same thing when we went from a 7 day workweek to a 5 day workweek. | |
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Sometimes it blows my mind that every 5 days I get two days off. You're off almost 30% of every week by default. | |
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No thanks, I'll take a 7-day workweek, 12 hours per day. | |
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Proposal: switch to a four day work week, but everyone has to do community service of their choice once a month on the 5th day. Thoughts? | |
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this would be fine for factory work, but I don't think it would be effective for knowledge work where most people can only consistently grind out maybe 3-5 hours of "real" work in terms of coding/writing/whatever. I think this is pretty commonly acknowledged on HN that nobody is grinding out 8 hours of hardcore coding every dayWorking 4 days for 10 hours is going to result in reduced output for the company, but better for the individual who wants to work on their side project with a fresh mind 3 days per week. I'd love it as an employee. Other obvious issue is that the rest of the world is pretty much working 5 days, so you risk losing deals and delaying all sorts of stuff over weekends and things like that | |
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I've said this before, but I find the belief that 4-day work weeks are broadly supported / feasible to be a bit of the typical tech-world conceit or the bubble tech people live in. Or maybe it's just in advanced heavily intangible-services-based economies.If you imagine this being applied to everything in the corporate/services world (and work is not "divisible"), would you be happy to have businesses closed 1 additional day per week? The DMV closed on Mondays -- but the fees and pay of employees remain the same? How about if prices go up by 20% to pay for the cost of having a 4 day week? Your plumber or car mechanic or doctor having 20% fewer available times to see you? The idea of the 4 day work week where people can do all that they do now, but be more efficient about it in 4 days instead, is something exclusively a privilege that white collar workers can even consider. | |
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People said all the same things about the 5 day work week before it was introduced. And the 8 hour day. IMO the economy absolutely can support it, but it may require some wealth distribution to make it work. | |
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If it's not doable in the age of fiat and 10-20% of the workforce actually producing things we actually need (food, housing), and doing it at extreme scale.. then it'll never happen.What I mean to say is that it is doable. Most of us are doing work that serves no real need other than contrived needs. It's absurd to think that given no one dies if I don't do my job, that we can't go to 4-10s. I could die tomorrow myself, and nothing changes. That's how inconsequential many employees and thus businesses are today. | |
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Why would business be closed? The workers just get scheduled less often.Part of the 4 day workweek idea is that we're not actually realizing the benefits of technological advances, instead of having the same output but working less were working more and outputting more. Self employed contractors like plumbers are free to do what ever they want | |
