I find it odd that everyone here is talking about productivity. Although I guess it's to be expected since posts about increasing productivity are popular in HN; lots of people here focusing on their careers I suppose.
Personally I find we work way too many hours. We spend the good part of 5 days a week (if we're lucky) at work, often literally all the daylight hours, at least in winter. I have to take my daughter very early in the morning to the nursery, then I can't see her until the evening.
I want to believe that future generations will look back and find this unconceivable, and I hope AI shows us the way.
It's so internalised that people gatekeep working long and hard...
I assume the "commute -> work -> chill -> sleep" cycle is doing a lot of work, you basically have no time to even think about what you're doing. Add some kids, a mortgage, health issues, it's the perfect cocktail. The "work -> vacation" cycle is also a good one, you can rationalise wasting 3-6 months in a work you don't enjoy to have a few weeks of peace (and spend all your money so you have a "good" reason to go back to work)
In a way it's also more pleasing to be fully invested in the rat race, once you start to want get out of it you'll hate every single second of your work week wondering where we as a specie fucked up so bad
I think you're right - the average person absolutely works more hours than is healthy or most beneficial to the true, human experience.
I would bet many people agree with you, too! Even many people in these threads.
I think what you may be seeing (I'm speaking for myself, I suppose?) is people who've thought about it for a long while, and we have to think about it in ways we can introduce and fight for that stance with our bosses, or with our shareholders, etc, since those are the people we have to convince, not the people in the trenches doing the work.
For myself, I have to operate as both my boss - trying to make enough money to continue or elevate my desired way of life - and myself the person - trying to live life to the most joyful and fullest.
People spend all their lives doing pointless work, accumulating wealth, then have nothing to spend it on so buy something like a car they don't need (like an SUV).
It's odd there aren't more people questioning this. Wouldn't they rather enjoy their lives while they're young and not worry about having tons of disposable income when they're old?
I guess there's something about security that drives people to the latter. Also I feel like there's an addiction and/or conditioning element to it. I think people are scared of what will happen if certain people (thick people) no longer have to work. What will they do during the day etc?
> It's odd there aren't more people questioning this.
I’ve been questioning this for a long time. It’s not an enviable position: it’s isolating (very few people understand), it’s very hard to keep any kind of salaried position (since you’re not a devoted doormat), and it’s mentally challenging because you can’t ever really feel safe nor fit in.
It won't be my kids even if I have them; they won't have the money to take care of me if wealth inequality in my country doesn't improve dramatically and rapidly
Henry Ford claimed his motivation for instituting the five-day week was so that people would want to go out driving on their newly available Saturdays, and buy a Ford for their leisure time. Which is some weird voodoo when you think about it. Produce extreme volumes, lower margins, lower production (per worker) and increase demand - huh?
I'd like to believe this too, but given that medieval peasants and antique slaves worked more or less the same hours as we do I'm quite pessimistic. Whenever we automate something they just come up with a new bullshit job that adds nothing to the standards of living, instead of reducing the workload for everyone.
When people didn't have ipad pros but could afford rent/mortgage and 3 kids on a single paycheck ?
We're flooded in useless shit but can't afford the basics. So yes, underfloor heating, smart light bulbs and google maps are great but is it really all there is to life
The real cost of food has steadily decreased for the last 200 years. (Much of the decrease was before 1980, though.) Here in Canada, one hour of labour at minimum wage, will buy you a 10 kilogram bag of flour, or 4 litres of cooking oil. That's enough calories for days. That is insane buying power compared to the historical norm, right into the 20th century.
My grandfather was born in western Europe, in what is today one of the wealthiest countries in the world. He was one of 14 children (of whom 8 survived), born to an illiterate peasant on a rural farm. This was pretty normal. You may have a retroactively gentrified image of what America was like in the 1940s - nearly half of homes didn't have an indoor toilet or electricity at the start of that decade.
I'm 200% positive that both my grandparents and great grandparents had it better in pretty much every aspect (job security, housing, future perspectives) than we currently do. We have unlimited bread and circuses but scratch the surface and we're worse in every other aspects: I couldn't afford 14 kids even if 10 died instantly.
Housing is insanely expensive. in US, healthcare costs are through the roof as well.
The only way I see long term housing becoming affordable is heavy taxes on single family homes as investment properties. Also open up zoning and allow builders to build.
Also naturally less kids, means less humans, means less demand.
Unless your great grandparents were born after world war 2, they had it worse in every aspect. People starved in the Great Depression. The only people who starve today are those who refuse to ask for help.
Infant mortality back then was atrocious, my grandpa had two (out of 13) siblings die at birth. He grew up working on the small family farm that was the family’s primary food source with the little excess produced sold to buy supplies for it. A bad harvest meant the whole family starving for months. Healthcare was essentially non-existent.
Step into the 50s during the baby boom and the huge economic boon that came from the post war rebuild and things started to look up, but they were still crap compared to today.
The houses they could so easily afford looked quaint but were absolutely trash quality on average. The ones left today are the nicest from that era. The average ones were gone by the 70s. That’s available today too, go get a manufactured home and it will be roughly the same quality but with better insulation, plumbing and electrical.
>I couldn't afford 14 kids even if 10 died instantly.
You absolutely could if you fed, housed, treated, and schooled them the way they were back when this was common.
Job security was also terrible back then. There was a reason unions were more popular.
You’re really getting a rose colored view of the past and I’m not sure where it’s from.
There are people starving now in my community in Canada and it's not a problem of pride or asking for help... It is due to multiple issues interacting and compounding. Limited pools of volunteers for the food bank to be open, lack of funding for non profits that help with food security, increased costs of food due to remoteness, lack of appropriate housing and transport esp. for elders who end up isolated, kids bullying each other when accepting free meals at school (that was solved by making meals free for all at least) etc. I myself only started scratching the surface of the problem really.
Just need to finally tax the rich, all major human affecting industries made publicly owned or heavily regulated; water, food, housing, internet, healthcare, etc.
I couldn't afford my great grandparents house on either side of the family, I'm in tech and don't have kids (they had 5 and 2). I can't even qualify for a mortgage for an equivalent house today in the same city
Get off your fucking ass and move like everyone back then did. They didn’t all sit around and cry that they couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan where their great grandparents lived.
Imagine if the standards of living goes up even more, we have x50 better medicine, huge houses for everybody, fine silken clothes, wall-sized TVs, and gourmet truffle soup every day of the week. But everybody is still working long hours, and only get to see their kids in the morning and a few hours before bedtime.
But no worries, even more improvements are on the horizon. Within 20 years, you'll get all that, but it's gold plated, and encrusted with diamonds too. People live until they are 200, houses rotate to always face the sun, and TVs are now so big they wrap 360 degrees around the entire room's walls. But you still gotta spend most of your waking hours in an office, copying numbers from one excel to another.
Is that really that good of an improvement? Do we measure quality of living purely in material wealth, and not in the time we get to spend with loved ones, or our passions?
In the distant past, a huge proportion of our lives was spent just making sure you had food to survive on. The part where we "spend a huge portion of our lives" seems to stick, even though food is no longer scarce.
I don’t disagree with your statements, but anyone at anytime can choose to opt for more time and less gold plating. There are lots of people making these choices - check out the r/FIRE, r/LeanFIRE, r/FatFIRE communities on Reddit.
> I don’t disagree with your statements, but anyone at anytime can choose to opt for more time and less gold plating.
"Anyone" unless you're part of the bottom 80% earners, unless FIRE means being homeless you'll need more money than what most people can attain if they saved 100% of their paycheck for 30 years
You can live on half the space as average people and eat half as expensive food, that lets you FIRE on an average wage. Doing that puts you much closer to typical living standards 60 years ago where people ate home cooked food and lived in much smaller homes.
> You can live on half the space as average people and eat half as expensive food, that lets you FIRE on an average wage
Not even close, unless your version FIRE is retiring at 63 instead of 67 and still get 80% of your pension
Average salary in germany: 42k gross, 23k net
Renting a small place : 500 euros (let's say it includes heating, electricity/gas)
Let's say you only eat potatoe and drink rain water: 3 * 1kg * 2 euros/kilos = 180 euros
Good job, after 15 years you have 210k euros you can retire at ~35 years old. This money will allow you to buy a flat in a ghost town and to continue your potatoe fuelled life until you die of old age at ~90
Now remember you have to pay water/electricity/gas, health insurance, property tax, &c.
I don't know about Europe, but in the US, there are various social safety nets that work perfectly with early retirement with some planning (a topic which comes up in "povertyFIRE" circles). There's been a shift (especially in Democrat-run states) over the last decade or two toward getting rid of asset tests for subsidies, so with planning you can get things like free healthcare, reduced electricity bills, free internet, subsidized home renovations for energy efficiency, etc. while having your assets grow in tax-shielded retirement accounts. Universities for your kids generally have asset tests for subsidies, but many of them exclude your home+retirement accounts.
You can also switch to part-time in a low-stress role rather than retire completely ("baristaFIRE" or "coastFIRE"). The trick is that you don't want health benefits from your employer so that you can get much better ones from the state instead. Usually part-time doesn't qualify for benefits so that works well.
"free" health care and other benefits aren't free though, they're paid by taxes on working people, if everyone (or even 10%) retires early and ask for them it doesn't work
I'm not saying it's impossible but it certainly isn't "anyone at anytime". In France for example 48% of people earn bellow 2000 euros per months. If you play the game you have an OK life with health care, a good flat, a car, whatever... but if you want to retire before the legal age it's next to impossible, you just can't build enough savings. If you work in a big city you'll never be able to afford a flat there, if you buy cheap property far away you'll need to pay rent in the city + mortgage.
Best case scenario you'll need a 20 years mortgage, most likely 30. You cannot be in debt to more than 30% of your net income, meaning 2k net per month gives you a 600 euros mortgage, assuming 0% mortgage you can't even afford a 150k euros property over 20 years
Agreed, I find it astounding how so many people seem to be ok with devoting almost all their useful hours of life to work (although maybe they aren't ok but cope / convince themselves somehow).
My weekday: get up and immediately go to work, come home, have about 2 -3 hours spare time, sleep, repeat.
In that 2-3 hours I'm supposed to source healthy food, exercise, contact family, maintain friendships, maintain a romantic relationship, do laundry, keep the house clean, volunteer / contribute to society, meditate, read, do endless life admin, plan for the future, and finally relax.
Then on the weekend, at least 1 day catching up on all the garbage that inevitably couldn't be done during the week. And maybe I'm left with 1 day out of 7 to do things I actually want to do (if I have the energy left).
And let's not even discuss the range of crap tasks that must be done during the 0 business hours I have free: posting mail, going to the doctor, getting an electrician or plumber, contacting the real estate agent, contacting any business really. Lucky I can work remotely or else do any of these I need to take half a day off work.
It's no wonder people have trouble with anxiety and sleep in modern times. There's literally not enough fucking time in the day to do everything which needs to be done.
Even if you try to minimise and optimise every part of your life, you still barely have enough time to enjoy yourself.
And we are living this life for what exactly? So in 50 years I still won't own a home and the environment will be irreparably destroyed?
This is a cultural thing, I think. I'm proud to work more hours than my boss expects. My relative never brag about the number of days off they have, but will quickly tell you that they only took one week off last year. The expected reaction is: wow, you're a great worker.
Companies are adopting the 4 day work week, but the numbers are still super small, even in tech industry that are most open to these type of experiments. Nevertheless it's happening and it's a movement with a lot of supporters around the world. For anyone interested here is a directory of 200 4-day week companies I work on: https://okjob.io/companies/
New company submissions are very welcome.
When I was nomadding around SE Asia, I worked 5 hours a day, 6 days a week (so I had time to do all the cool stuff in the places I was travelling through). That worked really well - I was at least as productive as I normally am in a standard 40-hour week.
A decade ago I was working 5 days a week from an open-plan office, and mentally clocked out around 2pm each day. Office culture meant I was just moistening a chair from then until it was acceptable to leave around 6pm.
For the last few years I've been working 35-45 hour weeks from home, especially during COVID, and that was fine productivity-speaking.
I'm currently working 4 days from a co-working space, and 1 day from home. I know my productivity drops when I'm at home, but I'm not sure why this changed in the last year or so.
I think a 4-day week would probably work well for me at the moment. But I'm not sure - I could end up with Tuesdays looking a lot like Mondays do at the moment. Or the extra day to do all the other stuff would be amazing and I'd really focus on the other four days. shrug
Developer productivity is a strange beast. Can't measure it. Can't control it directly. I know it when I see it, but I couldn't explain why or how.
I was nomadding in Istanbul, working 4h per day, whenever I wanted to. This was the perfect setup. Unfortunately, as one gets older the classical developer role is not really possible anymore. Now I work 8 to 9 hours, 2 days in the office per week, 3 days at home. While it is better than the normal 9 to 5, quality of life really suffers. But I think it is mostly about that the 4 hours I could do whenever I wanted without human contact, just deploy and make it work. Now I have more of a management lead role. Maybe I should switch back to pure development... But I am afraid, because I saw it, at least in Germany, this means it is going downhill career-wise with age.
I'm in my 50's, was nomadding around SE Asia when I turned 50. So yeah, age isn't it ;)
Getting into management is definitely more of a hours thing. But manager productivity is different; it's about talking to lots of people and not maintaining focus on one thing for hours. It's a shit-load easier to do from anywhere. But at the same time, it's definitely time-intensive. When I was CEO of a 200+ organisation I worked 10+ hours a day. The hours were a lot easier, though. Less hard thinking and focused concentration, more half-hour meetings which seemed to be mostly about listening to other people tell me why they decided to do something.
I was in Germany for COVID - I can see why you say this. But that's still only true if you stay in large organisations. In smaller orgs you get more flexibility, even in Germany. You can still become an expert developer and get the decent money without getting into management. Having said that, it is easier to climb the salary ladder if you get into management. But you can never go back; it's very hard to get back into a developer role if you've been a manager. Beware of what you wish for.
Thanks for the comment, this sounds actually kind of great. This year I'll enter my 40s so maybe in the next five years I'll start to switch to smaller companies. I really miss the builder schedule.
Sorry I could write it more clear I suppose; I meant 4 hour daily work 6 days almost has the same productivity (if not more) as 8 hour daily work for 4 days.
If you consider time for lunch and productivity decline in long working hours; having usable free time everyday without spending all your mental energy has huge benefits.
Last Sunday, I was walking down the street with my kids when a man bumped into me trying to cross the street. He turned around to apologize and we had a discussion at the red light. He was working a 12 hour shift and was now on his break which he had to rush to get to the store. He said memorial weekend was extremely busy. "After that we will go back to regular busy."
When we talk about 4 day workweek, it's for some specific jobs. Not for that guy. Culturally, at least in the US, we would be happier if some people worked 7 days, 24 hours a day.
Ex: wouldn't it be better if the bank was open after work? Wouldn't it be better if USPS would show up on Sunday? Isn't it annoying that Chick-fil-A is closed on sunday?
Personally , I would love to work 4 days a week, but if the people that package and ship the product I help develop worked only 4 days, we would have angry customers. They will switch to our competitor who will brag about faster delivery.
4 day workweek is a cultural problem. We will have to give up on our instant gratification mentally to make it a reality.
I think there's a trade off between keeping business open for longer hours with more staff working on smaller shifts vs keeping business open 9-5 with one shift of workers to worry about. Managing more workers is costly, plus you pay more expenses in utilities etc when business is running longer than 9-5.
4 day work weeks will be for the elite. While those in service jobs will probably end up with two 30 hour a week jobs. The definition for full time won’t change, but skilled workers will get full time benefits at 32 hours, everyone else will continue to get screwed.
It’s kind of like unlimited PTO. It sounds good on paper but some people will receive outsized benefits compared to others.
It doesn't __have__ to be this way. We have had record profits across most of the industries were workers are the most abused. We could legislate their lives better and treated with more respect.
I agree with you, but I imagine I’m a bit more pessimistic. I don’t like anything about the above scenario, but it’s what I believe would be the likely outcome of 4 day work weeks.
> Ex: wouldn't it be better if the bank was open after work? Wouldn't it be better if USPS would show up on Sunday? Isn't it annoying that Chick-fil-A is closed on sunday?
Of course. But that has nothing to do with 4-day work week. There are classes of jobs that should be desynced from each other - like e.g. stores and banks and barbershops, etc. should be open outside of core office hours, etc. We just can't figure out how to force society into running on shifts.
No, the market cant handle that right now. A 4 day work week happens because of market forces. Companies don't need to offer perks unless they cant attract enough applicants or retain their top talent. We just saw this last year that companies done need anymore applicants. We are also seeing now that companies don't even care which part of their talent they keep.
There might be a class divide coming that would include 4 day work weeks, but the vast majority of us scrubs are going to be 5 days a week for a while to come. At a minimum we are going to have to ride out this financial crisis for the next decade.
The entire point of this is that productivity does not go down in a 4 day workweek and retention goes up. As an employer, you get the same amount of output, happier employees, and better retention. Everyone says they’re a data driven business until the data tells them something they don’t believe.
One thing I learned working at a desk next to some marketing agency people is, if neither you nor your customer understand statistics, the data will just tell the story that makes both of you happy, and that keeps the money flowing.
> The entire point of this is that productivity does not go down in a 4 day workweek
Just an anecdote, but: my productivity definitely took a huge hit when I reduced my hours to 4days/week. All of the "working harder/more efficiently/more focused" doesn't help if you already worked hard/efficiently/focused. If you have a job with a lot of slack/downtime/waiting time... Sure. But sometimes, working 20% less means that 20% less work gets done.
It's the same as working from home. Some people are way more productive at home, away from all the distractions in the office. Others barely get any work done at all at home.
Most people are nowhere close to working fully focused 8 hours a day, and may also benefit from more time to recharge. Others benefit less. The average probably matters more for the company (also shorter work hours will improve retention, or allow you to pay lower wages to compete etc).
It's nowhere near the same. Changing locations is a minimal effect compared to working a full day more than another person. There are many jobs where hours worked are almost equivalent to work performed. Think of any manager spending their week interviewing candidates for hiring. One less day means less candidates interviewed.
Why would retention change if everyone works 4 days a week? At that point it is no longer a perk, you get it everywhere, so retention should be as before and the advantages of 4 day weeks is now gone.
I am a little baffled by the idea that job satisfaction is comparative. Three days a week to do what one wants and needs to do is life enhancing for me, even if everyone else has it and retention is a function of happiness.
Because people that are happy at their job tend to stay. Your point is "so what if they are miserable right now? They will be miserable elsewhere, too". That might be, but people will still try to get away from you, hoping it is better elsewhere.
With that argument retention would already be great with 5 day workweek since it is so much better than 6, but you don't see that, retention is really horrible today.
Management seems determined to mandate RTO. I am not seeing a flood of alternative perks being offered with suddenly being forced to waste 5+ hours of my life each week commuting.
Seems you think that a 4 day work week is paid as 5 is currently. I don’t see why that’d be necessarily true. In that scenario, it’s kind of like a part time worker and I can see many businesses finding appeal in that.
I know many people who do it in Germany, above a certain size companies can't really deny you if you ask for part time (unless you're critical to the system and have to be there every single day), of course you get the pay cut that goes with it
I bet many businesses would love that. More places of employment start acting like Walmart, where you have to be management to get a full time job with benefits. Everyone else has a shifting 30-35 hour schedule that makes it effectively impossible to have a predictable, normal life outside of work. And no benefits for part time workers either. And the pay is so crappy food stamps are practically mandatory.
Let me understand this: the state is actually indirectly subventioning Walmart with those food stamps right? It allows them to give crappy wages because the difference is supported with food stamps paid directly to the employees. And we still call this market economy and capitalism and and and.
And yet, I only ever hear rants about the unemployed being parasites, but never the same about corporations despite them getting way more tax dollars when you add up subventions, grants, tax cuts and indirect support like described above and letting others pay for the damage they do to the environment.
But the amount of work you're able to do is. And companies need to make money, they're not s charity. I took a 20% paycut to work only 4 days a week. And I think that is fair, because my output definitely did decrease by 20%. This might not be true for everyone, but all of the "working more efficiently" thing doesn't really help you if you were already working pretty efficiently 5 days a week.
> but I'm guessing you got slightly more done on the other days.
Or slightly less due to having to spend more time on overhead and reading up on things. There is a minimum amount of time you have to spend just to be ready to do your job, many current jobs are so poorly managed that most of their time is spent that way.
I know there are multiple ways this could be implemented, but the thing I'm hearing most is you'd probably work longer hours during those 4 days, which is a tradeoff I might be cool with. Otherwise, just chopping a day off the work week and not reducing my pay sounds great, too. I'm less motivated and productive on a Friday as it is, because my cherished 48 hours is finally within reach.
Kind of, I thought the reason was because productivity dropped after longer hours.
But mostly, the idea it gives you 8h work, 8h sleep, 8h for self seems like rationalizing and not even entirely true if you commute, unless you take half your commute out of work time...
I worked this schedule for many years (not in tech, "skilled" labour) and it's amazing. This was a 7 day a week operation and it worked quite well in terms of crossover here too. Each person had a fixed schedule but the day of the week for each person would vary so there'd never be a full "shift change over", so to speak, but always some overlap between the shifts and it helped with information exchange greatly. The guy working Monday-Thursday would overlap with people starting their weeks from Tuesday to Thursday, for example, so there was always a "working knowledge" of what was going on.
It worked well on the management side of things too, but with an actual "changeover", as you'd have a Monday-Thursday supervisor and another Thursday-Sunday supervisor, with one day a week of overlap however that Sunday-Monday changeover didn't have an overlap (although there was a lot of OT on this job so it did frequently happen).
I am working 75% since about 7 years now. However, I did not chose 4 days, but 6 hours (and 5 days). I like this much more because I can more evenly distribute my workload and I have a more regular schedule, including recovering from work on a daily basis. 6 hours is the maximum I found I can concentrate and be productive. Afterwards, my output always decreased significantly and I was mainly wasting time.
I never got it to work during various economic cycles where they owed me more than they could afford, but I tried once or twice to go to 30-some hours and it seemed to me the best solution would be to come in late on Mondays.
That was an at age when I still tried to take weekend trips and if anything unplanned happens it can make the return trip very stressful, which colors the entire experience if you don’t have to be in until noon you get to use more of Sunday without worrying about logistics.
I work in a remote friendly company (I can but don’t have to work fully remote). In addition to being remote friendly, they are also schedule friendly. If I have to take two hours for a personal matter during the day, I just say I’m afk on a chan on slack and I take two hours, the company trusts me to just do my job, time management is up to me.
Honestly with this setup I don’t need a four days week.
Just the other day I asked my boss if I can reduce my hours a bit, essentially giving me a 4-day workweek, just that even those days have slightly reduced hours (8->7 hours, though the lunch break is 1 hour, so really it's down from 9->8 hours. Subtext: I don't consider the forced 1 hour lunch break a good thing in my position BTW. It's okay when working from home because you can actually relax, but working from home doesn't always work so well in embedded software development)
Personally I think it'll improve my productivity because it'll give me more time to spend on "hobby" software development, which should improve my general motivation and in turn improve my productivity at work. Well that's what I'm thinking anyway. I've been wanting to do this for a couple years, and finally it's likely that I'll manage to pull it off!
Course, my salary will go down a bit, but it's probably high enough at the moment.
The ai leaders should come out and say… “Ai advancement is so powerful (as we have been saying and hyping for our shareholders) we now will offer our beloved employees - 4 day workweeks, as the productivity gain has removed 1 days worth of work for the work week”
And so will begin our fever dream tech utopia
Everyone checks out on Fridays with the exception of the rare fire.
But, crucially, we're all still present or within arm's reach. It seems more likely that we'll get 5 short days rather than 4 long ones so that everyone is on hand should things arise while, at the same time, acknowledging that long days become quickly inefficient.
Eh, it's not really the same, because you need to be available. You can't go do something outside and be unreachable even if you're mentally checked out.
Here in the Netherlands plenty of companies already switched to a 36 hour fulltime workweek, and I know of at least one large company (15.000+ employees) went to a 34 hour workweek. And all those companies pay the same as 40 hour companies.
Was it actually applied?
I find work in Europe had more social breaks during the day, but my 35h schedule (working 40 and getting paid catch-up days off to be used monthly) still ended up looking like 70h weeks reported as 40 with no extra catch-up days and no overtime pay.
Contrast to Canada, my 40h week does average to 40h and if I do overtime it is paid (provided I get it approved ahead of time) and I get to take that back as unpaid time off later. Though I am told to report my real hours in my timesheet provided they are 8h per day. So not my real hours.
A lot of this comes from being salaried vs. hourly, but I'm not really hourly other than on paper. As salaried I was expected to do a lot more unpaid overtime though under the guise of flexibility. Oddly the flexibility was rarely in my favor :p
I know people think a 4 day work week is the bees knees, but I'm not sure I would enjoy working a 10 hour day (assuming we are still expected to work a nominal 40 hour week). With commute, it means 12 hours+ a day, so less time for fitness or post-work de-stress.
As it is, the current 8 hour work day is really a 9 hour work day since lunchtime is not considered part of that 8 hour day, so if employees take that into consideration, it becomes an 11 hour day (or 13+ hours including commute).
P.S. anybody remember when we used to also work saturdays? Can't be just me...
So we should make everyone schedule 24/7, that way there is no unofficial overtime at all.
Unofficial overtime is a problem, but clearly the solution is not to make the official schedules longer. The solution is to actually do something about unofficial overtime.
I guess it's a stopgap solution so that more of the hours get paid at least, though I agree the problem is unofficial overtime issues should be solved to begin with.
The "4 day work week", as I understand it, is not 4x10s. It's 4x8's to reduce overall stress and mental load while still retaining the same amount of productivity.
Personally, for my own personal startup, I work 4-5 days a week, 4-6 hours a day, so 20-30 hours a week and I'm getting more work done than I did in 4-8s.
The real reduction of stress is invaluable for me to make good decisions and write code both fast, well and with minimal bugs (which just mean more wasted time).
4 days a week is great. I’ve dropped down to 4 days work (4x8hours paid), and look after my son one day a week. My wife has switched to doing compounded hours on 4 days (4x10hrs paid) and looks after our son on another day.
We both get close to an extra 2 months a year with our son, which is phenomenal.
One thing I wouldn’t recommend is having a Wednesday off - it’s what I’ve had to do, and I find it a big interruption to my week & flow, a Monday or Friday would be better.
It depends. My brother worked a 4 day week when he had his daughter, same reasons as you. He loved taking Wednesday off, since he never had more than 2 consecutive days in the office He really doesn't like offices...
Kind of wish employers would use this to hire more people to get additional productivity. But they probably won't do that, which shows how strong their inclination is to only retain employees that meet established preferences.
Treating healthcare as a benefit (as in the US) also works against expanding employment, as its a large fixed cost per employee that can't really be reduced.
Another part of this is that companies are in competition with each other. If company A reduces their workweek/hours but their competitor does not, then that might lead to them falling behind. It could be the difference between company A getting their new product out before company B which could theoretically mean the difference between launching a successful product and the company failing.
Whether this is how things actually work out...I'm not sure. It probably does in our short-term move fast economy over an economy that values long term investment, stability,\ and quality over quantity. To be able to switch to shorter work weeks, we also have to switch the economy to be more long-term oriented...which seems impossible after a decade of fake economy with free money getting everyone addicted to short-term games via gambling on startups and stock market.
I’m curious what the logical extreme of this is. Why 4 days? Why not 3 days? 2 days? 1 day? No days? When do we hit the equilibrium level between less work resulting in meaningfully less output? Were these jobs ever needed?
A friend of mine has this at her workplace and she loves it. She works 9 hours a day Monday through Thursday which at 36 hours isn't that far off from the 40 hours I put in over 5 days. I think anything beyond that starts to get ridiculous. Imagine working 11 to 12 hours a day for a three day work week, seems like that would just result in a lot of foot dragging to me.
Some jobs are thinking jobs, like software, accounting, screenwriting, basically the "creating for the first time" jobs.
Some jobs are rote work jobs - manufacturing jobs, warehousing jobs, etc.
Some jobs are butts-in-seats jobs, where you need a person physically there to "do the thing" - these are your customer-facing jobs. Your customer support, your banking teller jobs, etc.
Each of these jobs has a comfortable "max amount of continuous" work time for different people. Since I can speak to it, in software, I'm only productive 4-6 hours a day with the rare day I enter obscene levels of flow and disappear for like 9 hours. I imagine many of the creative jobs are similar.
I suppose the implications for 3-4 day, 'very high hour count' work week, in general* is one of the positions that can handle operating in the specific way they need to work for that long.
* I understand that nursing is a 3-12's job. There's special details that make that the way it is - I think it has to do with nurse-patient changeover? I dunno, very outside my field.
What happens to the economy when the contract janitor and the coffee cart lady have their hours cut and now can no longer afford rent. They only have one free day a week so they can't find a second job.
There's already people with 2-3 part time jobs. I don't imagine if a 4 day work week became the norm, that suddenly it would become the only available option either...
Frankly after the pandemic aren’t we all going to learn humans can’t work all day and consume nothing. They need enough free time to actually buy and experience all this stuff we are toiling to create.
The pandemic gave a large number of people a vision of what __could__ be rather than what is, and those that have tasted freedom and goodness don't want to be caged in the exact ways they have been caged before.
I wouldn't mind 5 day work weeks nearly as much if they had a 3 day weekend. This isnt a serious suggestion, but an 8 day week where I felt like I had a block of actual away time would be such a killer improvement for me.
But I do hope I see a 4 day week in my lifetime. That would be massive.
No, we're not going to reach that point outside of sci-fi utopias. I don't believe even the 4-day workweek is going to become a thing. Any increase in productivity will be captured by the owners, it makes no sense to give it back to the workers in the form of free time.
Comrade, what about the A.I. already doing some of our work? I recently read only the title of an article here that pointed out that drawing leaves less of a carbon footprint when it is done by the A.I. It is not a long way from there to getting paid for not going to work. This is how A.I. kills you (3x), not with a laser gun, but with a lullaby.
Productivity has skyrocketed, we crossed ~ 20% of current GDP per capita around middle of the last century and we would be able to get by quite well with that. There would need to be many policy and cultural changes to do it but it's definitely collecitively a choice today more than anything else.
How we distribute the surplus of production is decided democratically even with the current main knobs (taxes, income transfers, regulation, etc). And of we're not limited to existing tunables. Exercising this choice would need to start by citizens becoming active with this of course.
Probably not. Not for skilled jobs anyway, unless you mean that "productivity increase" will negate the need for serious skills. School isn't where you learn your craft, it's at work. I can't make myself learn a new programming language outside of work. I've tried, but I glaze over very quickly. There must be a need for me to do something, and "I'd like to learn Rust" isn't a need. "My team needs this tool and are relying on me to build it" is a need. If I'm trying to do that and learn Rust at the same time, one day a week is useless. At that rate I'd be lucky to get it done in a quarter, and from one week to the next I'd have forgotten most of what I "learned" the preview week.
For me, 4 days is perfect. I get a three day weekend every weekend, but I don't actually dread Thursdays because I feel like a failure in work.
Not without a drop in living standard, no. If you're good with what was normal in the 1950s, we easily could. This will obviously keep going, in about 2060 you will probably be able to afford a 2020s standard of living on one day of work.
> Waiting six days to finish something because you didn’t get it done last time… that’s not gonna work
You'd hand off work, to humans and machines, with a bit of overlap to sync expectations. With enough automation, it becomes plausible. But not in the near future.
> You asked for a one day work week. You’re either idling your equipment
Why?
An automated factory that has a team come in once a week to monitor and maintain isn't beyond our current capabilities for several simple products. It's simply uneconomic. It's not unfeasible to imagine that changing in the future.
You’re having a very, very basic failure of logic.
The set of all coworkers who work the same day as me is disjoint to the set of all employees who work on days when I do not work. Because anyone who works on Monday by definition of a one day work week does not work on Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. if I see them at work today they will not be at work tomorrow.
The best I can do is if there are split shifts on the same day, where someone shows up to work a few hours before I leave. But if for instance the problem is that a requirement for my work won’t show up until tomorrow, now I have to communicate with them.
There are three options I see. The most likely is that my communication is one-shot through a computer system, where I can try to tell someone who works tomorrow what needs to be done, in which case the task will have a bimodal completion time of either 2 days or 8 days with very little in between. Second option is I can tell the late shift person who will have to play telephone with two or three more split shifts to make it around to tomorrow morning.
And the last option is that I’m communicating to my fellow coworkers on my days off. Which means I’m working multiple days a week. Which only counts as one day a week to managers who are touched in the head.
In summary, there are many, many things one can do with a >1.5 day work week that simply stop once you reach 1.0.
Just like research on X wonder drug cures y needs the mandatory [on nice] feels like 4 day work week articles need the mandatory [for the same pay as 5 days]
The point is not the productivity, the point is giving something to workers in exchange NOT pretending WFH, for me the answer is NO. In 2024 all jobs done at a desk should be REMOTE, I do not care about how many days per weeks or hours per day, I do REJECT to be geographically bound just to keep up the keynesian circus of digging a hole today, fill it tomorrow and dig again that is the modern city.
In the past we have had paper archives, expensive office machines to handle paper and so we are bound to the office, this is not true anymore and there is NO REASONS behind the desire of human slavery to keep up the dense city model, needed only by surveillance capitalism and big real estate businesses, practically incompatible with the Green New Deal.
4-day work week, benefits and so on are this: gift in exchange to remain bound to the office. Not something else.
Fun fact: a previous company I worked for denied my request for a 4-day workweek precisely because they were scared I'd work another job. I honestly just wanted more time to ride my bike.
Let me offer an intentionally shocking counterpoint:
The 4-day workweek only appears possible due to the peace divident, and the peace is rapidly coming to an end. We'll need the fifth, and maybe the sixth day of the week to produce shells, missiles, trucks, tanks, ships, planes, and to make up for the lost productivity of those who are on the battlefield.
What we really need to do is find a way to get the large nations to go to perpetual war with each other so that we can all live in miserable poverty and spend that beautiful economic output on mutilating random teenagers for no reason!
Personally I find we work way too many hours. We spend the good part of 5 days a week (if we're lucky) at work, often literally all the daylight hours, at least in winter. I have to take my daughter very early in the morning to the nursery, then I can't see her until the evening.
I want to believe that future generations will look back and find this unconceivable, and I hope AI shows us the way.