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Comment by aditya | Hacker News Reader

Ask your people? Most likely, everyone will want the day off. Also, 37signals does 4 day weeks and still produces enormous revenues...

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There is a huge difference between 37Signals and us form business point of view.

37Signals is a product company having successful products in the market already.

We are an IT service company whose revenue literally and linearly dependent on the number of hours we work.

So need optimized solution for company and for developers.

In the short term your revenue is linearly dependent on the number of hours worked, but in the long term it's a function of productivity. The focus should be on creating value not putting in hours because you can always increase your hourly rate, but you can not work 25 hours in a day. And revenue is meaningless, the only important number for a company is profit.

PS: You can add employees but foxconn's 920,000 employees generate around ~100 million in profit per year. Google's 26,316 employees generate around 80 times that much profit meaning they are generating ~ 2,800 times the profit per person.

Yes so for that only, we were thinking of investing 2 Saturdays in growth of individuals. This will require dedicated time and efforts from our side. We are willing to do that.

Everyone has chance of improvement and we believe by investing our own time may help individuals to improve themselves.

For e.g. Not every programmer has good writing skills or spoken english skills which is required for communicating with overseas client. We can spend time in improving that.

I am just arguing here to have fruitful discussion. I am just taking the opposite side right now so that we can uncover more points.

you will eventually need to go fixed fee and use intellectual property to do things faster. This will let you get bill rates in the 300-500/hour or higher range.

The downside is that you are solving the same problems over and over again.

My guess is that in 100 years, working 40 hours a week will be seen as barbaric.

I don't know. One does have to spend one's time doing something. There is a natural limit to how LITTLE I'd like to work, technology improvements notwithstanding. If I only "had to" work 1 day a month, I can't imagine being competent at anything or feeling like I was contributing to the world.

Right now, a 4-day work week sounds nice, but a 2-day work week sounds boring. So there's a balance somewhere, varying for each person and job. But 40 hours is certainly less than people used to spend farming. It used to be "6 days a week, work from sunup to sundown."

I find around a 32 hour work week is the sweet spot for me. I have been in the position of working less than that and I don't really find it rewarding. However, the few times where I have tried working 40 hours a week it has been ok for a few weeks and then I started to become unhappy and get pain in my body from sitting too much.

To the OP, if the Microsoft article inspired you, you may also want to read this article about Henry Ford moving to a 40-hour work week - http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/ford.htm

Unfortunately, as you mentioned, you run a services company so you are rewarded based on the numbers of hours worked and not directly on productivity.

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