Comment by philmcp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philmcp | Hacker News Reader

From an employers perspective, I believe there are many advantages:

- 4 day week job listings get 15% more applications [1]

- Staff will be more productive. Microsoft experimented with a 4-day work week and productivity jumped by 40% [2]

- Staff will be happier and healthier [3]

- Staff retention will improve (e.g. "Now that I'm working a 4 day week, I could never go back to work 5 days")

- Some developers would compromise salary. In our current poll 84% of people would prefer to either work 3 days @ 60% salary or 4 days @ 80% salary

- Reduced office costs (e.g. close the office 1 day per week)

- It's better for the environment (e.g. less travel, closed offices etc)

[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/four-day-workweek-res...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/04/microsoft...

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38843341

Link to the poll: https://twitter.com/philostar/status/1393199633543966723

Link to the website: https://www.4dayweek.io

It is doable and in some countries like Switzerland even a common practice to offer an 80% - 100% workload (if you look at https://swissdevjobs.ch/ or any other tech job board you will notice it occurs quite often)

The problem is that an 80% workload for companies also means 80% of the salary which makes sense if someone wants to work part-time, but it's not the implementation of a 4-day work week idea.

Personally, I believe a 4-day work week will sooner or later be a standard, simply because Developers (including myself) waste a lot of their daily time and by having a constrained time-frame they will also be more efficient. In the same time (hopefully) management might reduce the number of meetings forced onto the Dev team.

The reason I get burned out working 40 hours a week is because I don’t waste time when I’m working / in the office. I can’t seem to “take a break” because I’m getting paid for my time and feel guilty if I do.

I’ve occasionally seen co-workers on YouTube throughout the day, and I’m like, “wtf”.

I don’t see it penalized and I’m not their manager and I’m not tracking their output. I guess if it works for them then it works for them, and no one’s complaining, except my own pride or righteousness.

Maybe that’s what they need to handle a full time work load. But in that case it’s not really full time? It doesn’t feel right to me so at my current place I work significantly reduced amount of hours for a proportional paycut. And I only work when I’m working.

Whether it's an environmental improvement depends on what your employees do on the day off. Less will be attributable to the company, but it's a giant leap to say this means it's better for the planet.

I like the references for 1-3, even if they might be cherry-picked it's still more likely to be signal than noise, but the rest seems like leaps and assumptions. There are very few companies where everyone wants to work 4 days, let alone have that day not be flexible, so closing the office for a day seems out of reach for all but the smallest businesses. Retention I'm also not so sure about, virtually every company in our line of work supports 36 or 32 hours per week and they virtually all pay proportional to hours so that's all same same.

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