My last employer refused to even accept 4 days a week for 80%. Manager brought up how much the company had invested in training me as a grad (which, to be fair, they did), and that cutting my hours would have meant that investment had gone to waste.

I now work for them 0 days a week. Funny how that works.

> Especially in industries that require deep thinking, the output doesn't necessarily scale with # of hours a worker puts in, not every hour is the same. I think 10 hours of highly productive work is much better than 40 hours of busy work.

I absolutely agree with this, but I'm skeptical of a model that allows someone to come to work for only 10 hours and have those hours be the productive time. Especially for deep thinking work. My experience is that to push forward in work that requires creativity and deep thought, one needs to be immersed in it, while at the same time not pressured to come up with something on the spot. The immersion (often) requires a full time commitment to the work, even if some of that time is actually spent chatting with colleagues or wasting time on HN or whatever. Providing the needed freedom from pressure, but still enough pressure to get results, is a question of management, either personal or from good manager.