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Let's say you are training for for the olympics, caring for a relative, volunteering for an organization, or something similar, just make your availability 4 days per week.
If your time is structured, you aren't "off" on fridays, you're busy.
It was pretty nice. You could schedule appointments or whatever for Friday afternoon, or if not, enjoy a longer slab of weekend time. If you were leaving town for the weekend, you could avoid the Friday evening traffic rush and perhaps even get to where you were going with plenty of time to get a good camping spot, or room, or whatever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> consider offering what the majority of them want It's a big assumption that you know what the majority of developers want. And advocating for people who have never asked for your help is both arrogant and immoral in my opinion.
I'm not advocating anything for the current employees, I'm only advocating this for new employees . I think this is where we have gotten confused so I'll update the original post. Also I'm currently running a poll and the majority of people so far (84%) would prefer to either work 3 days @ 60% or 4 days @ 80%. This has also been shown to be the case in my larger studies [1]. [1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/a…
I like my work. I contribute to society by working - that's why I get paid, my work is worth something. Given more $, I can better provide for family (which includes freeing wife to focus 100% on family care & opportunities, rather than 20%).
To really make it work, keep the "normal" work at 5 days @ 100%, then another proportionally-paid day to work on deep technical debt: there is much in any codebase which really should be fixed/improved, but is too obtuse/obscure to convince management it needs time doing in place of any of other numerous tasks. Result is more than 20% increase in productivity, by warding off defects and friction.
Employer might want to review that option further in light of me spending that additional time anyway working a secondary job: better I spend more time (and get more $) focusing on extended work on same project, than being temporally & mentally unavailable.
Reducing my time & salary by 20% as suggested would mean wife would have to take on a full-time job, dropping her family time massively in return for little more than making up for my salary drop. I'd rather sacrifice a few of my own hours per week to better support family's time together.
Let's say you hire two engineers, both at 50% salary. They will be strictly worse than a single engineer on 100% salary. To make it worthwhile for a small company you're looking at more like a 50% discount for 4 days work. Not a good deal imo.
> They will be strictly worse than a single engineer on 100% salary Citation needed. I don't think this is an obvious conclusion. There is certainly some threshold where it becomes less efficient (40 engineers, 1hr/week each??), but I'm not sure 20hr/week is a clear threshold.
Some examples is equipment, mentoring and knowledge transfer. Two engineers have to do that individually, they have separate equipment sometimes in the realm of thousands of dollars. You might spend tens of thousands on employee time getting people ramped up.
You also have to factor in that more people means more communication channels. Smaller teams are going to be more efficient because they can all talk to each other.
For some organisations the salary can be less than half of the total cost to hire an employee.
Two identical people who already have ramped up, have free equipment, etc...? Maybe.
I think that's a reach. I fail to understand how you'd arrive at such a conclusion.
From my anecdotal experience, most startups would actually prefer paying more if that meant they could get 6 days of work. But regardless, I think your conclusion for that particular point is a reach, unless there is more context/information around this.
> I personally believe that working 4 days per week doesn't equate to 80% output, more like 90%, and therefore I feel the salary should reflect this.
I believe it is super difficult to generalize this. For some, it could be that 4 days per week = 70% of 5 days per week, and for some it could be that 4 days per week = 90% of 5 days per week as you mentioned. Now, if people fall into the category of 4 days > 80% output, then good for them no? They can finish 5 days worth of work in 4.25 days and chill out the rest of the time and take it easy? Especially in these times when most tech employees are WFH, they can simply just spend time with their family, catch up on a show, do some house errands, read books etc etc.
I'm not sure that's a fair reading. I'm sure there are places that are like that, but I think that for a lot of places a more accurate read is "we already have more work to do than people to do it; we're addressing that by actively hiring (rather than by overworking people); one of our biggest challenges right now is hiring fast enough." Given that hiring is a major challenge, I'm not surprised that it doesn't seem like a good play to take 80% of the capacity for the same effort of hiring.
Yeah, yeah, diminishing returns, so you're probably losing less than 20% productivity. But I'd be shocked if on average it's as low as the 5% that one commenter claims (or even negative as another commenter claims. I figure 20% is still "in the ball park".
It'd be worth it if offering it as a perk makes the organization 25% better at hiring. And I believe that it can help, but I'm not sure it can help 25%.
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> This is also due to Parkinson’s Law.
Parkinson's law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". In a lot of organizations, that does indeed apply. But in some organizations, especially startups, the situation is "here's a list of work that we'll never get to, get through as much as you can in the time available"; there's no spare time for work to expand in to.
Now, you still get diminishing returns on more hours worked. But not as bad in some organizations as in others.
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But I'm just an IC, and I haven't talked about this with leadership, so what do I know?
This probably would mainly work well with A) highly talented software engineers who want to make much less than they could make for easier lifestyle or B) low productivity companies. The reason is that companies that employ software engineers are engines for transforming labor to value. They get a multiple in dollars in revenue out of their labor cost to you. Suppose this multiple is 3x. Then if an software engineer…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an extremely strange criticism. Unless you have some kind of strong union or co-op situation, as an employee you have almost zero control over the contract and payment structure at your company, and management’s decisions around it are influenced by factors as varied as “their spouse’s wishes” or “something they heard Elon Musk say on a podcast” or “a Tony Robbins quote on LinkedIn”. Having someone cold-call…
It's very straightforward. 1. I work for a company and I want to get paid more, not less. 2. OP is contacting companies and asking them to move to a model in which they pay less. (Even if the rate is the same, the absolute amount is less) 3. From the previous two points it follows that I don't agree with what OP is doing.