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Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

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Re: Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is awesome to hear. Check out 4dayweek.io for opportunities to surface this to candidates. (four day work week proponent, no other affiliation)

Haha thanks for the plug, and I totally agree, although I'm a little bias :p Let me know if you want to get added @krm01 :)

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

#142

In most tech companies you can negotiate a lower number of days per week for lesser pay. In the last two decades I've been in the industry, I knew very junior people (early in their career) and very senior people doing 3-4 day workweek due to personal reasons in pretty much every company I worked in. It wasn't a big deal. Ability to take 3-6 month long unpaid breaks (sabbaticals), 4 weeks of PTOs, plus sick/carer lea…

My previous company had instituted the forced holiday once or twice a quarter and it was truly effective at getting people who never take time off to take a break. They tried to discontinue it after the pandemic receded a bit but people protested so they kept it in the end.

One of my former coworkers went at least a decade without taking a single vacation day. He cashed them in every year. Eventually one year him and his wife went on a vacation and I guess he took a liking to the experience because from that point on he always used up all of his vacation time. All it took was him actually experiencing an actual vacation trip to see the value in them. It really annoyed our manager, from whose budget vacation payouts didn't come, when he no longer had one of his most productive engineers in the office all 52 weeks of the way, especially since the coworker had been with the company long enough to get six weeks per year. Though not completely due to the newly discovered fondness of using vacation days, we did end up increasing headcount around that time and I'm sure it was a contributing factor.

Re: Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

#143
post #139

In most tech companies you can negotiate a lower number of days per week for lesser pay. In the last two decades I've been in the industry, I knew very junior people (early in their career) and very senior people doing 3-4 day workweek due to personal reasons in pretty much every company I worked in. It wasn't a big deal. Ability to take 3-6 month long unpaid breaks (sabbaticals), 4 weeks of PTOs, plus sick/carer lea…

Wow I've never heard of this. I'm in NYC though. Is this in SV or generic tech? I'd love to take sabbaticals every year or two.

Not really related to the thread but I worked at a think-tank in DC that had such an issue with people never taking time off they started giving sabbatic pay. After your first year you started accruing both regular vacation time and sabbatic vacation time which was 1.5X your normal pay to encourage you to take time off.

Re: Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

#144
The 4-day workweek is great! Have you asked your current employer yet? If you like where you're at, it's not necessarily a reason to leave. Twice in my career I've started at a full time schedule, built trust for years, and then asked to work 20% less hours for 20% less pay. Each time with success.

Re: Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been at only one company where "unlimited PTO" was really treated close to that way. There were offices in San Francisco and Paris, and the CEO was French (and based in the US). The US office had untracked PTO, and from the get-go he would let the Americans know that the French office had around 7 weeks time off, and that they'd use it, so they should as well. He took essentially the month of August off, which d…

> help establish that 4 week vacations were "normal". I (an European) always took this as granter yet considered it crazy people have as little as just a single month of vacation a year. It's been just recently I found out this isn't even the case in the USA where people normally have just 2 weeks. This scared the heck out of me. Why even live at all if all you have to live is 2 weeks a year and you have to sell the…

Because anything better would be SOCIALISM!! /s

In America, our government and media are all controlled by corporations, so there's a massive propaganda machine that tells the population they need to be workaholics if they want a chance to be wealthy.

Also, employees have no leverage. You can't decline a job because they only offer 2 weeks PTO when everyone else also only offers 2 weeks.

People that push for a culture shift for more PTO are shouted down as being lazy, and the propaganda machine screams about how bad small businesses would be hurt. The machine LOVES to talk about small businesses, and people fall for it.

Re: Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

#146
post #108

At Automattic, you can do 4 days à 10 hours with 100% pay, 4 days à 8 hours with 80% pay, or 3 days à 8 hours with 60% pay. https://automattic.com/work-with-us/

I think 4 days at 10 hours is the worst possible arrangement for both employer and employee. I'm curios, isn't there anyone that would prefer a 5 day 6 hour work schedule instead?

I worked for a while at a place that did 9/80 scheduling, essentially every other Friday off and it was quite nice. Of you did have things that took you away from work normally you just made it up by working a bit on the off Friday.

Re: Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

#147
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you'd have to explain going beyond, say, 4 weeks This is less than the PTO mandated by law in many European countries. Hardly unlimited.

Important to know Europe doesn't calculate time offs like the US does. In the US, if you take 4 weeks off, it's 20 days PTO. In Europe it's 28-30.

Based on the downvotes and replies, I'd say this is not true.

Re: Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Bumble we have: - an unlimited PTO (you'd have to explain going beyond, say, 4 weeks, but otherwise working) - mandatory 2 payed weeks off (1 in December and 1 in Jun) - mostly remote using the "office-hub" model, only requiring presence when necessary - every 2 weeks there something we call a Focus Friday, when nobody can contact you and you are free to concentrate on things you want to work on. This covers all o…

“Unlimited PTO” is a scam. If it’s truly unlimited why not take 52 weeks off per year?

You're still expected to get a certain amount of work done.

Re: Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

#149

At Automattic, you can do 4 days à 10 hours with 100% pay, 4 days à 8 hours with 80% pay, or 3 days à 8 hours with 60% pay. https://automattic.com/work-with-us/

Hate these long initial applications. You spend an hour filling these nonsensical questions and no one even takes a look at your application. I will only answer these questions and write essays if there is a promise of response on the other end. Tech interviews have become anything goes free for alls for companies, who think they can do as they please.

Get yourself in the position of being able to say no to interviews. I have declined plenty that were unashamed to ask me to do 8-20 hours of work for their tests.

At this point if a company is asking me to do more than an hour more effort than they’re willing to spend with their own employees, it’s an automatic no.

Re: Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

#150
At WeGroup (https://www.wegroup.be/en/join-us) we are running a 4-day workweek without pay cuts. We are still experimenting with it, but everyone is loving it so far. The experiment is running for 2 months now, we saw a drop in output, which I think is normal. With a 4-day workweek comes more responsibility, so we are pushing the teams to take more ownership over the planning and feedback loops. We are running the experiment till end of June.

We are looking for:

* Backend (Python/Go/Postgres) * Frontend (React) * Infra/DevOps/Tooler (k8s/Docker/AWS/OpenSource-tools/CI-CD)

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