Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

We work 4 days a week (4x7.5) and we have a very strict “policy” that no one works on a Monday. The same way that no one works on a Saturday or a Sunday. It’s easy to see when people work outside of work, and we don’t celebrate it, we try and find out why it happened and to change process to better protect time off. Generally employees working “overtime” is not a failure of them, it’s a failure of process (estimation, workload, support, roadmap etc)

“Most folk work a 2-3 day week” - while this maybe true, don’t let it discount a bonafide 4 day work week. On the extra day off I’m presumed uncontactable and not at my desk. There’s a big difference between that and being at work but not really working.

It sounds like he only applied and went through the interview process for jobs that already passed his “high moral standard”

US Military. I have a pile of leave that accumulates at a reasonable rate. When I'm not deployed or TDY (Where leave continues to accumulate), I take almost every Friday or Monday off. When you mix in the federal holidays, it's sustainable.

I work 6h x 5d.

7 person company doing CMS customization and operations for large gov, edu, and ngo clients.

I started as a contractor at that schedule, and when my boss wanted to "put a ring on it" they didn't want to up my pay by 30%. If you account for that time, I am in the top 10% of earners for my stack according to stack overflow.

That process took a long time and a willingness to work for "less", as well as a lot of uncertainty and a willingness to do a lot of shit work that should be "not my problem".

Also, after having worked with the same business for the last 7 years, there are some things that I feel I could improve:

- I'm the old guy who is supposed to know fix the hard issues and if I can't figure it out then it probably isn't getting fixed - I haven't gotten reasonable raises but I don't want to start my own business or take a full-time position (though I have gotten some okay bonuses) - I'm working mostly with WordPress, which has a number of infuriating flaws and while I've gotten better at identifying, preventing, and remediating them it's still a crappy stack - I've had to learn a lot of infrastructure stuff I don't particularly care about

But I do have health insurance, and have been working a relaxed schedule remotely the entire time. I've spent a lot of time practicing various musical instruments while ruminating on my work. And we're usually pretty easy-going about moving hours around if (for instance) the snow is really good and I want to get out and ski.

Also, I get the idea that everyone in my business has gone through some serious depressive or other personal issues (based on their periodic lack of availability) over the time we've been working together... I know that when my second marriage was breaking up there were multi-day periods where I was literally phoning it in for several months. I consider the fact that we're all still working and getting a lot of useful, remunerative things done to be one fact that keeps me working this business instead of, like, taking up electrical contracting (that is, finding another trade) where I think I could have more control over my working conditions.

I also have enough extra time that I can work side gigs, mostly involved with performing music in a variety of capacities. I happily engineered a concert last night and played a trio gig at a beautiful winery today.

I feel incredibly fortunate, even though I could probably triple my annual income if I were motivated.

There's no way that gets filled right? That's completely divorced from reality lol.