Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

My pace of work is burn myself out in the first 1-2 hours of every day and then procrastinate / go to meetings.

I'm so happy to be out of the office. Being able to work whenever works for me (and my ADHD brain) has probably given me at least 50% more output on average. Hours don't mean anything to me and nobody has ever complained about my work pace (rather the opposite).

Pretending to be busy in an office was torture.

A lot of businesses have a goal to maximize work and minimize wages, and for those businesses…

It's not a bad metric. It's just not a perfect metric. And, more importantly, paying for time isn't a metric at all. It's just one of the legal ways to employ people. Paying for deliverables, which you describe, is another legal way to employ people.

Here are some downsides to paying for deliverables:

Any job that requires talking to other people will suffer, as they won't work at the same time. Some jobs this is okay (e.g. open source development is very asynchronous) but many are not.

If you move to deliverables, what happens if you don't deliver on time? Do you not get paid?

Who sets the deliverables? How are they paid, if they are the ones creating a nice deliverable structure for others to get paid for delivering bits of?

How do we measure the value of each deliverable, to pay accordingly?

How do we measure if you really delivered?

If the company decides the deliverable is no longer valuable and stops it halfway, do you not get paid? Do you get paid based on the estimated value (at the time the work was agreed) of the bits you did do? Do you have to negotiate that?

If you go on leave, should you not get paid?

If you deliver twice as fast, do you get paid faster?

How does "realisation of a function" work except based on time? If I'm at a service desk, should I be paid nothing if no tickets come in? Or should I be paid for... my time?

What I'm driving at is you've invented something that already exists: the fixed-price contract. Scope is agreed, lawyers get involved to approve it, and finance for its budget, you do the work, the scope slips in a way that the customer believes was implied all along, you bring in lawyers to fight, and you get paid at the end, or not, and the work at the end probably suffers quality-wise because you had a fixed-price deliverable, and the faster you do it the more money you get. I don't think many people are up for that; nor are many companies going to go through that pain per-employee.

Even with 5-day weeks lots of colleagues were running side projects. Honestly a 4-day a week job WFH I'd probably try to run two jobs at a time. I'm here to work and get paid, not have a good balance.

You are failing to engage with the content here.

Work itself is behaving like a complex system with bottlenecks and constraints and all that. The deadlines are being shown to expand to the time allotted, in a similar fashion to how opening a new lane on a highway often does not improve traffic and might even make it worse.

In complex systems, the “greedy algorithm” (gradient descent) fails. For example, you might see some welders playing cards, and yell at them to go be doing work, (greedy algorithm: any inefficiency you see, correct it immediately) but this might cause huge delays for your customers rather than making things faster. How? Well it comes down to why were they playing cards. If it truly had to do with them being lazy, that's one thing. The Union rep might even back you up and yell at them for you. But they might also be implementing a low-latency subunit. They don't have work to do right now and it's important that the moment they have work to do, they can start it in an instant. You send them all to look productive God knows where, then when work comes in folks have to hunt them down and get them back here. Or, the card playing could implement a backpressure mechanism, “yeah we know the QC folks who will handle these are still pretty swamped with the backlog...”

So if you give me a linear circuit comprised of resistors and capacitors and inductors, and you propose increasing the voltage on the lines that feed it, I know that other voltages seen across the circuit will scale proportionately—this is your “20% more.” and same with “if I reduce this resistor's resistance, more current will flow over there” etc. But once you throw a diode or transistor in there, all bets are off! “No, when you tweak this the diode goes from being forward biased to being reverse biased and NO current flows over there.”

So it matters terribly much whether work is a simple linear system or a complex of feedback loops.