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Once You Try a Four-Day Workweek, It's Hard to Go Back

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Re: Once You Try a Four-Day Workweek, It's Hard to Go Back

#91

Post by 015a »

n4r9 wrote: post #63
015a wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO: I have never worked in a job where I would have been like "heck yeah, four day work week lets do it". Part of that is, there's kinda two distinct and separate camps, and sometimes its unclear which camp people are in and what we're fighting for. Is it "I work ~40 hours in four days" or "I work ~32 hours in four days"? And my take is, I don't like either of these solutions. I've never worked in a role where I fee…

> there's so much admin and meetings (and even just finding availability for meetings!) So I moved to a four day week just over a year ago. It's been crucial to get really strict about reducing the amount of time spent in meetings. It's not easy always being the awkward person that's often telling people to take tangential discussions offline, demanding agendas, or challenging whether a call is required. > Policies l…

> Or high performers who've recently become parents, or whose own parents are nearing end of life, or who have some other reason to want to spend more time with family.

I don't feel this is a fair assessment of what I'm proposing.

I haven't personally met a parent who would choose "8am to 6pm, Mon-Thu, strict, in an office" over "core hours of 11am to 2pm, Mon-Fri, more lenient, but put in 40 hours a week". I have met two parents who have left jobs that were more like the former, for jobs more like the latter. So, N=2, YMMV, etc.

Everyone wants freedom. Less freedom benefits no-one.

Choosing between "9am to 5pm, Mon-Thu, strict, in an office, paid 20% less" over "core hours of 11am to 2pm, Mon-Fri, more lenient, put in 40 hours a week" is hazier. I think depending on the nature of your responsibilities parents/caregivers might be pretty split. On the one hand, that 20% pay-bump is significant; but on the other hand, the freedom to be able to e.g. take a 90 minute lunch with your kids every day is priceless.

My point is stated very clearly in my first paragraph: These discussions get so damn hazy because when people hear "four day work week" many will think "32 hour week", many will think "32 hour week, paid at 100%", some will think "40 hours compressed into 4 days", there's no standard way to talk about this.

Choosing between "9am to 5pm, Mon-Thu, strict, in an office, paid identically" over "core hours of 11am to 2pm, Mon-Fri, more lenient, put in 40 hours a week" is obviously the most hazy. Its also not what most 4-day-a-week outfits do. Have you ever had a sick kid, the doctor has an opening in 30 minutes, its 9:30am, and you want to worry about also asking your boss "pretty please boss-man let me go take care of my family"? I still think there's be a good split between the two. Is your childcare hourly or daily? Is the second job remote or not? Lots of variables.

Re: Once You Try a Four-Day Workweek, It's Hard to Go Back

#93

Post by matrix87 »

myprotegeai wrote: post #60
nntwozz wrote: post #23

Aldous Huxley imagined in the '20s we would automate most things and work less in the future. Today we work more than ever together with increased automation, and women work as well instad of being home to take care of the household. On paper it looks like progress, but I'm not so sure about the quality of life.

It's not progress. Every organization has "load bearing" employees that do the brunt of the real work, and everyone else just creates a cloud of confusion about what they actually do and why it's important. Most people are doing fake work. But unfortunately "fake work" jobs are the only way to fight back about the ever-optimizing, ever-extracting process of the free market. My job is needed because fuck you, I'm not…

> If I don't have kids and grind harder than women who take time to raise kids, why should we have equal opportunities?

they're not comparing vs people who are grinding. I think they just want some guarantee that they won't be discriminated against because of maternity leave. And that they'll have some kind of on-ramp for getting back into the workforce

Which is entirely doable and reasonable, just a question of whether corporations are held accountable here or not

Re: Once You Try a Four-Day Workweek, It's Hard to Go Back

#94

Post by foogazi »

015a wrote: post #32
alexjplant wrote: post #15

Parts of US Department of Defense and their contractors do what they refer to as Compressed Work Schedule (CWS) wherein employees work 9-hour days and get every other Friday off. Some people opt to split their off day and make every Friday a half-day so that they can be on the links or at the riverside bar and grill by lunchtime. While in college I worked 10 hours a day Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Saturd…

IMO: I have never worked in a job where I would have been like "heck yeah, four day work week lets do it". Part of that is, there's kinda two distinct and separate camps, and sometimes its unclear which camp people are in and what we're fighting for. Is it "I work ~40 hours in four days" or "I work ~32 hours in four days"? And my take is, I don't like either of these solutions. I've never worked in a role where I fee…

> I've never worked in a role where I feel like working 32 hours a week would deliver meaningfully similar results to working 40 hours.

But why the 40 hours at all ?

Why not 48 and be more productive ?

Re: Once You Try a Four-Day Workweek, It's Hard to Go Back

#96

Post by EasyMark »

015a wrote: post #32
alexjplant wrote: post #15

Parts of US Department of Defense and their contractors do what they refer to as Compressed Work Schedule (CWS) wherein employees work 9-hour days and get every other Friday off. Some people opt to split their off day and make every Friday a half-day so that they can be on the links or at the riverside bar and grill by lunchtime. While in college I worked 10 hours a day Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Saturd…

IMO: I have never worked in a job where I would have been like "heck yeah, four day work week lets do it". Part of that is, there's kinda two distinct and separate camps, and sometimes its unclear which camp people are in and what we're fighting for. Is it "I work ~40 hours in four days" or "I work ~32 hours in four days"? And my take is, I don't like either of these solutions. I've never worked in a role where I fee…

Why not split the difference and do four 9 hour days? I am reasonably sure most people will get just as much done as they would have with eight 5hr days after a couple weeks of adjusting. But then they may be to happy with their lives, and that is not something that upper levels like to see, I think.

Re: Once You Try a Four-Day Workweek, It's Hard to Go Back

#97

Post by 015a »

t-writescode wrote: post #50
015a wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO: I have never worked in a job where I would have been like "heck yeah, four day work week lets do it". Part of that is, there's kinda two distinct and separate camps, and sometimes its unclear which camp people are in and what we're fighting for. Is it "I work ~40 hours in four days" or "I work ~32 hours in four days"? And my take is, I don't like either of these solutions. I've never worked in a role where I fee…

> I've never worked in a role where I feel like working 32 hours a week would deliver meaningfully similar results to working 40 hours. It may be my neurodivergency, but I'm the exact opposite. There's rarely a job where I'm *actually, butts-in-seats working* for 40 hours a week where I would deliver, over a study period of months, more good, correct and helpful work than if I spend less time at work. I could probabl…

> I could probably technically vomit out more code; but it would be more buggy and have more design decisions that would bite me later (and more possibly sink the company).

So: Very generally speaking: I disagree.

You've conflated "productive" with "coding", which is something software engineers do quite often. There are many, many ways to be productive beyond just writing code, that even software engineers should consider within the realm of their responsibilities. I call out a couple in my original comment; admin, meetings, organizing information, documenting, writing tests, small chore-like tickets, mentorship, learning about some part of the system, etc.

Part of gaining seniority is, I think, that ability to recognize "I'm not gonna be able to write more code today; but I think my brain is in the right place to make some meaningful progress on {whatever}". Going steps beyond that; planning your days by predicting what your mental state will probably be, to maximize the things that need to be done when you are at your best to do them, is how you start going above Senior.

Re: Once You Try a Four-Day Workweek, It's Hard to Go Back

#98

Post by 015a »

foogazi wrote: post #94
015a wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO: I have never worked in a job where I would have been like "heck yeah, four day work week lets do it". Part of that is, there's kinda two distinct and separate camps, and sometimes its unclear which camp people are in and what we're fighting for. Is it "I work ~40 hours in four days" or "I work ~32 hours in four days"? And my take is, I don't like either of these solutions. I've never worked in a role where I fee…

> I've never worked in a role where I feel like working 32 hours a week would deliver meaningfully similar results to working 40 hours. But why the 40 hours at all ? Why not 48 and be more productive ?

Because 40 is sustainable, and the standard we've mostly all agreed to (with some fuzzy room in there for heavy versus light weeks/etc).

This sounds like a reductive answer, because it is: Capitalism is social, zero sum, and reductive. There are people out there who will put in 50, 60, 70 hour weeks. If you do 40, they'll probably beat you, plain and simple. Fortunately, we've all mostly agreed that 40 is enough, so you aren't regularly competing with the people who are willing to destroy themselves for shareholder value. There's nothing all that magical about the number 40. There are numbers greater than 40 that approach "ok, humans can't physically sustain that"; but fortunately we've pushed the number to 40 through years of positive labor movements.

Re: Once You Try a Four-Day Workweek, It's Hard to Go Back

#99

Post by edanm »

nntwozz wrote: post #23

Aldous Huxley imagined in the '20s we would automate most things and work less in the future. Today we work more than ever together with increased automation, and women work as well instad of being home to take care of the household. On paper it looks like progress, but I'm not so sure about the quality of life.

> Today we work more than ever together with increased automation,

I don't think we work "more than ever", not at all.

This is something that's really hard to quantify, but even harder to get an idea about "anecdotally" (cause what're you comparing to, when you were working 100 years ago?). What makes you think it's true?

Re: Once You Try a Four-Day Workweek, It's Hard to Go Back

#100

Post by nxobject »

myprotegeai wrote: post #60
nntwozz wrote: post #23

Aldous Huxley imagined in the '20s we would automate most things and work less in the future. Today we work more than ever together with increased automation, and women work as well instad of being home to take care of the household. On paper it looks like progress, but I'm not so sure about the quality of life.

It's not progress. Every organization has "load bearing" employees that do the brunt of the real work, and everyone else just creates a cloud of confusion about what they actually do and why it's important. Most people are doing fake work. But unfortunately "fake work" jobs are the only way to fight back about the ever-optimizing, ever-extracting process of the free market. My job is needed because fuck you, I'm not…

You’ve slipped from “equitable opportunities” to “equal opportunities” - they aren’t the same thing, and we run the risk of setting up a strawman if we’re doing so.

No one who’s advocating for employees with children with benefits like subsidized childcare, flexible schedules for driving children to and from things, etc., is suggesting that everyone should somehow get “equal opportunities”, or is proposing an actual concrete definition of how that would work. (Would you require that all promotions be internally posted and limit the amount of opportunities people can apply to? No one would call that equitable - that would disadvantage people with, say, racist bosses wanting to switch orgs.)

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