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We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

ryancarson.com

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Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#11

Post by kiba »

leoedin wrote: post #2

Over the summer I extended a lot of weekends with a days holiday and so ended up working a lot of 4 day weeks. Surprisingly, I found that my productivity really didn't drop that much. I went into a week with a sense that I only had 4 days to get stuff done, and so often felt much more focused. It's only an extra day, but somehow in my head a 5 day week feels almost endless. The suddenly it's Friday and you wonder wha…

I worked 30 hours a weeks for quite some time. While it is very focused, it is also very painful. I don't record any downtime as contributing to my time at all. If there's coffee break, bathroom time, time driving in car, etc, it doesn't count.

Whether or not I am productive or not is another story altogether. I feel like I don't accomplish much in 30 hours a week, but I know I was very efficient. With the power of learning interest rate, I slowly accumulated knowledge and skills. I was able to accomplish a few projects worth of note in that time as well. In the end, I fell off the wagon because I couldn't keep up with the painful routine of 30 hours a week hyper efficiency. If I want to make 30 hours work, I have to add mindless routines as well.

Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#14

Post by ritchiea »

My experience working 80 hour weeks wasn't with startups, it was with political campaigns where I made far less money and there was obviously no equity. Similar situation though, get idealistic 20-somethings recently out of college without families to work endlessly.

I don't support 7 day weeks and 12 hour days, but frankly for politics it works. Why? Because for 95% of campaign employees it's not work quality that matters, it's talking to a ton of other people, repeating simple messages, engaging them and asking them to get involved with the campaign. I am extremely supportive of organizations that support reasonable work hours and not overextending yourself. I would never work 7 days a week again. But just as much as you should not needlessly overwork yourself and your employees, you need to understand (or at least try to understand) what is necessary to hit your goals.

I suspect the average engineer at most startups could use an extra day off. For some founders it may make sense to work long hours because some of that work is touching base with investors, forging connections and doing other things that may not be intellectually draining but just need to get done.

Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#16

Post by wtvanhest »

I'm a finance guy, I don't know how to code. I signed up for teamtreehouse about 3 months ago and I've successfully been able to learn HTML, CSS, and I am starting to dive in to Javascript, MySQL, PHP and maybe AJAX.

The site has given me enough structure to learn the basics while other books and the internet has provided me with more in depth learning.

I wrote Nick at teamtreehouse yesterday and said that I was disappointed with the end of chapter quizzes because they were sometimes difficult to bypass due to confusion over what they were asking.

He responded immediately and said they knew it was an issue and were hiring to fix it very soon. While the round announcement is old, if they are in fact hiring, it is great news for those who use their service.

Other than that one interaction, I don't know the team, but I was impressed.

I can say, I used to work a few blocks from their office in downtown Orlando. Orlando usually sparks memories of Disney, but Disney is actually located in Kissimmee, FL about 45 min from downtown. Downtown Orlando is young, great nightlife, fairly small and EXTREMELY affordable.

Thanks for the customer service yesterday!

[Edited because the round was actually a few years ago]

Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#20

Post by tlogan »

Congratulation! This is how it should be done.

And I have a question....

All professors of management and organizations understand that work week should be defined differently for knowledge workers. And that most the important quality of knowledge workers is initiative.

So if you have 80 hours work week and all innovation or initiative is dismissed, that can mean two things:

1) you are not "knowledge worker" but just "coding monkey" (it is "above your pay")

2) the company sucks

Majority of tech companies require 7-day work week and they discourage any initiative.

Does this mean that majority of programers are not actually hired as "knowledge workers" but as "coding monkeys"? Or that majority of tech companies suck?

EDIT: This 7-work week is actually based on calculation: 5 days * 10 hours per day + 5 hours on weekend (just check email) which is 55 hours per week => 7 working days of 8 hours each.

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