Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by krm01 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:38 PM UTC

Currently not hiring (will hire in the coming months again), but I run a small UI/UX design agency where we help B2B software teams design cleaner & more user friendly products [1].

A 4-day workweek is a core part of our culture. It dramatically increased productivity, increased energy levels and reduced overall mental pressure. The way we make it work is to not have everyone be away during the same day.

It’s really surprising that not more companies have 4-day work weeks.

If you’re an employer and you read this, just give it a try. All your concerns are most likely just limiting beliefs.

[1] http://www.fairpixels.pro

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

#122

Post by qwerty456127 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:42 PM UTC

bethling wrote: post #99

sakarisson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad that you're happy with the system, but I'm not satisfied with your comment. In my personal experience, people with "unlimited vacation" tend to take less overall vacation than I do, on a mandatory vacation time per year. > (you'd have to explain going beyond, say, 4 weeks, but otherwise working) Unless "I'd like to take a 5-week vacation" isn't enough explanation in itself, it clearly isn't working. An emplo…

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 remaining 50 weeks of your life time yearly? I would rather commit suicide.

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

#123

Post by c-fe » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:45 PM UTC

jeanlucas wrote: post #97

egman_ekki wrote: post #50

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/

Kinda random, but I'm curious: what's your native language? The "à" looks different in use here from my native language (Portuguese).

Not the OP, but the usage of à in the sentence is typical for french, where it means 'at'

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

#124

Post by lillecarl » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:49 PM UTC

hansbo wrote: post #115

lillecarl wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I look at my tax statement nothing about what's mentioned by parent(gp) looks generous anymore. 50% of what my employer pays for me is conveniently put into the governments pockets rather than mine. Add 25% VAT, petrol that costs 2$ per litre, alcohol that's taxed through the roof, another 20% tax if you make more than 44KSEK/mo. I don't like the deal, to me it feels like a ripoff. But the government has conveni…

I don't think anyone expects the Nordic model to be free. Higher taxes in exchange for the associated benefits is what has been decided by the government, elected by the people. Of course there will be people against it, as well as people for it.

The problem is the disassociation that keeps happening where "everyone" (literally everyone I talk to) thinks that the government is spending money on things that we don't want them to spend on.

Back in the days there was a system called "Tjänstemannaansvar" which held our politicians accountable if they grossly mismanaged our money. It's sadly been taken out, since the politicians don't want any responsibility.

I like the nordic model, I just don't like that our politicians can spend money as they like without any repercussions, and since our government is big/fat it's worse than if it was a small/slim government.

If "decided by government" had a clearer, more transparent, less corrupt path from "elected by the people" that'd be great. But here we are buying "medical socks" for 100$ a pair rather than the identical 10$ one that is always out of stock.

We used to have great roads, great healthcare, great social security and all other things you'd expect to get for paying 50% of your income to it. We don't have either of these anymore, taxes haven't gone down significantly during this time, things have just become worse :(

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

#125

Post by adalu » Mon, May 02, 2022, 1:00 PM UTC

I'd be more interested in 2 or 3 day weeks, optionally up to 7. And 100% remote.

I've been or still am self-employed and what I like about that is that I can work when I have the brainjuice to work and not work when I have no brain for it.

I do Go on the backend, Vue mostly on the front. Angular in the past. Some experiments with React and Svelte. Sometimes I do classic websites (in Go). Self-employed in Germany, but willing to give it up for the right employer, however I'm scared to do so. I value my freedom. I'm also 7 months in Germany 5 elsewhere, so 100% remote is required. I don't really know what an employed work life looks like nowadays, tbh.

Isn't it time for a "who's hiring" on HN? Or when does that usually happen? It's the 2nd of May, beginning of the month.

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

#126

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn » Mon, May 02, 2022, 1:00 PM UTC

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #52

How doss 4 day work week work with public holidays. Say that one week you have a bank holiday on Monday, but you usually only do Tue-Fri, would you be allowed the Tuesday off as well? Making that week a 3 day week?

In Poland you cut hours, so if the month has 21 working days in total, that's 168 hours full time, or 126 hours if you're on 3/4th of full time. You need to agree with the employer how you allocate those (there are limits, e.g. you can't work 12h days even if you want to).

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

#127

Post by MDGeist » Mon, May 02, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

vinay_ys wrote: post #95

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.

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

#128

Post by c-fe » Mon, May 02, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

drpancake wrote: post #4

I'm currently hiring for a 3-day workweek in case that's of interest: https://remoteok.com/remote-jobs/110323-remote-pt-full-stack... I had a job like this in the past and I loved the freedom of it the fact that I had plenty of energy left over to pursue other interests. So I wanted to recreate that for those that I hire. EDIT: my role is part-time so it's not a fair comparison.

Hi, I had a look at the position and it fits very much what I was looking for. I hope we can arrange something. I applied to the position with my email (c [at] cfx [dot] lu)

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

#129

Post by philmcp » Mon, May 02, 2022, 1:21 PM UTC

mhitza wrote: post #106

philmcp wrote: post #103

For companies offering 4 day week jobs in Europe @ full salary, try: https://4dayweek.io/remote-jobs/europe There are currently ~100 companies on the platform atm but I have a backlog of new companies to add and see more companies every day And @HN, if your company is open to 4 days @ 80% salary, please get in touch :)

Please do paginated listing, or save the state of the progress across the infinite list. Currently the back button starts you from scratch.

Ye, agreed - this has been annoying me for a while

Added to my todo list

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

#130

Post by drums8787 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 1:21 PM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #78

I stroke such a deal by accident, clients informed me that due to budget cuts they can't afford my full-time services anymore, so rather than lowering my fees (never do that) or loosing the client, I offered them to hire me for 32h a week instead. My initial plan was to take another part-time project to fill the gap, and I did that for a while, but in the end now I really enjoy having 3-days weekends. You come on Mon…

+1. Being able to keep my rate and adjust for inflation is important to me, so in cases of budget crunch I've negotiated less time. Which has turned out to work great for everybody, over years now.