Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 191 posts

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

#161

Post by InitialLastName »

_ink_ wrote: post #102
melenaos wrote: post #93

I have an open position with a 4 working days week for a full stack developer. The post is for junior but i need a medium/senior developer https://menelabs.com/Careers

> The male candidates must have finished the military service What's that about?

They look to be based in Greece, which requires that all males over the age of 18 (with a number of exceptions) serve a set period of time in the military. They presumably do not want to hire somebody who might disappear for a year soon after starting.

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

#162

Post by AlwaysRock »

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…

> In most tech companies you can negotiate a lower number of days per week for lesser pay

I don't think most companies will let you. I tried to negotiate this many times in the past for engineers and it was never successful. Even for companies that otherwise were very flexible or knew that a 4 day work week was the only way to afford someone they wanted to hire.

Many tech companies will do this and its worth asking. But most is not really accurate.

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

#163

Post by pm215 »

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?

The way my UK employer handles this is to add N extra days to your holiday/leave allowance, where N is 80% (or whatever % of fulltime you work) of the number of public holidays in a year; then they require you to book any public holidays which would be on your usual working days from your leave allowance. The net effect is that everybody gets the pro-rata fair number of extra days whatever their part-time schedule is, and nobody is in the office on a public holiday.

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

#164

Post by pm215 »

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 experience is limited (couple of UK companies), but I've twice been able to negotiate down to 4 days as an existing employee without much difficulty, but found it much harder (failed) to negotiate starting at 4 days with a new employer.

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

#165

Post by wnolens »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #109
mhitza wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 4 days at 10 hours is the worst possible arrangement for both employer and employee. I'm curios, isn't there anyone that would prefer a 5 day 6 hour work schedule instead?

No, having an entire day off is sooo much nicer than working less per day. You can plan something for the entire day, like golf for me as example. Plus, if you have kids, working 6 hours likely means your off time is all spent with your kids. Having a Friday off means you get that free time purely for yourself. (Advice from someone who’s done both).

Definitely. I tried 20h weeks for a while at 4h/day and it was.. ok. 3 day week+4 day weekend is so much better. It's like having an additional life.

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

#166

Post by kevincox »

mhitza wrote: post #108
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/

I think 4 days at 10 hours is the worst possible arrangement for both employer and employee. I'm curios, isn't there anyone that would prefer a 5 day 6 hour work schedule instead?

A friend of mine prefers longer days. She says that she is too tired getting home from an 8h day to do much of substance anyway so may as well do 10h days and get a whole free day to do stuff with.

Basically instead of using your extra 2h a day to lie on the couch and swipe through tiktok or similar time wasting take a full day and do something useful.

That being said it sounded like the extra 2h at work were typically fairly quiet anyways so I don't think there was much value to the employer over an 8h day.

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

#168

Post by egman_ekki »

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).

Native language is Slovak, but saw it used in various languages.

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

#169

Post by birdyrooster »

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…

Just find a team where you can quietly fuck off one or more days a week and no one cares. It's better than a formal 4 or 3 day work week because you don't have to ask permission. Much simpler than trying to negotiate some HR approved solution.

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

#170

Post by dominotw »

colechristensen wrote: post #149
dominotw wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate these long initial applications. You spend an hour filling these nonsensical questions and no one even takes a look at your application. I will only answer these questions and write essays if there is a promise of response on the other end. Tech interviews have become anything goes free for alls for companies, who think they can do as they please.

Get yourself in the position of being able to say no to interviews. I have declined plenty that were unashamed to ask me to do 8-20 hours of work for their tests. At this point if a company is asking me to do more than an hour more effort than they’re willing to spend with their own employees, it’s an automatic no.

These aren't even questions after you start interviewing with them. They want you to write these before they even consider you as a candidate.

This company wants me to answer these ridiculous questions for a privilege to interview with them( looks like they do wordpress themes and plugins, from what i gathered.)

> How do you use our products, or their competitors? How would you improve one of them?

> Tell us about an interesting app you’ve worked on. What made it interesting?

> Tell us about the hardest technical problem you had to solve. Any problem is okay – a compelling architectural decision, a hard-to-track bug, a performance or scaling issue, etc. Please outline the problem as you would describe it to a colleague

> Tell us about your production experience with two different technologies that are solving a similar problem. It could be two different programming languages, two different frameworks, two different databases, services, etc.

> Why Automattic and why now?

What kind of people are even coming up with this kind of stuff. They don't even have the minimum decency to put in the salary range if they are expecting people to write these essays even before interviewing them.

So tired of this nonsense. Just when you thought you've seen the worst. Someone figures out a way to make this even worse.

Post reply on HN