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Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week

reuters.com

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Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week

#21

Post by _RPM »

scarejunba wrote: post #17
_RPM wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then I have confirmed it. I read about browsing the internet and generally no one working 8 hours a day it they work in software. Some days I literally don’t have work to do, so I browse the internet. Sometimes it’s nice to work on tasks around the home if I am working from home that day. Management must know this. I consider it an unwritten/not talked about fact of working as a software developer.

Why would you bother staying at work if you have nothing to do. Take your laptop home and VPN for OC issues if that’s why. But I can’t unders how you can have nothing to do. If you feel like doing nothing, that I understand. Some days just don’t work. But having nothing to do is quite surprising.

I like to work from home when there isn’t much work to do, so then I can have my laptop.

It’s common for us to have a code freeze, where we do not have any items in our backlog.

Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week

#22

Post by hinkley »

scarejunba wrote: post #17
_RPM wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then I have confirmed it. I read about browsing the internet and generally no one working 8 hours a day it they work in software. Some days I literally don’t have work to do, so I browse the internet. Sometimes it’s nice to work on tasks around the home if I am working from home that day. Management must know this. I consider it an unwritten/not talked about fact of working as a software developer.

Why would you bother staying at work if you have nothing to do. Take your laptop home and VPN for OC issues if that’s why. But I can’t unders how you can have nothing to do. If you feel like doing nothing, that I understand. Some days just don’t work. But having nothing to do is quite surprising.

I once heard this described as “in-office on-call”.

If your work is done but your collaborators or subordinates aren’t then you never know when they’ll need your help.

People get pretty bristly when they need you and can’t find you. Better for you to be there, or be officially sanctioned to be gone.

Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week

#23

Post by _RPM »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #18

It's not the number of days but the constant fire drills, everything is always top priority, notifications coming at all hours... and at least with software dev very rarely is it a priority to fix poor quality things thereby making even more fire drills.

If you’re at a startup this is my experience, but working for a stable company, I have not had a fire drill in my two years here.

I write software only though, I’m not doing DevOps. DevOps probably handles the fires.

Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week

#25

Post by Sharlin »

aviv wrote: post #11
alexashka wrote: post #6

It'd help to avoid lumping all jobs into a single pile and proceeding to suggest a planet-wide remedy. A software developer has different needs from a convenience store employee. I hope that's obvious. I don't understand why this is even on HackerNews, because this article contains no news at all. It's just pandering to those who feel that working fewer hours is a good idea for them, nothing more. ps. if you're in a…

> ps. if you're in a job that involves using your brain, you're not working more than 3-4 hours/day max This (not necessarily the quoted part, more so the article concept in general) is non-sense. People don't work enough . The problem is not the long hours, it's that people no longer have the stamina (mental, physical and emotional) to sustain a long work cycle so they think they "burn out".

What makes you think they ever did? And why should they anyway?

Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week

#26

Post by vidanay »

_RPM wrote: post #21
scarejunba wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you bother staying at work if you have nothing to do. Take your laptop home and VPN for OC issues if that’s why. But I can’t unders how you can have nothing to do. If you feel like doing nothing, that I understand. Some days just don’t work. But having nothing to do is quite surprising.

I like to work from home when there isn’t much work to do, so then I can have my laptop. It’s common for us to have a code freeze, where we do not have any items in our backlog.

That's just piss poor management on several layers.

Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week

#27

Post by tareqak »

I've thought about this idea quite a lot and shared it with a bunch of people. I've found that having that third day off (taking it as a vacation day to experiment) definitely helps me personally when it is adjacent to the weekend (e.g. Friday or Monday). However, I can totally see the need for having this third day be in the middle of the week to break up the week (e.g. Wednesday) or help with things like doing chores and getting to appointments when other people are working, but you're not. As a result, I think the third day off is most useful when you get to pick which day it is according to your particular circumstances.

I know having the day be flexible adds additional complexity, and even the risk of it not being taken / pressured into not taking, but I think it adds the most utility for everyone.

Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week

#28

Post by Sharlin »

rationalfaith wrote: post #4

As long as you're productive and meeting deadlines, I couldn't care less about the "hours" you're in the office. Also, the market well balance itself. If someone is more productive they'll be rewarded more. I just don't want the "equal outcome" crowd to start enforcing equal pay when most of them are clocking in minimum hours and others are over-delivering. This is for merit based companies, which personally I can't…

That’s not sufficient. If your deadlines de facto force people to do 12 hour days, I couldn’t care less what you think about office hours.

Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week

#29

Post by waz0wski »

_RPM wrote: post #23
cpuguy83 wrote: post #18

It's not the number of days but the constant fire drills, everything is always top priority, notifications coming at all hours... and at least with software dev very rarely is it a priority to fix poor quality things thereby making even more fire drills.

If you’re at a startup this is my experience, but working for a stable company, I have not had a fire drill in my two years here. I write software only though, I’m not doing DevOps. DevOps probably handles the fires.

That's ... not remotely devops

What you're describing is a legacy, traditional, (and terrible!) 'ops will fix it' mentality that often permeates larger companies where dev teams 'throw stuff over the wall' to another team for production deployments, outage triage, etc

A company with a devops culture deeply involves both developers and operations oriented folks from the start of a project to ensure best practices, reliability, and observability are being baked in from the start, that deployments are automated, and usually developers are more directly responsible for and involved in the operations of their software rather than having dedicated 'ops' teams doing 'firefighting'

Read some of the content put out by Gene Kim or Martin Fowler for a much more in depth look at devops culture and the benefits it can bring a company.

Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week

#30

Post by snarf21 »

tareqak wrote: post #27

I've thought about this idea quite a lot and shared it with a bunch of people. I've found that having that third day off (taking it as a vacation day to experiment) definitely helps me personally when it is adjacent to the weekend (e.g. Friday or Monday). However, I can totally see the need for having this third day be in the middle of the week to break up the week (e.g. Wednesday) or help with things like doing chor…

True but there is no reason you can't do Wednesday > Friday > Wednesday every other week to give people a mix of three days off and a day during the week to do errands that are harder to do on the weekends.
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