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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)

#21

Post by kaiuhl »

andrewfong wrote: post #19

Anyone have thoughts on how 4-day work week compares to a 5-day-but-shorter-days work week (discussed a bit yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6912645 )?

I've worked 40 hour weeks in a corporate environment (where it's often actually less than 40), 60 hour weeks in an agency, 32 hour weeks at Treehouse. I find that needing to physically commit to work five days a week is the crux—it makes very little difference how much time you're spending in the pursuit of it. I'm big into backpacking, so three full, available days makes a world of difference to me, not the amount of hours I'm expected to work.

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

#22

Post by mathattack »

ritchiea wrote: post #14

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 m…

Political campaigns at least have downtime though, right? You can have a month or two off between sprints. I think certain creative work (movies?) is like this too.

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

#24

Post by yapcguy »

ryana wrote: post #10

This post is 2 years old. Any reason to resurrect it? My first thought reading through was that treehouse had some recent layoffs or poor results and this was a "hah, look at you now" post. Thankfully I can't find news like that anywhere.

> World’s best investors, including Kevin Rose

At last I got a laugh scanning the post.

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

#25

Post by graue »

conorh wrote: post #5

I worked at StreetEasy for 3 years (helping lead the dev team and writing lots of code) when it was a fast growing startup and we didn't work a 4 day week, but we worked normal business hours (9-5,10-6'ish) and never ever worked weekends - unless you felt like working on some code. One of the co-founders there had the opinion that we were in it for the long haul, not for the sprint, so why burn out early. This seemed…

Congrats on your company's success!

However, I'm surprised that you single out a 40-hour work week as though it's something exceptional. Isn't that the standard? I would never consider joining a company that expected me to work weekends. I hope that's not as common as you imply.

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

#28

Post by tannerc »

tlogan wrote: post #20

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…

Doubtful any research has been done on the matter, or that you could accurately do a survey or dig through data (Resumes? Job postings?) to get an answer.

However, statistically speaking, it's likely not an either/or scenario. I'd be willing to bet that it varies greatly and there is no "majority," additionally what about the companies that suck and only hire monkeys?

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

#29

Post by ryancarson »

tlogan wrote: post #20

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…

Totally agree. Engineers are stripped of all their power when their ability to choose their projects has been taken away. They get reduced, as you said, to simple code monkeys. It's insane.

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

#30

Post by Domenic_S »

graue wrote: post #25
conorh wrote: post #5

I worked at StreetEasy for 3 years (helping lead the dev team and writing lots of code) when it was a fast growing startup and we didn't work a 4 day week, but we worked normal business hours (9-5,10-6'ish) and never ever worked weekends - unless you felt like working on some code. One of the co-founders there had the opinion that we were in it for the long haul, not for the sprint, so why burn out early. This seemed…

Congrats on your company's success! However, I'm surprised that you single out a 40-hour work week as though it's something exceptional. Isn't that the standard? I would never consider joining a company that expected me to work weekends. I hope that's not as common as you imply.

Welcome to startups.
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