Wonder if school will ever switch to four days a week.
There are some small private schools that do this.
We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon
281–290 of 351 posts
Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was working before my retirement I routinely had to work 60 hr weeks since I was lead (went to every meeting) and wrote code full time along with my team. Most of our projects started with a hard deadline (estimates were only used for budgeting, the time was predetermined) and constant change was endemic during every project. No way this would fit in 32 hr weeks. Yet we still had sprints (which assumed 40 hrs…
Absolutely. Almost every org treats engineers as an expendable resource. They do this because they fear the alternative, which requires treating people with respect, because those people are valuable to your organization.
You and I have very different career experiences. I have worked for 5 Fortune-100 technology companies over the past 20 years and never once did I feel like I was an expendable resource. Outside one particular experience, every one of my managers (Directors, Sr Directors) treated everyone with respect and honesty. Furthermore, they were genuinely concerned about health and family issues (family health, PTO, etc). Even in my current role, my company goes out of its way to provide a solid work-life balance (additional PTO for COVID, extra volunteer time, etc).
I hope others on HN have had the opportunity to work in places such as these...
Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon
#283Quick refresher on productivity in economic terms: decreasing inputs = decreasing outputs UNLESS tech or technique improves. During supply and/or debt driven inflationary periods (eg. now), increased productivity = increased supply and/or decreased debt. What do these maxims of economics mean for a 4 day work week? At Beacon, nothing*. But implement this at Tyson Foods, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Waste Management, the…
Are you trying to say if Amazon works less hours delivering packages , less packages will be delivered because they are already pushing every productivity edge possible?
That is shocking to me. It feels like I just push these buttons and the package shows up to my door like magic. I assumed everyone has a job pushing buttons so why would we waste time pushing buttons for more than 4 days a week.
Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. Almost every org treats engineers as an expendable resource. They do this because they fear the alternative, which requires treating people with respect, because those people are valuable to your organization.
You and I have very different career experiences. I have worked for 5 Fortune-100 technology companies over the past 20 years and never once did I feel like I was an expendable resource. Outside one particular experience, every one of my managers (Directors, Sr Directors) treated everyone with respect and honesty. Furthermore, they were genuinely concerned about health and family issues (family health, PTO, etc). Eve…
Things have changed in the past decade for engineers. In the 00s, I felt expendable at every job, even at places that suffered after an exodus engineers. In the 10s, I felt necessary, but fungible. And in the 20s, I feel important and that my skills are distinct.
I'm sure this varies a lot for people working in different sectors, but I think every sector has seen the perceived importance of technology engineering increase over time.
Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only thing I support more than WFH is my competitors working 20% less. If they're doing this to compete for talent, go ahead by all means. I suspect they need to do something like this also because they're a UK SaaS company (so lower wages to start) serving the low-end of the non-profit market (price sensitive buyers). And they don't have the enterprise features to compete with Salesforce and CRM for the high-end…
The goal is to keep expanding these trials until labor law ratchets the work week down for everyone to 4 days. It will take time, but it will happen. If you as a freelancer want to work five days a week (or more), by all means, spend your life in such a manner. The rest of us work to live, not live to work.
Laws mostly do not apply across borders, and many of your competitors are in other countries. How do you think you can compete if your competitor's employees work 25% more?
Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Fun for who? You? The people around you getting off on it? The HR employee who didn’t elect the name of the organization and who is just trying to get through a day like you are, and apparently has to put up with meme confrontations in the workplace? There is not much that is more cringe than overhearing someone do this within earshot; it’s almost as bad as a joke everyone has heard and can predict while someone loud…
Every position has a storytelling. That of HR is about building a double standard: on the one hand, a discourse that emphasizes on the employees' best interests, while on the other hand, take actions that are on the employer's sole interest.
Is it expected? Yes of course, I stopped being naive on the topic long ago.
Where this is pervasive is that even some HR people tend to buy it. Also the tech industry should consider happy to at least have some reassuring (yet false) speech.
Sure, in the tech industry, people may be considered a bit better, but I've seen and met people in blue collar industries where people were not worth so much more than the paper clips holding their contracts together.
And since HR, as a support function of a company, does not differ much from one indistry to another, the culture of HR, really, fundamentally, is to treat people as you'd do with your trucks or machines or chairs or paperclips, and that is, treat them as resources. Hence the very apt name of the function: human resources.
And this is the kind of perspective I have on HR and the kind of points I could (but not always do) raise if we touch on the societal aspects of our jobs.
Note that as a manager myself, I have my fair share of cognitive dissonance to bear as well, and critics are always welcome :)
Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
The goal is to keep expanding these trials until labor law ratchets the work week down for everyone to 4 days. It will take time, but it will happen. If you as a freelancer want to work five days a week (or more), by all means, spend your life in such a manner. The rest of us work to live, not live to work.
Laws mostly do not apply across borders, and many of your competitors are in other countries. How do you think you can compete if your competitor's employees work 25% more?
You disadvantage foreign firms with cross border financial/policy mechanisms, in the same way you encourage better labor and environmental practices for work outsourced abroad. This is a well worn policy path.
A race to the bottom can avoided with laws and regulation.
Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hot-take, it was never NOT cool to blast open offices. Unless you're in middle management.
I worked briefly for a transportation company helping with a migration to Solaris. I was the FNG, and everyone else was primarily Windows so I stuck out like a sore thumb. My manager (and his manager) were really nice but had experienced a bit of turnover. My first day showed why. All of the sysadmins worked from one room, with a "datacenter" in the room next door. Imagine a single room, with desks lined up around th…
I looked it up so you don't have to: FNG means "fucking new guy"
Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon
#289I work a four-day week (80% time, not imagining 4-10s) as a software engineer at a non-profit academic organization. For a paycut basically, I make 80% of what I think of as my "actual" salary. I have managed to do this at a succession of several jobs now. When I briefly tried to go back to 5 days, it was really hard. It seems insane to me now that anyone works 5 days a week. (And I do know plenty of people work even…
To clarify to a since flagged (by someone else) comment: When i say "I'm at least 90% as productive" -- I mean I am more productive per hour worked. Not that I end up working 90% hours but only getting paid for 80%. I really do work 80% hours, only four days a week, Monday to Thursday. I am not expected to and don't work on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays. I just get done I think 90% or more of what I would get done i…
Personally I don’t find an ethics violation. If you’re meeting your output expectations who cares how many hours you work. I certainly don’t as a manager at a large public company. I fully expect most ppl are getting some amount of personal stuff done during the day, or power napping between meetings. Just don’t be a dick and make the rest of the team pick up your slack.
Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon
#290I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself. As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the…
If you can do your work week in 4 days without losing productivity, you don't have anywhere near enough responsibilities.