I have worked at a company where we had a mandatory 35 hours week and I definitely feel that less working hours leads to a more disciplined workplace where less time is being wasted. At that company we actually worked during work hours whereas in my current company we spend a lot of time in meetings and other interruptions so I think I actually work less time than 35 hours.
Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week
31–40 of 94 posts
Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week
#32As 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…
"Also, the market well balance itself. If someone is more productive they'll be rewarded more."
I don't think that's true at all. If you don't spend significant amounts of time on self promotion you will not get rewarded but taken for granted.
Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week
#33Earlier 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.
Perhaps have release branches and hotfix there, merging into master? May be a more enjoyable development cycle.
Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week
#34I'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.
I guess you could have a default day or default rotation (e.g. your Wednesday > Friday > Wednesday every other week) and then negotiate for one of the other days in lieu of the default when it makes things more convenient.
Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week
#35As 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…
"Also, the market well balance itself. If someone is more productive they'll be rewarded more." I don't think that's true at all. If you don't spend significant amounts of time on self promotion you will not get rewarded but taken for granted.
In one of my early jobs out of college I had a manager who really got this. He knew I was getting my work done, so our 1:1's turned more into career coaching, and his focus was almost always around improving my "visibility" within the org. Looking back, it's hard to say whether he was genuinely interested in helping me get promoted, or if he just wanted to improve his own visibility by proxy, but either way it worked, and the lesson stuck with me.
Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, rel…
Devops makes this worse. When the cycle between issue discovery and new code deployment shortens enough everything becomes an emergency.
If it’s possible for a minor change to go into production within 24 hours, everything needs to be this fast. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/1myllo/the-miracle-of-flight
Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week
#37It'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…
> if you're in a job that involves using your brain, you're not working more than 3-4 hours/day max.
There are stream online of people doing mental work for 10 hours (with 5 min bathroom/snack breaks). I don't know if it's genetics or training, but some people can do it.
Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week
#38When talking about this, I usually mention the utility cost vs straight cost. Not all hours are created equal! How many employees are as productive on friday as they are on tuesday? The employer may be losing 20% of the hours, but maybe only 10% of the productivity. I could see this actually breaking even, as employees rested from their three-day weekends become ever more productive.
And it's a tremendous hiring and retention perk, at least as long as it's not standard practice. "Work for us, and you get three day weekends every week!" And that turns into "So, recruiter, does this new gig you're trying to hire me for offer a four day workweek? No? Well okay then, bye."
Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, rel…
Devops makes this worse. When the cycle between issue discovery and new code deployment shortens enough everything becomes an emergency. If it’s possible for a minor change to go into production within 24 hours, everything needs to be this fast. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/1myllo/the-miracle-of-flight
Prioritization problems exist independently from release cycle problems. "Everything becomes an emergency" is a symptom of broken priorities, not fast releases.
If you're in the habit of doing 24 hour turnarounds, then a 24 hour turnaround is no longer an "emergency", it's just normal process. No reason to panic, or to act panicked. Emergencies are only emergencies if they interrupt work-in-progress.
Re: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Monday morning off sounds like an awful idea. > First off, even when I lack sleep, I'll function better in the morning if I force myself out of bed, and I'll have a big slump in the afternoon. On the other hand, i work better in afternoon no matter what. 2-5 are my most productive hours. Maybe how you feel isn't how everyone feels. A better solution would be to allow employees to choose their half a day/ a day off.
We used to have 9-6 working hours, but +- 2 each way, it was funny, almost everyone chose to come in early, and do 7 to 3, except the programmers who all decided to do 10 to 7 or 11 to 8, It worked well though
Yeah, you will obviously need a day or some hours where there is an overlap. So for a 4 day work week, maybe you have 2 days where you have to work. But that will still be a much better and a flexible solution.