321–330 of 351 posts
I 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…
What is 4-10s?
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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.
they do it because they can. Engineers have the tendency to be overly individualistic and ignore collective bargaining which is the primary means by which people can gain better working conditions. As long as people are willing to put in those 60 hours to climb up the next career rank ahead of their peers it's gonna be that way.
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If you can do your work week in 4 days without losing productivity, you don't have anywhere near enough responsibilities.
That makes no sense. I have exactly the same responsibilities as before my switch. I also have exactly the same responsibilities as my peers working 5 days. And yet I successfully squeeze those 5 days into 4, and it wasn't even that hard. Magic? No, modern office work is incredibly ineffective. Most of the day is spent collaborating with almost no part of the day spent on actually doing things.
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If you only said you don't want other's needs to affect you, that would be a valid opinion. (Albeit not very altruistic) But what you're saying is also that those wanting to be at the office are friendless, need this as a substitute for a normal life etc. That's unnecessary, and just you being a total dick. Please present your arguments here in a better way.
i never said that. please be more mindful when making accusations and try and reread what people write here if english is not your strength, instead of being a pretentious prick.
>My personal observation is that most pro office folks are seeking to substitute gaps in their personal lives with onsite work. A drain on their coworkers to be frank. Lack of friends, proper housing, lack of exercise you name it. A tiring hindrance on those...
This is an unfair and spiteful characterisation of people who happen to have a different viewpoint than you. We can do better than that.
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You assume everyone is self-oriented and wants to be autonomous and have a great work ethics and care about their privacy. There are people like that. There are also people that want a lot of guidance. There are also people that just wants to be paid and don't really care much about the current job goals. There are also people that will do the bare-minumum they can to keep the job. Understanding who is who requires g…
> You assume everyone is self-oriented and wants to be autonomous and have a great work ethics and care about their privacy. No, they assume that people who are self-oriented and want to be autonomous and have a great work ethic are the people that you want to have working for you. You don't need to employ "everyone", you just need enough for your workload, and you will need fewer people if you optimize your company'…
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I'd argue that the majority of office settings don't have moments of slack, but rather moments of productivity. This same productivity can be achieved in wayy less time than the standard 40 hours/week.
I can only agree, depending on what you include in "productivity". I'd say it's incredibly common for a modern office worker to be engaged in email, meetings and chat for some 4-6 hours per day. Not only does this leave little time to do actual tasks, that little time is also highly fragmented across the day. It's a point I've made repeatedly on similar threads: the problem with modern office work is too much collabo…
Just recently I had to migrate a website to some new servers with a new OS. Server build, fully automating the post-build and deployment, code changes, and testing… done in 2 days. Working with other teams around networking, change management, etc…. 9 months of waiting and hell.
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You assume everyone is self-oriented and wants to be autonomous and have a great work ethics and care about their privacy. There are people like that. There are also people that want a lot of guidance. There are also people that just wants to be paid and don't really care much about the current job goals. There are also people that will do the bare-minumum they can to keep the job. Understanding who is who requires g…
Another sign of a low-trust organization: lots of managers to "keep an eye on" employees.
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No-one ever quit from our company so that's not it.
How many got wind of your surveillance policies and never bothered to apply? How many sensed your attitude towards your employees in the interview and took a different offer? How many spoke to one of your employees after the interview and then ghosted you? You can't measure the potentially wide-ranging negative impacts of your attitude and policies.
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What is a results oriented work week? How do you measure? If its "I said I would get X done" then yes, a four day work week is much better.
Sounds to me like someone does not trust employees to manage themselves and meet deadlines, and thats ok. I was coming into this thread from a highly skilled, well paid workers perspective. Completely agree, if you need to micro-manage then workday oriented results are easier.
They don’t need to micromanage, but they are choosing to, and doing it very poorly (as if there is a good way).
At https://www.waiterio.com we are fully remote and we introduced 32 hours work weeks except for customer support which still does 40 hours a week. We track hours with hubstaff.com which takes a random screenshot every 10 minutes. It's been a mixed bag. Half of the team kept productivity up and logged those 32 hours stably. Another half of the team, when left unchecked went down to 14 hours a week and very low output…
Measuring exact hours and performing surveillance is unbelievably immature.