Maybe you should do less 'work'

You should really relax your moral rigidity. You believe your intuition is correct, but there's nothing saying it is. Our intuition comes from culture, which is the result of centuries of Judeo-Christian influence, which I hazard to guess most of HN is not OK with taking as a source of knowledge, even an implicit, squishy kind of knowledge.

Instead we should be foundational about this. "Every economist" doesn't believe anything, as there is widespread disagreement about almost every topic in science, and furthermore every economist believing something doesn't make it true, as economists are subject to groupthink same as the rest of us.

To the extent that employees are being taken advantage of by for-profit corporations, employees are accepting of this situation, because alternatives are available. There is nothing that says you must work for a for-profit corporation. There is also nothing that says you can't join a co-op. There are distinct benefits to working for a for-profit corporation; those are what I am choosing when I choose to allow myself to be "fucked over" as you say. In reality, what is happening is I am allowing some of my value to be captured by the organization and invested into its long-term stability, productivity, and desirability. If I wished for none of this, there is nothing stopping me from starting my own company of one person, correct?

The % of value that you create which you keep as COMP decreases as your value creation increases.

Totally understood that someone not being available is an inconvenience, especially if that someone is the only one.

I'm curious though how that's really so different from other situations than "4 day work week guy". I'd say that it could shape up as much of the same, depending on how you define "4 day work week". If that means someone is always unavailable for an entire Friday or Monday or Wednesday for example and everyone else works nine-to-five in the same office, that can seriously change some things, sure. Not a fun situation. Heck, being the "remote only guy" during the exact same 5 day work week when everyone else is in the exact same team room in the office together is not great.

How about having teams made up only of people on 4 day work weeks? Suddenly it's not an issue any longer I would say and that is something I think the pandemic has taught us can be done. Not without some rules and not without some adjustments. I do think that those adjustments made permanent are well worth it for both sides. You gotta align when people work their 4 days at least a bit so that there is a chance to have some synchronous communication.

I can think of a few examples of this actually. One would be a team that is not co-located but instead spread over multiple timezones. Say some people in London (GMT), some in New York (EST) and some in Los Angeles (PDT). There's a short period of overlap in a "normal workday". If we limit the 4 day work week such that everyone has to work during each weekday's overlap period but is free to choose when to work (during Mon-Fri "normal workdays", I would argue this is totally workable. Another example would be (mostly freelancers) that travel from their home town to work on Monday morning and leave for home on Friday afternoon. They will arrive at work around mid-day Monday and leave for home when everyone else goes for lunch on Friday and work a little longer than everyone else in the evenings Mon-Thu. Works perfectly well from my experience tbh.

So what about "4 day" guy being that last example? He starts work Monday after lunch and is gone at lunch on Friday. Just no commute? Instead of working late the rest of the week he just doesn't. Should work just fine if you ask me without most of the effects that being off for an entire whole day (whichever it is) would have. Add in a few timezones across the team and you won't really notice the difference with a bit of planning of when someone will be available.

Now one thing that is left are "urgent matters". I think that is not really an issue either. You gotta plan properly anyway. The fact that many C-levels (and some lower levels) can't plan and just "need to get this done by EOD" is completely irrelevant to me. They just gotta learn to plan instead of just making people bend to their will because they're utterly bad at even the tiniest bit of planning ahead. For everything else there's "on-call" or "tomorrow", because it's either really important and you pay for it or it's not that important.

> Do you find that you're more "out of the loop"? Naively, I would expect you to become a lot more of a satellite employee, less involved in any decisionmaking

yes. more decisions will be made without your ability to influence them. if everyone else is full time then projects won't wait for you!

there are some ways to mitigate this, that perhaps also overlap with ways to organise decision making more effectively. if your company or team has a culture of drafting and circulating written docs (e.g. engineering design docs) before making a decision, then you can somewhat influence decisions by submitting written feedback and recommendations in advance, even if you cannot attend the meeting on the day when the decision will be made. also, if there is some written record of the decision -- written up in the company wiki, or emailed, or broadcast into the project slack channel -- then you can catch up over morning coffee and review how the entire strategy has changed since last week.

similarly, avoid becoming a bottleneck for your full-time colleagues. if i leave a code review on a colleague's pull request that we're not able to close off before my week ends, i tell them they don't need to wait for me to "approve" the pull request & ask them to merge it when they feel they've sufficiently addressed review feedback, or get a colleague to review it instead.

You are bartering your value to the organization and getting less in return. That's the definition of getting fucked.

If you want to start your own company then you are fucking other people. In either situation, somebody is getting fucked.