[HN Gopher] Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after ...
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Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they
still love it
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 237 points
Date : 2024-03-01 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| > They began it as a six-month experiment. But today, 54 of the
| companies still have the policy. Just over half have declared it
| permanent, according to researchers with the think tank Autonomy,
| who organized the trial along with the groups 4-Day Week Campaign
| and 4 Day Week Global.
|
| PDF of the research: https://autonomy.work/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/02/making-it-s...
| j45 wrote:
| Working four 10 hour days doesn't seem as much of a stretch
| compared to 8 hour days.
| figmert wrote:
| The point of a 4-day work week isn't to cram the 5th day into 4
| days, it's completely removing the 5th day, thus working 8
| hours every day for 4 days, as opposed to 10 hours for 5 days.
| pjerem wrote:
| Yes, also without reducing salaries.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Question: If they removed the 5th work day and the same
| amount of work got done, then management can say that
| basically the employees were slacking off for a day a week.
|
| And if so, what's stopping them next to increase it back to 5
| and chase 5 days worth of productivity out of 5 days/week
| instead of the previous 4 using the same efficiency gains as
| performance benchmarks of the 4 days/week?
| vidarh wrote:
| They can try. They will fail. If people could maintain that
| higher performance without suffering at a level people
| aren't willing to, many would.
| captainbland wrote:
| I suppose the same forces that usually prevent a move from
| a 5 day week up to a 6 day week: it's unpopular and
| counterproductive. But I wouldn't be opposed to a 4 day
| week being privileged in law somehow.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| For knowledge workers, being 100% productive for 8 hours a
| day 5 days a week is a lie.
|
| I don't think anyone can truly deep focus 8 hours a day
| without burning out at some point.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> For knowledge workers, being 100% productive for 8
| hours a day 5 days a week is a lie. _
|
| Of course, but if this is a known fact, why are we still
| working 5 days a week as the norm and not 4?
|
| Clearly inertia is more important to companies and
| legislators than facts.
|
| Or that probably not all jobs are so leisurely and
| inefficient, that 5 days of actual productivity can be
| don in less.
| hananova wrote:
| Many of us only work 5 days a week _officially_ , there's
| many of us that deliberately and knowingly slack off one
| day a week. Others will just slow down a little to fill
| the five days. Yet others will use WFH as an opportunity
| to do a 4 day work week.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> there 's many of us that deliberately and knowingly
| slack off one day a week_
|
| Many? I doubt it. Maybe many very privileged tech/big-
| corp workers in developed rich western countries, but
| globally that's not that many.
|
| Your argument is exactly the argument companies use to
| justify not going 4 days a week. If workers already have
| it so good that they have free time to slack off one day
| out of 5 days per week what's to say they also won't
| slack off for a day at 4 days per week once that becomes
| the norm?
|
| Don't get me wrong I'd be al for it, but your comment
| proves many already have it so much better even at 5
| days/week.
| jerf wrote:
| The fact they already tried 5 days a week and it apparently
| didn't work. Why would anything be any different when going
| back?
|
| It reminds me of the way that as we improve in our ability
| to automate laws, we're going to need to do a better job of
| thinking about what laws are for rather than assuming that
| simply reifying the current laws exactly into computerized
| enforcement will do what we expect:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17094010
|
| Just because a butt is in a seat does not mean a butt is
| doing work. It wasn't true before, it isn't true now, and
| it won't be true if they try to squeeze another day out at
| the new efficiency levels. It may be a common delusion but
| there is no magic path to that level of productivity.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> The fact they already tried 5 days a week and it
| apparently didn't work. _
|
| How didn't it work? Probably the devie you're typing this
| on was made by a person working 5 days/week, or way more
| if we're talking early iOS /Android devices.
| jerf wrote:
| I am speaking in the context of _your own assumption_ in
| your post, that previously people were only doing 4 days
| of work in a 5 day week, so there 's some option of
| getting people to work 5 days a week at the 4-day-a-week
| pace. Please don't equivocate on _your own terminology_
| for the purpose of hostilely misunderstanding my reply.
|
| If you're going to roll with "actually people have in
| fact been productively working 5 days a week after all"
| than I would advise FirmwareBurner of 6 minutes ago to
| take the debate up with FirmwareBurner of 1 hour ago. I
| don't see that I'd add any value in mediating that
| discussion.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| I'm sorry, Your comment makes no sense to me.
| zen928 wrote:
| I'll pile on since I find your "sudden" confusion on this
| comment chain to be a disgusting and shameful way to try
| and engage conversations with other people.
|
| The top post tries to identify the results as reducing
| the hours of 5 days of work into 4, the response to that
| was highlighting that the goal wasn't to make up for
| missing hours but to try and measure the efficacy of
| needing that fifth day's 'worth' of hours. You then
| selectively choose how you interprete the topic to be
| either:
|
| 1) questioning why they couldn't use their results of 5
| days VS 4 days to effectively say "if you're effective in
| 4, then why not 5?
|
| then when questioned on how this doesn't make sense in
| the context of the article, feign confusion on the
| distinction and ignore the results of the article to flip
| flop to your other point:
|
| 2) questioning the articles results by asking others
| outside of the study to personally prove to you what the
| measure of "success" is since you see modern technology
| built with this framework (phones) as a reason why it
| shouldn't change
|
| despite this being a nonsequitor that isn't a point
| anyone has shown interest in discussing. Then when asked
| why you went from being confused on why they couldn't use
| the results showing their effectiveness to try and
| enforce another "effective" day, to then denying the
| results and saying that it's already effective and to ask
| others to personally prove to you why it isn't effective
| (instead of reading the article).
|
| Do you have any answer yet?
| huytersd wrote:
| It's a 32 hour work week
| ActionHank wrote:
| I can't wait for companies to use this as a way to drive down pay
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Great callout for unionizing. Because corporations would
| extract as much from workers as they could without boundaries.
| Labor law modifications will help as well, but that takes
| longer as you wait for old political and business leaders to
| age out (and take their work ideas with them).
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Unionizing is not enough. 4/day workweek needs to be
| universally standardized across the OECD/world for it to
| stick, because whether we like it or not, countries and
| economies are in competition with each other. And if one
| factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X
| -20% because they work only 4 days per week, then all the
| jobs and industry will move to the former as the latter will
| not be competitive anymore.
|
| The 4 day workweek seems to currently work without loosing
| productivity in wealthy service based economies like
| Amsterdam, the City of London, etc where a lot of "work" is
| just Blue Chip companies with theatrics and endless meetings
| while riding the gravy train of other peoples' productivity
| from across the globe who don't have access to a 4 day week
| doing all the heavy lifting(basically economic neo-
| colonialism), but this obviously can't scale across economies
| that actually depend on actually designing and making the
| stuff the wealthy economies speculate on.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I agree! But workers can organize _today_ while moving
| forward improvement with each election result (which will
| take time; for example, 1.8M voters over the age of 55 die
| every year, 4M young folks age into voting ability at 18 in
| the US). Luckily, the entire world is getting old fast [1]
| [2] [3], which means there is a shrinking population of
| total workers; makes it more difficult to have workers
| compete against each other race to the bottom style.
|
| [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/ageing-global-
| populat...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_China
|
| [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8505790/
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Won't less workers also mean less consumers therefore
| less demands for goods and sdervices?
|
| People keep saying how the declining demographics will
| mean the workers have more leverage but when will that
| come? As currently I'm struggling to find a job and a
| recruiter who rejected me just told me they have huge
| supply of "strong candidates" and they don't need to
| compromise anymore on offering WFH or accepting only
| English speaking candidates.
|
| Maybe by the time I retire I can see that leverage?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > Won't less workers also mean less consumers therefore
| less demands for goods and sdervices?
|
| Longer convo for another thread, but TLDR yes,
| "structural decline." Trajectory is a function of how
| fast folks age out of the working population (retire or
| death), because cohorts coming up behind them keep
| shrinking.
|
| EDIT: Put some contact info in your profile.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> EDIT: Put some contact info in your profile.
|
| _
|
| For what?
| sokoloff wrote:
| > EDIT: Put some contact info in your profile.
|
| That's a particularly strange demand to make as someone
| who doesn't expose your own contact info.
| red_admiral wrote:
| We went from "six days thou shalt labour" to the 5-day week
| for a number of reasons. Unions were one reason, Henry Ford
| was another [1][2]. His original argument was that if we
| give workers an extra day of leisure time, there'll be more
| demand for leisure products to consume - like, you know,
| Model T cars. Then, Ford noticed that his new 5-day workers
| were so much more productive per hour than before, that it
| more than made up the difference for the extra hours not
| worked.
|
| So I'd have two criticisms of your "X-20%" figure. The
| first is that just because individual workers are only in 4
| days a week, doesn't have to mean the factory only operates
| 4 days a week; indeed a lot of steel factories do some kind
| of shift work anyway because firing up a furnace from cold
| is hugely inefficient. Sure, that means more heads total
| and so more HR expenses than if everyone worked 5 days, but
| I don't think it adds up to the 20% you quoted.
|
| Secondly, as in Ford's case, the extra productivity you get
| this way might be enough to more than offset the losses,
| and even increase your profits.
|
| [1] https://www.morningbrew.com/sidekick/stories/history-
| five-da... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/a
| rticle/american-... (But note, the claim that moving to a
| 5-day week was a pay cut needs some context. The 5-day week
| started in 1926. But in 1914, Ford already doubled his
| workers' wages from $2.50/day (which was already not bad by
| the standards of the time) to $5/day, almost unheard of at
| the time - though initially with strings attached [3] which
| were later removed. So working 5 days a week at Ford's
| factory could well have still brought in more net pay a
| week than 6 days a week at a competitor in 1926. [3]
| https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-
| implements-5...
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Secondly, as in Ford's case, the extra productivity
| you get this way might be enough to more than offset the
| losses, and even increase your profits._
|
| Henry Ford's revenue boost firstly came from his
| improvements to automation and innovative highly
| optimized production line assembly processes, not because
| le let his workers work 5 days a week instead of 6.
|
| It was those innovations that allowed him to reduce the
| numbers of worker hours needed while get same
| productivity levels or higher, not vice versa as they
| didn't just magically come from working his workers less
| but from innovations to production lines efficiency.
| Workers working less was a consequence of that, not the
| cause.
| esafak wrote:
| And while productivity has steadily risen since then, we
| still work five days/week.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Shareholder returns have also never been higher.
| Coincidence?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Why should shareholder returns be so high when we could
| all work less? That is where the productivity wage delta
| is going: shareholder returns.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| >> And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and
| another X -20% because they work only 4 days per week
|
| The number of widgets produced and the price asked for them
| is not a function of workdays.
|
| You'd need to control for quality of widget produced - and
| since buyers are human that may mean perceived quality
| rather than some absolute assessment of quality.
|
| You'd need to control for location & distance to
| market/customer for each widget produced.
|
| You'd need to control for efficiency of production process.
|
| You'd need to control for... you get the point. The only
| possible way your idea could stand would be if all else was
| held equal - and that's simply not possible outside of
| horse shit models.
|
| Models can be useful, but not like this. This is a BS way
| to think about an economic model.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> You'd need to control for... you get the point. _
|
| Exactly. And most companies and factories in the west
| have already optimized for all these factors to get
| maximum output on a 5 day work week. Moving to a 4 day
| workweek would be an automatic production loss and
| therefore a loss on economic competitiveness compared top
| those still on 5.
|
| What you're talking about, companies who can lower
| working hours without loosing productivity and
| competitiveness are very few and far between, usually
| world champions who have a captive market to themselves
| like Nvidia, ASML, Airbus, high end service jobs, etc,
| but that's only a microscopic share of the total amount
| of players on the market. The rest are firing on all
| cylinders trying to overtake or catch up to those
| established market players, and if you ever worked at a
| startup, it usually means longer hours, not fewer.
|
| _> This is a BS way to think about an economic model._
|
| What's the better way? If all companies could get the
| same levels of productivity form 4 days a weeks from 5
| why haven't they done that already?
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| >> have already optimized for all these factors
|
| Factories and companies start and die all the time. The
| idea that some steady state equilibrium exists is only in
| these BS models.
|
| >> production loss and therefore a loss on economic
| competitiveness
|
| Apple is less competitive because it makes less iPhones
| than Samsung?
|
| >> What's the better way?
|
| Stop pretending models predict reality perfectly.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Stop pretending models predict reality perfectly.
|
| _
|
| But what it reality to you and how do you describe it if
| not by models?
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| >> But what it reality to you
|
| Complicated. It's rare for any interesting scenario not
| to be complicated.
|
| >> how do you describe it
|
| By aiming for honesty and accuracy but with enough
| humility to realise these absolutes are unachievable in
| most interesting cases. To make it more concrete in this
| particular case It means being careful to state
| assumptions is essential.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| But you haven't described anything, you just said it's
| complicated.
| bombcar wrote:
| It would be decently hard to find an argument against the 4
| day workweek that would not ALSO apply to the 5 day
| workweek (compared to 6) - perhaps the only real one is
| "it's what everyone does".
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| But then why work 4 day/week and not 3, when 4 days/week
| becomes the new normal that burns people out? And then
| why not work 2 days instead of 3? And so on.
|
| How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?
| ssklash wrote:
| Shouldn't the goal be to work as little as possible?
| Infinite growth in a finite world just makes us all work
| harder than necessary, and instead of using productivity
| and efficiency gains to benefit people/workers, they just
| go to pad some company's stock price.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Shouldn't the goal be to work as little as possible?_
|
| It's my goal indeed, but not the goal of my country, the
| economy and the businesses in it who provide the jobs I
| work for and also lobby for the labor laws my EU country
| has.
|
| Of course doing no work at all while getting paid loads
| would be the dream, but I wasn't talking about dreams, I
| was talking about reality. And the reality is way
| different than what you dream of.
|
| How do we make less working days a reality for everyone,
| instead of just ~60 companies form the UK?
| bombcar wrote:
| Too bad the "government goal of X% employment (whatever
| that is)" couldn't be met by tuning the workweek up and
| down instead of futzing with interest percentages.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| So why haven't they done it? Seems like a good way to get
| votes. "If you vote for me you'll only work 4 days/week."
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Because at a certain point it will be impossible to argue
| that "Knowledge workers can get as much done in X-1 days
| as in X days" because it's trivially untrue. The problem
| is that the brain is a muscle and gets really really
| tired solving knowledge problems all day because it is
| optimized to avoid doing that at as much as possible
| because it is energy intensive and the ancient human who
| solved everything perfectly rationally died of starvation
| while the one that relied on imperfect heuristics and
| belief got to eat.
|
| Solving super hard Sudoku puzzles 40 hours a week will
| take a toll on your brain that solving super hard Sudoku
| puzzles 1 hour a week empirically cannot.
|
| >How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?
|
| Through the exact science you say you "don't buy" because
| you seem to believe companies operating in a flawed
| market are better at finding ground truth than literal
| science.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Through the exact science you say you "don't buy"
| because you seem to believe companies operating in a
| flawed market are better at finding ground truth than
| literal science._
|
| I'm saying companies believe in science that leads to
| profit, as the market can stay irrational longer than
| companies can stay solvent.
|
| Same how science showed switching to EUV lithography is
| better than sticking to DUV and then all companies
| adopted that, if science would also show workers working
| 32h per week results in more profit for them than 40h,
| then they would all switch in a heart beat to capture all
| that money left on the table by their competitors still
| stuck in their ancient 40h workweek.
|
| But that hasn't happened.
| bombcar wrote:
| Companies (currently) compete by offering _more money_ -
| if the pool of applicants dried up enough, perhaps they
| 'd begin competing by offering _more time_.
|
| The problem is if they pay you $x per year, they don't
| care _how_ many hours you work, as long as the job gets
| done. So something that makes their life a bit more
| annoying (no replies on Friday) but makes your life
| amazingly better won 't get done.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Companies (currently) compete by offering more money -
| if the pool of applicants dried up enough, perhaps they'd
| begin competing by offering more time._
|
| Because more money is what most candidates prioritize
| when job hopping, because when buying a house they can
| pay it with that money but can't pay it with more time
| off.
|
| The only people who prioritize less hours for less money
| are those who are already fortunate enough to have enough
| money but those can always choose to work less hours for
| proportionately less pay.
|
| Like it or not, there are so many people in this rat race
| trying to build wealth that 40h and more money is
| preferable to 32h and less money. That's why the 40h
| sticks and the negotiation is done on money.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Because more money is what most candidates prioritize
| when job hopping, because when buying a house they can
| pay it with that money but can't pay it with more time
| off.
|
| Although you could argue that's already the case in a lot
| of Europe vs. parts of the US. Of course, it's an
| imperfect comparison because of the barriers to moving
| countries or even acquiring a remote job in a different
| country.
| jedberg wrote:
| > And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and
| another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per
| week,
|
| When was the last time you saw a widget factory running 8
| hours a day 5 days a week? Factories already run 24/7/365.
| They hire enough workers for their own economics to make
| sense (either enough so they all work no more than 40 a
| week or they just pay a bunch of overtime). If a 4 day
| workweek became standard it would just mean hiring more
| people or giving more overtime, since it's not the people
| that need to be optimized in that equation.
|
| But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been
| repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not
| more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's
| been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally
| if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a
| week.
|
| _
|
| But then why hasn't it become the norm already and even
| in some cases, like in Asia, people are forced to stay in
| the office way more hours than 40?
|
| If I take that research and show it to my boss saying I
| should work 32 hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay,
| he'll most likely laugh in my face and tell me to go back
| to work.
|
| Clearly the vast majority of companies don't believe the
| same research, otherwise we'd be working 32 hours/week a
| long time ago.
| jedberg wrote:
| For the same reason companies are forcing return to
| office -- control. They like to see their people working,
| it makes them feel like better managers.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| I don't buy this.
|
| I think my manager would also like to work just 32
| hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay. So weh do we
| stop blaming them?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| His manager wants control too, and that goes all the way
| up the chain.
| jedberg wrote:
| I'm sure your manager does. They aren't the ones
| demanding 40 hours and return to office.
|
| It's the C-suite that is doing it. The C-Suite got where
| they are because they are extroverts who excel at in
| person interactions. They can't use that skill unless
| you're there in front of them. They also came up in a
| world where everyone worked in an office 40 hours a week.
| And since they are in charge, they get to choose the
| rules of engagement, and are seemingly choosing to ignore
| productivity studies that show their decisions don't make
| sense.
|
| Eventually they will be eclipsed by C-Suites that follow
| the science as they will get out-competed. But it will
| take decades.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> and are seemingly choosing to ignore productivity
| studies that show their decisions don't make sense._
|
| I also don't buy this. Companies are all profit oriented
| and don't like leaving money on the table if research
| shows there is left over money on the table.
|
| They can't monetize control but they can monetize money.
| If research would show they would make more profits using
| AWS instead of Azure(example pulled out of my ass for
| simplicity), they would immediately switch to it.
|
| So if research would be universal and clear cut that
| working 32 hours outcompetes those companies working 40
| hours, then at least a significant proportion of
| companies would be using this new way of work as leverage
| to outcompete their competitors working 40 and beat them
| at profits and market share, and then that would become
| the new norm as it's the proven winning strategy, since
| that's how competition in capitalism works.
|
| But so far that's not been the case.
| jedberg wrote:
| Return-to-office mandates aren't making companies more
| valuable and productive, study finds:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/return-to-office-
| mandates-re...
|
| "Any one of the three economic factors described above
| (real estate, retention and recruitment), by itself,
| could justify the alleged loss in productivity. When you
| consider all three, it is extremely hard to imagine any
| organization for which the losses resulting from a strict
| RTO policy would be offset by a possible increase in
| worker productivity. As a further consideration, a strict
| RTO policy will also disproportionally impact certain
| traditionally disadvantaged groups, leading to further
| decreases in organizational diversity.":
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/paologaudiano/2023/08/14/her
| e-i...
|
| People return to offices, productivity plunges:
|
| https://ktla.com/news/money-business/people-return-to-
| office...
|
| The return to the office could be the real reason for the
| slump in productivity. Here's the data to prove it:
|
| https://fortune.com/2023/02/16/return-office-real-reason-
| slu...
|
| Expecting a return to office will boost worker
| productivity is 'magical thinking,' says Meta's former
| director of remote work
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/expecting-return-office-
| boost...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Highly factualized comment. I believe the mental model in
| question is not yet flexible enough to update based on
| the data, and there is an expectation of logic from fancy
| emotional monkeys ("executive leadership") grounded in
| status, control, and work as identity.
|
| > So if research would be universal and clear cut that
| working 32 hours outcompetes those companies working 40
| hours, then at least a significant proportion of
| companies would be using this new way of work as leverage
| to outcompete their competitors working 40 and beat them
| at profits and market share, and then that would become
| the new norm as it's the proven winning strategy, since
| that's how competition in capitalism works.
|
| If only it were that simple.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/15/alibabas-jack-ma-working-
| ove...
|
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-sense-
| identity-j...
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90955495/happiness-work-
| survey-u...
|
| https://www.careerchange.com/newsletters/working-
| standards-u...
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| I'm talking about 32 vs 40 h per week productivity, not
| WFH productivity. What's one have to do with the other?
| jedberg wrote:
| You said you didn't believe C-suites were ignoring things
| that could make them more money. I showed you a bunch of
| cases where C-suites are hurting themselves by ignoring
| data.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Except the money they currently make, or not make, is
| directly related to the stock market's performance or
| lack thereof due to the zero interest days being over,
| not to that of WFH or RTO employees.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, I suspect that--based on what I've seen from
| talking to people--remote makes it easier to do no-
| meeting, maybe do some light cleanup Fridays. So there's
| some relationship probably.
| codegeek wrote:
| Why not though. If you are getting $x for 5 days, why should
| you not get $x * 0.8 for 4 days ?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Because you're just as productive in those 4 days. Same pay
| for same results. 5 days doesn't make you any more
| productive.
| codegeek wrote:
| That's one hypothesis. Why not then 3 days ? 2 days ? Where
| do u draw the line ?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Can't if everyone did 4 days weeks. At some point weekends
| would become 3 days long. Market forces determine wages more
| than anything.
|
| It's inevitable really.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That seems reasonable. Take two equivalent companies, one that
| has a 4-day workweek and an otherwise identical one that has a
| 5-day workweek.
|
| Which one would you rather work for? Which one do you think
| will have a relative abundance of applicants (read: supply of
| labor)? Which other one do you think will have a lower supply
| of labor and might need to pay more to attract candidates?
|
| It seems logical that a company offering 4-day workweek would
| be more attractive and, on a balance of factors, could pay less
| to attract the same workforce.
|
| Flip it around. If a four-day workweek was the standard, I feel
| like _literally everyone_ would agree that companies who are
| trying to _introduce_ a five-day workweek would have to pay
| more.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Probably true. Today there are generally premiums for working
| weekends or nights.
| ausbah wrote:
| if productivity is the same why should i be paid less just
| because # of hours is lower? which isn't even always the case
| as these companies will do 9-10 hour days
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Because management will be better?
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's not a matter of philosophy ("should") but rather of
| economics.
|
| I think that the balance of supply and demand will tend to
| have the market-clearing comp be somewhat lower, assuming
| that the offered labor for four-day weeks is well in excess
| of the demanded labor for four-day weeks.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Because productivity is not the same.
| switch007 wrote:
| I think that's exactly the driver behind it
| glitchcrab wrote:
| Not necessarily - I work for a company which went down to a 4
| day work week about 2 years ago and the goal is entirely to
| improve employee wellbeing. Salaries have not changed and
| will not change.
| denysonique wrote:
| Every industry is different. Having the same 5-day, 4-day, x-day
| or x-hour workweek across all industries doesn't make any sense.
|
| More diversity in this area could bring a worldwide increase of
| productivity, wellbeing and result in an economic boost.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 4 day work weeks will be required to compete as structural
| demographics compresses the working age population [1] [2]. For
| example, over 1000 school districts in the US have moved to a 4
| day week to retain teachers, as they have no other choice [3].
| There is evidence it works in many industries (office work,
| manufacturing, law enforcement, government) [4]; it might not
| work everywhere, but it can work where it works.
|
| There is no reason not to ratchet down the work week as
| productivity has increased, and most people work to live, not
| live to work (as indicated by the satisfaction indicators in
| these 4 day week trials).
|
| [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-29/japan-
| s-t... | https://archive.today/jXo6a
|
| [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/13/uk-worst-
| pe...
|
| [3]
| https://www.google.com/search?q=us+school+districts+4+day+we...
|
| [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261177 |
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39254455 (citations)
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| There already is diversity. My in-law works 12 hour days 7 days
| for a week in mining for instance.
| elawler24 wrote:
| This is what Keynes predicted might happen -
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecca.12439#...
|
| That article notes most people can't make enough money from 15
| hours of work to save up for retirement. I also wonder if
| "leisure" has to be redefined, since work and life blend so much
| online. What does 15 hours of work really mean in a knowledge
| work job?
| throwaway-123b wrote:
| For me and I think in the past leisure did not mean mindlesly
| doing something like nothing, it meant time after misery is
| gone. I see it as working necessary time at work that you
| likely do not want to do, like at a factory assembly line or
| farm, hospital, etc. After that, you can stay at work, but do
| something else, like engineering at that factory or what else
| there is you would like to do. This mean less working hours,
| more people could get a job, it is something like work sharing.
| It would allow older people to work too, since work day will be
| lower, it is not like old people can't work at all, they can't
| work as intensivelly. In the end, those who do not work at the
| moment, still connsume, they just do not produce what they
| consume. With smaller work day, they will be able to produce.
| By work here I mean work and firms that produce things related
| to "misery gone", not all there is. So if someone would like to
| work himself 16 h/day, ok, but not in those firms.
| sph wrote:
| And many cannot save enough money for retirement on 40 hour a
| week either.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| I see enough people with way more than 40h/w not being able
| to save the money.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| They just need to read mr money moustache.
| ghaff wrote:
| While I find a lot of his stuff is a calculated over-the-
| top schtick, it's also the case that a lot of people
| overspend on things that are largely luxuries and don't
| materially improve their quality of life.
| bschne wrote:
| I have some gripes with this group and their publications:
|
| - They don't randomize pilots, so any effect you see is likely to
| be confounded
|
| - In this publication, it appears there was ~50% attrition
| between the initial pilot and the follow-up study -- again, a
| huge source of potential confounding
|
| - As another example, in another publication, they showed a plot
| of GDP per capita against average working hours, and insinuated
| from the negative relationship that less working hours somehow
| made workers (causally) more productive, without even hinting at
| the obvious alternative explanation that people work less as they
| get more productive because they don't have to work as much to
| maintain standard of living.
|
| I like that things like this are being tried, but I wish the
| research conducted on it were more intellectually honest and less
| obviously geared towards pursuing an agenda. The level of
| analysis here is more like a company marketing whitepaper than
| anything bordering on scientific.
|
| Don't get me wrong, personally I think companies where it's
| feasible should just define minimum presence where the business
| needs it and leave it to employees where and when to do the work
| within those constraints depending on preferences and their
| situation. I don't have an axe to grind against working less (and
| in my circles it seems like many people are making this decision
| by reducing their workload to e.g. 80%, albeit at a corresponding
| salary cut). But the whole thing just seems a big disingenuous.
| timthorn wrote:
| They also count charities/non-profits as "companies" - it's
| unclear to me if they also include local government, but it
| would be helpful to see the results that for-profit
| organisations achieved broken out separately.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| How would you randomize 4 day work weeks in an unbiased way?
| FredPret wrote:
| You can't, which makes it difficult or maybe impossible to
| have hard facts about it
| black_puppydog wrote:
| seems like a bad excuse to not even try to go beyond
| shrugging/handwaving
| FredPret wrote:
| Nope - it's a great reason to not even start spreading
| more bullshit into the info-sphere.
|
| (The same can be said for almost everything related to
| nutritional "science".)
|
| If we don't have a good mechanism for knowing something
| is true or not, we should acknowledge that and approach
| the problem philosophically / aesthetically.
|
| We need to know what we know so that we can use knowledge
| as our building blocks, not fake information.
|
| You can't magic science into existence and then use it to
| make decisions.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| More discussion over here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39457728
| HermitX wrote:
| In the movie The Matrix, should those people trapped in the
| cultivation tanks be considered as having seven days of rest a
| week?
| lamontcg wrote:
| Newsflash: most people working 40 hour weeks aren't working the
| whole time and spend a lot of time surfing reddit and HN when
| they're not yapping about sports or their weekends with
| coworkers.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| At a job I had a few years ago, 95% of my time was spent on
| reddit/HN.
|
| There was corporate in-fighting over who would would be
| responsible for some work, and my team lost, so my team no
| longer had any work to do. My manager quit, but his manager
| didn't actually know what we did on a day-to-day basis so
| basically left us alone. He was extremely occupied with the
| work from another one of his teams, anyways.
|
| It was actually kind of stressful. I was always waiting for the
| day that my acting manager would discover that we had no work
| to do and would eliminate the entire team. I ended up leaving
| and getting a job where I actually had important (to the
| company, anyways) work to do at a significantly higher salary.
| perfunctory wrote:
| I personally first tried 4-day workweek about 10 years ago and
| still love it. That was one of the best decisions I made in my
| life.
|
| Especially in software industry, it's not that hard to arrange I
| believe. Even easier if we do it collectively. And when more and
| more people do it and it becomes a norm, the income will just
| readjust and return to the current levels.
|
| But even today, when it's still not a norm, and I have a reduced
| income compared to my fulltime working peers, I still consider it
| a bargain. Extra free day is totally worth it. I am basically
| paying for some extra happiness.
| quaintdev wrote:
| This is something that will never happen in India because no
| matter how bad you want 4 day work week theres always someone
| who will do full 5 days a week and do additional work over the
| weekend.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Really sucks that economic systems built on the ability to
| exploit surplus labor can persist. Lots of work left to be
| done. A bug to be patched.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| The hard part is convincing the people who see that bug as
| a feature
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| Sounds like the US should introduce similar legislation to
| what India did with the on soil stuff.
| jart wrote:
| You're assuming that the goal is to increase productivity. I
| wouldn't put it past Europe to have security escort anyone
| who stays past the 32nd hour.
| u02sgb wrote:
| "Europe" is not a homogenous working mass.
| bigfudge wrote:
| The comment you're replying to also has many
| characteristics of trolling. It's ignorant of what
| actually happens inEU countries, as well as the
| motivation behind the regulations that seem to have
| become a between noir for a certain libertarian flavour
| of HN commenters.
| Cheezmeister wrote:
| > theres always someone who will do full 5 days a week and do
| additional work over the weekend
|
| Good for them. If the quality bar holds, they deserve to be
| rewarded.
|
| Based on personal anecdata, the quality bar does not hold.
| Not in India, nor anywhere else.
|
| Why employers can't see this on the balance sheet is a
| different discussion.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Why employers can 't see this on the balance sheet is a
| different discussion._
|
| Because it isn't on the balance sheet. The job gets done,
| the overtime is unpaid.
|
| They assume that if the hours reduce, the job won't get
| done, they don't see each hour of less hours being
| productive because they've but been convinced to try the
| fewer hours option.
| me_me_me wrote:
| > the income will just readjust and return to the current
| levels.
|
| hahaha, good to see some hopeful people around. But the MBA
| people will never let this happen.
|
| They already reduce your salary based on location of your home
| (when remote), as if it matters if you do your work in office
| or whenever.
| Arrath wrote:
| Yeah some of the best times of my life have been on 4-day work
| weeks. Added bonus, they were 10 hours days so we not only got
| our 40 hours a week but a chunk of that was OT!
| barbazoo wrote:
| Usually the point is to reduce the total hours per week as
| well, i.e. 32h instead of 40h.
| Arrath wrote:
| Oh yeah I totally get it, but we were hourly rather than
| salary so it was the best of both worlds. We were working
| out of town so what's a couple extra hours a day on the
| site getting paid when your alternative is primarily the
| hotel room. For us the killer benefit was driving home
| Thursday night (avoiding all that extra Friday traffic) for
| a full extra day home with our families
| Cheezmeister wrote:
| Like defragging your weekly rhythm. I get it.
| esafak wrote:
| You've dated yourself with your magnetic hard drive :)
| brightball wrote:
| Counterpoint: When hiring people reasonably early out of school,
| they often just want the additional hours. I know of a business
| in my area that tried the 4 day work week and they ended up
| having to open on Fridays for half a day because people just
| wanted more hours (and money). Without it, the same people were
| just getting second jobs.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| This isn't for people how are hourly, it's for salaried
| employees.
| viscountchocula wrote:
| Presumably the salaried people weren't clamoring for more
| hours?
| esafak wrote:
| Give people the option to choose how much they want to work,
| and adjust the compensation.
| ysofunny wrote:
| I prefer a 6 hour workday 5 days a week
|
| but I'll take a 4 day workweek (I assume 8 hours a day)
| whycombagator wrote:
| Why not both?
| ysofunny wrote:
| it's from 40 hours a week, down to 32, then to 30. doing both
| means a 24 hour work week...
| nly wrote:
| Tech salaries aren't good enough in the UK to make this feasible
| for most of us.
| CapeTheory wrote:
| Once you get into the top tax band, the 20% cut in base pay
| only corresponds to an ~8% cut in take-home pay - a pretty good
| deal as far as I'm concerned. The problem is that employers who
| pay this much tend to be large US companies and therefore not
| well equipped to deal with requests for flexible working.
| Fortunately the law here means that such requests can't be
| dismissed out of hand, but unfortunately that doesn't mean HR
| is obligated to make such requests easy for managers to go
| along with.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes, though you could also put that money into your pension.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| I used to do 3 12 hour days and it was glorious.
| switch007 wrote:
| Did you have to convince an employer you'd be productive for 12
| hours?
| lzmibes wrote:
| Employer and employee should be free to negotiate whatever
| arrangement is mutually agreeable. I don't think there needs to
| be any more to it than that
| malux85 wrote:
| Except most employers just do what everyone else does - and one
| might say "the market forces them to" but that's total
| nonsense.
|
| Look at remote work, it was fairly uncommon in programming and
| very uncommon outside of programming.
|
| Then everyone was forced to do it with Covid and now it's much
| more common because it works. Everyone was free to negotiate at
| any time before and after Covid, but anything that was even
| mildly radical would be met with a hard no. Simply because
| nobody else does it that way.
|
| I agree that it shouldn't be mandated with laws, but I don't
| agree that it should be left totally up to employer / employee
| because the power balance of negotiation still sits with the
| employer too much.
|
| Unfortunately I don't know what the solution is, we need some
| external force that's not as firm as a law to push a large
| number of companies to 4 days, what could that be I wonder... ?
| lzmibes wrote:
| Did remote, partially remote, 3, 4 and 5 day weeks before
| COVID. It was always there. Did you ask? Do you need a union
| to ask for you?
| piva00 wrote:
| No one said there wasn't, what was stated is that it wasn't
| common.
|
| Great for you to manage to find those gigs, it's not
| representative of the more general trend.
|
| It was always there, for a very few select opportunities. I
| only got 2 remote gigs for very early stage startups
| without an office before COVID (and I've been in this
| industry for 20 years), after it's been 70% of offers from
| recruiters telling me "we're remote friendly".
|
| Do you understand the difference? If you don't like unions,
| don't join one, you're free to do it, as others are free to
| associate and be part of one. If you don't like a unionised
| place you can always move to another job, it will always be
| there for you, no worries.
| lzmibes wrote:
| Wasn't hard to find. Repeatly. Coincidence perhaps...
|
| "Do I understand the difference?"
|
| Sure, the free market is favourable for some. Others
| stand to benefit more from collectivisation.
| piva00 wrote:
| It wasn't hard to find _for you_. In the market you were
| looking for a job, at the time you were looking for a
| job, given that the vast majority of people weren 't
| working remotely before can we agree that it wasn't
| common nor easy to find for a vast swath of the
| population?
|
| You seem to conflate your experience with the general
| experience, that's an extremely harmful bias to have
| since it signals you are unable to see the bigger
| picture, nor empathise with how others have very
| different life experiences...
|
| Again, great for you, it wasn't the common experience.
| lzmibes wrote:
| Extremely harmful. Perhaps union membership should be
| contingent on some sort of empathy test?
| piva00 wrote:
| I simply do not understand your grudge against unions.
|
| You're absolutely free to not join one, I have no idea
| where you are from so can't understand the cultural
| aspect of your grudge. It's just really tiring to read
| the same non-sequitur repeated ad nauseum, yes, you do
| not like unions, I got that, what else do you have to
| say?
|
| Unions where I live are a central and core component of
| the labour market, the government does not interfere in
| the market, all employment contracts are established by
| employees and employers with the support of strong unions
| to provide the basics: minimum wage, working hours,
| additional benefits not covered by law, etc. That's a
| free market of labour, and the right of freedom of
| association working as intended.
|
| If you care to expand the discussion further than being
| edgy about unions we can have a meaningful chat, right
| now you just sound like a parrot.
| piva00 wrote:
| Let me know when both parties have equal power to come to the
| negotiation table on equal grounds, until then, nah.
| vundercind wrote:
| When my failing to find a job for three months is no more
| painful to me than an employer failing to fill a role for three
| months, and when applying and interviewing takes so little of
| my attention that I can also do several other things at the
| same time (as a company is not paralyzed by conducting some
| interviews and reviewing some applications), sure.
|
| Since that will never happen--no.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| This study is a perfect fit the HN crowd who won't question the
| methodology and incentive systems because it fits their
| narrative.
|
| Of course employee are going to report happy. What next? a study
| saying "Employees love more money for the same work?"
| beastman82 wrote:
| Sadly it's a reflection of this reporting. They quote exactly 1
| of these leaders and couch the failures with suggestions of a
| failed methodology.
| harikb wrote:
| Just curios, why single-out HN crowd though???. In a typical
| 'HN crowd' comment, it is usually about a persona that think
| 'tech is great' or 'tech can solve all problems', not this
| particular characterization of 'worker vs management'.
| IshKebab wrote:
| The HN crowd tends to have unrealistic views of money and
| employment, probably partly because software development is
| an unusual job - extremely well paid for relatively little
| work and responsibility - and partly because the kinds of
| people on HN are surprisingly naive when it comes to
| economics (and also people; but that's not surprising).
|
| Some examples:
|
| * Never-ending optimism about UBI, despite the maths clearly
| not working. Kind of similar to this really.
|
| * Expecting salary to exactly match value - i.e. to get the
| same pay remote working no matter where you live. The number
| of people here that fundamentally don't understand that
| salary is a supply/demand negotiation is weird. And they
| really don't think it through to the obvious conclusion if it
| did happen - they'd get paid the same as people in Eastern
| Europe or India.
|
| I think a 4-day work week could eventually happen, but HN
| types like to pretend it will make people more productive
| which it absolutely won't. It probably won't reduce
| productivity to 80%. More like 90%. But it will happen as a
| cultural shift; not because it increases productivity.
| bigfudge wrote:
| Why not point to actual flaws in the methodology then? It's a
| really interesting a very hard to run piece of research.
| Inevitably it will be flawed because tight real world
| experiments in economics are hard/impossible.
| leoff wrote:
| > Of course employee are going to report happy
|
| isn't this also about the firms loving it? If it's a win/win
| for both sides, what's the problem?
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Union meeting 2124: "Mr. President, do we really have to work
| _every_ Wednesday? "
| op00to wrote:
| If we get so efficient that we can meet all our needs working
| once every 14 days, spending the rest of our time exercising
| and enjoying life, why is that bad?
| jjcm wrote:
| There's no doubt that there's a benefit to the employee, but for
| corporations to adopt this there has to be a measurable benefit
| to the company as well.
|
| I do think there is one clear benefit as measured in the article
| - employee retention. It's an extremely strong incentive to stay
| with the current company, and domain knowledge gained over
| decades really is a competitive advantage if your employees
| commonly have it.
|
| What remains to be seen though are if the efficiency gains are
| good enough to justify less hours. Are employees more productive?
| That's the question that remains to be answered or objectively
| measured here. Less burnout and better mental health means higher
| quality work for sure, but is output as a whole better with a 4
| day work week versus a 5 day work week? That's what shareholders
| will care about more than anything else.
| bb123 wrote:
| I'd happily take a 20% pay cut for a 4 day work week, if it was
| offered.
| totololo wrote:
| I think that's common in Switzerland. They call it 80%
| contracts.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I would too but only after I raise my base rate by 25%. If
| I'm on a salary and have project deadlines it's the same
| thing anyway.
| vidarh wrote:
| It's "sort of" what I've done, only last time I changed jobs
| I told recruiters it'd take 20%-30% more for me to come into
| the office full time, and pro-rated below that.
| whatyesaid wrote:
| If most companies become 4 day work week, that would be the new
| floor and not a perk no more?
|
| You might still have 5 day work week employees who get paid
| more but to them the perk is money/earlier retirement.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| That's true for all perks: _if_ all firms offered the same
| perk, that becomes the new floor. But this does not stop
| companies from offering perks.
| esafak wrote:
| Mission accomplished. Otherwise what's the point of
| increasing productivity? If we can get the work done in less
| time, we should be able to work less. In an ideal world, we
| would work as little or as much as we want and be compensated
| accordingly.
| detourdog wrote:
| Also large organizations could have smaller facilities by using
| staggered schedules.
| ghaff wrote:
| Now you're hoteling though which people complain about as
| well.
| detourdog wrote:
| What I have heard is that you can please some of the people
| all of the time and all of the people none of the time.
|
| I also think the USA is marching towards making the gig
| economy the new normal so fractional employment will be
| come normal.
| ghaff wrote:
| And some people are fine with that. I know freelancers
| and consultants who work for multiple companies
| (generally remotely) and they wouldn't have it any other
| way.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| _domain knowledge gained over decades really is a competitive
| advantage if your employees commonly have it_
|
| I'm not so sure. On the one hand, it seems nearly tautological.
| Yet, so much of the comp structure and general attitude towards
| employees in big tech seems to incentivize job hopping every
| few years. I would prefer not having to do that, but my hand is
| forced.
| autoexecbat wrote:
| It's pretty clear to me that deep knowledge of how the
| company works and the historical quirks of how things
| happened, and how the tech-debt works, is considered of only
| small value to a typical company. I've seen countless
| examples of people in such positions being discarded without
| a thought during layoffs.
|
| Additionally, having deep expertise in a particular technical
| area can protect you somewhat during a layoff, but also makes
| you easier to define a replacement for if there is more that
| one of you.
|
| Companies will get what they pay for. They pay for short term
| gain.
| burningChrome wrote:
| In the mid aughts, I worked at a company that put ROWE (results
| oriented work environment) into practice. This approach
| basically meant you could work whenever you wanted, as long as
| you were meeting goals and metrics. There was a list of metrics
| you had to meet before being eligible for it. They kept it in
| place for two years and nothing really changed. Devs were still
| meeting their metrics and the company was still doing well, but
| when the old VP who put ROWE in place left, the first thing the
| new VP did was take it away along with some other perks we had.
| Myself and about seven other devs left within the next 3-4
| months.
|
| I'm currently working for a large corporation who went through
| several cycles of trying to get people to come back to the
| office after C19 slowed down. After three or four versions,
| they finally gave up and put an optional (hybrid) model in
| place. It was interesting to hear the stunned VP's glowing
| about the increased productivity and the company had two of its
| most successful quarters going into and coming out of the
| pandemic. I'm guess seeing those results made it easier for
| them to allow people to work from home more easily.
|
| Some anecdotal evidence for your retention theory. Since my
| current company allowed 100% WFH, our team has had barely any
| turn over and at least three of the teams I worked with have
| also have little or no turn over as well. It would stand to
| reason you probably have a good point about retaining people
| when you allow them a little more freedom to do their jobs.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I'm with a large organization (government, military) that
| also implemented a hybrid model under covid and decided to
| keep it going. But not a day goes by that someone doesn't
| scream for it to end. We have too many people "working from
| home" all the time and never getting done the stuff that
| cannot be done from home. Is the server not responding after
| the recent power outage? Too bad. The guy to turn it back on
| only comes in Monday-Tuesday. They put the real property
| maintenance people on a hybrid model. No joke: The plumbers
| and electricians still "work from home" half the week.
|
| "Hello, this is General Smith." "Sir, ... um .. you are
| answering your own phone?" "Yup. My EA is working from home
| thursday-friday and we cannot get the secure phone to forward
| calls to her cellphone." "Did you talk to IT?" "It is friday.
| IT works remote on fridays." "How about I come to your
| office?" "Please do, I'm all alone here."
| vidarh wrote:
| My employer's IT is in a different country. I'm not sure
| which. If it matters, that's an organizational problem, not
| a WFH problem.
| nilamo wrote:
| Your IT should always be remote. A laptop in the office is
| not any different from a laptop out of the office.
|
| It definitely feels like most people complaining about wfh
| have no friends and work is their entire life. I honestly
| do not understand how anyone can pretend they get anything
| done, while also being constantly interrupted or having
| conversations about what they're doing this weekend, or
| such and such sports team last night etc. Like... just get
| the work done and move on, jeez, it's work, not a social
| club. Ending wfh so you can force people to hang out with
| you is weird.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Your IT should always be remote. A laptop in the
| office is not any different from a laptop out of the
| office.
|
| Maybe if you are working at Google, with infinite budgets
| and gleaming-new machines everywhere. But we have old
| stuff. We have phones that cannot be managed remotely. We
| have desktop computers that cannot get up and walk
| between offices unaided. We have fiberoptic wires that
| break when 60+yo buildings shift on their foundations. We
| have UPSs that cannot change their own batteries. We have
| antennas exposed to the wind/rain/snow. We also have
| innumerable systems that are either too old or too
| classified to be managed from a laptop at starbucks. None
| of this stuff can be fixed from home.
| duckmysick wrote:
| I was always curious - in fully remote IT (especially one
| located in another state/country), who does the actual
| on-site visits? Say, a PC part has to be replaced or a
| new laptop has to be deployed.
|
| For the deployment I guess you can use something like
| ImmyBot or Intune, but at some point someone has to be
| there and connect a new machine to the internet/intranet.
| How does that work in practice?
| belval wrote:
| That sounds mostly dysfunctional and not really a WFH
| issue.
|
| > Is the server not responding after the recent power
| outage? Too bad. The guy to turn it back on only comes in
| Monday-Tuesday.
|
| A reasonable company would have some rotating in-office IT
| or at the very least an oncall that goes to wherever the
| server is to fix it.
|
| > The plumbers and electricians still "work from home" half
| the week.
|
| Pretty much the same thing.
|
| As someone who is a big proponent of WFH, one thing I must
| still agree to is that organizational and cultural issues
| that existed prior to WFH at usually just worse in WFH. If
| your employees are so disfranchised that their install
| scripts to wiggle their mouse while they watch Netflix the
| battle is already lost.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> A reasonable company would have some rotating in-
| office IT
|
| Ya. We had that. We had 10+ people doing trouble tickets
| 8am to 4pm across more than a dozen buildings. They
| worked hard, but were never actually done. There was
| always a priority list. Now they work half the week from
| home. Stuff is piling up and we are begging for more non-
| at-home IT staff to be hired.
| lolinder wrote:
| I think you missed the point--your organization is
| completely dysfunctional at this point and hiring won't
| change that.
|
| Based on your description you don't have a WFH policy,
| you have a policy that incentivizes not working at all.
| What makes you think that these hypothetical new hires
| are going to actually work while the rest of their
| department doesn't? What sane person would put up with
| that treatment?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> I think you missed the point--your organization is
| completely dysfunctional at this point _
|
| Would you be surprised to hear that most companies in the
| world are just like that?
|
| HN readers are in a bubble where they can afford to be
| picky on where they work choosing companies that fit in
| their belief system in terms of organizational efficiency
| and work culture, instead of just choosing the least
| horrible job they can find with the best pay, like the
| other 99% of the people in the world.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> If your employees are so disfranchised that their
| install scripts to wiggle their mouse while they watch
| Netflix the battle is already lost._
|
| That would be a lot of companies and workers out there,
| dare I say the vast majority even.
|
| Believe it or not, many workers don't actually enjoy
| their work, their company, their boss or their job, but
| they put up with it because housing in expensive and it
| was the least horrible job they could find with the
| highest pay they could land, enabling them a lifestyle
| upgrade, even if they don't care for the work itself, so
| of course they'll take every opportunity they get to
| slack off and watch Netflix if they can.
|
| Expecting all your workers to be fully invested and
| committed on work time is an exercise in futility and
| something no company past a certain size will ever
| accomplish because everyone just looks after themselves
| and their own self interest first, screw the company and
| their shareholders. And the companies know this, hence
| the culture of micromanagement, spyware, RTO, etc.
|
| That's why start-ups and small companies can accomplish
| things the likes of Google can't, because they're formed
| mostly of motivated people who care about the product and
| the mission first and foremost, while the likes of Google
| are full of coasters who are there just to make as much
| money as possible with as little work as possible while
| the gravy train lasts.
| risyachka wrote:
| The work week went from 6 days to 5 and economy growth didn't
| stall (when people were waaay less productive)
|
| My bet is literally nothing will change if we go to 4-day work
| week.
|
| Can't say about others but my productivity goes way up with an
| extra weekend. I am way more rested and eager to do some work
| in Monday.
| nickff wrote:
| Reducing the number of days worked per week per individual
| increases (relative) overhead costs, including administrative
| costs, benefits (most notably including healthcare), and
| capital costs (because everything is being used less, but
| still devaluing). These are all real changes with real
| impacts.
|
| Also of note, the increase in these costs from going down to
| 4 days will be substantially larger than the prior one (due
| to the smaller dividend).
| ipaddr wrote:
| Capital costs spent do not go up. An opportunity for saving
| exist. One extra day means less electrical costs. Admin
| costs remain static. These costs do not change unless you
| are hiring someone for that one day.
|
| The costs are not going up substantially or at all for most
| 9/5 businesses
| nickff wrote:
| Capital expense is ~= depreciation, which is inversely
| proportional to the amount of work performed with a given
| capital asset.
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| I suspect we'd see a bunch of change. A difference of when we
| moved 6 to 5 days is in those times most business were closed
| on the weekends + generally people were more tied to one
| company for longer term. Plus 2 days off is very different
| than 3 in terms of alternate work opportunity.
|
| From that a likely issue is a steep increase in people having
| second jobs so they work a 4 day job and a second 2/3 day
| job.
|
| I suspect the 4 day week will work well for people with good
| salaries and market power, but encourage working class to
| 'work the weekend' in alternate jobs resulting in lower
| downtime.
|
| For this I'd actually like a 4 day week but with it either
| more restricted business opening on Sunday type thing or
| significant wage multiples over 3 day weekends to encourage
| time off vs the 24/7 economy.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| 4day work week won't do magic by itself. The company committing
| to it must also apply the necessary modifications and seek
| innovation to tap into this productivity well.
|
| It's like in the Industrial revolution when kids (!!) shift
| were lowered from 18 hours to 12-8 hours. Adults that were
| assisted by kids also couldn't maintain the same 18 hours shift
| and for the factories to maintain productivity they had to
| implement innovations. And would you look at that, the average
| textile factory today is orders of magnitude more productive
| and efficient than that of the 19th century.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Conditions for factory workers in the US haven't improved
| because it turned out to be an optimal way to improve
| productivity. It's because of worker movements demanding it
| again and again.
|
| Those productivity innovations you mention would've come
| either way. In other countries with worse working conditions
| and even less labor power than the US, factory owners reap
| the benefits of applying such productivity innovations AND
| the increased output of longer working hours than is
| generally tolerated by US workers.
|
| From the parent comment:
|
| > but for corporations to adopt this there has to be a
| measurable benefit to the company as well.
|
| This is only true in a world where workers are entirely
| subservient to their masters.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Oh sure, don't get me wrong. I am not a techno-positivist
| that believes innovations will save us from evil. That was
| only to illustrate how a change in working policy has to go
| alongside technical and cultural adaptations.
|
| These worker movements are crucial to keep workers from
| getting both pressured to produce more AND work longer
| hours.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Got it.
|
| The parent's line about a company needing to maintain or
| increase productivity in order to make an improvement to
| working conditions is one that only those truly part of
| ownership should be making. Especially when it's never
| said so in both directions: if productivity improved
| (through automation or otherwise) then the workers
| shouldn't have to work as long hours. Only actual owners
| get to work less if they wish to in wage labor business.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > but for corporations to adopt this there has to be a
| measurable benefit to the company as well.
|
| > I do think there is one clear benefit as measured in the
| article - employee retention.
|
| Well, sure, I think that's a given. This is also, for example,
| why companies pay their employees money in exchange for their
| labor. The measurable benefit to the company is that very few
| people would work for free.
| statquontrarian wrote:
| I've been doing a 20-hour 3 day work week (50% of total pay) for
| a few years now and I love it. I'm outperforming a full-time
| colleague in total output.
|
| Edited to add that the 3 day work week totals 20 hours.
| op00to wrote:
| What does your full time coworker say about that? Are you
| concerned at backlash or retaliation?
| statquontrarian wrote:
| I didn't mean to give the impression that I was boasting or
| that I bring this up with him or my management, but just that
| there's a somewhat objective relative measurement that shows
| that it's possible to keep up high output for some jobs. I
| was surprised that my _total_ output stayed so high after
| transitioning from 40 to 20 hours.
|
| No backlash or retaliation so far after more than 2 years.
| op00to wrote:
| I didn't mean to insinuate you were boasting! I apologize
| if that was the case.
|
| I do my required work in 20 hours most weeks. I spend the
| rest of the 40 hour work week resting, learning, and
| working on myself. I am careful not to publicize this
| because I am concerned at backlash from colleagues who find
| they have to spend more time than me.
|
| People work at different paces and provide different value
| to the company for many reasons. I may be efficient and
| effective, but I tend to burn out faster, hence the rest
| time.
| glenjamin wrote:
| If you're producing more than a full-time colleague, does the
| 50% pay cut seem a bit harsh?
| statquontrarian wrote:
| Probably, yes, but I suspect that it's so hard to find this
| arrangement (20 hours per week, full benefits, and still very
| good pay despite it being 50% of total), that I'm just very
| content with the arrangement.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Maybe I'm getting this wrong but... you're working 3/5 of the
| time, you're getting 1/2 of the money and you are earning the
| company > 100% than full time?
| statquontrarian wrote:
| I'm working 1/2 the time (7 hours Monday & Tuesday, and 6
| hours Wednesday), and, yes, it even surprised me that my
| total productivity is about the same as when I worked 40
| hours per week. It's even possible that my total productivity
| is actually greater than before but we don't have
| sufficiently precise metrics off of which to judge that.
| pythonguython wrote:
| I work in contracting, so this could never work. At the end of
| the day, many Americans sell time. There's no incentive for my
| organization to produce more in less time.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| They love it because while everyone works 5 days they work 4.
| Once everyone has 4 they will be back to square one just like
| everyone is now (5 days a week). Humans are like that, they
| compare what others have to see if they have it better. Where do
| you think we got the term, grass is always greener on the other
| side?
| kkfx wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: 4-days workweeks is used as a scam to force
| people in the office instead of full-remote. That's is.
|
| Since https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/
| "productivity" in not a thing really interests companies, they
| are much more interesting in having an effective grip on their
| workers, with remote workers the sole grip is fair conditions and
| nice work environment. They do want to keep the geographical grip
| and various other small potatoes grip on workers. Here the
| popularity of shorter workweeks, of course "if you go in the
| office", meaning if you live nearby.
|
| I can work 6 days a week, no issue, but if the job can be done
| from remote it MUST BE done from remote.
| spoonjim wrote:
| 4 day week is very stupid. You can only do a few hours of good
| programming a day and throwing away one of them is idiotic
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| I think future generations will look back and find unfathomable
| that we spent the best part of 5 days a week (if not more)
| working. At least I hope so.
| kypro wrote:
| And here I am sad that no one will let me work weekends in IT.
| pitahat wrote:
| I think the biggest thing we often miss when we talk about the
| 4-day work week is that most employees would not mind doing
| condensed hours i.e. longer hours everyday but then work fewer
| days. It doesn't have to be straight cut to 32 hours etc
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