There certianly is when choosing where to work.

>It's typically not an accepted proposition to offer to work 4 days for proportionally less pay

I currently have a 40 hour work where I can set my own hours and earn "flex time" (future PTO) for any hours over 40.

I am paid well now, but I could certainly earn more by switching to company that would expect me to work more than 40 hours.

The people complaining about working extra are absolutely choosing more time and more money.

How often do you get to actually use that flex time, though? I think most of us have plenty of horror stories about being offered "time in lieu" for overtime, and then the boss conveniently "forgets" that he offered us this.

I earn and use about one every month just working an extra half hour a day. I can see why that would that would be a concern.

It's a company wide thing, so that helps.

I'd second this. All the responses to the contrary seem to be about >40 increase, but there aren't many chance to take a 20% (30%, realistically) pay-cut and work 4 day weeks.

Partly I think that's an efficiency thing - if you're critical path on a task, having you available when everyone else is becomes worth a large multiple of your salary. Partly I suspect it's just about not opening the floodgates, where people either resent you or take the same deal.

I wonder what the real cut would be, though? For work like software where adding shifts can't be done cleanly, you risk all kinds of major benefit, payroll-tax, and hardware/facilities costs. Still, there have to be programmers willing to take a 50% pay cut for a 33% hour cut.

(There's an essay somewhere for programmers about how to ask a manager for this, which is full of notes on how they'll be confused and try to reject it without considering it.)

There's full time and then there's full time.

You can certainly choose to work for a 40h company instead of a 60h company but the latter type of company doesn't seem to have any problems recruiting.

That's on the other side of the issue. My point was that there isn't anything like a 'proportional electiveness function' for the hours of work people are able to get with employment agreements. I think it looks like this for salaried professional employment: anything less than 40 is very low probability, 40-45 is very typical, and decreasing popularity in bins afterwards 50-60, 60+ etc.

Given that's the distribution, you can't say people won't don't want to elect for <40 for less pay, it's not a really a choice in the current environment.

> anything less than 40 is very low probability, 40-45 is very typical, and decreasing popularity in bins afterwards 50-60, 60+ etc.

Oh god. America is even worse than I thought.