https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Although, sometimes we wish we could.

Similar to Microsoft, we only have one 45-min meeting each week and then everything else is heads down work.

To maintain efficiency, we also have strict Slack protocols in place to keep everyone in deep work throughout the day. (No @ or DMs, everyone checks Slack at 11am and 4pm).

The major downside so far has been customer support, which the founders still manage to maintain our response rate.

Oh and we're hiring! If you're frontend engineer and like 4-day weeks + side projects, reach out directly [email protected]

https://monograph.io/jobs/frontend/

A 6 hour x 4 day work week is 75% the regular work day and 80% of the regular work week, but I bet it gets a lot more than 60% of the regular work done. That is largely cutting out the unproductive "slack time", and giving it back to the employees so they don't have to look busy when they are already spent for the day/week.

If you need to squeeze more out of the workforce, please hire more employees, and worry less about their specific "qualifications". Instead, spend more on management recruiting. Get managers who can coordinate the efforts of people working together asynchronously. Just like asynchronous programming, it takes a little bit more skill than just managing everyone together in the same office location, at the same time, doing the "manager walk" and demanding status reports and status meetings. And employees are universally happier with managers that are more skilled at management.

People who want to work more should be able to, but we generally need a massive reevaluation of what work in America is worth, in favor of labor. We're giving up way too much because we're afraid.

We also need a reevaluation of what work is worth, in terms of self-worth and position in society. We're too far on the side of "you are your job" (and its less-savory friend "your net worth is your worth").

I think we (as a society/industry) need to start publicly having this discussion.

I am not ADHD/ADD, but have interacted with a few in this situation..

Regardless of how it's classified, I tend to think of it more as just a different way the mind works, and not necessarily an inferior one (even if our society seems to make it harder to thrive at a young age when that's how your mind works[1]). Given the number of people I've seen that seem to leverage this aspect of how they function to good success as adults, I definitely wouldn't consider it a disability.

1: My daughter has ADHD and takes medication because the structure of school and the constraints it puts on the people in it doesn't really allow for other options that don't result in her failing or one of her parents devoting ourselves to her education. I have complex feelings about this, but believe it's beneficial at least for now.

In my 10+ years of office experience I never even come close to 20 hours of actual work in a week, even if I was there for 40-60 hours. Usually, half the time or more was dedicated to office politics and making people who need to constantly socialize feel good about themselves with various meetings and team-building exercises and chit-chat. During one particularly bad period of time, work often only happened the little gap between morning meetings and noon because certain people would come back from lunch pissed out of their minds and make it impossible for anyone to do anything. I never had a problem with the actual work, but the non-work I was putting most of my time and effort into was exhausting and lead to long bouts of depressions.

Now that I'm freelancing from home, with no commute and no babysitting egos, not only am I spending most of my work time on work, but the time I do spend is about 10x more productive, due to lack of office (and commute) stress.

It could be 9hr/4day, and you will do that until you run out of capital after 1800 work hours.

From a business strategy standpoint, my experience has been that sometimes companies try to compensate for poor strategy by piling on the hours. To me, it's like trying to do push ups to solve math problems faster.

Similarly, I have noticed that strategic structural soundness is vastly more important than hours worked. When the structure is there, all your efforts are leveraged many times over such that, effectively, 30 hours a week becomes more like 300.

Hard work is important and satisfying but duration is not the real measure we should look at, imo.

For op, chores are basically just more work, more things for him to mentally whip himself to concentrate on.

Op wants a break from that mental process of forcing his concentration but can't because it's the only way he knows to actually make himself do anything useful.

I didn't miss it. Every single person is going to have something they need to work through that others don't. ADHD is a cross that OP needs to bear and he has to learn to deal with it the same as a single mother of 2 has to juggle raising her children and providing for them, or a recent immigrant may have to work through language and cultural barriers while working their job and sending money back home for their family.

>Op wants a break from that mental process of forcing his concentration

We all want it to be a little easier, but sometimes life doesn't give you that option. And OP didn't make it easy to empathize with him when he shifted the blame on the world and likening himself to a slave because he has to work 5 days a week (leaving not enough time to do 'chores' and 'still have fun') until retirement.

It would be a worse situation for everyone if I wasn't given the drugs, but there's something awfully dystopian about the whole thing.

I can't wait to be done forever.

Startups, by definition, try to scale up quickly..which means lots of money (investors) and lots of time (overtime and long hours).

[0] - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/startup.asp

Developers generally agree that it's better to spend some time writing tests, as even if it increases our latency in the small term, it will improve output it in the long term.

Yet, we also seem to think that it's totally fine to sacrifice mental and physical being for the sake of short term gains instead of long term ones?

I am not saying one should not do the occasional push, but surely as a founder it's better to work 40 hours a week and keep yourself sane, than push yourself into burn out after 1 year of 70h/week and no holidays?

Only because you've surrounded yourself with people that don't know any other way to do it. Find more creative people to hang out with.

I've never understood this line of thinking. Providing for yourself is being a contributing member of the species, work is a means of providing for yourself. For all of human history you've either had to get up every day and go be productive bringing resources in or you had to depend upon someone else to do it for you.

I see this "working is slavery" attitude constantly in /r/leanfire and other personal finance subs and I just don't get it. Every single thing you use required labor to come into existence. Your phone, your computer, where you live, the clothes you are wearing, the food you eat, all of that required human labor to produce.

Worse, I often seen the 'work is slavery' form 6-figure salary types (at least in /r/leanfire) that have great benefits and are griping they won't be able to retire by 35 or from people that are on their first job (usually retail) and think it is unfair they can't sit at home playing video games and having all their needs met.

This sort of mentality can't be good for the future of mankind. Sitting in an air conditioned building, listening to spotify, while you decide if you want to go get the catered lunch or sit in your cubicle while you screw around on HN/reddit and pretend to work is NOT slavery.

If you genuinely feel this way, go get a job throwing trucks/planes in the dead of summer or go get a landscaping job for a few weeks. Seriously, go get a manual labor job part time on the weekends and realize there are people doing that 40, 50, 60 hours a week all year long.

Go tell someone from the 1950s, 1850s, 1750s, 1650s how hard you have it and how bad it is having to sit at a computer all day in a climate controlled building. They'd look at you in utter disbelief and beg you to tell them how to have such a wonderful life.

I've had a job since I was 12 and working full time since the day I turned 18. I'm grateful that I get to work, grateful that I am able to provide for myself, grateful that I do get to sit a desk and am no longer humping a backpack full of diesel weed eating and digging graves. I'll take sitting at a monitor over getting sunburn to the point of blistered skin from being outside working all day with no cover any day.

However, I can't truly pick when I want to work. There are no jobs in my area that pay 80% of my current rate for the same task done 4 days a week.

If a job was truly an even exchange of value between employer and employee, I would expect to see some people working 7 days a week and making 40% more than me, and some people working 3 day weeks and making 40% less. But aside from service workers with work on nights, weekends, and holidays, everyone in my city went to work in the dark this morning and will go home in the dark tonight.

I am not against trading labor for money - that's the point of a job. I am against trading freedom plus labor for money.

You can totally get this kind of flexibility as a self-employed contractor. The fact that you aren't just as easily allowed it as an employee is ultimately due to excess red tape in the paid-employment sector, nothing else. Every bit of red tape in the employment arrangement is an extra fixed cost that has to be paid-for somehow, meaning that the employee has to work that much more just to break even.

Why? There are plenty of concentration effects that go against this; e.g. it's better for everyone to work the same hours for communication reasons.

I've got some news for you, many manual labor jobs aren't just picking up a shovel and digging a hole or picking up a box and setting it back down.

Your first sentence, to me, reads "I'm more valuable than you because I know thing, so I want more resources for less effort".

One can state a fact without making it into a brag. Saying, "I get paid more than you" is not the same as saying, "I am a better person than you", despite the culture that the rich prefer to cultivate that equates the two. A person that gets paid $15/hour is the same amount of person as someone paid $100k/year. The latter is "more valuable" only in the economic, marketplace sense, and gets roughly 3x the resources for the same amount of labor, which likely does not involve work that requires separating ass from chair.

If you don't pay people more to acquire the difficult skills, they won't bother, except in rare cases.

I was only saying the engineer version of myself adds greater resources to an economy than a hypothetical hunter-gatherer version of myself - who, being myself, obviously has equal moral worth.

Congratulations you just described capitalism.

That's how it is for most people anyway. Sure there's other options like starting a business or whatever, but those are restrictive in their own ways and aren't possible for most people.

There's no reason work needs to be structured in the tyrannical matter it is. Work could be democratic, but it's not.

Obviously work is necessary, but not _all_ work is, especially in today's world. Society as a whole is taking the path of working more in order to consume more, instead of working less and having more free time. It's hard to escape this. Most part-time jobs are minimum wage type jobs.

You'll have to choose that though, it means you adjust the location where you live so that rent is reasonable, and it means not constantly buying new shit. Of course if you're working for an employer you more or less have to do what they tell you but I don't think there has been any time in history that it was this easy to earn your freedom.

I make a typical SF software engineer salary and I live in a low cost of living area. The reality is that I still need about $3M to permanently stop working. Healthcare is expensive and the dollars that I'm making now will be worth much less later in life, even when prudently invested.

I'll probably be able to achieve independence by 40 or 45 instead of 55 or 65 because I have a low CoL and won't have kids. I'm very much looking forward to the freedom I'll have purchased for myself, but it's still an absurdly long time to wait to start living.

Until then, it's more pills and more work.

I have no idea how people manage to live fulfilling lives while still working 40+ hours a week, but I sure can't do it.

$3M is a lot, typically the rule of thumb is that you need 25 years worth of living expenses to be financially independent. That means you expect to spend $120k yearly? That's up to you of course but that fits exactly in what I said about choosing how much you spend. My monthly expenses are currently < $1500 per month (for 2 people, in Sweden), and I think it's more likely that I will taper off working (work fewer hours, more fun but lower paying jobs) than that I will stop working altogether. That means $300-400k would probably be enough to provide a significant level of freedom especially once my girlfriend graduates and has an income as well.

My salary is far from an SF salary and I do work full-time but I find my work quite fulfilling. If it weren't I wouldn't have much difficulty finding work with more freedom for e.g. part-time employment.

I checked my math again with https://www.firecalc.com/

I would need about $50k/yr in expenses at present (adjusted for inflation in the future). If I'm planning for 50 years out, that means I need a portfolio of about $1.6M to have a high probability of being able to make it 50 years.

So not quite $3M, and maybe I could cut more expenses, but I think at least $1.5M in liquid assets is what I need. If by some miracle I can get a $1M payday when my current employer sells, then maybe I've got a chance at being done in the next few years.

If I could get my spending down to $30k/yr, which might be possible, then I could get away with $1M, but I'll still have to put in another 5 years or so to hit that $1M number.

Keep in my mind for US people, we have to buy our own health insurance, and if something medical goes wrong and you can't work, you can easily go bankrupt that way. There's such little safety net that I'd like to have more than I think I'll need.

I don't know if you've met tribes people or those living in agrarian societies, but while they do tend to have excellent work ethics and do a lot, they also tend to have _more_ down time and family time than someone working a 40 hour week, tilling fields is hard fucking work, maintaining all your own equipment and making things by hand is slow and laborious, but you do get to finish. Sometimes there's weeks that you're working every single day, but there's also seasons where you aren't.

I've literally dug graves for a living.

I've thrown trucks for a living in 90F heat in 80%+ humidity.

I've worked 40 hours for a company and 40-50 hours a week for myself trying to get ahead some.

I've been working since I was 12 years old just to help make ends meet. Sitting at a desk doing 'unfulfilling, repetitive' work is the easiest thing I've ever done and I'd take it over every single other job I've ever had without hesitation. I get to sit in a temperature controlled office all day, I can go to the bathroom when I need to, I'm not in the heat/cold all day getting sun poisoning anymore, I have set hours with a reliable schedule and steady pay. It's amazing.

Probably not. You wouldn't want to waste time on back-breaking labor that has no productive purpose, would you?

But the white-collar desk job does that every time it says "work 8 hours every day" while the worker consensus is that the 7th and 8th hour is mostly useless, and subsequent hours in the same day are often counterproductive.

If you spend 8 hours digging a grave by hand with a shovel, your muscles get tired. But if you do it long enough, the muscles get stronger, and you can dig graves for longer before getting fatigued. If you spend 8 hours a day thinking about difficult problems, your brain gets tired. If you do it long enough, you get smarter, but also burn yourself out, go slightly insane, and lose the ability do the job at all any more.

They're different kinds of cells. They have different physiological processes for maintenance and repair. Muscles don't sleep and flush with CSF; brains don't bulk up and add additional nuclei.

its the same argument of saying "yeah well someone in a insert 3rd world country has it way worse than you so your problems dont matter."

you need to step back and understand that people in white collar jobs are allowed to be miserable regardless of whether theyre breaking their back or not, and if that misery can be subsided by having an alternate schedule to work to produce efficiency, then why is that such a crazy ask? because that's just "the way things have always been done"? when was the last time that argument has ever worked out well?

This doesn't apply to MANY jobs, unless you're talking about replacing humans with robots with superior strength and agility that do not need to rest.

The majority of HN, and silicon valley types in general, are incredibly myopic. The vast majority of people here automatically assume everyone else in a thread works in CS, they assume everyone has a degree, they assume everyone hammers away at code in a comfy office all day.

The vast majority of the world is not sitting at a computer coding for 6 figure salaries with great benefits and profit sharing.

Why does that mean other people should feel the same way you do?

Fuck this.

In the United States the benefits of full time employment are mandatory if you want to live a much less stressful life. Tying benefits to employment has given employers far too much control over their employees lives, without a huge savings or secondary income source anyone without insurance is one bad day away from bankruptcy (and too many people /with/ benefits are as well).

If a 4 day work week lowers stress and increases productivity that much, I don't see why many industries shouldn't adopt it. And don't tell people that "You have a choice, just get a part time job instead". Thats not a choice, thats a financial death sentence.

If you want to change that start with changing how you vote, the two party system is broken beyond repair, the US would fare much better under a coalition government.

One potential issue is that I think there are fewer legal requirements, but competitive employers already provide benefits that exceed the legal minima.

This would also allow industry to focus on what industry does which is make money. They no longer would have to spend on expensive Cadillac health care plans in order to compete for employees. Governments job is to keep its populace safe and healthy, that is not the job of private industry.

The only reason we don't have this is due to lobbyists.

Retirement makes sense as this is your source of income. I feel that company resources would be better spent elsewhere than on healthcare.

This would, of course, require universal healthcare or direct market healthcare. This would help new businesses thrive, especially the "mom and pop" types.

I guess I am jaded on this as my parents lost their business when I was growing up due mainly to the cost of healthcare. Not all companies have monolithic budgets.

I doubt most Fortune 500 employees would support turning their company plans into some medicare-for-all. Next step would be turning Social Security over to Goldman Sachs.

Getting health insurance, whether public or private, out of the hands of employers is probably the single best thing that could be done for working conditions in America.

If I've contributed my maximum amount in 4 days rather than 5, it should not be called part time. Part time should be reserved for instances where you are indeed contributing less than a full amount per week, such that you could hold two part time jobs.

So the question is really why some employers insist on the full 40 rather than being open to a range from 30 to 40.