That's because you increase your free days by 50% by cutting your work days by 20%. It's not a symmetric exchange. I did the same over the summer (just by using my excess vacation days) and it was a revelation. Highly recommend, especially now that it's so hard to travel.

And then I realized there are second order effects. Double my pay actually means much more than double my savings per year as my costs are more or less fixed.

So then I changed the formula to scale with respect to the amount I am saving versus the discretionary free time. Maybe a 30% raise would actually double my savings.

And by discretionary free time I am subtracting time spent doing chores. I live very close to work and even getting a job that requires a 1 hour commute each way makes a huge difference in my discretionary free time and should be compensated accordingly.

And then I took it one step further. I decided to take an Excel sheet and map out all the discretionary free time I think I will have for the rest of my life. And then I evaluated job offers based on which one will maximize that free time. So maybe cutting short free time right now is okay if it is more than compensated by having me retire a lot earlier. Of course then you may want to factor that free time while young is perhaps worth more than free time when your body is not that healthy.

And of course you may not live long enough to retire and you do want to take that into account as well and not put all your joy off towards the end.

It's a bit of a rabbit hole.

How can you tell which jobs will give you how much free time? Besides commuting (I hope to work remotely forever), at many big companies, amount of free time greatly depends on the team you land on. Either way, there seems little insight into true work life balance of a company.

But there are things one can know such as the number of vacations you'll have.

But yeah commuting is where you have the most certainty.

Similarly, having more money hits serious diminishing returns. Watching a 500$ TV vs a 5,000$ TV doesn’t actually change much in the moment. Jump all the way to a 500,000$ home IMAX and watching a terrible movie still sucks.

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/how-research-shows-you-can-l...

I still enjoy life in the present but I do sacrifice a bit of it so I can also enjoy life when older.

If you don't want to completely sacrifice today for tomorrow you simply adjust the age related weight in the Excel sheet :-)

GF does not like it at all, but it works very well for me.

  echo $(expr '(' $(date -d 2070-01-01 +%s) - $(date +%s) + 86399 ')' / 604800) " weeks until I turn 80"

For example, I'd bet most people would be unwilling to smooth over their 40 hour workweek over the course of the full week of 7 days, working 5.7 hours a day. Of course that's nice in a way, but having no fully free days and perpetually working forever, is agonising.

In that sense you can't just compare cutting a working day to simply having more discretionary time (which you have after workdays, too). Fully free days count a bit differently.

The worker interviewed in the article said, "Also being on call can be a challenge, but it's nothing that's not fixable."

I understand that to mean that he's not truly working a 4-day week. He's working 4 days + on-call day(s) at times.

But culturally, it also encourages a lot of automation, redundancy, and conservative DevOps decisions.

Granted, at times I'm on the job until late at night, to get things done and, sometimes, to make up for an extra long shopping excursion etc.

A 4 day on-site job would feel severely disadvantageous by comparison.

Not having to waste time commuting is fabulous, and in my case all my colleagues work in other countries. We do have a small office nearby, and I choose to go in once every 2 weeks or so, just for a change of scenery and a wee bit of socialising.

As in, your output is the same as with a 5 day work week? So essentially a 20% pay cut per unit of work performed?

From the management side, it's common for teams to get into routines where Fridays are basically lost. It starts with getting into the habit of leaving a little bit early on Fridays. Then people realize that they only have a few hours between lunch and leaving early, so they start checking out right after lunch. Then people realize that if they get in after 9AM on Friday, they don't have many hours to get anything done before lunch, so they don't want to get started on anything that requires focus. Eventually, Fridays are a short, laid-back day at the office where they catch up on stray e-mails before going home.

For those teams, going to a 4x8 workweek has no productivity drop because they weren't doing much on Friday anyway. However, for teams that actually get things done on Friday, going to 4x8 or even 4x10 can start to decrease productivity.

Productivity and hours spent working aren't the only things that matter, though. Going to a 4-day workweek is an easy way to keep employees happy, which is valuable in itself.

Also keep in mind that we aren't great at judging our own productivity. We tend to perceive percentage of busy time as productivity, and a 4-day workweek will naturally have a higher percentage of time occupied by work than a 5-day workweek. This increase in percentage of busy time can mislead people into thinking they're being even more productive on more time-compressed schedules, even if they're putting out less work on an absolute scale.

Frankly, a lot of companies switch to 4-day workweeks because they can get 80-90% of the productivity while offering employees a perk they can't usually get at big companies that pay higher salaries.

Perhaps Parkinson's law in action: 'work expands to fill available time'.

Working 4/5 of a standard week and getting paid 4/5 of standard salary would not be a win for me unless I only needed to complete 4/5 as much work.

This does not sound like winning.

The Thread Parent has cut down the hours that they are working, and cut their pay accordingly. But they also happen to be consistently more productive in those hours than they used to be. It wasn't a condition of their cut hours that they are required to work more productively, they just happen to be.

(Yes, ideally a good organization would reward this with a higher monthly pay. But that's a separate issue. I get paid the same as another developer in my position, even if one of us tends to be slightly more productive.)

If you're getting paid the same hourly rate it's still a win to work less.

It just didn't initially sit right with me when I heard Look at me I'm winning! I used to do five days of work and get paid for five, now I do five days of work and get paid for four.

I also went from 8 hour day to 6 hour day with a cut in pay and no loss in productivity and I feel it was a win. I've enough money either way and a lot more time.

If, on the other hand, you’d rather go home and put your 3 day weekends to better use taking care of your household, spending time with family, engaging in a hobby, travelling, or relaxing at the cottage (if you don’t own one, you might try renting one), then your Friday is more valuable to you than the money you lose from taking the day off.

I know I've spent half a day messing around before and then smashed out a piece of work in a few hours and still had the impression of being productive. Simply because the majority of employees aren't as productive as me. Being a very productive and capable developer will open lots of opportunities but some of us don't want to climb the ladder. I just want a comfortable job and be good at it.

I'd never take a pay cut though. If you kept the same productivity at a lower pay then you're effectively saying they overpaid you before. 20% less pay is 20% less work in my eyes.

It's your choice, of course - but that kind of thinking would just keep the parent poster from getting the deal they obviously prefer.

It was first when Covid19 WFH hit I realized how few hour a day I actually "work". It was hidden by meetings and discussions at the office I guess.

Regarding meetings maybe half the time in meetings is of no use for me and I am of no use for the others at the meeting but I still need to be there is the topic changes. The single biggest productivity improvement in WFH is that I can just work during uninteresting parts of meetings without being rude.

If you're working in an assembly line or checkout at the grocery store, your productivity isn't as variable. Assuming customers/inputs are always lined up, you'll process a similar number every hour and the quality is somewhat static.

In cloud infrastructure, I notice quality of work is highly variable. Some engineers will bandaid everything to get the task done. It's easy to do that.

Other engineers create solutions taking into account the current technical environment, business requirements and future concerns. I don't think we should hide from this fact. Software engineering as a profession becomes worth more the more we realize there's a difference in quality and quantity dependent on the engineer's abilities.

Highly recommended.

I'm a freelancer and not an employee, so you'd think it would be easy to negotiate such. However, I keep running into the same issue: few people need just a little software engineering. If someone needs some software engineering, they usually need a lot of it. Several times, I've been hired by customers with the promise of "we just need 10 hours a week", but somehow get talked into working full time pretty quickly.

The megacorp I have spent large amounts of time at actually seems to have a significant population of people with this informal arrangement with mixed opinion on the part of their management mostly based on how close they are to a realist position.

1) Work/Delivery can’t suffer. No decrease in velocity because of some work/life balance. This is easily measured and padded with a +\- 5%.

2) Accountable. If you have things you are accountable for and they aren’t done yet, better get that homework done.

3) If your an engineer, we pay you to think, not to sit in a chair. The “office” benefits are communication, collaboration, and contemplation. If you can achieve that with cohesion with the team then +1 I’m all for it!

The ‘70s white collar management style doesn’t really work well for productivity in 2020. It makes unhappy employees which makes people leave. If you enjoy interviewing people by all means, continue that oppression. If you value your employees and their innovation they bring to your company (or your department, or team) then you should practice servant leadership and remove any blockers from them being able to bring their best work to the table.

How did you communicate this to upper management or was it don't ask/don't tell?

But you do have to be available for calls or meetings.

Also opens up visits to regional parks and activities outside the weekend, which means no crowds and sometimes cheaper tickets.

20% less pay for 50% more leisure time each week = winning.

Unless your income and outgoings have been fixed at their exact current levels for your whole life, there's nothing magical about their current values and they could change?

Don't get me wrong, both myself and my wife are both working 4 day weeks after the birth of our son (culturally, that certainly helps the discussion), and that extra flexibility let's you choose the option that's best for you, but there is an opportunity costs trade off between them all...

That means there’s been a 20% increase in productivity! So you’re now underpaid by 20%.

As it stands however, I work for a megacorp that offers nice projects to work on, but with a "system" that's like a dystopian nightmare, and a rulebook and HR staff that exist to waste your time, use you up and spit you out.

It's weird that owners are paid proportional to aggregate productivity (units produced and sold), but those delivering the results are most often paid proportional to costs (hours worked).

I get why the system is this way, but it's not a "good" system in my opinion.

The biggest thing about working fewer hours was I could shift my days around to optimize for tasks. When I sat down to write code, I was in the zone to write code.

If they also worked 4 days a week, I bet productivity would fall.

It's something I could do, but I always think that as long as I'm able to earn that money, better get it as we don't know what tomorrow will be made of.

Still though, as a software engineer without a family and with money as high priority, you'd have a whole extra day per week to spend on side projects...

What it boils down to is: do things (work & play) while you're young. Spinning in place is the only real waste of time.

I spin in place.

I can get my work done in four days, but I also get work requests with same-day deadlines, either a soft expectation that you can miss sometimes but not structurally, or a hard expectation that you simply can't miss.

This is especially the case for friday because clients will often work weekends on the high-priority stuff. Sometimes they rely on something that takes me 2 hours on a friday, if I don't do that, they're stuck till monday. It's just not acceptable in my line of work.

I've not really found a good solution.

I can get fridays off formally, but then you're not just cutting your salary, you're also cutting chances for promotions (which isn't just a matter of pay, but also a matter of career development, personal development, keeping work interesting and dynamic, status/ego). There's a strong preference for employees with full-availability such that clients have one point of contact, instead of multiple parttimers across the week. And leadership positions are expected to always be working during regular working hours.

edit: I’m teasing ofcourse forgive me :) But like I mention in another comment, you have to agree employment in the US is generally very different from the EU with regard to working hours etc.

I've spent a little time in the US in the past with work, mainly in Texas, and the hours everyone worked were crazy - 60h weeks with unpaid overtime seemed to be the norm.

US is a big place though, and with my limited knowledge I'd expect places like CA to be more progressive, sensible even.

London and Switzerland are the only places in Europe with decent salaries.

(I work in Oslo, Norway)

Spending $1.5k on healthcare a month in exchange for double or triple the salary is worth it, by a long shot.

This isn't a religious debate, it would be great to be a developer in a friendly and beautiful EU country for me personally, but not if my salary is slashed to the bone to do so.

The EU is not competitive in the tech market at all, and especially not for senior level contributors.

According to Payscale, Senior Developers in Sweden earn roughly the equivalent of $70k USD. That's the biggest shafting I've ever seen.

$1.5k / month was my total cost of living as single! That was owning my own condo with 15 minutes bike ride to Stockholm city center. The rest I mostly used for vacation trips and did 4-5 (one week each) every year. No need to save for unexpected health care bills, your unborned kids college education, grandmas retirement home, that car you need to buy to commute 1 hour to your job etc.

That 3x salary comes with a really high price! In reality I would probably not make more than 120k / year in the US though. With that said, I can understand that some people really enjoy spending most of their lives working for the man, and getting a high salary and skipping out on vacations and work life balance. But not for me.

I work for a big multinational co that grants me 15 days off in a year, but bigco does not celebrate most holidays. The next holiday we will have, that does not count towards PTO after New Years Day, is July 4, 2021... 5-6 weeks off sounds amazing.

I've got colleagues in EU, China and other places and they all seem to have better benefits (mandated by the govt) compared to how things are in the states. US corporations seem to only see humans as resources.

Second, there's work/life balance, for example you can look at annual workhours and see there's a 350 hour gap between the US and Sweden: https://clockify.me/assets/images/working-hours/oecd-hours-w...

350 hours is equivalent to 8.75 weeks (or more than 2 months) of 8 hour, 5-day workweeks. That's a massive difference.

Second, Sweden has free education. Being a top 5% earner in the US sometimes comes easy, but often times you're looking at medschool, lawschool or CS or whatever, that can set you back anywhere from 30k to 250k, with 7% average student loan interest rates.

Stuff like this can put a massive weight on your shoulders from age 18 til 38 or so, constantly climbing a corporate ladder, working crazy hours, and paying off a massive debt. All the while fearing that an economic crisis or some kind of disability leading to unemployment, can ruin you. In a country like Sweden there's no such weight on your shoulders, subsidised, and a massive social safety net. Quality of life is quite stable, and you can both very much enjoy student life, and your life right after, all the way til old age, with a healthy work/life balance.

You also don't have to live in a city that you share with an extremely poor underclass, homelessness, crime, drug addiction, while paying a million for a single bedroom.

Of course I'm not saying everyone in tech is working 80 hours and getting crushed by debt while working in an overpriced city with some minor dystopian undertones. But when looking at these things, Sweden and the US are certainly on opposite sides of the spectrum. And it must be taken into account when looking at pay.

I'd love to move to the US for some time, the natural parks are amazing, I like the culture and the vibe. But work/life balance, the lack of safety net if you're unlucky and the general state of the country for many of its people, are repelling me. I've never thought of pay as something that attracts me to the US, it's really not worth it for me because I'm not lacking anything (although I do make about $100k equivalent in western Europe, but even at much lower salaries when I was younger I loved it here).

What are you doing about it?

I've heard (but never checked, although I did find some resources: https://www.hensche.de/Rechtsanwalt_Arbeitsrecht_Gesetze_TzB...) it is mandated by law that employer (as long as it has more than 15 employees) must allow you that.

The 20% paycut is pre-tax, so the real cut is a lot lower. It also lets employers hire a 5th person for every 4 80%s, so total productivity is likely higher due to people being happier, and there's more jobs total.

It's hard for me to imagine why tech companies wouldn't want to offer this to all their employees.

“Equal employment conditions

You must offer your part‑time staff the same employment conditions as full-time workers, including pay, leave, notice periods and other rights and benefits linked to their employment.

Modifying working arrangements

Whenever possible, you should try to accommodate requests from your employees if they want to change their working schedules, such as:

- transferring from full-time to part-time

- transferring from part-time to full-time

- increasing their working hours

You cannot dismiss an employee if they refuse to transfer from part-time to full-time work or vice versa.”

Working hours per week by country in Europe (includes some non-EU countries) at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

I'm sure there are other similar cases, but overall it's pretty rare here.

In the EU, employers have to, by law, consider reasonable requests for flexible working. If you work for a large company, that should mean most will have the option.

Why as people do we not just add an extra day to the week between Saturday and Sunday?

Who cares about official calendar?

Make all months 4 days longer.

All work weeks still 5 days.

All monthly : 30 day contracts stay the same.

People who need cash or work hard can use the extra day to get ahead.

3 day weekend society - I would vote for it.

Months and weeks are completely independent, we could have an eight-day week and keep months precisely as they are now.

I think it's way too weird to actually do it, but it's less weird than having a cycle of months that's longer than a year.

Islam manages, somehow, to have a cycle of months that's substantially shorter than a year, and doesn't throw in an extra month from time to time like Jews do. I've always found that exceedingly strange, but I guess you get used to it.

- Seasons shift, who cares...

- Law overhaul (this is the ask, make it the law...)

- Consistent tracking mechanism (we aren’t throwing anything out)

Meaning you get more days off by shortening the work week than you do by making all of society adapt to adding an extra day to the week.

The calendar feels very illogical and made up compared to most measurement systems but there’s a reason why they are what they are! A much more realistic proposal would be to just give people every other Friday off. Or work one Friday a month, something like that.

3 day weekend society

It can cause issues

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform

If you're going to keep months, but have an 8-day week, I'd rather see something like: 9 months of 5 weeks each (40 days) with an extra 4 days at the end or beginning of the year. Leap days could be appended to the extra week. This has the added benefit that the 8th is always Blernsday in any month.

In any case, I think there are advantages to only working 4-days in a row; and 4/3 is a better ratio for workers than 5/3; and I think you're just moving the goal posts, really. People 50 years from now would be arguing about going to a 4/4 week...

As it is, lately i've been working longer chunks of days in a row, 14+ days without breaks and it drains me. It feels like each day after the next really compounds.

It's also why i dislike longer vacations. I get super antsy after day 3 or 4.

Fake-work-fridays is the new casual Friday.

What are you gonna do it about? And no, I’m not taking a pay cut either.

Though you're not really under EU law anymore, has the UK resolved these sorts of issues, i.e., EU law will apply unless/until changed by Parliament?

AFAIK we are basically keeping everything from the EU at the time of severance, and I think the Brexit trade deal means we can't make any significant degredation of labour laws going forward. If anyone reading this knows different, please do correct me.

I can narrow it down to a handful of Indian outsourcing companies though (I'm British, working out of the UK tho), since I've talked about them all in the past.

It's a megacorp (100s of thousands of employees) known for outsourcing. It calls itself a USA company (but it's not; it's mainly based in India).

From my other post, you should easily be able to narrow it down to about 5 (which includes the horrible company you mentioned), and TBH, they are all about equally horrible.

> There has been no drop in productivity

Your employer seems to believes different.