As far as company / coworker expectations, how does this work? Are responsibilities / work adjusted to fit the hours provided? What about being on-call?
It seems like something a lot of companies should be taking advantage of, but the desire to own souls fights against it.
Some observations:
* The folks working 4 days are a bit less likely to pick-up 'side activities' (e.g. help organise an external event, lead some of the recruiting efforts, etc.), because a day away takes out 25% of active time in one go.
* Ratio overhead vs work is probably better for the part of the team working 4x9 vs 5x8. It turns out they can miss many of these meetings and still be fine without additional catch-ups. (unfortunately not in my power to just remove it completely)
* I believe in people having broad responsibilities ("deliver this project in the best way you see fit") rather than "work X hours". We don't downscope projects because someone works 4 vs 5 days, but no one has ever remarked on it either. This type of responsibility sometimes means people wrap-up early, sometimes they feel responsible enough to pick something really important up in the evening/weekend and take a few hours off on another day.
* I think the ~10% difference wouldn't be measurable for software (or AI in our case) development anyway, we're not a call center where you can measure 'minutes called'.
Final notes:
* This is my European/Dutch perspective. I understand this trend is stronger in the nordics/Germany/Netherlands than in the southern countries. Having managed a team in the US in the past, I find it hard to imagine how this would work in the US culture I experienced.
* I have no desire to own souls ;)
On real part-time: I think once it moves below 3 days a week it works better for transactional roles. E.g. I know dentists that work for a few days per week in a practice, people with 8-16h per week in chat-support, 3-day/wk secretaries, etc. Most of these roles measure their work in calls/appointments/hours rather than longer running projects though.
But with the right culture it can be done in IT as well, I think Gumroad is a good example.
Honestly, I get as much done in 4 days as I did in 5 - I really think it's a sweet spot, where you are forced to focus more for a shorter time.
Anyways, in terms of team working, obviously some meetings need to be either held without me, or not held on Fridays. Otherwise, it's simply never been an issue.
I've worked before with developers who work similar hours, and again it's never been a problem - we just adjust our sprint capacity/staffing accordingly.
I work for an out-sourcing and consulting mega-corp - I get to work on interesting projects, but and honestly, it's a horrible company to work for in terms of culture, power struggles, biases, bureaucracy and lay-offs. I plan on getting out soon, going full-time on my side business. As such, I'd never recommend them to anyone.
And most people simply put their days / hours in their e-mail signature so other colleagues know when to expect a reaction. From personal experience this works fine. Half my team is off every Friday and some also on Wednesdays.
Companies can and do require 36 or 40 hours though, but most of the time vacancies will list something like "24-36" to signal the possibilities.
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edit: for your curiosity: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/dashboard-arbeidsmark...
It's in Dutch, but as long as you know that 'uur' = 'hour' you can read the charts.
As of 2020, 72% of men worked 35 hours or more (full-time) compared to 26% of women.
I've never got any complain from my manager, employer or colleagues about it.
I'm usually taking my day off on Friday. All my colleagues know it, so we will try to schedule meetings for which I'm required on other days. If that's not possible (it only happens a few times per year), I'm flexible enough to take my time off some other day.
I might be 90% as productive compared to when I was when working full-time. This difference is probably too low to be noticeable by anybody else in the team.
My gross got reduced by 20%. But considering the way taxation works in Belgium, I'm only getting about 10% less on my bank account. I also got promoted to a senior role since then, which entirely offset the difference anyway.
While it has been working extremely well for me (I spent the additional free time doing physical activities and launching my personal project [1]), it might be harder/impossible to get into higher positions (team leader, project manager...) while working part-time.
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Projects were not meeting deadlines yet everybody dropped the pen at 5pm sharp, I was baffled and amazed at the same time.
And the reasons why a project is not on schedule may not be due to the behavior of people dropping their work at 5pm.
Even so, tough luck: in NL most work to live, we don’t live to work like in some other countries.
I really resonated with the original question of ASK HN.
I hope it will be useful for people in this thread.
Is this actually a thing? There are laws regarding this? How do these laws work if there's a job requirement itself which needs certain number of hours?
“Part-time workers cannot be treated less favourably than comparable full-time workers solely because they work part-time, unless it can be objectively justified.”
So, employers can deny requests for shorter working hours, but only if that can be objectively justified.
In general, that’s fairly hard to do, given the amount of part-time workers and the diversity of their jobs already in the market.
Also, when I was considering moving to the Seattle area, I got the feeling that non-compete clauses were fairly standard, although, that is entirely subjective and might be incorrect.
Both Oregon and Washington are at-will states, and have the same laws with the same kind of work cultures -- you're a cog in a system, and if you start grinding or upsetting the status quo in some way, the candidate pool in this region is strong enough, they'll replace you. However, the expectation still remains that when you choose to exercise your same rights under at-will that you give two weeks notice. Can't say any employer is going to give an employee that same courtesy when letting them go. Not to mention if you're salaried, you might as well accept that your role is nothing more than indentured servitude branded as capitalism (to clarify, this may not be at all companies, but definitely is a strong cultural trait I've seen at the ones I've worked at).
All that being said, the PNW is much prettier than many areas of Texas, and while natives are hostile towards transplants, the quality of life is leaps and bounds better than that horrendous mass of land called the Lone Star State.
This is a page from the government describing your rights: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/arbeidsovereenkomst... (you can translate it)
I understand that it is fairly strictly enforced, so an employer saying "no sorry, that would be annoying" won't fly - they would need a concrete justification.
Some companies won't let you do 24hr/week though. They'll require at least 32hrs :P
I myself started on 40 and will move to 32 hours somewhere next year. It's your right by law to reduce your hours for the same pay/hour.
So my advice would be to look for remote only dev jobs in the Netherlands, and just ask to work 24h or 32h a week. It's very common here and won't be a roadblock.
Although this is going to entirely depend on how much money you actually need to get by.