A 3-day weekend feels like proper time off - you have time to do all the chores and stuff that needs doing, and you have time for self and/or family.
My other great move was going almost fully remote around 10 years ago. Because of the pandemic, the benefits are now well known by many, so I won't bore you by detailing them again here :)
Through these 2 decisions, work and life feels well in balance.
I agree with the benefits of a 4 day workweek but personally going 80% will have disproportionately higher marginal costs. This is one of the occasions where a collective solution (4-day workweeks for all) outperforms individual initiatives.
First, if some of the total compensation is through stocks, usually they reduce both the vesting amount and vesting frequency by 20%, which could translate to some 25% cut in total comp. New stock grants are also prorated, just as your bonus will be prorated by that amount.
You vacation days are also reduced by 20%, a typical figure would amount to being deprived of another week of paid time off. In other words, you could have used one day of that paid time off every week to simulate your 80% work, but now you take a pay cut for it.
The cost of work side of things are not linear either. For example certain fixed costs like weekly meetings do not reduce by 20%, which means your available heads down work time reduces more than 20%. Unless you do overtime to compensate for that (which beats the purpose of part time), that means you also get an additional productivity hit.
Without any WFH arrangement, cost of being housed in a commute distance of work is also constant. If you don't move to a 20% cheaper place while going part time, your rent to paycheck ratio increases, which matters especially for HCOL areas because it hits your disposable income rate disproportionately.
The cost function of going to 80% personally is horribly non-linear. Pushing for a 4-day workweek for all avoids that.
When you need only 4 days of vacation to take one week off, 20 paid vacation days will let you go on vacation for 5 weeks per year, just like like a full-time employee with 25 vacation days.
In fact, if your employer is flexible about which days you work, you could leave on a Friday and return next Monday (4 days) without using any vacation days.
Sure, but it is contingent on using your vacation allotments at full week increments, which is not the only way vacation days are used. In your hypothetical scenario, since we're in the realm of managerial approvals, you could as well ask for a 1 month unpaid time off which amounts to a nominal %8 pay cut for 20 some days (which is actually less because stock vesting tend not to stop), whereas a 20% time cut only gets you 45 extra non-workdays with more than 20% paycut due to the non-linearities I explained above. Marginal cost of non-workdays are much higher in the latter scenario.
> In fact, if your employer is flexible about which days you work, you could leave on a Friday and return next Monday (4 days) without using any vacation days.
If your employer is flexible you could work 5 days for 4 weeks and take the next week off without vacation days too. It runs through every person's own objective function for sure. I am not saying costs can never outweigh the benefits, but I am trying to draw attention to the cost function which is not usually as well thought through.
My intention (which I'll reach in October) is to get sufficiently close to that 240-hours cap that I will have to take off one day every fortnight to keep under it, for almost every fortnight in the year.
My wife was offered a 9/80 schedule at her job, where she worked 10 hours per day for 9 days, and got the 2nd Friday off. I'm looking forward to my own version, except it'll only be the 8-hour nominal work day...
Compensation through stocks applies to a tiny proportion of workers in the US, and a miniscule proportion elsewhere.
And to a substantial portion of the tech workers in the Bay Area.
As an aside, it would be interesting to know what proportion of HN users was actually based in SV; I imagine many times fewer than those who are not.
The only day I could see plausibly doing this is Friday as there are few meetings and lots of senior people WFH/use remote offices then. Of course this also means taking the easiest day off!
How did you make this work, is it a consulting role? Individual contributor? What is the off day, Friday?
If you're part of a team, the team should be big enough to be resilient to this change (and everyone else should do this too, and your team may need to expand by 15-20%).
If you manage a team, your team should be skilled enough to work without your direction one day a week. If they aren't, you need to step up and develop better procedures.
How many people have come back from a long weekend to a 4 day week and noticed it's just 5 days of meetings/work rescheduled to fit into 4 days.
I'll always remember the stunned response years ago while moving when my wife picked up my cell phone (my hands weren't free) to what was a production trading outage at my firm.. and said we are off today, we are in the middle of moving, we have no internet or computers plugged in. On a 30 person dev team in a 20K+ person firm and we had cross team direct dev team escalation to my personal cell phone because no one could be bothered following escalation procedures/rotas/call lists/etc.
My fear would generally be taking the 20% pay cut and not really getting 20% less work/time expected.
My company treats it the same as vacation time. On the occasion there's something that only he can do but he's not in, it'll have to wait.
He is a "regular" salaried dev on a medium sized team.
I think probably 60-70% of the places I have worked, this sentence " On the occasion there's something that only he can do but he's not in.." would end in "we call his cell".
I was just on a medium-urgent outage the Friday before Memorial Day weekend and 2 teams on the call were calling their on-vacation colleagues for help.
I am anxious throughout the weekend. It may have to do with the lockdown we have.
But I am glued to mobile anyways or some sort of screen.
How can I work on this mindset?
Most people here are smart, hard-working and aspire to be high performers in whatever they do. So when you have an extra day off, you're expected to use it for an ambitious side project, self-improvement, learning new technology or whatever.
I have a part of this mindset in my identity, but it's a source of stress. So after a bit of a history of anxiety and depression in my past, I've made the deliberate decision to relegate this to the part my attention that's focused on employment and earning money. I never let it enter the part of my time that I have for myself.
This means that my three days off are spent on activities I find meaningful: Family, seeing friends, reading, playing computer games, hiking/biking/working out, philosophizing, re-filling my social introvert energy. Occasionally flying airplanes in summer, skiing or snow kiting in winter. I always say yes when opportunities to do activities with friends show up, and this never turns into a stressful thing since I always have the opportunity to recharge before work.
If I feel like doing something more structured and ambitious, something creative, I'll do it. But it has to come from the heart. Generally, I don't have a lot of excess creative energy even when working 4 days a week, and I'm perfectly okay with that.
I always have a lot of excess energy for handling stuff that might otherwise get low priority: Getting enough sleep, seeing enough friends, handling any physical or mental health issues that want attention. That's a big difference.
It was amazing. Two-day sprints separated by a day or two of rest are really, really productive for me. I never had Monday blahs because I was never facing a long haul of 5 days of work.
Number one recommendation I have for you, regardless of your working situation: change where you are. I don't mean move to another city, I mean keep work things away from personal things physically. If you have a corner that you always work in, never do anything else there. Go get exercise -- if you aren't doing any at all now, pull up a map and find a place about a kilometer from you. Walk there, walk back. When it's raining, take an umbrella. If it's too hot, take a bottle of water and an umbrella. There's nothing shameful about hiding from the sun.
> I logged into work today (Sunday) and that eased my usual Sunday "fear".
The weekends are short enough as it is!
I’m in the UK, and while I haven’t really heard that particular term used as a common saying, I intuitively knew what you meant! (Sadly)
I recently reduced my working hours (so I now have the freedom to work 3-4 days if I like or more if desired/needed) and I would say if you can make it work it’s 100% worth it.
It’s worth bearing in mind it doesn’t have to be permanent. You can suggest a “trial” to your employer to see if it works for both parties.
From my own experience I think it’s more likely that an employer will agree to this request than not.
Good luck if you decide to go for it.
So high tax rates can be an incentive to work less...
I’m convinced it’s nothing but positive for most workers who aren’t constrained by the hours available for meetings, meaning ICs.
That does seem to be changing, but is certainly a cost factor many endure, which ironically shifts people into using their own transport and another car on the road factor plays in.
Now for a company, were before you had 4 staff to cover 20 days of work, you now have 5. That has pro's and con's, and certainly numbers of employee's will entail scaling costs. Making you hit certain numbers more easily and that can see more requirements as an employer. So suddenly you need an extra toilet, or larger kitchen, extra facilities and all becomes the number of people registered working in that location tips you into complying with such requirements. On the other hand, you have more resilience and less dependence upon individuals and the impact of loosing one member of staff is less impacting. That with fresher more focused staff due to working less hours, then it becomes a complicated equation to balance out on both sides of the employer/employee relationship.
I certainly do feel the 4 day week is a good thing, one you appreciate more in later life and does help prevent things like burn out. Also working from home has it's upsides, but also like everything, in moderation.
So if you had a choice of working in an office for 4 days a week or working from home for 3 days and 2 days in the office. I'm not sure the choice would be an easy one for many. Personally the later has much going for it, even if working 5 days over 4.
But one of the best balances I've known somebody to use was that they would do IT contracting in the Winter and would do water ski instructing in the summer. Equally known somebody who would contract in the summer and Ski Instructor in the winter. Which gets down to one of the key aspects in any job/work - variation, if done right can be as good as a break. Just need to look at all the options and get the balance that works for you.
I just hope more public transportation systems adjust pricing to not punish those working shorter weeks as is the case with the model used in many places today (trains, buses).
I've of course always taken care to not present this as the first thing that comes out of my mouth when interviewing, but I have always broached the subject in the first conversation I've had with decision-makers at the company in question.
I'd work 5-day weeks if the pay was so well that I, say, could save up five years of expenses in one year. Unfortunately, my local tax system strongly disincentivizes this by effectively having a 62% marginal tax rate.
So, in summary, I will most likely never have a 5 days a week routine again. It's just that good. In fact, due to the marginal tax situation, it's more likely I'll downscale to something closer to 50% if I can get away with it career-wise.