Also East Coast fintech. Here's the deal: if your company can't deal without you one day a week, you are a bus accident away from killing the company.

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.

Well yes, should lol. I guess my point/question is what types/sizes/percent of organizations this would be feasible. How many of us work nights/weekends because of lack of strategy & constant fire drills.

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.

That all sounds dysfunctional. I hear tech jobs are hot right now; you should start looking.

I work in fintech and have a coworker that made a similar deal (4 day weeks for 6 months a year for slightly less pay).

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.

How realistic is this for most people/firms though?

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.

It all comes down to how the company is run. We sell our product vs hosting some SaaS, so outages aren't a big deal. We also are not a young company who "moves fast and breaks things", so showstopping bugs are pretty rare.