I can’t imagine a firm offering “a couple” of percentage points of comp for 20% less paid hours. Would you take a 20% pay cut for 4 day/32 hour workweek?

Just curious about your mindset on this. I would love to find myself at a spot where I’m working 4 days a week, but not interested in doing 10 hour days.

By the way, I do understand that most people, including myself, would probably have a greater fraction of productive hours of work working 4/32 than 5/40. Not sure if many employees would recognize that though.

I took a 20% pay cut for a 4 day/32 hour work week a few years ago and it was great. One additional day off is much more free time than you'd think. It's 50% more days off compared to the weekend. I'd recommend it to anyone whose circumstances permit it.

I would argue that an extra day off is effectively much more than 50% more "days off" for someone who typically only gets weekends off. Weekends are a miserable day to be off if you need to run errands, or just want to go anywhere in public where crowds can diminish your enjoyment or even keep you out entirely.

I take time off during the week for "appointments" at the park for precisely that reason - it's almost impossible to get a relaxing hike at some of my favorite trails on a saturday or sunday.

The flipside is that it's much easier to hang out with your friends on weekends, because most of them are also probably off. So having a little of both is best.

"Would you take a 20% pay cut for 4 day/32 hour workweek?"

I would take an 80% pay cut for a 1 day/8 hr workweek in a heartbeat (the industry is remarkably inflexible and I ended up having to do a 100% paycut for 0 workdays and I'm happy with that too).

Yeah you're obviously right, 20% would be more of a starting point for a negotiation. I'm still thinking about it but right now I feel like with WFH and PTO I get enough time with my family that I don't need a full day yet. If that changes, I'm planning on taking a day a week off to spend with my kid before he's at school age, I'll do it. 20% less comp (in reality it'll be less due to tax brackets)for 50% more time is a no-brainer for me.

Why would it have to be less paid hours? Lots of people do 4/10 instead of 5/8.

That is just a preference for myself, I bet it's much easier to negotiate 4/10 than 4/32 - I just hate working extended hours even if it means a day off.

Knowledge work isn’t time based. Your brain doesn’t turn off.

We have a 4-day workweek, but still do 40 hours. We work 4 10-hour days. I love it.

I'm sure there are some forms of carefully crafted hybrid that works well - but in our case it's become a weird case of "whoever happens to live near an office comes in". End result is you have folks with no team overlap across the company hanging out. You get the social bits, which is nice, but none of the collaborative parts. Net/net feels like the worst possible option from a company productivity perspective.

WFH and 4 day workweek should just be standard, and you're saving the company massive amounts of money from doing WFH, so there's no way you should be taking a paycut for it.