> Takuya Hoshino, an economist at the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute, says simply introducing a four-day workweek may not necessarily encourage employees to use their time off in a way that benefits their careers or contributes to the economy.
The idea shouldn't be how this benefits their career and contributes to the economy, but how the individual can live a more balanced and healthy life.
> For employers, while people working four days a week may become more motivated, this may not improve their productivity enough to compensate for the lost workday.
But why do we have to "compensate for the lost workday"? Let's just say that at this point in history we appreciate work-life balance more than before and we'll switch to 4-day weeks with the same paycheck.
I don't want to share what app I'm using in real-time (Smiling face with open mouth and smiling eyes) Is this just me?
But ok, nice way to be open & transparent I guess.
Still my first thought is: seems like I always have to be mindful about what app I'm using right now as the whole team can see it when I read too much HN
It's kind of subjective to say this is better. If 100 million people had a bunch of cool image filter apps on their phone but no access to medical care the outcome is pretty clearly not better.
Perhaps it's more reasonable to say that providing a small amount of value to a larger amount of people is more profitable.
Luckily this isn’t a binary choice, the more profitable cool image filter app takes nothing away from healthcare.
The world is full of people who simply aren’t capable of providing “value” at scale. Odds are that society gets better outcomes when the few who can do so pursue things like silly image filter apps (and sometimes actually useful things too) over nursing careers.
This may be true today, but it is a lot easier to build a silly image filter app now than it was 10 years ago. If the incentives remain skewed in favor of "highly distributed but small value" contributions to society while the difficulty of making such contributions also decreases we may, in fact, see a shortage of nurses.
1. People with the talent to make high-value/low-scale products (e.g. medical imaging) are working on low-value/high-scale products (silly apps). This is similar to how our brightest minds are making people click ads.
2. Apple and the HN reality distortion field make everybody (even those without the skills) believe they can become rich by creating low-value/high-scale apps.
Many of the overhead costs scale as a function of headcount irrespective of how many hours each employee works. For example, let's say you work in a regulated industry where each employee needs to follow a certain training every year. Having twice as many employees each working 20 hrs will double the training costs. Management overhead will also go up since there will be more one-on-ones etc.
There are some issues that I think would make this difficult to do:
- Two employees at 50% salary and time are not equivalent to a single employee at 100% of salary. They're strictly worse if always run in series, all else being equal. Alice starts project X on Monday and Tuesday, and hands it off to Bob on Wednesday because it's urgent. There's some inefficiency there. Good management could help avoid it, but would be hard-pressed to prevent it in all cases. At best, it's one more thing to worry about.
- There are benefits outside of your salary that are more difficult to cut in half. Health plans, headcount taxes, etc.
Ok, I see. I guess if company feels that the talent is very valuable to them, it's possible to negotiate special terms like this, but I guess in general companies are not then interested in part-time roles yeah.
Long story short: As the startup I'm working at doesn't have enough money to raise my hourly price, I'm now proposing to cut my hours in half, but keep the pay. So I'm working half the time, but keep the pay. It's summer now, so I'm happy to spend more time with friends and family.
And while we're talking about working less, another thing that's interesting I think is "4-day work weeks". There are remote companies who work 32h per week. I even made a list of the ones I know, but I'm sure there are more: https://remotehunt.com/remote-companies-with-4-day-work-week...
Aside from fixed costs and aspects like coordination efficiency, companies have to raise pay more than linearly to get people into high hours jobs. Those disproportionate gains should be given back at cut hours, but too many employees would claim this is unfair.
Nice that you brought up the location. I'm in Europe.
There are two sides of me when I think about the salary and location:
1) you write code and produce stuff and it doesn't matter where you live. you can live anywhere you want, just do the job and get paid. from that POV it seems weird to think that one person gets a lot more money than the other for the same output, the same work
2) another POV in me is that your costs are different depending on where you live. so while the salary's number on paper can be the same for people working from different countries, the "worth" of the money is different.
But mostly I tend to agree with POV number 1 I think.
TBH, of course I do know that moderators exist, but I've never consciously thought that it can be really awful what they see (children stuff, suicide, etc)
Yeah, I get how this can sound like a pathetic moan about my salary. But I was really looking for some comments and data about dev salaries from the HN community.
The idea shouldn't be how this benefits their career and contributes to the economy, but how the individual can live a more balanced and healthy life.