You can only compress things so much though. You can't just tell people to show up and do only the productive n% of the hours. You can't force 2 days of perfect productivity out of people. That's not how any of this works. When you cut hours, you're cutting productive and unproductive hours at the same time, you don't get to cherry pick.

Or if you can cherry pick, go into management consulting - you'll be able to squeeze so much more out of everyone who still works full time by telling them to only do productive things at work.

While we're at it, we can tell people who gamble to only go to the casino on the days when they win.

In the 9-5's defense, a good chunk of my "downtime" at work is due to waiting on other people and/or not having something I can make progress on.

I would love less than a 40 hour work week where the effort is more concentrated, but after a certain point you just can't expect full productivity in a shorter space of time.

I wonder if the increasing shift toward remote work (often in disparate timezones) will end up pushing teams to eventually adopt 1-3 "core hours" 2-3 days per week with team meetings and collaboration sessions and a more laissez-faire attitude toward working the rest of the usual 9-5 day; I would love to just focus on getting my work done any time I feel like it, attend meetings during core hours, and have the ability to get out of the house and go do things during the normal workweek.

I appreciate the irony, and to some degree I agree with the argument but you have to keep in mind that in the real world employers like to see their cogs working.

I'm a night owl and I really hate getting up early. Early in my career when I was working in digital advertising I had a job where I tried to argue with my employer that while I'm coming late to work I never refuse to stay late hours or work through weekends when jobs needs it. Unpaid overtime mind you. They didn't understood. Instead they preferred - at least they thought they preferred - seeing me at my desk from 10 to 6, because that's what they were paying for. After 18 they were leaving the office and not knowing what I was doing they just assumed no work was done. Probably. Actually couple of jobs like that. Those were small shops. Recently I worked for bigger corps and (un)surprisingly the patter repeated. Instead of agreeing on me showing late to the office but willing to stay late if there was actual work to do without getting any compensation my managers preferred me to get to my desk by 9 and sit there till 5 even if there was nothing to be done. Another recent situation was when I was responsible for architecture and setting up a team for a fairly complicated project. I like to think on my feet so I was spending a lot of my time in quiet corridors of the office or in cafeteria trying to figure out how to make things going. My managers were furious at me for not sitting in front of my desk and I repeatedly failed to convinced them that neither my job description, nor my current position requires me to sit in front of my keyboard at all time to complete the tasks I'm facing.

I agree it's stupid, but we can't deny that it's sad reality for many people out there.

> If you work a "9-5" and are reading this comment at work right now, I can give you a hint: it's not 40 ;)

I don't like this attitude as it implies "reading" isn't work. The role of a "knowledge worker" is to find and generate new ideas and implement them. Hacker News is regularly filled with good articles and commentary about the tech space - and is something I encourage my team to follow.

Its not uncommon for there to be articles directly related to our tech stack. So yeah, even if you aren't pushing code for 40hours, doesn't mean you aren't "working" that whole time.

Personally I don’t want compression. I want five days a week of 3-8 hours of work each day. I fill the rest with family stuff, piano, hobbies when they pique my interest, chores, etc.

That is, I think the flexibility is more valuable than concentrated time off. It enables me to follow the flow of life.

An awful lot of jobs are about being available to do that 2 days fo work as and when it has to be done, and that work is split up into random chunks of a few minutes to a few hours throughout the week and aren't compactable. Any job that provides an available service to others is like that.

There may be some jobs that are slugging away at a big block of work and you could do it any time during the week. Part of some of my jobs have been like that, in fact that was software development which was part of the role, but not all of the job.

I think over-asking for that sort of work week isn't productive to be honest. And I'm an anti-work kind of person. The real problem is that modern work doesn't reflect the actual labor involved. I don't know how many hours I've wasted on meetings where a simple email and a 15 minute follow-up for questions would've been sufficient to get any issues out of the way. I'll grant that some labor is just meetings to debate the course of a business but beyond that as a software developer my job really should be about what is getting priority and then doing that priority queue. The meeting schedule for me should be 1 or 2 meetings a week total (not exceeding 45 minutes total) to set the work queue for said products then the rest should be me doing the work with some time to get help from other developers who have expertise in something I'm unfamiliar with. The total hours for that? Probably 30-40 a week tops. Anything past 40 is just screaming for contractors.

that's an interesting idea, but wouldn't work.

my personal theory is that all uncertainty ultimately is derived from the weather and cascades down. that is, even if you eliminated inattention, carelessness, tardiness, and laziness and what not, the weather would inevitably cause accidents and other unpredictable things.

as a result much of the time people spend is actually just waiting around for other people.

I have a frame. 28 hours. M/W/F I do 8 hours, am available. T/T I do 2, alone. Sometimes I do more. I have the good fortune to say when and where, but this gives me modalities and no one has to wait too long and I get quality work time in both parts. Pay is not that good, perks are.

All my working life I've worked 24 hours/3 days per week.

Once or twice a year there is an "all hands on deck" emergency, and I will work a day or two extra. But those are the very rare exceptions.

My take is: I see colleagues do almost [1] the same amount of work, but because they are in the office all week round they are far more visible. I on the other hand am much more awake and energetic, and cost the company less € too...

Also I'm personally happy to work less. More time for side projects, hobby's, my family and people in general. I'm less stressed.

[1] (hard to compare myself with others in any case)

I work 40%, so I do this, just spread over 5 days. I've also tried one week on, one off. It's heaven. I hope I don't have to go back to working full time ever again. I'm currently working and travelling without a permanent address.

Coming soon, the 0 day work week. No one needs lazy meatbags when 10 robots can work 24/7.

Do it!

I'm 36 and my current gig offers 5 weeks vacation, and I just came back from 3 months (topped up) parental leave.

Life is too beautiful to work 5 days a week

Depending on how tied to the USA you are, you could also consider a move to the EU, where 4 weeks vacation are basically the minimum everywhere.

I'm in my mid 20s and I'll never go back to 5 days workweek, definitely go for it, it's a life changing move, no amount of money makes up for time lost

Oh I would easily take a 20% paycut to have Fridays off forever.

I'm 47 and I just left my last job. I'm going to take some time off, but I'm committed to only working 4 days per week or less when I look for my next position.

If your office switched to four days, nobody would really work on Thursdays instead.

Just to clarify - you're implying that the amount of work getting done in a day is _positively_ correlated with the amount of meetings that day?

Many people do this, it's called freelancing! It's not for everyone, but if you have the right personality type you can have this kind of freedom.

because management usually has no better way to determine how much you're actually contributing than how many hours you put in

You're assuming that by working fewer hours you'd magically eliminate only the unproductive hours. That seems extremely unlikely.

I read an article years ago from someone that tried it, expecting exactly what you're expecting, but they found that proportional of their working time that was productive was about the same.

That's not much of an improvement for people who have a long commute - eliminating a work day eliminates 2 commute stretches (plus the cost of the commute).

Yep, although I'm living in a very conservative state and workplace, many people are questioning the 40 hour work week. Hopefully this becomes a reality in the next 5 to 10 years or so.

Competent managers in technical companies managing highly skilled professionals do. The rapidly growing corporate surveillance market says that incompetent managers and companies that grind people until they burn out are still a a major force out there.

No:

> In the next few weeks, the Montreal and Sherbrooke studios will be officially closed on Fridays, without changing the working conditions currently in place nor the salaries of employees, thus switching from the 40-hour week to 32-hour.

They live in Canada, their salaries are already lowered. This will help them from leaving for better $ elsewhere.

Come on man, its in the article:

> without changing the working conditions currently in place nor the salaries of employees, thus switching from the 40-hour week to 32-hour.

This is tough when your time at work has to be entered on a time sheet, and any allowance for down time is maxed at five minutes a day.

I have to put down 7.5 hours a day, five days a week, and what I was working on for all those hours.

Do you work in a silo? never have any meetings, answer questions that might span over a 40 hour time frame? How do you figure out your value vs your co-workers value?

That's called being a freelancer.

It's an equally gigantic pain in the buttocks to be the only someone who can give out AWS credentials. Why does that have to be one person? Why isn't that role spread out across a team?

What you're describing is an organizational failure, even if that person were working 168 hours a week.

Well, I suppose we could compensate people for being on call for this sort of stuff separately from "heads down" work.