[mcless]

You seem to be making an assumption that just because you have not seen companies where the management encourages cutting down on daily working hours, then such companies must not exist. From my experience, I would claim that your assumption is false.

During my career, I have worked for a few small as well as big companies where the management indeed encouraged limiting the working hours to about 4 to 6 per day. All of them had 40 hour week on the contract or legal agreement but the company culture went beyond the written contract to support something like a 25 hour week.

In my career, I did not see any kind of correlation between financial success of the company, productivity and the number of working hours. Financial success had a strong correlation with good decisions made by higher management. Productivity had a strong correlation with high skill-level of engineers and managers hired.

Another way to describe what I mean is: When I worked for one of these companies that encouraged four-hour working day, there were competitors who worked the regular eight-hour working days and were beating us in the competition, and there were also competitors who worked the regular eight-hour working days and were losing to us in the competition.

[mseebach]

I'm not assuming that, I'm observing that the review doesn't reference any of them, and wondering why (just like when we'd read an article about how some super-successful startup founder owes his success to broccoli, we'd wonder what happened to all the broccoli-eaters who didn't end up as particularly successful).

When you're recommending specific radical reform, it helps your argument to analyse specific implementation of said reform, rather than merely extrapolating from a cool research article and sprinkling a few historical anecdotes.

[valuearb]

I can believe that people normally can't get as much done in the second 4 hours of their 8 hour day as they do in the first 4 hours.

I can't believe that people can get as much done in 4 hours as they can in 8 hours.

Less output == less revenues == ultimately less pay. You can't change math, companies aren't going to get paid the same amount for making less stuff or providing less services.

Maybe the difference is only 30-40% less instead of 50%, but I think most people are willing to put in the extra 4 hours for the additional benefits.

[mcless]

> Less output == less revenues == ultimately less pay

Where is the math that working for 4 hours produces less output than working for 8 hours?

Also, like I said before I don't believe that less output == less revenue. Like I said, I have seen no correlation at all between working more number of hours, or producing more output and revenue. What I have seen though is a strong correlation between working on the right problems and revenue.

You are free to believe what you want. Similarly, I am free to believe what I want based on my experience. As a result, I work for companies that don't have a culture where they believe that output is always directly proportional to number of hours spent. A company that believes working for 8 hours leads to more productivity and I may not be a good fit for each other.

[valuearb]

Really? If you worked for 4 hours in a single day, there wouldn't be a single useful thing you could do for your company in the next 4 hours?