[imtringued]

Instead of mandating that everyone should work a fixed work week why not just let people decide how much they want to work? The 40 hour work week is just a "social construct". Let the unit of labor be half a work day (4 hours) instead of a whole person. If people want to work 24 or 32 or 44 hours let them.

The labor market isn't much of a market if you can't even do something as basic as decide how much you want to work.

[__turbobrew__]

I have went down to about 20 hour work weeks since I started working from home (1.5yrs ago) and am about as productive as 40 hour weeks in the office. In that time I have been marked as a top performer and promoted to lead a team.

The trick is to start working the shorter weeks and not ask for permission. As long as you fulfill your duties and are flexible when needed nobody will notice. No where in my employment contract does it say my ass needs to be in a seat for 40 hours a week so I have no moral problems with my arrangement.

[LandR]

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.

[onion2k]

Why base it on time at all? If I can be as effective in 20 hours as my coworker is in 40 hours, why not just pay us the same salaries for the same value produced?

The fact I get stuff done twice as quickly shouldn't be a factor unless I choose to work 40 hours and do twice as much as him. Then I should be paid more.

[bosie]

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?

[0des]

Your value is the amount of currency you exchange for an acceptable amount of your free time.

[hyperhopper]

This is the opposite of what the comment chain you replied to is talking about: the thread is about output as a measure instead of time. The hard part is measuring output. The market is currently time based because time is easy.

[bserge]

That's called being a freelancer.

[aeyes]

Because it works both ways, there are a lot of companies which offer "unlimited vacations" on paper. In theory you could use that to only work 3 days per week. In practice the employer will just argue that you don't meet expected performance goals (even if you do).

I work at a company which doesn't have any hours in the contract. People are active from 10-7 in general. This is the time where you have most overlap with your team and usually you have some dependency on others. If you aren't available you are letting your team down and again - you'll be flagged for not meeting performance goals.

[strken]

It's a gigantic pain in the buttocks when you need someone to give you AWS credentials and you have to wait three days for them to be back in the office. Add in a few other people with multiple days off and you can spend an entire week waiting for a combined 10 minutes of labour to be done.

If there was some kind of common arrangement where employees could go to the beach or attend piano lessons or whatever, but check their phone once an hour and unblock everyone else, and always be in the office for the official meeting day, it would be a lot more palatable.

[tremon]

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.

[strken]

Sure, but organisations do fail. Saying "oh, that's just an organisational failure" doesn't stop it from happening. Putting people in an office together is designed to let them recover from failure faster. When a randomly selected group of people are absent at any given time, gridlock happens.

There are also better examples than "one employee with AWS credentials," and I feel we're bikeshedding on the specific bad example, rather than talking about the broader principle of coping with blockers when the team doesn't work the same hours.

[falcor84]

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

[sokoloff]

There’s a market for people who want to work shorter workweeks. It’s not as crowded with employers as the “more common” market, but it’s there.

I can offer 0.5oz beers and if no one buys them, do I conclude there’s no market or a broken market for beer?

[dbbk]

People still need to be able to collaborate.