It's perfectly fine to ask the same question to a new audience. There might be different answers. Not everyone saw it the first time.
My answer to op, assuming they're not being facetious:
- We need time to recharge and let our brains work asynchronously on problems.
- We need more coordination and integration points with colleagues. If we're steamrolling ahead, there's little chance to coordinate.
- Quality of work begins to suffer after a certain point and reaches diminishing returns.
- Expending that much effort at once, repeatedly, likely leads to incredible burnout.
- Personally, the will to do Herculean tasks isn't a renewable resource you can tap into week over week. It happens, but it depletes. There have to be breaks.
I think that over time, the Overton window of what's acceptable will slowly shrink to 4 hours a week. But it'll be the optionality of work, like the 4-hour-work week, rather than a work-to-survive model we currently live in
What would help me at my job is just having the benefits/money to feel appreciative of the job. Instead I feel exploited. The easiest way is 4-10s. Working 8-6 daily and having a 3 day workweek would make me so much happier with my life. I would LOVE to have 3 days with my family, and would likely never leave the job.
How about just "work," and whenever it makes sense? I've always figured that if I achieve what I'm supposed to achieve, why does it matter how or where that happens?
Since some of the replies seem to have missed what I was alluding to, I want to put here what I replied below:
Sprint goals are based on capacity, which is loosely defined by how much your team works. Defining how much you need to work by basing it on how much you should achieve, which is based on a number defined by how much you roughly work, is circular reasoning.
Incredibly difficult to quantify, but there are heuristics.
Look at what your peers with a similar level of experience are doing.
Look at what you're committing to do during sprint planning or 1:1s with your manager. (Assuming you're in a reasonable organization with a healthy workload.)
Anything above that is deserving of a raise or promotion.
Sprint goals are based on capacity, which is loosely defined by how much your team works. Defining how much you need to work by basing it on how much you should achieve, which is based on a number defined by how much you (and your team) work, is circular reasoning.
Some jobs are process oriented in which the value contributed is in volume and efficiency.
>> achieve what I'm supposed to achieve
Other jobs are development oriented in which value contributed in defining the process or the end result of the process.
It seems like the former is more amenable to "regular hours" and the latter to great swings in hours spent in effort directly related to a specific purpose.
Alas, this isn't sufficient. For the same reason that unlimited vacation results in people actually taking less vacation, if you say this to someone without a ton of security in their position they will work approximately as much as their boss.
If the boss keeps sending emails on Friday there is no way that other people will really feel secure disconnecting.
How much vacation you have is how much the company is required to pay out as earned income when you separate from the org. Anything else is generosity that can be rescinded without notice or recourse.
Unlimited Vacation is great if there is a base guarantee of vacation given to the employees. That is, give them their usual 2 weeks (or more) of PTO in their contract. Then anything on top of that is unlimited.
But companies know full well what they're doing. They know that if they replace guaranteed PTO with unlimited, not only does the employee take less vacation (more bang for the company's buck), but they also get to skirt around state laws on paying for unused PTO when the employee quits.
Plus, without any guaranteed PTO, companies can just decline your request for vacation any time. They can say they're in busy season, or they need office coverage, whatever. Whereas with guaranteed vacation, the manager would have a harder time declining those hours you earned due to bad optics.
Unlimited vacation without a guaranteed PTO base is a scam.
I work for a small org, joined when it was like.. 7, now we're ~50, and fully remote. The where doesn't matter, but the when does for us. We still exploit synchronous communication quite heavily.
Yes i know some orgs can async everything. Some people prefer it. You could argue many cases on why async makes for a more mature interaction process, more efficient, etc. However we have not managed it. I'd say largely 50->80% of our communication is sync, and i don't see anyone advocating for changing that with us, despite having basically fully flexible hours and a global team.
I agree. Async communication is hard. Humans are not equipped for this. We are limited in our focus and prioritization ability. It is the same reason calling someone on the phone gets you results and information 10x faster.
Fully async is hard; I prefer it however a lot of people do not. So I adapt to the timezone of who I work with as I am usually the most flexible (no children and enough space to not disturb my wife or dogs). I overlap significantly with Asia now and in other years with the US. Works well enough to not risk too much change.
Even if most communication is async there is a part of "somewhat async" and a part of "mostly sync" communication. And then there is the social aspect of not being alone, but "seeing" that others are working as well.
On the semi-async stuff: If I am stuck with a task I probably can grab a coffee and eat a snack or check mails, but I would like to get some feedback soon, while I'm in the state of mind of that task. Else I switch completely to a different task, which has effort to come back on speed on the initial task on e the feedback is there. And if there is some clarification needed, it is good if all parties focus on that topic for a while, till key questions are cleared and everybody is unblocked.
I think the issue is coordination costs. In fact, Coase's entire theory of the firm is predicated that they exist to minimize coordination costs. I think it is interesting to think about this shift (and the remote from work phenomena as a whole), as adaptations that are essentially following a drastic reduction in coordination costs. More of our work can be asynchronous, done from disparate places, communication tools are infinitely better, etc. If you take the theory seriously, all else equal, you'd expect smaller company sizes, remote work weeks, and more generous time off. But that you'd still have a sense of needing to know "when it happens" equally makes sense given that coordination costs for a lot of these scenarios haven't reached zero (i.e. I can decide to work Tuesday but if I need Bob and he's decided to not work Tuesday that's a problem. Yes, maybe we could work something out individually, but if this happens enough times, and with enough people, its more efficient for the company as a whole to dictate a schedule when we can reasonably expect folks to be available)
World Without Email by Cal Newport talks a bit about the challenges here.
Specifically, Peter Drucker advocated for autonomy in knowledge work. However, this often leads to a lot of creep around meetings, Slack pings, and other context-switching activities. Cal, in the book, talks about the need to have good, organization level policies AND org-level processes to actively align to the work traits that the org needs.
Much like microservices provide a defined enforcement of system component boundaries, a 4 day work week is a way to force the removal of 'theater' work.
Neither should be required to achieve the end goal, but then there is reality.
Yeah back when we lived in Sweden, Swedes are kind of known to "take lots of breaks" and "pack up when the clock strikes 5". Between coffee breaks, lunch, and fika, people barely worked... except during those precious hours they did work — they were very productive. The idea was that you get your stuff done as much as you can, up until the next break, which was always right around the corner.
If that's not indicative of another dotcom bubble I don't know what is. That's an insane amount of money to be paying, especially for a pre-IPO company.
I have a close friend who got Sr Engineer offer from Bolt. The 500k yearly TC is somewhat misleading because it’s assuming more than 2x growth in evaluation. While they may very well achieve that, you’re not gonna see the full 500k for an uncertain amount of time. More people should be aware of the nuances in these compensation figures.
It is, if they're offering RSUs rather than options. With options there's no meaningful "current valuation" since they're granted with a strike price that should be equal to their last valuation, there's only a potential distribution of future outcomes based on expected multiples (incl. 0).
I know of this org pretty well; they just did a massive round compared to their size and any rational business metric. They've convinced a big group of investors that they can basically disintermediate almost all ecommerce transactions, but this is a very frothy/competitive space, with really big players like Apple and Amazon, plus your paypals and a bunch of other unified checkout players. I'm skeptical but have my popcorn & I'm ready to watch.
I read the related "conscious culture" manifesto and came across this "gem":
"When hiring a new person, wait until their official start date to onboard them, which includes granting access to email and internal documents. Avoid letting a new hire start early because:
[...]
Information in Slack or Google drive could tip them away from your company"
Oh dear, they're really telling on themselves aren't they?
I mean not giving them access to e-mail and internal documents until their formal start date is pretty normal, unless they sign an NDA that kicks in earlier.
It's quite possible that they're a dubious organization, but this note hardly proves it. It's really hard to get a read on internal company docs without any context whatsoever, they weren't written for an outside audience and it doesn't seem surprising that they could cause major confusion for someone unfamiliar with the local jargon and so on.
we’re encouraging employees to set the following out-of-office email notification of Fridays: “I’m out of the office today because we’re working consciously here at Bolt and are currently testing out a four-day workweek. I’ll be back in touch with you on [Monday].”
Ugh. Just say "I'm out of the office today and will respond on Monday" no need to tout your experimental company philosophy.
Ugh. Four day work week trials have proven very successful in Japan, Iceland, Spain, and now the US. It absolutely makes sense to tout this proven benefit to others. The only folks complaining are the ones who don’t believe data driven evidence or have an unhealthy relationship with work. No need to denigrate positive, no cost efforts to drag forward work life balance and quality of life.
Disagree, if I have to interact with someone only on Fridays and I’m getting back an out of office notification literally every time I email them, I want to know what’s going on.
Think this begs the question, Why? Saying it's company-wide is fair. But honestly I think people have their own cases and can make the judgment on too much/too little info
Definitely not. Childcare, company policy, focus time on development, playing darts - it doesn't matter. All that matters is they're not reachable on Fridays and that they've chosen not share the why.
Disagree. While the "we're working consciously" bit can be left out, you have to let the people you communicate with know that it's not just this Friday, it's EVERY Friday. Just saying "I'm out of the office today and will respond on Monday" implies it's a one-time thing.
You only have to do that if you're in a situation where your correspondent expects same-day responses. Mostly you should try to avoid creating that expectation -- or where you do want to provide that level of service, eg for customer interactions, that sort of email should be going via some kind of role address or internal ticketing system so that it gets reliable rapid responses that don't depend on individual employees not happening to fall ill and so you can ensure cover during holidays or whatever.
(I work a four day week personally, and I never set an out-of-office response.)
Not necessarily just for that. It's also useful for people knowing whether they send you something Thursday towards the end of the day that's somewhat time sensitive whether to expect/hope you'll get to it, or if that's something they shouldn't expect any more than sending it towards the end of the day Friday. It's useful in the same way as knowing when holidays are and not estimating when someone might get something done while including a Monday they will not be working.
I feel like many or most places already have the "be cool late Friday" mindset. Emergencies or critical things can still happen, but if possible maybe don't schedule a long meeting end of day Friday. Don't ask for something that needs turn around after the morning as people already are going to likely be in a wrap-up mode. It always feels like a very implicit "can this wait till Monday?" attitude permeates the day. And it's not just being nice, splitting a task over a weekend can lead to things being forgotten or missed or just the context being lost. Hell, I've seen places operate more in a "be cool all of Friday, it's the pseudo-weekend".
All that is a long way of saying that that group feeling now exists a whole day before and it's important to communicate that.
Why would that matter? If it comes up again next week, the person will get the same message. If I have a one-time interaction with you, all I need to know is that you're out today and back Monday.
For example, if I need X done by Friday, and I know Y company doesn't work on Fridays, I have a better idea of how much workload there is per day. It saves me from sending another email asking "hey, I know you weren't here on Friday, but is that every Friday or a one-time thing? And does that affect Joe from marketing and Sally from DevOps, or is it just you?"
When I first graduated college in 2008, I got a job at Lockheed Martin which offered flexible working schedules. I loved it, but was so naive to think this was commonplace. Adopting flexible working arrangements seems like an easy way for organizations to improve morale.
At Lockheed, they let you pick if you wanted to work the standard 5x8 days 40 hour week, 4x10 days 40 hour week, or the 9x9 80 hour two-weeks with every other Friday off. This worked great. Everyone was aware that not everyone on the team could be counted as being available on Fridays depending on their schedule. Unfortunately for me when I left there, I realized how unusual this working arrangement is.
Now that my kids are grown I would absolutely love this. You can stay in the pocket, get a quieter few days over the working weekend and it would help enforce good comms/docs when you wrap up your week.
The only issue is that I would try to pack too much into the 5 day 'weekend' and be exhausted when I start back up.
Could be. My step-dad was just telling me about his night shift at AT&T in the 70's doing operations for switching sytems. They would to 10 8's in a row b/c it was hard for them to stay on the night shift schedule over the weekends, so this just let them stretch the weekend. He really liked it.
9-80 used to be extremely common in the oil and gas world. It's started to go away now that it's not just a "good ol boy" industry but plenty of supermajors still offer it.
I used to work with different Oil&Gas companies in Houston, and one of the things that enabled this was that they started work at 6AM and ended at 3PM. Part of the reason was to have time overlap with other Oil producing countries (e.g. the Middle East), and part of this was to avoid Houston rush hour traffic.
I think it's easier to do 9 hour days when you start that early. It's nice to end your day at 3 and still feel like you have some daylight hours in the winter.
I'm in the public sector, and a number of my coworkers do it. I had that schedule in the before times too - the entire day being off was advantageous for going out and doing things and eliminated an entire pair of commutes.
Now, I have a 9x4+4 schedule where Fridays are half days. The reduction of the commute isn't as valuable when its "put on pants and down the stairs" and the full day to "do things" is reduced.
The trick with the 9-80 schedule is to define the week starting at Friday at noon.
And thus, for the defined 7 day period, the work doesn't exceed 40h. Additionally, no day is more than 9h (some places have requirements when 10h is worked within one 24h period).
The 9-80 as we called seemed like the most popular option in my building. Ten hour days was too long for some. It was nice getting every other Friday off.
Afaik the non-union folks were all switched to 4x10 without choice when working from home over pandemic.
I have to drive to the office and put on pants so prefer 9x80.
And it was never 9x9,but that's close. It was 9-80, the Friday in between were 8hours. (2x40 hour weeks, week just shifted early to split the first Friday).
Its a nice option, but harder to make up hours, if you have to shift them.
Hr suggested we could get our non-work things done on every other Friday off, but my dentist doesn't work Fridays.
10x4 are tough for me, when I have to make up hours, hard to concentrate.
And no one else other than my dentist has (every other) Fridays off, and he doesn't invite me on his boat. So no extra socializing.
As was mentioned in the public sector I feel like it was the norm. People liked having their every other Friday off (or other day they chose). When we were always in the office I chose to come in because fridays were quiet and I could work uninterrupted. Now almost all of my employees work a flexible schedule. They send me their schedule prior to the pay period starting. They have the ability to flex and violate the “core hours” one every two weeks (working less than 6 hours and can be outside the 10-2pm period). So for instance my one employee works about 2-4 hours every other Friday and has the other one off, just picks up the slack on some other day. And if they want to adjust their schedule more they just need supervisor approval (haven’t had a time yet where I had to deny a request). I personally stick to a mostly 8-4:30p schedule but if I have a big project coming up I shorten a day and put in extra time another day.
I have friends at Lockheed and they all love the flexible schedules. What I find interesting is that a company as large as Lockheed does this, but it hasn't picked up much steam.
Over the years it has been a bitter pill to swallow to discover that the majority of my first ten years was spent working at places that were exceptionally forward thinking in ways that matter to me but it turns out don't matter as much to loads of other people. I've spent a lot of time butting heads with people who are 5, 10, 15 years behind where I empirically observed 'standard practices' are at.
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
All of the Agile Manifesto signatories had been doing their own thing for at least 5-10 years before they tried to compare notes in 2001, and it was another 10 before most of us accepted half of XP as de rigeur. 15 years is a long, long time to wait for 'rain'.
> At Lockheed, they let you pick if you wanted to work the standard 5x8 days 40 hour week
Boeing was also once that way, and that survived the MD merger, though I don't know if that's still true.
This is nice, but I find it disappointing that they didn't offer 4x8 32 hour weeks, when the company's culture seems to have already been set up for it. They could have let people opt in to reduced pay.
That is very likely an option, but probably not used a lot. I have worked with several people that had a similar schedule, but they did not start at the company with that schedule and of course took a pay cut due to the lower hours.
It is very difficult to argue for hiring someone that is not 40 hours. HR and management thinks in terms of full time (40) or part time (<30). The 30-39 hour schedules seem to be used to keep someone they really don't want to lose and not offered to new people. I have seen it with people getting close to retirement and people caring for someone sick or small.
The 9-80 schedule is one of the things I miss most about working for LM. Along with the great coworkers I had.
Now I work for a typical software company, and I realize I took the flexibility of the 9-80 for granted. I got so much personal stuff done during that extra day off. And, for the rest of the days, I didn’t really feel like going from 8 to 9 hours a day that difficult.
Note that in California, hourly people will be getting two hours of overtime per working day. About a decade ago the unions got a law passed that overtime was after 8 hours in a day not 40 hours in a week. This ended up screwing people who had been able to move their schedule to four ten hour days.
I've stayed on much longer at the business I work for because of my 4 day week arrangement. Definitely golden handcuffs; I recognise that I probably wouldn't have this anywhere else. It's my life admin day mostly: chores, going to the dentist etc and when it isn't I make time for fun. Generally I feel much more rested in the week.
this would be fine for factory work, but I don't think it would be effective for knowledge work where most people can only consistently grind out maybe 3-5 hours of "real" work in terms of coding/writing/whatever. I think this is pretty commonly acknowledged on HN that nobody is grinding out 8 hours of hardcore coding every day
Working 4 days for 10 hours is going to result in reduced output for the company, but better for the individual who wants to work on their side project with a fresh mind 3 days per week. I'd love it as an employee.
Other obvious issue is that the rest of the world is pretty much working 5 days, so you risk losing deals and delaying all sorts of stuff over weekends and things like that
182 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadMy answer to op, assuming they're not being facetious:
- We need time to recharge and let our brains work asynchronously on problems.
- We need more coordination and integration points with colleagues. If we're steamrolling ahead, there's little chance to coordinate.
- Quality of work begins to suffer after a certain point and reaches diminishing returns.
- Expending that much effort at once, repeatedly, likely leads to incredible burnout.
- Personally, the will to do Herculean tasks isn't a renewable resource you can tap into week over week. It happens, but it depletes. There have to be breaks.
-----
Edit
Since some of the replies seem to have missed what I was alluding to, I want to put here what I replied below:
Sprint goals are based on capacity, which is loosely defined by how much your team works. Defining how much you need to work by basing it on how much you should achieve, which is based on a number defined by how much you roughly work, is circular reasoning.
Look at what your peers with a similar level of experience are doing.
Look at what you're committing to do during sprint planning or 1:1s with your manager. (Assuming you're in a reasonable organization with a healthy workload.)
Anything above that is deserving of a raise or promotion.
Some jobs are process oriented in which the value contributed is in volume and efficiency.
>> achieve what I'm supposed to achieve
Other jobs are development oriented in which value contributed in defining the process or the end result of the process.
It seems like the former is more amenable to "regular hours" and the latter to great swings in hours spent in effort directly related to a specific purpose.
If the boss keeps sending emails on Friday there is no way that other people will really feel secure disconnecting.
Plenty of places with unlimited vacation cue or even pressure employees to take a minimum amount of vacation.
Edit: u/babycake's comment says it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29879742
But companies know full well what they're doing. They know that if they replace guaranteed PTO with unlimited, not only does the employee take less vacation (more bang for the company's buck), but they also get to skirt around state laws on paying for unused PTO when the employee quits.
Plus, without any guaranteed PTO, companies can just decline your request for vacation any time. They can say they're in busy season, or they need office coverage, whatever. Whereas with guaranteed vacation, the manager would have a harder time declining those hours you earned due to bad optics.
Unlimited vacation without a guaranteed PTO base is a scam.
Yes i know some orgs can async everything. Some people prefer it. You could argue many cases on why async makes for a more mature interaction process, more efficient, etc. However we have not managed it. I'd say largely 50->80% of our communication is sync, and i don't see anyone advocating for changing that with us, despite having basically fully flexible hours and a global team.
On the semi-async stuff: If I am stuck with a task I probably can grab a coffee and eat a snack or check mails, but I would like to get some feedback soon, while I'm in the state of mind of that task. Else I switch completely to a different task, which has effort to come back on speed on the initial task on e the feedback is there. And if there is some clarification needed, it is good if all parties focus on that topic for a while, till key questions are cleared and everybody is unblocked.
Of course it is a balance.
Specifically, Peter Drucker advocated for autonomy in knowledge work. However, this often leads to a lot of creep around meetings, Slack pings, and other context-switching activities. Cal, in the book, talks about the need to have good, organization level policies AND org-level processes to actively align to the work traits that the org needs.
One thing I wonder is if everyone's getting a pay cut, or if they just got a net 25% raise on their hourly rates.
I guess if 94% of employees liked it[1], there was no pay cut involved...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/05/the-4-day-workweek-becomes-p...
Neither should be required to achieve the end goal, but then there is reality.
"When hiring a new person, wait until their official start date to onboard them, which includes granting access to email and internal documents. Avoid letting a new hire start early because:
[...]
Information in Slack or Google drive could tip them away from your company"
I mean not giving them access to e-mail and internal documents until their formal start date is pretty normal, unless they sign an NDA that kicks in earlier.
Ugh. Just say "I'm out of the office today and will respond on Monday" no need to tout your experimental company philosophy.
> I want to know what’s going on
Why are you restricted to interact ONLY on Fridays? What's going on with you?
(I work a four day week personally, and I never set an out-of-office response.)
Not required, but useful.
All that is a long way of saying that that group feeling now exists a whole day before and it's important to communicate that.
For example, if I need X done by Friday, and I know Y company doesn't work on Fridays, I have a better idea of how much workload there is per day. It saves me from sending another email asking "hey, I know you weren't here on Friday, but is that every Friday or a one-time thing? And does that affect Joe from marketing and Sally from DevOps, or is it just you?"
> I tried him last Friday, and the one before that, and the one before that. He's never available.
I genuinely don't understand how HR/higher handle these things. Are they just extremely out of touch or something?
- Name
- Company
- Department
- Mon-Wed-Thur
Or something like that, to signal when a person is working...
At Lockheed, they let you pick if you wanted to work the standard 5x8 days 40 hour week, 4x10 days 40 hour week, or the 9x9 80 hour two-weeks with every other Friday off. This worked great. Everyone was aware that not everyone on the team could be counted as being available on Fridays depending on their schedule. Unfortunately for me when I left there, I realized how unusual this working arrangement is.
The only issue is that I would try to pack too much into the 5 day 'weekend' and be exhausted when I start back up.
I think it's easier to do 9 hour days when you start that early. It's nice to end your day at 3 and still feel like you have some daylight hours in the winter.
Now, I have a 9x4+4 schedule where Fridays are half days. The reduction of the commute isn't as valuable when its "put on pants and down the stairs" and the full day to "do things" is reduced.
The trick with the 9-80 schedule is to define the week starting at Friday at noon.
And thus, for the defined 7 day period, the work doesn't exceed 40h. Additionally, no day is more than 9h (some places have requirements when 10h is worked within one 24h period).https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/80-w...
https://gusto.com/blog/people-management/9-80-work-schedule
https://www.zoomshift.com/blog/9-80-work-schedule/
Afaik the non-union folks were all switched to 4x10 without choice when working from home over pandemic.
I have to drive to the office and put on pants so prefer 9x80.
And it was never 9x9,but that's close. It was 9-80, the Friday in between were 8hours. (2x40 hour weeks, week just shifted early to split the first Friday).
Its a nice option, but harder to make up hours, if you have to shift them.
Hr suggested we could get our non-work things done on every other Friday off, but my dentist doesn't work Fridays.
10x4 are tough for me, when I have to make up hours, hard to concentrate.
And no one else other than my dentist has (every other) Fridays off, and he doesn't invite me on his boat. So no extra socializing.
Been there, got the t-shirt, had it signed.
Over the years it has been a bitter pill to swallow to discover that the majority of my first ten years was spent working at places that were exceptionally forward thinking in ways that matter to me but it turns out don't matter as much to loads of other people. I've spent a lot of time butting heads with people who are 5, 10, 15 years behind where I empirically observed 'standard practices' are at.
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
All of the Agile Manifesto signatories had been doing their own thing for at least 5-10 years before they tried to compare notes in 2001, and it was another 10 before most of us accepted half of XP as de rigeur. 15 years is a long, long time to wait for 'rain'.
> At Lockheed, they let you pick if you wanted to work the standard 5x8 days 40 hour week
Boeing was also once that way, and that survived the MD merger, though I don't know if that's still true.
It is very difficult to argue for hiring someone that is not 40 hours. HR and management thinks in terms of full time (40) or part time (<30). The 30-39 hour schedules seem to be used to keep someone they really don't want to lose and not offered to new people. I have seen it with people getting close to retirement and people caring for someone sick or small.
Now I work for a typical software company, and I realize I took the flexibility of the 9-80 for granted. I got so much personal stuff done during that extra day off. And, for the rest of the days, I didn’t really feel like going from 8 to 9 hours a day that difficult.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/27/four-day...
link: https://employernews.co.uk/news/brits-to-quit-jobs-if-not-of...
On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29877234
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-10/japan-s-p...
Let's make 2022 the year Four-Day Workweek spread like wildfire ;) Talk to your coworkers -- I suspect many of them would love for this to happen.
Working 4 days for 10 hours is going to result in reduced output for the company, but better for the individual who wants to work on their side project with a fresh mind 3 days per week. I'd love it as an employee.
Other obvious issue is that the rest of the world is pretty much working 5 days, so you risk losing deals and delaying all sorts of stuff over weekends and things like that