> Close to 8 in 10 Gen X and baby boomer workers (or 78 percent for those between the ages of 43 and 77 combined) support a four-day workweek.
> But younger workers indicate they’re willing to go to greater lengths for the schedule, and it sets them apart. More than 9 in 10 of Gen Z and millennial workers who prefer a four-day work week (or 92 percent) would still be willing to work that schedule if it meant giving something up, versus 86 percent of Gen X and baby boomers.
> The steps those younger workers say they would be willing to take include working longer hours (48 percent), changing jobs or companies (35 percent) and coming into the office or working fully in person (33 percent) to have three days off a week. Some would even be willing to take less vacation time (20 percent), accept a pay cut (13 percent) or take a step back in their careers (12 percent) for it.
Which is interesting, because I feel like I'm lucky when I have the focus to do even 4 hours of high intensity, cognitively demanding work in a day. Much of the rest of that day is fluffing around, meetings or doing stuff that seems like it could probably be delegated or automated with the right setup.
If they (or you, or anyone) want a 4 day work week, then why not pick a profession that allows it? Most healthcare related fields work in 12 hour shifts, so working 3-4 days a week is the normal standard.
I took a $50k job in my late 20s just for full remote with no calls/meetings, just Github issues and a chat app for synchronization.
I felt pathetic accepting the offer especially after my counteroffer was rejected (imagine your bluff failing here, lmao), but I remembered sitting in meetings for a higher paying job fantasizing about how I'd give half my salary away just to have no meetings and living on a beach surfing in the mornings. And that's what I did.
My first job in 2012 was 30k/year, after that 25k/year in 2015. & these are CAD, not USD. I didn't feel pathetic, I felt lucky getting to stay inside during the winter instead of working 12/hr flooring
Guess it's harder when you've had the higher salary already. For me I'd skipped college, so was building a resume
My first job out of uni in 2011 was 50k USD as a Ruby on Rails software dev in Austin.
What feels pathetic is when, 10 years later, you are making the same salary again. But at least I was surfing on a beach in Mexico this time around. I was really happy. Maybe that's priceless.
When I negotiate with someone on something like this, I make it (relatively) painful for the company to break the rule.
Full day pay bonus if we text/call someone on a non-scheduled work day, no matter how trivial the issue and no matter if they pick up or reply. So we don’t get a guarantee that the issue is resolved and they’re not obligated to help (if they do, they also get paid for working that day, obviously).
It wasn't an agreement. It was just how they operated.
It was worth it at the time. But I'm back in the States looking for work after years abroad and can feel the pressure of having a less impressive resume, no big names on my resume, and no US network.
Sometimes I look around at people my age who own property and make six figures and I feel so underachieved. But then I consider how miserable I was working in Austin before I went abroad and I can't think of a better way to have spent my 20s (for me).
I did not mean necessarily offshore jobs like tech call centres but capital which is sent into 'growing/emerging economies' creating various manufacturing jobs in india/china/SE Asia where human resources can be used 'efficiently'.
I'm not sure "growing in popularity" is exactly the right phrase for "coming to accept the inevitable consequences of living on a planet with finite resources," but it's good to hear it anyway.
If there's one thing that has truly happened with the pandemic, it's that it has exposed the psychopathy of grinding in corporations, and made people more aware of the value of their own lives. Thus, leading to large masses of people not caring about the corporate and management nonsense.
For folks who are concerned about younglings not working hard enough or China will take over or some other boomer ideology, this is even happening among youth in developing countries.
Solution: People want to be treated with respect and dignity. That's it. As long as companies treat people as fungible factory workers, companies will be in a constant churn of employees - especially as the newer generations are smaller in size.
Young people don't want to work hard because there's little incentive.
No matter how hard you work, unless you're in the top 5%, you're far priced out of most places most people want to live.
You can afford everything comfortably beside housing & health care (which you don't need much of when you're young) on a relatively low wage in the US.
So you've pretty much given up on housing. What's the point in working hard?
Damn, I can't even afford healthcare at my current wage in digital marketing. The plans I've found would take up about 10% of my yearly income and I'm late-20's, healthy, no pre-existing, non-smoker, etc.
Even with that, the pay is barely enough to qualify me for my apartment, which is artificially low in rent since I moved in during peak COVID and have had low rent increases.
Your fable states that there is a time for work and a time for play, and contrasts a worker that did nothing vs workers that did work and can survive.
The premise of the relevant discussion is that the marginal value of additional work and wages beyond the basic requirements is largely nothing. You cannot accrue meaningful savings, but still probably have enough disposable income to live comfortably enough, so it’s just a bad deal to work more.
Very simply, the marginal utility of additional wages is much lower than the cost of working them at the rates being paid.
And the point of the fable is that the ants understand that the marginal value of working now includes future benefits, whereas the grasshopper doesn't. The original comment doesn't really seem worth debating. People would rather work less because they ascribe greater value to their contribution than potential employers. Fine.
No it’s not equivalent. The young folks do want to work. They don’t want to work the last bit because they’re not being given anything of meaningful value. This is not the case of the grasshopper. Nor is it similar to the ants.
> So you've pretty much given up on housing. What's the point in working hard?
They don't want to work some last x% because they're happy with their current condition. The ants work the last x% so that when they retire they can continue to live in the style to which they've become accustomed.
The young folks are being offered money. They don't think it's meaningful because it doesn't enable them to afford some item now. So they can either decline the money or increase their estimate of its utility by taking their future into account.
The modern version has both the ant and the grasshopper freezing together as the ant was laid off and booted out at the start of winter after the larder stocking was finished. There just wasn't much work to be done in the winter and since productivity was down the hive would be more vital without the now useless ant.
They both freeze to death but at least the grasshopper had fun during the short summer first.
Also gen z has surpassed millennials and genx in home ownership (with comparable timing).
""In 2022, 30% of 25-year-olds owned a home. At the same age 28% of millennials, and 27% of Gen Xers owned homes, according to real estate brokerage, Redfin.""
Im more inclined to believe the lazy mentality is from lifestyle and cultural stemming. Its cool to not care or try. And according to instagram if you're not a millionaire by age 25 then you're a loser. So why even try?
That being said I see nothing wrong with a 4 day work week.
Im more inclined to believe the lazy mentality is from lifestyle and cultural stemming
If this generation is on a par with previous generations, or even surpassing them, wouldn't that indicate they're less lazy? You can't have it both ways - either they're lazy and that explains why they're behind, or they're not behind and that has to mean they're not lazy. How can they be both lazy and ahead?
The financial aspect of owing a home, as we know, is more complicated than wages and home prices. Theres also the debt aspect and juxtaposed interest rate.
In any case, the home ownership hasnt budged much in over 50 years. People just like to complain like they always have.
Well, this is simply not the case. Inflation adjusted housing prices per square foot has been flat for the last 50 years with slight fluctuations. Houses increased in footage, so inflation adjusted house prices have been flat vs wages (that grew).
Perception of things being different is simply because everyone and their dog is trying to fit into the few most attractive areas where prices have indeed skyrocketed.
U.S. is by far the cheapest in housing prices vs salaries of all developed countries and nearly the cheapest of all large countries in the world. 5th cheapest to be precise, those 4 above are oil petrocracies plus South Africa, that's fucked in so many ways it doesn't need to be discussed.
Urbanisation is a trend across the entire globe for many more reasons than just wanting to live in a few attractive areas.
And it's absolutely necessary for us to urbanize instead of the wasteful way we use our land, in order to avoid the impending climate, biodiversity, and energy crises.
Anyway --- with this square footage argument. End of the day, I'm still priced out of a house, whether it'd be a big one or a small one. I don't really care about the price per square footage, I care about the ability to get a roof over my head.
Edit: Actually, can you provide sources for this? From what I can find, home prices have been anything but flat, even adjusting for inflation: https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/
I have a hard time believing that in ~12 years we grew the entire housing stock square footage by 33%
as for your link - easy, what's understood by "house" in Luxembourg is usually a "Soviet style apartment block". You need to be a billionaire to own a typical US-sized single family house there, these are passed down the generations from the people who were rich 100+ years ago (but granted, they are usually not built of shit).
This rating assumes same housing everywhere, not just "average house in a given country". In this case, easily U.S. can be among top 5, because being very rich, and as people say here in the same thread "everything apart from housing and healthcare is cheap anyway", a bigger chunk of expenses can go there.
By another metric - "mortgage vs income" - U.S. is 6th best out of 106 large countries. 50% of the countries (that is, omitting 1/4 worst and 1/4 best) are between 1.7x and 5x worse.
Housing is much more accessible in the U.S. than in just about any country, even if you correct by per capita GDP, that is, it is more accessible than the per capita GDP would imply.
For example, the western part of the country's $/sqft going from $140 to $220 from 2012 to 2022 -- including inflation adjustment?
Sorry but, "housing prices have only gone up by 20% in the last 10 years in areas that are hemorrhaging job opportunities and education!" is not a good counterargument.
The particular chart i posted a separate link for, uses inflation adjustment, not GDP adjustment.
And sure, every country has a growing segregation between attractive, expensive areas and unattractive, cheap ones. That's normal. Fitting into attractive ones is a matter of competition and only the best few will - there can't be a place for everyone there no matter how the economy is doing and how high/low are the taxes "for the rich" (because it's not the rich who are buying up the housing).
Oh duh, why didn't I think about purchasing just a quarter of a unit? Just need to decide if I want a bathroom and a bedroom, or a bedroom and a kitchen, I suppose. Maybe a bathroom and kitchen is the optimal move and then I can sleep inside a kitchen cabinet and charge my next-room neighbors to use my kitchen.
> Im more inclined to believe the lazy mentality is from lifestyle and cultural stemming. Its cool to not care or try. And according to instagram if you're not a millionaire by age 25 then you're a loser. So why even try?
I'm assuming this is why you're being downvoted. It sounds like you're calling the new generation lazy, though I see now that it wasn't necessarily your intent.
Personally I fully understand those who don't want to spend most of their time and energy at work. Most jobs aren't fulfilling. Some even downright encourage a dysfunctional system.
I was impressed by tech companies in the late 2000s only to realize that they're not trying to "make the world a better place" and that they're just trying to make more money for their shareholders like every company before them.
So why would anyone sacrifice their family time, friends and hobbies just to work on another app that puts scooters on cities' sidewalks and build more hardware that'll end up in a landfill?
It has nothing to do with being cool or being a millionaire. It's just a generation that had their basic needs taken care of and are now getting their priorities straight.
>It sounds like you're calling the new generation lazy, though I see now that it wasn't necessarily your intent.
I think there is a lot of data that says the latest generation is the most cynical and jaded yet. There is some crossover between cynicism and motivation. Of course if you ask them, it isn't cynicism, it is realism.
>It's just a generation that had their basic needs taken care of and are now getting their priorities straight.
I think there are is a bit of wanting to have the cake and eat it too. A desire to live a dense urban life, but also have a quaint country home. A desire to be financially independent, but also follow their passions.
In short, I think they have been taught and sold a contradictory set of ideals and desires.
I'm sure you'll find some overly idealistic people in the mix, but the article mentions clear trade-offs that young workers are willing to take.
Some of them are willing to take a pay cut in order to work less, and they're being called lazy for it. My argument is that it's not laziness, it's the belief that they're better off fostering their personal relationships and passions than adding the extra money in their bank account.
I don't disagree. My comment was more about the general malaise and Outlook in Generation Z. That said, I don't think the article really supports the idea that they would readily trade time for money. Only 13% of the respondents said that, which is pretty Slim. I wonder what the crossover is between those respondents and the top 10% earners.
> but also have a quaint country home
I have never heard a human being complain about wanting "a quaint country home", or pose any permutation of requirements that might approximate that.
Perhaps the closest concern I have ever encountered on that front is "where do I put my stuff?" because US culture on average certainly does a lot more hoarding than nearly anywhere else in the world. But that's less to do with square footage of living space and more to do with square footage available to store hoarded items.
EG: such folk (now narrowing perspective to anecdotes of room mates I've had) often wind up placated by access to space in the garage plus a rented storage unit that they literally never visit between when they move in with us and when they move back out perhaps a year or two later.
Our place is a three bedroom unit within a triplex building built in the late 70s and falling apart. Its' rent has recently increased to close to half of all of our net incomes combined. We would like to live somewhere within walking distance (a mile?) of basic necessities, that we can afford, and if its not too much to ask perhaps also is not falling apart.
Number of square feet holds no interest to us but number of bedrooms would be nice so that each adult can have one to sleep in.
My apologies if that strikes you as too "quaint" and you'd rather force us to live 50 miles from the nearest store beyond the reach of basic utilities just because then the rent and/or mortgage payments would be half what we get here.
The homeownership rate is the percentage of HOMES that are lived in by their owners, not the count of PEOPLE that own their own homes. Given a shortage of homes, the homeownership rate will not show you that there is a crisis.
For example, if you homeless you do not count. If you live with your parents even though you would prefer to rent if you could afford it, that is a home-owned household. If the owner lives in their home and they rent out a room, that's a home. If you used to rent with 4 people and now live with 8, that's a single rental. If you own and live in multiple homes, you count multiple times.
Without more analysis, you can not use this rate to come to any conclusions.
> If you live with your parents even though you would prefer to rent if you could afford it, that is a home-owned household.
But not owned by you… so it wouldn’t end up in the 30% of "X own their homes" statistic. I’m not really sure what you’re going on about here but none of it makes any sense.
Here's backup from wikipedia, or are they also not making sense?
> The name "homeownership rate" can be misleading. As defined by the US Census Bureau, it is the percentage of homes that are occupied by the owner. It is not the percentage of adults that own their own home. This latter percentage will be significantly lower than the homeownership rate. Many households that are owner-occupied contain adult relatives (often young adults, descendants of the owner) who do not own their own home. Single building multi-bedroom rental units can contain more than one adult, all of whom do not own a home.
> the home ownership rate is created through the Housing Vacancy Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. It is created by dividing the owner occupied units by the total number of occupied units.
So you're not going to be able to live where most people want to live. That's far different from having no house.
"Giving up on housing" is not the right answer. "Start small and work your way up", like most of us did.
See, when you hit 20, you're looking at your parents, and you're seeing them when they're 45 or 50. You're not seeing them when they were 20. You expect that you're going to be able to live like they do at 50, not like they did when they were 20. That's not realistic.
But the answer isn't to give up. The answer is to keep working on it, over decades, instead of expecting it to be handed to you on day one.
lol good luck telling that to this this community who are frustrated they cant afford a home in the most niche place on earth and refuse to live anywhere else.
Is wanting to live less than an hour commute to work "the most niche place on earth"? Most people I know are renting because they can't afford anything within an hour commute and we have grown up hearing and seeing the pains of the commuter life. So why saddle ourselves with both a 30 year mortgage for a overpriced home that will also drain us of 10+hrs/week
Sounds like a lifestyle choice. Stop packing into cities like a can of sardines and it wont be an issue. Being inflexible to literal physics and reality is a personal issue.
Living in a place with no jobs is not exactly the solution for financial issues. And when you commute for more then 3 hours each day, it becomes impossible to be present parent or keep relationships or just do anything except work.
Which one? This used to be true where I live (Twin Cities area, Minnesota) but is no longer. Prices have really exploded pretty much everywhere over the past 10 years, my home purchased in 2013 is now worth about double. It's easy to miss if you haven't been on the market.
I haven't checked in a while. In my city there are still reasonable houses (I don't want to say for obvious reasons), but I bought mine in the early 2000s and it only recently doubled. I just looked and you can still find fixer-uppers in not great neighborhoods for under $100K, but you can live in them with electric/water and all that.
> Is wanting to live less than an hour commute to work "the most niche place on earth"?
I'm guessing OP meant San Francisco?
There is some truth in that message. One can't always live where you wish. In my 20s my #1 goal in life was to live in Manhattan. I tried and tried and tried, but could never afford it. I gave up. Moved somewhere much cheaper (but still jobs around, not talking middle of the desert) where affording a house was no problem. It's not exactly what I wanted at the time, but looking back after a couple decades, has turned out fine.
Quite easy to say when you already have the momentum of a career and net worth. Much harder to sincerely believe when you're crushed with student loans, have no savings, and career prospects are utterly depressing if you weren't fortunate enough to be raised in an environment that pushed you to set your life up properly from the get-go.
There are no guarantees and the odds are harrowing. Software engineering could completely dry up tomorrow. Then what? The professions that make any sort of thriving wage and have some semblance of career stability (medicine, finance, etc.) all have stringent gatekeeping pedigree requirements. What's left? Sales? Restarting in a trade where all the incumbents have been doing manual labor since they were in middle school, and you're no longer as youthful and full of vigor as you once were? Grind out for 10 years to get a foothold in the industry, and your body's breaking down, but now you have a shot at starting your own business instead of getting paid $60k/yr (disregarding backbreaking overtime) to do shit work. Great, you're 40 now and all of the economic tribulations you've faced means your retirement accounts are severely lacking. You will never retire and will have to keep on working until you die (either naturally or on the job). Healthcare: costs are going to go up. Housing: you never got the chance to own, so now you're stuck burning money renting. Inflation: everything is more expensive, but compensation hasn't grown with it.
Or more poignantly: can you keep on grinding forever? With all of the young bucks that come into this field with the drive to "make a name for themself" and reinvent the wheel ad nauseam. Can you keep up, old man? You're one psychological accident away from being unable to put bread on the table. Then what? Disability? Living in halfway houses because you can't pay rent anymore? Being surrounded by people who've fallen on hard times who can do nothing but drag you down with them? That's when you spiral further into a hole you can never get yourself out of. You're fucked.
I don't expect to live like my parents, but I won't pretend that life is not utterly and depressingly precarious. Lucky are the middle-aged and older; for they had grown up in utter blissful ignorance of things. Woe is the hyper-connected youth; unable to simply exist.
Except that economy when starting is not the same across generations. In addition, cohort of people who graduated into depression will never recover as a whole either.
And that is the thing - they simply do not see path to better conditions in the long term either.
Your take is from a tech worker perspective or you're a boomer.
You're assuming it's still possible to buy when saving 5k/year (what my median friend is able to do). It really isn't, or requires complete sacrifice of much of what makes life worth living anyway.
Re: location, there are cheaper places but they're far enough away it's like asking most people to move a plane ticket away from everyone they know (and likely all jobs they have experience in) to restart life.
Instead, most of my friends just accept the studio apartment they live in which costs half their cash flow, and spend the other half on essentials and therapy to cope. It's hard to see this from a $1M house in the burbs
As someone who considers themselves to be pretty motivated and entrepreneurial, I look around and see very little opportunity. Businesses that actually make money trade at all time high multiples while funding for a new business is non existent. Want to buy a business? Good luck, high interest rates squeeze margins to nothing.
The financialization of housing means you’re competing with massive hedge funds when you want to buy a home or invest in real estate.
Incredible government defect spending ensures more inflation which will outpace salary increases.
This is how I’ve heard the late 70s/early 80s as being described: general malaise.
Probably the same as it's ever been. Out of three random employees, you have one who's just going through the motions, one who's working hard, and one who's actively hostile. Which one gets the money when review time rolls around?
That, and what's the long term strategy? Do they turn 30 and flip from working part time at Pizza Hut to a professional salaried career? Good luck getting an interview with that CV.
I'm not saying it's an ideal situation to be faced with, but tuning out is just going to make it worse.
Of those 3, most likely who is a better “fit” to their manager. Promotions especially are more about personal relations than “metrics” hard to measure productivity.
GP's point is that the extra money has little value, because your spending options are becoming bimodal in distribution: all the trinkets are priced at "approximately anyone with a job can afford some of it", while the important bits like housing are priced at "an order of magnitude more than people typically earn", and this gap just cannot be crossed by working hard to get salary raises.
Let's consider some actual numbers, though: In 1999 I got my first "corporate" job at a starting salary of $50K. I was paying $800 a month for a two bedroom apartment, and what was left over was enough to comfortably support me and my wife. Entry level salary for the same job is now about $120K, meaning someone in that position can easily afford to pay $1920 a month for rent. According to Zillow, that same apartment is now renting for $2305 a month.
So what we're hand-wringing about is a ~$385 increase in rent, which comes to about 4% more of the person's gross salary than 25 years ago. That sucks a little bit, but it's not a catastrophe.
And on top of that, you can still make a ton of side money through bonuses and stock, in the industry that I assume we're mostly talking about. A few months ago I gave a $90K stock grant to a guy. Even if the stock price stagnates, that on its own is almost half his housing costs for the next five years, and it's all because he works harder than the guy in the next cube over.
You used a single personal data point and then pulled numbers completely out of nowhere and are comfortable making general statements about housing affordability on that basis? Bold.
That pay is significantly above the US average of $77,463[0].
For a different anecdote, an friend of mine briefly worked a pizza fast-food joint in Davis (CA), and the pay from that didn't even cover her rent and bills, she had to get support from others.
maybe young people don't want to work hard because history has proven time and time again that "working hard" doesn't make you happy, it's actually the opposite and they have now come to realize that balance is key?
It's not for everybody, but if you can find a way to not play the rigged game, you can get ahead.
I moved from a high cost of living city in North America to Latin America. I bought a two floor penthouse overlooking the ocean for less than the price of a two bedroom apartment back where I came from. My mortgage is -$2000 / month. That's right, negative $2000 because I save the full mortgage payment plus an extra $2000 on taxes each month, completely legally and above board.
Now not everything is sunshine and roses (well there is a lot of both, but you know what I mean). The price is I have to work remotely, I had to learn a new language, and Amazon delivery is more like two weeks than 2 days and the shipping is not free. There are definitely things that I miss, but nothing compared to what I gain.
> My mortgage is -$2000 / month. That's right, negative $2000 because I save the full mortgage payment plus an extra $2000 on taxes each month, completely legally and above board.
Your solution is to be the top 5% in some other cheaper economy while continuing to get paid a US comp package. Not sure how that's better. In fact, this is exactly the thing that's going to drive down all of our comp over time. If you can work effectively in Costa Rica, why won't I just hire good English-speaking talent in Costa Rica (more likely Brazil) at a tenth of your expected comp?
> why won't I just hire good English-speaking talent in Costa Rica (more likely Brazil) at a tenth of your expected comp?
you can try! but you'll find that this is basically impossible -- the folks that are good enough aren't going to take 1/10th of the comp they could be making.
To be clear - you can read the crystal ball much like the whole generation in terms of whats going to happen in the future? I'm glad everyone knows how the future is written, I for one don't know and am quite curious.
Of course you have predictions and some things are more probable than others. I'm pretty sure that fertility is going to keep dropping and extreme weather is going to get worse in the mid-term future.
Agree but building a whole narrative how definitely life will be worse in the future really binds yourself to a bad mental trajectory. The default option is to not put the effort in because why bother? Where would we be as humans if that was our internal resolve.
This is precisely why fascism is on the rise, and I’m not being hyperbolic
It’s reminiscent of the lead up to the drug war that was coinciding with the antiwar movement
Young people looked around and said this society is not working for us, and instead of creating a new society that actually takes care of people, people voted for Nixon and doubled down on maximum alienation capitalism
Add in a certain amount of awareness that more consumption as in bigger car, more square feet and shorter product replacement cycles isn't just good.
Sure, few people would actively reject an opportunity to have a high footprint life, but the relative attractivity between footprint maximization and having other priorities in life certainly aren't the same as they used to be in the days of infinite growth illusions.
The effect you describe is much stronger I think, but they are not competing, they complement each other.
My theory is that compared to people in the 60s say, there are more things to do with your free time now, to the point where they are sometimes in conflict.
Before you’d get home and all you could do was have a beer and maybe watch tv, listen to the radio, read a book. Now we are so connected to so many things, and we know about all the activities possible around us through social media, that work is in the way. Work would define life, now it’s just something to pay the bills.
Sure, not universal, people still have professional goals, I want to change careers, I want to finish that project at work because I think it’s interesting and would benefit people, but I would not get in the way of working 4x8 instead of 5x8 for that.
I want to play games, learn about AI, 3D printing, CAD, mountain bike, go to trivia, travel to Thailand, travel to Europe, see family across the globe, get more flexible, build muscle, etc etc etc. None of them are at work.
Well said. Life is really freaking good. There is a never ending list of cool things to do. No matter what you choose, you will be missing out on something else that’s equally amazing.
I wouldn’t trade my life now to be a billionaire 70 years ago.
Indeed. The list of things I want to do is so long that the only way I could ever make a dent in it is if I were to become financially independent and not need to work. That’s maybe a possibility in my particular case if I’m smart, but not remotely realistic for most people.
I just see it as the system reaching equilibrium on some meta level. You have to do better than the norm to break out of the norm. And if everyone can do it, then it's the norm and not what you want.
Now, whether that's right or if the norm is a good place for the majority of people - That's a different matter entirely.
Upward mobility is a very recent phenomenon. Pesants weren't told that if they worked hard they could be nobility. There were born peasants and were very aware they would die peasants.
We're at a unique point in that there was a brief period in recent history where upward mobility was true, and now it's becoming untrue again and those for whom it was true don't believe its becoming untrue again.
Why is wanting an improved work life balance (and thus improving things like health (mental/physical) and family and happiness) seen as not wanting to “work hard”?
Gone are the days of 10x emps, power badasses doing laundry and eating 3 meals a day on campus. It never was healthy for the emps anyway - it only ever benefits the owners.
Unless you own, the only incentive is to work as hard as you are paid for as we all exchange labor and limited lifetimes for wages that ensure someone else’s profit still meets its owners set marks.
As someone who worked very hard for 10y and was paid in some top percentile, the incentives still ran out.
I'm bored of the meaningless high paid work, single and likely socially stunted and emotionally blunted from workaholism. But at least I can buy a house where none of my loved ones can, and who will eventually be priced out of renting even basement apts nearby.
As someone living in a low cost of living area (happily) and working in an unsexy but profitable tech job that was basically begging to hire anyone with a degree, I really dont understand this rhetoric.
> No matter how hard you work, unless you're in the top 5%, you're far priced out of most places most people want to live.
That's not even true. I have a large set of anecdata, with people below median income buying houses, and people in the 5% being afraid to buy a house (too risk averse to the point of being detrimental).
If owning a house is your priority, you will make it work. My conclusion is that a large set of people just don't have the basic skills to maintain a house, or simply don't want that responsibility, despite being able to afford it.
> So you've pretty much given up on housing. What's the point in working hard?
What's your plan for when you're 50, broke and almost unemployable due to ageism? Who's going to rent to you and how will you afford it? Are you going to be a squatter? Do you plan to wait until your parents die and live off the inheritance?
That's cool if you don't have answers to those questions when you're 22-25, but what about 35+, like most millennials now are?
In my experience working at a 4DWW company I saw the opposite.
The happiest were the oldest, most established workers, because they had already ticked off all so many life goals, had a house, a dog, kids, etc and so less money and more time was great.
In contrast the youngest workers had no stable housing, and wanted more money more than they wanted time, because they wanted an ability to buy themselves some of those lifestyle things the older workers already had (read: stable housing).
In practice the young workers that needed more money simply used the other day for another job, which was their right.
This was in an environment with a dysfunctional unaffordable housing market, so maybe this all just shows how important affordable housing is and how it eventually starts to trumps all other issues.
"so maybe this all just shows how important affordable housing is and how it eventually starts to Trump all other issues."
Of course it does, and why anyone would think otherwise has baffled me my entire adult life.
(1) in any survival class, for me boyscouts, you learn that first priority in any survival setting is shelter.
(2) anyone living in the US in the last 60 years and has paid any attention to the homeless know how fast your life falls apart when you don't have a home. Countless stories of someone having a traumatic life event, and then being evicted with their entire life being tossed out on the curb by an uncaring landlord
(3) a shelter is safety, it is engrained in ourselves that we feel safer and more secure when we have a dedicated place that is permanent.
So of course shelter/affordable housing trumps almost everything else, it always has and always will. It is surprising how society has been, seemingly, brainwashed with the idea that housing has to be (a) an investment vehicle and (b) done for obscene profits.
These companies are so rare, why wouldn't the younger workers just go find a job with higher pay and less time off? It's not like they're being forced to work at a 4-Day Work Week company... They're kind of unicorns to find in the first place.
it makes a lot of sense to me. It has to do with the fixed quantities work can be found in. It is a matter of finding a combination that is compatible.
There was at least one person I was aware of that did not like 4dww and left because they didn't want to do it. They were relatively young. But in general most stuck around. Possibly because yea 4DWW is rare so maybe they felt their money troubles were transitory and it's better to stay at the company and get more money in another way. I dunno.
One way to think about it is that you’re getting a 20% pay bump. It’s not 1:1 exactly but I’m willing to bet a lot of people would trade certain perks for a 20% bump. But it’s a net loss for society to remove these perks. Being young means you don’t need these perks. You don’t give a damn about healthcare, child care, or life insurance. But you most likely will in a decade and getting it back these perks would be nearly impossible after you trade short terms gains for long term loss.
I don't think this is a reasonable way to think about it. You are getting 20% more *per hour* but that isn't the same as a 20% pay bump. It doesn't help you afford a house, raise kids or buy luxuries. (Unless you use that extra 20% time to find a different job that pays similar).
Personally I would switch to a 4 day week with 20% less salary. I would probably even be more than 80% of my current productivity because I'm definitely less productive on many Fridays.
Moving back to the US after living abroad I was used to month long holidays. I applied to a few companies and tried to negotiate 5 weeks PTO. They wouldn't budge. Then 4 weeks. Still no. I offered to drop my salary in exchange for vacation. Still no. I asked HR why everything else was negotiable except PTO and they told me I would have more time off then people who've been there for 7+ years.
This was my first clue that there was a lot of momentum to keep you dependent on your employer and it doesn't stop with a paycheck. 10-12 days per year really restricts your mobility. Instead of backpacking through SE Asia for a month I basically used that time for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.
BTW, having 3 days off means you can sprinkle on additional vacation time throughout the year. I'm not surprised Gen-Z would negotiate less vacation time if they could use it more effectively.
I'm Australian but have lived in Europe for a long time. When I begin to consider moving back, one of the things that puts me off is that 4 weeks is pretty much universal in Australia, plus in Australia I think it's pretty standard to have a fixed number of days you're allowed to be sick. I'm too used to having 6 weeks holidays and essentially unlimited sick leave (as long as it's legitimately required).
It's a more grown-up arrangement where businesses realise that regular time off (and as much time as you need if ill) increases happiness and therefore productivity.
> It's a more grown-up arrangement where businesses realise that regular time off (and as much time as you need if ill) increases happiness and therefore productivity.
Is there a metric of some sort that I can share with other people that demonstrates 4 weeks PTO does work and has led to increased productivity in Australia?
I personally believe in shorter work weeks, but my experience is anecdotal, so was wondering if there was a study or some kind of economic metric that reflects that statement for increased productivity in AU.
As an Australian, the only metric that matters for me is >80% of all semi-competent developers, designers, and founders I knew (including myself) left AU because they hit a career ceiling normalized by that culture.
Zero local innovation, and the relatively healthy economy is mostly due to exporting stuff to Asia (education, tourism, and resources).
I’m confused. It kinda sounds you are asking what metric needs to have a bias for it in a study. If you otherwise have information that you believe would demonstrate the point, just share that.
I'm asking for any material that supports this statement: "businesses realise that regular time off (and as much time as you need if ill) increases happiness and therefore productivity."
Productivity can be measured and if that productivity was increased then those statistics should be more visible!
I work for an Australian company in Australia and they'll give me paid sick leave beyond the standard allowance if I need it. But I agree that it'd be better if that was a right.
as far as worker rights go, i think australian workers have it better than in most countries. in places in eu like austria you even have "sicky police" that go to check up on you when you are sick. lol i dont think something like this would fly in 'straya. to be clear im not talking about full on compo and insurance companies hiring private investigators. im talking about calling your boss and telling him/her that you have high temperature
still, weirdly enough, i think that overall work life balance and quality of life is much better in europe than in places like sydney. i think that this is actually because australia has turned into a nanny state in almost every other segment of life. europe in this regard treats its inhabitants as adults much moreso than australia
> still miss the food at home
in europe? im actually the opposite. i miss the great variety of great restaurants in sydney and melbourne
yep i miss viet pho and leb chicken. thai food is a train wreck in europe. there are some really good chinese restaurants but they are far and few between. best one is in lisbon. however there are some really good places for good food and just general good vibes. if one likes these sort of things i recommend visiting belgrade
its aussie bogan slang. if you are new to australia, rock up to work barefoot with a VB or a Tooheys in your hand and tell the next new guy "wellcome to straya mate"
>in places in eu like austria you even have "sicky police" that go to check up on you when you are sick. lol i dont think something like this would fly in 'straya.
Pretty much yeah. Austria (the Mozart one, not the kangaroo one) has in general pretty terrible workers' rights and benefits compared to most other wealthy EU countries, unless you work for some government institution or some big and wealthy Metall unionized company.
Sure, it looks good on paper from the outside, but in practice it's not that great, it's just good PR.
> Moving back to the US after living abroad I was used to month long holidays. I applied to a few companies and tried to negotiate 5 weeks PTO. They wouldn't budge. Then 4 weeks. Still no. I offered to drop my salary in exchange for vacation. Still no. I asked HR why everything else was negotiable except PTO and they told me I would have more time off then people who've been there for 7+ years.
One of the reasons I work in the education sector is the generous (compared to startups / most tech companies, anyway) PTO.
We get all of the big holidays off (I think 12) and we have 2-4 weeks of vacation (depending on length of employment) and we have two weeks of paid medical leave (which accumulates, so after the first couple of years you have massive amounts banked) and paid maternity/paternity.
Mine isn't the only employer like this, there are plenty of others, it's not hard to find one. The key to look for is "work life balance." Government jobs, non-profits, education, these sorts of areas - they know they can't compete with tech company salaries but can make up for it in other ways. PTO is only a part of that.
It's not quite the 4 day a week dream job, but there are options available if you look. And as a bonus, you might find yourself more aligned with the mission of the organization than you would at a for-profit tech company.
In my experience, it's really hard to deal with 4 day weeks in education, but maybe just because I was trying to schedule week-long courses. I was at a job that observed 4 day weekends for every single federal holiday which, in practice, meant that you had 2 4-day weeks and 2 5-day weeks each month. It felt very hard to get stuff done generally, but that may have been a characteristic of the native speed of the bureaucracy in that particular org (4 day weekends were relatively new) or the fact that face-to-face work was prioritized due to nearly-nonfunctioning computers.
This is the one thing I really hate about American work culture. It really is pervasive throughout the economy, capitalism here optimizes for money over happiness and there just aren’t many companies that are willing to release their grip on you. My employer is now trying to transition to three days a week in the office and the reasoning is totally capitalistic even though it will most likely reduce overall happiness, they also will not approve a month off PTO even though it’s apparently unlimited, the reasoning was basically “we don’t work that way”.
So many things are wrong with American work culture and there’s nothing most people can do about it.
I could do that. I'd rather have it officially on the books rather than hack something together that could be used against me later, ie "This guys seems to be out of office more than usual."
What makes you think having and fully using "official" PTO wouldn't get used against you for the same reason? People don't say stuff like that because they like seeing your face.
In the US, I have found that what HR will tell you is different than what your hiring manager will enforce.
My hiring managers were often much more permissive and allowed 4 day work weeks and “unlimited” time off provided it was not detrimental to the team. This also meant that when there was a legitimate emergency; they expected you to assist.
I have heard many horror stories but have been luck not to experience most of them at this point in my career.
Unofficial requests are exactly that. We don't like planning long, expensive trips based on what the manager is feeling that week or quarter.
I've circled the sun long enough (and dealt with enough military recruiters, LOL) to know that you get it all in writing. Any implied or verbal agreements aren't really worth much.
I don't know about the US but in the Bay Area PTO hasn't been negotiable for about seven years. It's all "unlimited" now and so there are no official numbers to compare anymore.
The good news is that in large publicly traded companies people routinely fly back to India for a month so 4-week vacations are a thing if you are good at leetcode.
I don't know if this is a problem specific to PTO. In general, after 20+ years of working, I've found US employers to be pretty inflexible on all terms/aspects of your working life besides compensation. They may (or often may not) be willing to negotiate pay, but will almost never budge when it comes to:
- Vacation / PTO
- Unpaid leave
- Health benefits
- Financial benefits like 401(k) or life insurance
- IP ownership
- Moonlighting or second jobs
- Schedule flexibility
- Paid training
- Company equipment
These things tend to be "take it or leave it--we won't accept changes to our boilerplate agreement!"
Not to defend them one bit but it’s very likely because a lot of that stuff is hard to keep track of. If you only have one policy that everyone is subject to, it can be easily tracked/updated/cost calculated/etc. The bigger the company, the less likely they will craft a custom policy for you.
Any half competent HR system can keep track of it. I know because part of my job was managing those systems. Setting PTO was simply advancing a digit in a field in a giant HR database. Not exactly rocket science.
BTW, senior executives had far more flexibility when it came to PTO, leave, pensions, bonuses, IP, etc. And it was managed in the same system that frontline employees were managed from.
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
Leisure is expensive. This year the kids have all week off for
Thanksgiving. We said we should go and do something. Then we priced out a bunch of things and everything is far too expensive, so we are staying home.
If we move to a four-day week as standard I hope we do it in a flexible way, so that some people don't work Monday, some people don't work Tuesday, etc.
I acknowledge that could be difficult to manage in some industries (e.g. trying to get eight people together in a meeting), but it means that traffic would be lowered each working day, as well as people being more spread out when attending leisure activities (i.e.not everyone goes to the beach on a Saturday).
> e.g. trying to get eight people together in a meeting
This could potentially be mitigated by having some "common days" enforced. So maybe the whole company works monday and tuesday or something like that. Prefer putting smaller meetings on the other days (You should have at least 1 overlap day with everyone else assuming that everyone has weekends + 1 day of their choosing off) but for larger meetings those provide a high chance of finding a time.
1) Friday or Monday are more likely to be days off anyway, so you’re asking (slightly) less by asking for one of those.
2) Lots of people really like having longer stretches off, as it opens more options for things you can do with the time off.
3) If kids are off school, even for a non-holiday (teacher in-service, say) it’s often a Friday, so that’s a nice day for parents to have off.
TL;DR there’s a pretty strong case for Friday and a somewhat less strong case for Monday. I expect employers and co-workers alike to prefer either of those over Wednesday.
This is a fun move to pull for the reasons you stated but also because it surprises those who didn’t consider it as an option when selecting a schedule.
Downside- we need long breaks to truly relax and calm down. Not much resetting you can do in a day but with three there’s more opportunity.
An important part of this is to eliminate the idea that as a society we all need to have the same 2 weekend days off. (Which we don't anyway because a huge percentage of the population does work on weekends, just not most "professionals".)
Let my dentist's office be open 7 days a week, with some of them working M-Th and some working Thur-Sun and some working Sat-Tues etc. Maybe some of them mix it up and do M/T/Th/Fr or M/W/F/Su or whatever.
K-12 schools are the tough nut to crack in this scenario.
Don’t agree with this at all. The advantage of a three day weekend is that the extra day gives you time to tie things up, wind down, and actually be able to enjoy both days of the weekend instead of that only being true of Sunday (the tail end of which is fudged up by having to prepare for Monday).
It probably wouldn't be practical for small companies, but what I'd really love would be a rotating third day off that moved between Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I don't think it'd make sense to rotate through all days because having it on a Tuesday or Thursday would just be annoying to go back to work for one day before having another break day.
With a MWF rotation you'd get 4 on, 2 off, 2 on, 1 off, 2 on, 2 off, 4 off, repeat and having that four day weekend every three weeks would really open up weekend trips that require more travel.
I do this where I work (in higher ed). I work 4 tens and have Wednesday off. It's like having a lot of two-day weeks with alternating 1- and 2-day weekends. Also, if I need a Friday or Monday off I can change which day I take off for that week. What sold me on it was "never work more than two days in a row unless you choose to".
I see a lot of criticism of the 10-hour days, but in a mixed environment I like it. With the hours I chose I have a 1 1/2 hour work time in the morning where most everyone else isn't in yet that is very productive for me. I also have an extra half-hour after the time most people leave to do the same. My work is more project oriented, but I still have inconvenient meetings with small windows for work throughout the normal work day.
If they (or you, or anyone) want a 4 day work week, then why not pick a profession that allows it? Most healthcare related fields work in 12 hour shifts, so working 3-4 days a week is the normal standard.
I never said it would be easy: most things in life that are important are not easy.
The point is that there are many different types of jobs with a variety of benefits, including non-traditional scheduling. If that is something important to you, why not work towards it?
Healthcare is just one example. It’s not perfect either, there are problems for sure. But that is ok for some people who value something like a 3-4 day work week. No job is perfect, it’s all about what trade offs make it worth it to the employee.
What point does this argument hold besides "it's what we do now so we don't change it"? Same thing could be argued when five-day work weeks were first proposed.
I think this should be a common sense rule:
If your statement starts with “why don’t they just” or some sort of variant: Think about it twice.
You’re suggesting that 92% of the young workforce concentrates on the few jobs with extended shifts.
92% of the next gen of workers will not be working a 9-5 in your scenario.
> why not pick a profession that allows it?
> Most healthcare related fields work in 12 hour shifts
I don't know, but I guess working 12 hour shift has something to do with it. Around where I live healthcare workers are also often on strike because of low wage and poor working conditions.
I negociated a 4-day workweek for my first job when I was 23.
25 years later, I wouldn't do it. I'm worried for my retirement, I don't think I'll have enough saving to live in a safe and convenient place, and have access to good healthcare. This is the type of things you don't think of when you just graduate and are used to the student worklife.
A 4 day work week is not '4 days work for 80% of the money'. A 4 day work week today means working 4 days a week for the same money as a person working 5 days a week. Depending on the company that's either 10 hours a day for 4 days a week, or more commonly it's an 8 hour day for 4 days a week with an assumption (proven in many studies) than people work harder with less downtime for that 8 hours so consequently get the same amount of work done as their 10-hour-4-days and 5-day-week counterparts.
> A 4 day work week today means working 4 days a week for the same money as a person working 5 days a week
Sure, but you'll have even less hope for a salary increase next year, since this is basically what it is.
This was the theory behind France's move to the 35-hour workweek, too. They also expected companies to hire more people to compensate for less work being done. Didn't work out as expected.
The way I see it, as programmers we will be far more productive working fewer days per week and just taking more time to relax. If this assumption is accurate you have to do nothing to compensate.
Sure, I think there's a big difference between programmers (and similar) and the situation in France at the time, when most people affected by this were factory workers, who didn't have themselves much influence over how productive they were (aside from the obvious issues of not showing up / slacking off).
Basically, "nothing" happened. The expected drop in unemployment never materialized. And although pay rises never were an expected effect of the change (from what I know), they were negatively impacted.
I'm not knowledgeable enough in those matters, so I may be off base, but it would seem that companies started to be less "competitive" when the rule started to be applied, in 2000-2002. But from what I've read on the subject, none of the sides (for and against the measure) can prove that it was undoubtedly a good or a bad thing.
> The way I see it, as programmers we will be far more productive working fewer days per week and just taking more time to relax. If this assumption is accurate you have to do nothing to compensate.
I agree with this. Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to make this kind of decision. And it's pretty clear to me that many managers don't think this way, and somehow figure that your productivity is roughly constant and proportional to the time your butt spends in your seat (at least up to a point).
Nothing, 35 hours week don't apply to us, but we have 9-10 more paid holiday than before. As for impact on salary, hard to say, it wasn't an A/B experiment. We can only speculate.
> more commonly it's an 8 hour day for 4 days a week with an assumption (proven in many studies)
When I looked at these studies, the productivity was measured by company's revenue, so it was pretty much useless.
> people work harder with less downtime for that 8 hours so consequently get the same amount of work done as their 10-hour-4-days and 5-day-week counterparts.
Maybe it works that way for some people, but I doubt for all.
Personal anecdote - I don't work full 40 with full intensity, I do slack a lot. But it's not like I work hard for the first 32 hours and then slack all Friday. It's more like I work hard for 2 hours and then slack for the next hour, because the mental load is just too intense. Rinse, repeat. Another day off won't do much for me in terms of productivity. On the opposite, I believe I'm less productive on Mondays and even less after longer holidays (I believe it's basically loss of context and "work mood").
I personally also do programming in my free time (usually at least an hour a day), so it's not like the overall load is too much.
Having said that, I would love to have a 4-day week, especially without lost compensation. But to me this idea that there's no productivity loss looks to me very much like wishful thinking.
> Personal anecdote - I don't work full 40 with full intensity, I do slack a lot. But it's not like I work hard for the first 32 hours and then slack all Friday. It's more like I work hard for 2 hours and then slack for the next hour, because the mental load is just too intense.
I felt this way too, but it's a reaction to chronic brain tiredness. When I was working a 4 day workweek, I remember noticing on Tuesday that I only had a couple of days until the end of the week, so I better buckle down if I wanted to get something done. And then I did. Having that reliable 3-day weekend meant that I really focused on work when I was at work. And I was able to schedule "bank appointments" on my Friday off, instead of having to take time during the workweek.
I know it seems like wishful thinking, but
I was demonstrably more productive, more sustainably, in that 4-day/week job, than any 5-day/week job I've ever had.
I had a 4 day workweek for a period of time after I got diagnosed with ADHD in a ripe age. Eventually bumped it back up to 5 days because it paid me 1/5 more. My efficiency, however, is around the same, or even slightly lower, than it was when I was working 4 days. Which isn't low enough to cause me any issues, but it's also sort of silly that I get paid more for the same/less solely due to spending more hours in the office and not for the work I'm actually performing. This isn't because I'm quiet quitting or whatever trend there is hip with the anti-work crowd, it's simply because I'm more tired and I perform worse when I'm tired.
I did a 6 month stint with 4 day work days and I noticed the same thing. I think I was more productive when I had that added day of rest and yeah they paid me 1/5 less. I didn't mind the pay cut because I was much happier. It's pretty amazing what an extra day of rest does for you.
During spring of 2020 at the very beginning of COVID my (100K+ person) company furloughed all of us for about 12 days, but most of us had to take it as 2 days of unpaid time off per week, so we effectively had 3 day work weeks. I have to say that felt a little too short and it always felt like it was a scramble to get things done. 4 day weeks feel a lot more comfortable.
This is a huge trend in Europe. A sizable portion of people I know are simply deciding to work as little as possible, even if that means getting paid less. The general perception is that there is no point in saving for a house or for retirement, and many perceive the career ladder game to be a fool's errand. So they just want to get enough money to live at present.
I've seen some strange criticisms after a friend of mine transitioned to a 4-day week. Like whether he has any ambitions, doesn't want to work etc. He is a very committed, good programmer really kinda keeping the company running. I bet he gets more stuff done in 4 days than others in 5. But he has a very active private, social life. He goes a lot on vacations, has hobbies or is just actively enjoying life. He's also in europe so quite a bit of vacation.
Programmers usually have a comfortable salary, even with 80% you're still above average and have a lot of disposable income. Maybe a smaller apartment but who cares.
He has such an enormous quality of life that I kinda suspect that all the ones got it wrong. In the end life is not about grinding for the man, it's just a means to an end. They should justify themselves, not him. It's also really stupid considering how committed he is, he just has a rich life besides work. I see others just working inefficiently, trying to dodge responsibility and being kinda lazy. But he get's criticised.
Not colleagues, but people outside his work (it's an advanced startup, so everyone still knows everyone). For example older relatives or random people who found out he works 80%. Sometimes it's really a random condescending person.
I give myself a fixed number of "hands on keyboard" hours that I need to meet each week and track my time to the second. If I hit my number in four days, hey, three day weekend. If I don't hit it by Friday, I'm working Saturday. I love it. I want to keep doing this for as long as I can.
Here is one thing about 4 day week that opens eyes. If you are let's say 35 and hope to retire at 60, switching to a 4 day week could save you about 1,300 workdays—that's, roughly 3.5 years.
228 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] thread“Younger workers want a 4-day workweek — and some would give up remote work or higher pay for it” https://www.bankrate.com/personal-finance/younger-workers-wa...
> Close to 8 in 10 Gen X and baby boomer workers (or 78 percent for those between the ages of 43 and 77 combined) support a four-day workweek.
> But younger workers indicate they’re willing to go to greater lengths for the schedule, and it sets them apart. More than 9 in 10 of Gen Z and millennial workers who prefer a four-day work week (or 92 percent) would still be willing to work that schedule if it meant giving something up, versus 86 percent of Gen X and baby boomers.
> The steps those younger workers say they would be willing to take include working longer hours (48 percent), changing jobs or companies (35 percent) and coming into the office or working fully in person (33 percent) to have three days off a week. Some would even be willing to take less vacation time (20 percent), accept a pay cut (13 percent) or take a step back in their careers (12 percent) for it.
I feel like people that do meeting all day have no idea how draining coding is.
Hey, I can't look at code for longer than 2 seconds but could you spend 8 hours doing it.
Not every professional job is an office job 9-5.
I felt pathetic accepting the offer especially after my counteroffer was rejected (imagine your bluff failing here, lmao), but I remembered sitting in meetings for a higher paying job fantasizing about how I'd give half my salary away just to have no meetings and living on a beach surfing in the mornings. And that's what I did.
My first job in 2012 was 30k/year, after that 25k/year in 2015. & these are CAD, not USD. I didn't feel pathetic, I felt lucky getting to stay inside during the winter instead of working 12/hr flooring
Guess it's harder when you've had the higher salary already. For me I'd skipped college, so was building a resume
What feels pathetic is when, 10 years later, you are making the same salary again. But at least I was surfing on a beach in Mexico this time around. I was really happy. Maybe that's priceless.
Full day pay bonus if we text/call someone on a non-scheduled work day, no matter how trivial the issue and no matter if they pick up or reply. So we don’t get a guarantee that the issue is resolved and they’re not obligated to help (if they do, they also get paid for working that day, obviously).
It was worth it at the time. But I'm back in the States looking for work after years abroad and can feel the pressure of having a less impressive resume, no big names on my resume, and no US network.
Sometimes I look around at people my age who own property and make six figures and I feel so underachieved. But then I consider how miserable I was working in Austin before I went abroad and I can't think of a better way to have spent my 20s (for me).
"Growth at all costs" mindset is not sustainable or good for anyone but the upper echelons of society.
High housing costs benefit literally nobody but investors trying to wring ever more profit out of the basic needs of their fellow human beings.
They sunk a lot of money into a get-rich-quick scheme and get upset when anyone suggests curbing said scheme for humanitarian reasons.
That money must come from somewhere, and everyone who has to constantly finance those gains with no benefit in return will find a way to change it.
Have fun!
For folks who are concerned about younglings not working hard enough or China will take over or some other boomer ideology, this is even happening among youth in developing countries.
Solution: People want to be treated with respect and dignity. That's it. As long as companies treat people as fungible factory workers, companies will be in a constant churn of employees - especially as the newer generations are smaller in size.
No matter how hard you work, unless you're in the top 5%, you're far priced out of most places most people want to live.
You can afford everything comfortably beside housing & health care (which you don't need much of when you're young) on a relatively low wage in the US.
So you've pretty much given up on housing. What's the point in working hard?
Even with that, the pay is barely enough to qualify me for my apartment, which is artificially low in rent since I moved in during peak COVID and have had low rent increases.
https://read.gov/aesop/052.html
The premise of the relevant discussion is that the marginal value of additional work and wages beyond the basic requirements is largely nothing. You cannot accrue meaningful savings, but still probably have enough disposable income to live comfortably enough, so it’s just a bad deal to work more.
Very simply, the marginal utility of additional wages is much lower than the cost of working them at the rates being paid.
Marginal utility changed with each unit.
They don't want to work some last x% because they're happy with their current condition. The ants work the last x% so that when they retire they can continue to live in the style to which they've become accustomed.
The young folks are being offered money. They don't think it's meaningful because it doesn't enable them to afford some item now. So they can either decline the money or increase their estimate of its utility by taking their future into account.
They both freeze to death but at least the grasshopper had fun during the short summer first.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Also gen z has surpassed millennials and genx in home ownership (with comparable timing).
""In 2022, 30% of 25-year-olds owned a home. At the same age 28% of millennials, and 27% of Gen Xers owned homes, according to real estate brokerage, Redfin.""
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/09/14/how-are-gen-zers-buyi...
Im more inclined to believe the lazy mentality is from lifestyle and cultural stemming. Its cool to not care or try. And according to instagram if you're not a millionaire by age 25 then you're a loser. So why even try?
That being said I see nothing wrong with a 4 day work week.
If this generation is on a par with previous generations, or even surpassing them, wouldn't that indicate they're less lazy? You can't have it both ways - either they're lazy and that explains why they're behind, or they're not behind and that has to mean they're not lazy. How can they be both lazy and ahead?
In any case, the home ownership hasnt budged much in over 50 years. People just like to complain like they always have.
Perception of things being different is simply because everyone and their dog is trying to fit into the few most attractive areas where prices have indeed skyrocketed.
U.S. is by far the cheapest in housing prices vs salaries of all developed countries and nearly the cheapest of all large countries in the world. 5th cheapest to be precise, those 4 above are oil petrocracies plus South Africa, that's fucked in so many ways it doesn't need to be discussed.
And it's absolutely necessary for us to urbanize instead of the wasteful way we use our land, in order to avoid the impending climate, biodiversity, and energy crises.
Anyway --- with this square footage argument. End of the day, I'm still priced out of a house, whether it'd be a big one or a small one. I don't really care about the price per square footage, I care about the ability to get a roof over my head.
Edit: Actually, can you provide sources for this? From what I can find, home prices have been anything but flat, even adjusting for inflation: https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ I have a hard time believing that in ~12 years we grew the entire housing stock square footage by 33%
I also found some data that strongly disputes your claim that the US is the 5th lowest house price to salary ratio: https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-income-r..., in fact it seems to be comfortably in the top 10 _highest_
https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/
as for your link - easy, what's understood by "house" in Luxembourg is usually a "Soviet style apartment block". You need to be a billionaire to own a typical US-sized single family house there, these are passed down the generations from the people who were rich 100+ years ago (but granted, they are usually not built of shit).
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...
This rating assumes same housing everywhere, not just "average house in a given country". In this case, easily U.S. can be among top 5, because being very rich, and as people say here in the same thread "everything apart from housing and healthcare is cheap anyway", a bigger chunk of expenses can go there.
By another metric - "mortgage vs income" - U.S. is 6th best out of 106 large countries. 50% of the countries (that is, omitting 1/4 worst and 1/4 best) are between 1.7x and 5x worse.
Housing is much more accessible in the U.S. than in just about any country, even if you correct by per capita GDP, that is, it is more accessible than the per capita GDP would imply.
For example, the western part of the country's $/sqft going from $140 to $220 from 2012 to 2022 -- including inflation adjustment?
Sorry but, "housing prices have only gone up by 20% in the last 10 years in areas that are hemorrhaging job opportunities and education!" is not a good counterargument.
But GDP is _absolutely irrelevant_ to the average citizen's purchasing power / income.
And sure, every country has a growing segregation between attractive, expensive areas and unattractive, cheap ones. That's normal. Fitting into attractive ones is a matter of competition and only the best few will - there can't be a place for everyone there no matter how the economy is doing and how high/low are the taxes "for the rich" (because it's not the rich who are buying up the housing).
I'm assuming this is why you're being downvoted. It sounds like you're calling the new generation lazy, though I see now that it wasn't necessarily your intent.
Personally I fully understand those who don't want to spend most of their time and energy at work. Most jobs aren't fulfilling. Some even downright encourage a dysfunctional system.
I was impressed by tech companies in the late 2000s only to realize that they're not trying to "make the world a better place" and that they're just trying to make more money for their shareholders like every company before them.
So why would anyone sacrifice their family time, friends and hobbies just to work on another app that puts scooters on cities' sidewalks and build more hardware that'll end up in a landfill?
It has nothing to do with being cool or being a millionaire. It's just a generation that had their basic needs taken care of and are now getting their priorities straight.
I think there is a lot of data that says the latest generation is the most cynical and jaded yet. There is some crossover between cynicism and motivation. Of course if you ask them, it isn't cynicism, it is realism.
>It's just a generation that had their basic needs taken care of and are now getting their priorities straight.
I think there are is a bit of wanting to have the cake and eat it too. A desire to live a dense urban life, but also have a quaint country home. A desire to be financially independent, but also follow their passions.
In short, I think they have been taught and sold a contradictory set of ideals and desires.
Some of them are willing to take a pay cut in order to work less, and they're being called lazy for it. My argument is that it's not laziness, it's the belief that they're better off fostering their personal relationships and passions than adding the extra money in their bank account.
Perhaps the closest concern I have ever encountered on that front is "where do I put my stuff?" because US culture on average certainly does a lot more hoarding than nearly anywhere else in the world. But that's less to do with square footage of living space and more to do with square footage available to store hoarded items.
EG: such folk (now narrowing perspective to anecdotes of room mates I've had) often wind up placated by access to space in the garage plus a rented storage unit that they literally never visit between when they move in with us and when they move back out perhaps a year or two later.
Our place is a three bedroom unit within a triplex building built in the late 70s and falling apart. Its' rent has recently increased to close to half of all of our net incomes combined. We would like to live somewhere within walking distance (a mile?) of basic necessities, that we can afford, and if its not too much to ask perhaps also is not falling apart.
Number of square feet holds no interest to us but number of bedrooms would be nice so that each adult can have one to sleep in.
My apologies if that strikes you as too "quaint" and you'd rather force us to live 50 miles from the nearest store beyond the reach of basic utilities just because then the rent and/or mortgage payments would be half what we get here.
For example, if you homeless you do not count. If you live with your parents even though you would prefer to rent if you could afford it, that is a home-owned household. If the owner lives in their home and they rent out a room, that's a home. If you used to rent with 4 people and now live with 8, that's a single rental. If you own and live in multiple homes, you count multiple times.
Without more analysis, you can not use this rate to come to any conclusions.
But not owned by you… so it wouldn’t end up in the 30% of "X own their homes" statistic. I’m not really sure what you’re going on about here but none of it makes any sense.
Here's backup from wikipedia, or are they also not making sense?
> The name "homeownership rate" can be misleading. As defined by the US Census Bureau, it is the percentage of homes that are occupied by the owner. It is not the percentage of adults that own their own home. This latter percentage will be significantly lower than the homeownership rate. Many households that are owner-occupied contain adult relatives (often young adults, descendants of the owner) who do not own their own home. Single building multi-bedroom rental units can contain more than one adult, all of whom do not own a home.
> the home ownership rate is created through the Housing Vacancy Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. It is created by dividing the owner occupied units by the total number of occupied units.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...
"Giving up on housing" is not the right answer. "Start small and work your way up", like most of us did.
See, when you hit 20, you're looking at your parents, and you're seeing them when they're 45 or 50. You're not seeing them when they were 20. You expect that you're going to be able to live like they do at 50, not like they did when they were 20. That's not realistic.
But the answer isn't to give up. The answer is to keep working on it, over decades, instead of expecting it to be handed to you on day one.
Being unaware of reality is also a personal issue too, bud.
I'm guessing OP meant San Francisco?
There is some truth in that message. One can't always live where you wish. In my 20s my #1 goal in life was to live in Manhattan. I tried and tried and tried, but could never afford it. I gave up. Moved somewhere much cheaper (but still jobs around, not talking middle of the desert) where affording a house was no problem. It's not exactly what I wanted at the time, but looking back after a couple decades, has turned out fine.
There are no guarantees and the odds are harrowing. Software engineering could completely dry up tomorrow. Then what? The professions that make any sort of thriving wage and have some semblance of career stability (medicine, finance, etc.) all have stringent gatekeeping pedigree requirements. What's left? Sales? Restarting in a trade where all the incumbents have been doing manual labor since they were in middle school, and you're no longer as youthful and full of vigor as you once were? Grind out for 10 years to get a foothold in the industry, and your body's breaking down, but now you have a shot at starting your own business instead of getting paid $60k/yr (disregarding backbreaking overtime) to do shit work. Great, you're 40 now and all of the economic tribulations you've faced means your retirement accounts are severely lacking. You will never retire and will have to keep on working until you die (either naturally or on the job). Healthcare: costs are going to go up. Housing: you never got the chance to own, so now you're stuck burning money renting. Inflation: everything is more expensive, but compensation hasn't grown with it.
Or more poignantly: can you keep on grinding forever? With all of the young bucks that come into this field with the drive to "make a name for themself" and reinvent the wheel ad nauseam. Can you keep up, old man? You're one psychological accident away from being unable to put bread on the table. Then what? Disability? Living in halfway houses because you can't pay rent anymore? Being surrounded by people who've fallen on hard times who can do nothing but drag you down with them? That's when you spiral further into a hole you can never get yourself out of. You're fucked.
I don't expect to live like my parents, but I won't pretend that life is not utterly and depressingly precarious. Lucky are the middle-aged and older; for they had grown up in utter blissful ignorance of things. Woe is the hyper-connected youth; unable to simply exist.
And that is the thing - they simply do not see path to better conditions in the long term either.
You're assuming it's still possible to buy when saving 5k/year (what my median friend is able to do). It really isn't, or requires complete sacrifice of much of what makes life worth living anyway.
Re: location, there are cheaper places but they're far enough away it's like asking most people to move a plane ticket away from everyone they know (and likely all jobs they have experience in) to restart life.
Instead, most of my friends just accept the studio apartment they live in which costs half their cash flow, and spend the other half on essentials and therapy to cope. It's hard to see this from a $1M house in the burbs
Median weekly earnings of the nation's 122.1 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,118 in the third quarter of 2023 (1118x52=58136)
412,020/58136=7.09 years wages to pay off a home
Median house price 1980: $64,600
The 1980 median family income was $21,020
64600/21020=3.07 years wages to pay off a home
https://www.redfin.com/us-housing-market
https://www.gobankingrates.com/investing/real-estate/how-muc...
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1982/demo/p60-13...
edit
more detail
2023:
412020 30 year loan at 6.5% =
Total principal paid $412,020
Total interest paid $525,508.80
Monthly payments $2,604.25
58136/12=monthly salary of 4844.6
53.7% of monthly pay going to home loan (at 0 down)
1980:
64600 30 year loan at 14% =
Total principal paid $64,600
Total interest paid $210,953.77
Monthly payments $765.43
21020/12=monthly salary of 1751.6
43% of monthly pay going to home loan (at 0 down)
The financialization of housing means you’re competing with massive hedge funds when you want to buy a home or invest in real estate.
Incredible government defect spending ensures more inflation which will outpace salary increases.
This is how I’ve heard the late 70s/early 80s as being described: general malaise.
That, and what's the long term strategy? Do they turn 30 and flip from working part time at Pizza Hut to a professional salaried career? Good luck getting an interview with that CV.
I'm not saying it's an ideal situation to be faced with, but tuning out is just going to make it worse.
Trick question. None of them.
The CEO.
So what we're hand-wringing about is a ~$385 increase in rent, which comes to about 4% more of the person's gross salary than 25 years ago. That sucks a little bit, but it's not a catastrophe.
And on top of that, you can still make a ton of side money through bonuses and stock, in the industry that I assume we're mostly talking about. A few months ago I gave a $90K stock grant to a guy. Even if the stock price stagnates, that on its own is almost half his housing costs for the next five years, and it's all because he works harder than the guy in the next cube over.
For a different anecdote, an friend of mine briefly worked a pizza fast-food joint in Davis (CA), and the pay from that didn't even cover her rent and bills, she had to get support from others.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
I moved from a high cost of living city in North America to Latin America. I bought a two floor penthouse overlooking the ocean for less than the price of a two bedroom apartment back where I came from. My mortgage is -$2000 / month. That's right, negative $2000 because I save the full mortgage payment plus an extra $2000 on taxes each month, completely legally and above board.
Now not everything is sunshine and roses (well there is a lot of both, but you know what I mean). The price is I have to work remotely, I had to learn a new language, and Amazon delivery is more like two weeks than 2 days and the shipping is not free. There are definitely things that I miss, but nothing compared to what I gain.
If you have the option, more power to you - literally.
Your point reduces to the idea that nothing can be true, because people can lie.
Yes.
(That question makes no sense.)
Can you elaborate?
It's a lot better for me personally!
you can try! but you'll find that this is basically impossible -- the folks that are good enough aren't going to take 1/10th of the comp they could be making.
It’s reminiscent of the lead up to the drug war that was coinciding with the antiwar movement
Young people looked around and said this society is not working for us, and instead of creating a new society that actually takes care of people, people voted for Nixon and doubled down on maximum alienation capitalism
Sure, few people would actively reject an opportunity to have a high footprint life, but the relative attractivity between footprint maximization and having other priorities in life certainly aren't the same as they used to be in the days of infinite growth illusions.
The effect you describe is much stronger I think, but they are not competing, they complement each other.
I want to play games, learn about AI, 3D printing, CAD, mountain bike, go to trivia, travel to Thailand, travel to Europe, see family across the globe, get more flexible, build muscle, etc etc etc. None of them are at work.
I wouldn’t trade my life now to be a billionaire 70 years ago.
Upward mobility is probably something every generation has complained about throughout history. Economic nihilism isn’t the answer.
Our future generations count on us to improve whatever cards we’re dealt
Now, whether that's right or if the norm is a good place for the majority of people - That's a different matter entirely.
We're at a unique point in that there was a brief period in recent history where upward mobility was true, and now it's becoming untrue again and those for whom it was true don't believe its becoming untrue again.
Perceptions of the past are filtered through media that The life of the top 5% was the average.
Gone are the days of 10x emps, power badasses doing laundry and eating 3 meals a day on campus. It never was healthy for the emps anyway - it only ever benefits the owners.
Unless you own, the only incentive is to work as hard as you are paid for as we all exchange labor and limited lifetimes for wages that ensure someone else’s profit still meets its owners set marks.
That's not even true. I have a large set of anecdata, with people below median income buying houses, and people in the 5% being afraid to buy a house (too risk averse to the point of being detrimental).
If owning a house is your priority, you will make it work. My conclusion is that a large set of people just don't have the basic skills to maintain a house, or simply don't want that responsibility, despite being able to afford it.
> So you've pretty much given up on housing. What's the point in working hard?
What's your plan for when you're 50, broke and almost unemployable due to ageism? Who's going to rent to you and how will you afford it? Are you going to be a squatter? Do you plan to wait until your parents die and live off the inheritance?
That's cool if you don't have answers to those questions when you're 22-25, but what about 35+, like most millennials now are?
The happiest were the oldest, most established workers, because they had already ticked off all so many life goals, had a house, a dog, kids, etc and so less money and more time was great.
In contrast the youngest workers had no stable housing, and wanted more money more than they wanted time, because they wanted an ability to buy themselves some of those lifestyle things the older workers already had (read: stable housing).
In practice the young workers that needed more money simply used the other day for another job, which was their right.
This was in an environment with a dysfunctional unaffordable housing market, so maybe this all just shows how important affordable housing is and how it eventually starts to trumps all other issues.
Of course it does, and why anyone would think otherwise has baffled me my entire adult life.
(1) in any survival class, for me boyscouts, you learn that first priority in any survival setting is shelter.
(2) anyone living in the US in the last 60 years and has paid any attention to the homeless know how fast your life falls apart when you don't have a home. Countless stories of someone having a traumatic life event, and then being evicted with their entire life being tossed out on the curb by an uncaring landlord
(3) a shelter is safety, it is engrained in ourselves that we feel safer and more secure when we have a dedicated place that is permanent.
So of course shelter/affordable housing trumps almost everything else, it always has and always will. It is surprising how society has been, seemingly, brainwashed with the idea that housing has to be (a) an investment vehicle and (b) done for obscene profits.
Personally I would switch to a 4 day week with 20% less salary. I would probably even be more than 80% of my current productivity because I'm definitely less productive on many Fridays.
One reason I stopped consulting on the side was a lack of time. Even my hobby projects have taken a backseat these days.
I imagine some people would choose to work a part time job or learn a new skill, which would increase their income potential in the long run.
This was my first clue that there was a lot of momentum to keep you dependent on your employer and it doesn't stop with a paycheck. 10-12 days per year really restricts your mobility. Instead of backpacking through SE Asia for a month I basically used that time for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.
BTW, having 3 days off means you can sprinkle on additional vacation time throughout the year. I'm not surprised Gen-Z would negotiate less vacation time if they could use it more effectively.
It's a more grown-up arrangement where businesses realise that regular time off (and as much time as you need if ill) increases happiness and therefore productivity.
I still miss the food at home, though.
Is there a metric of some sort that I can share with other people that demonstrates 4 weeks PTO does work and has led to increased productivity in Australia?
I personally believe in shorter work weeks, but my experience is anecdotal, so was wondering if there was a study or some kind of economic metric that reflects that statement for increased productivity in AU.
Zero local innovation, and the relatively healthy economy is mostly due to exporting stuff to Asia (education, tourism, and resources).
Productivity can be measured and if that productivity was increased then those statistics should be more visible!
I would love to have a 4-day work week.
still, weirdly enough, i think that overall work life balance and quality of life is much better in europe than in places like sydney. i think that this is actually because australia has turned into a nanny state in almost every other segment of life. europe in this regard treats its inhabitants as adults much moreso than australia
> still miss the food at home
in europe? im actually the opposite. i miss the great variety of great restaurants in sydney and melbourne
Yeah that's what I mean - harder to get good east Asian and Middle Eastern in Europe - although there's more African food here (Europe) than straya.
Pretty much yeah. Austria (the Mozart one, not the kangaroo one) has in general pretty terrible workers' rights and benefits compared to most other wealthy EU countries, unless you work for some government institution or some big and wealthy Metall unionized company.
Sure, it looks good on paper from the outside, but in practice it's not that great, it's just good PR.
One of the reasons I work in the education sector is the generous (compared to startups / most tech companies, anyway) PTO.
We get all of the big holidays off (I think 12) and we have 2-4 weeks of vacation (depending on length of employment) and we have two weeks of paid medical leave (which accumulates, so after the first couple of years you have massive amounts banked) and paid maternity/paternity.
Mine isn't the only employer like this, there are plenty of others, it's not hard to find one. The key to look for is "work life balance." Government jobs, non-profits, education, these sorts of areas - they know they can't compete with tech company salaries but can make up for it in other ways. PTO is only a part of that.
It's not quite the 4 day a week dream job, but there are options available if you look. And as a bonus, you might find yourself more aligned with the mission of the organization than you would at a for-profit tech company.
So many things are wrong with American work culture and there’s nothing most people can do about it.
In the US, I have found that what HR will tell you is different than what your hiring manager will enforce.
My hiring managers were often much more permissive and allowed 4 day work weeks and “unlimited” time off provided it was not detrimental to the team. This also meant that when there was a legitimate emergency; they expected you to assist.
I have heard many horror stories but have been luck not to experience most of them at this point in my career.
I've circled the sun long enough (and dealt with enough military recruiters, LOL) to know that you get it all in writing. Any implied or verbal agreements aren't really worth much.
The good news is that in large publicly traded companies people routinely fly back to India for a month so 4-week vacations are a thing if you are good at leetcode.
I don't know if this is a problem specific to PTO. In general, after 20+ years of working, I've found US employers to be pretty inflexible on all terms/aspects of your working life besides compensation. They may (or often may not) be willing to negotiate pay, but will almost never budge when it comes to:
- Vacation / PTO
- Unpaid leave
- Health benefits
- Financial benefits like 401(k) or life insurance
- IP ownership
- Moonlighting or second jobs
- Schedule flexibility
- Paid training
- Company equipment
These things tend to be "take it or leave it--we won't accept changes to our boilerplate agreement!"
BTW, senior executives had far more flexibility when it came to PTO, leave, pensions, bonuses, IP, etc. And it was managed in the same system that frontline employees were managed from.
It's not about complexity, it's about control.
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
* https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure
Then we can rest between 2-day work spurts.
But I might want to vary it from time to time. So, choice.
I acknowledge that could be difficult to manage in some industries (e.g. trying to get eight people together in a meeting), but it means that traffic would be lowered each working day, as well as people being more spread out when attending leisure activities (i.e.not everyone goes to the beach on a Saturday).
This could potentially be mitigated by having some "common days" enforced. So maybe the whole company works monday and tuesday or something like that. Prefer putting smaller meetings on the other days (You should have at least 1 overlap day with everyone else assuming that everyone has weekends + 1 day of their choosing off) but for larger meetings those provide a high chance of finding a time.
2) Lots of people really like having longer stretches off, as it opens more options for things you can do with the time off.
3) If kids are off school, even for a non-holiday (teacher in-service, say) it’s often a Friday, so that’s a nice day for parents to have off.
TL;DR there’s a pretty strong case for Friday and a somewhat less strong case for Monday. I expect employers and co-workers alike to prefer either of those over Wednesday.
Let my dentist's office be open 7 days a week, with some of them working M-Th and some working Thur-Sun and some working Sat-Tues etc. Maybe some of them mix it up and do M/T/Th/Fr or M/W/F/Su or whatever.
K-12 schools are the tough nut to crack in this scenario.
With a MWF rotation you'd get 4 on, 2 off, 2 on, 1 off, 2 on, 2 off, 4 off, repeat and having that four day weekend every three weeks would really open up weekend trips that require more travel.
I see a lot of criticism of the 10-hour days, but in a mixed environment I like it. With the hours I chose I have a 1 1/2 hour work time in the morning where most everyone else isn't in yet that is very productive for me. I also have an extra half-hour after the time most people leave to do the same. My work is more project oriented, but I still have inconvenient meetings with small windows for work throughout the normal work day.
Not every professional job is an office job 9-5.
The point is that there are many different types of jobs with a variety of benefits, including non-traditional scheduling. If that is something important to you, why not work towards it?
Healthcare is just one example. It’s not perfect either, there are problems for sure. But that is ok for some people who value something like a 3-4 day work week. No job is perfect, it’s all about what trade offs make it worth it to the employee.
You’re suggesting that 92% of the young workforce concentrates on the few jobs with extended shifts. 92% of the next gen of workers will not be working a 9-5 in your scenario.
I don't know, but I guess working 12 hour shift has something to do with it. Around where I live healthcare workers are also often on strike because of low wage and poor working conditions.
25 years later, I wouldn't do it. I'm worried for my retirement, I don't think I'll have enough saving to live in a safe and convenient place, and have access to good healthcare. This is the type of things you don't think of when you just graduate and are used to the student worklife.
Sure, but you'll have even less hope for a salary increase next year, since this is basically what it is.
This was the theory behind France's move to the 35-hour workweek, too. They also expected companies to hire more people to compensate for less work being done. Didn't work out as expected.
The way I see it, as programmers we will be far more productive working fewer days per week and just taking more time to relax. If this assumption is accurate you have to do nothing to compensate.
Basically, "nothing" happened. The expected drop in unemployment never materialized. And although pay rises never were an expected effect of the change (from what I know), they were negatively impacted.
I'm not knowledgeable enough in those matters, so I may be off base, but it would seem that companies started to be less "competitive" when the rule started to be applied, in 2000-2002. But from what I've read on the subject, none of the sides (for and against the measure) can prove that it was undoubtedly a good or a bad thing.
> The way I see it, as programmers we will be far more productive working fewer days per week and just taking more time to relax. If this assumption is accurate you have to do nothing to compensate.
I agree with this. Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to make this kind of decision. And it's pretty clear to me that many managers don't think this way, and somehow figure that your productivity is roughly constant and proportional to the time your butt spends in your seat (at least up to a point).
When I looked at these studies, the productivity was measured by company's revenue, so it was pretty much useless.
> people work harder with less downtime for that 8 hours so consequently get the same amount of work done as their 10-hour-4-days and 5-day-week counterparts.
Maybe it works that way for some people, but I doubt for all.
Personal anecdote - I don't work full 40 with full intensity, I do slack a lot. But it's not like I work hard for the first 32 hours and then slack all Friday. It's more like I work hard for 2 hours and then slack for the next hour, because the mental load is just too intense. Rinse, repeat. Another day off won't do much for me in terms of productivity. On the opposite, I believe I'm less productive on Mondays and even less after longer holidays (I believe it's basically loss of context and "work mood").
I personally also do programming in my free time (usually at least an hour a day), so it's not like the overall load is too much.
Having said that, I would love to have a 4-day week, especially without lost compensation. But to me this idea that there's no productivity loss looks to me very much like wishful thinking.
I felt this way too, but it's a reaction to chronic brain tiredness. When I was working a 4 day workweek, I remember noticing on Tuesday that I only had a couple of days until the end of the week, so I better buckle down if I wanted to get something done. And then I did. Having that reliable 3-day weekend meant that I really focused on work when I was at work. And I was able to schedule "bank appointments" on my Friday off, instead of having to take time during the workweek.
I know it seems like wishful thinking, but I was demonstrably more productive, more sustainably, in that 4-day/week job, than any 5-day/week job I've ever had.
As workers, we shouldn't lower our expectations or standards for employers. It hurts us all.
Programmers usually have a comfortable salary, even with 80% you're still above average and have a lot of disposable income. Maybe a smaller apartment but who cares.
He has such an enormous quality of life that I kinda suspect that all the ones got it wrong. In the end life is not about grinding for the man, it's just a means to an end. They should justify themselves, not him. It's also really stupid considering how committed he is, he just has a rich life besides work. I see others just working inefficiently, trying to dodge responsibility and being kinda lazy. But he get's criticised.
The 5-minute window where my funny 4 day week calculator will shine: https://okjob.io/4-day-week-calculator/