Because if we did we’d have universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing, and every single one of those things makes it harder for abusive jobs to control their employees.
Naive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common?
I see the opposite in most startups that have a 6 day work week to get ahead of the "slowly moving" 5 day work week competition.
Edit: It’s becoming ever more increasingly common on HN to get downvotes for innocuous respectful posts. If you’re downvoting, I’d genuinely appreciate if you explained what is it that you find offensive about this post. You’re not going to hurt my feelings, I sincerely want to understand what it is that you see as transgressive so I can learn from it. Thank you. Another example which baffled me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222383#48227701
> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
I appreciate Feynman’s contributions—and in fact have been recently revisiting the Messenger lectures—but that seems like an unnecessary jab. The use of “usually” is also a convenient cop-out which makes the remark meaningless because the speaker can pick and choose in any conversation so they always win.¹
I thought about it and picked the first thing which came to mind: Natural science. From Wikipedia²:
> Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances.
Seems pretty scientific to me. But alright, let’s check the article to give it a fair shot in context. The only time the word “science” comes up is “Social Sciences”. Again from Wikipedia³:
> Social science (or the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, sociology, culturology, and political science.
That’s a wide range. Are all of those “not science”?
¹ Assuming your rephrasing is accurate and not missing important context.
What a hollow dismissal of based on acrobatic leaps of semantics.
The word 'study' is no sacred possession exclusive to the natural sciences, and there is nothing wrong with properly conducted surveys as a method in sociology, economics or psychology.
If surveys targeting the very people responsible for optimising their businesses' productivity, with no incentive to falsify their conclusions, is good evidence. Without any other way to systematically measure the change in productivity across a plethora of different businesses implementing a four-day workweek, it is as good as it gets — much better than purely theoretical assumptions that productivity must have dropped.
> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
This is such an absurd thought-terminating cliche. Science suffixation seems more an indicator of the age of the field, not its scientific rigour. Are "climate science" and "computer science" not science?
On the flip side, just because it says "ology" at the end of a word does not mean it's a science.
I remember one business class anecdote, where the conclusion of changing workplace conditions (light, music, etc. both ways) was that productivity studies increase productivity ...
Only if you do bad science experiments without a control group, otherwise you'd see the control group productivity boost as they'd also be under the same scrutiny. I didn't read the study methodology, so I'm not comparing to that, only responding to your comment in isolation.
Related to it we have novelty effect and bunch of other psychological effects that are hard to isolate in human science. In this sector, a lot of studies cannot be repeated.
Australia also has a 60 year productivity low and a government that is boosting taxes on capital gains on shares/business to basically a worldwide high. So take our experiments with a grain of salt!
Speaking as an American, I don’t give a shit if it increases productivity or not. Productivity has gone up exponentially with technological advancement since the advent of the 5 day work week. We, as a species, should be minimizing work to 3 or 4 days a week with equal overall pay. Corporations should be fined heavily for contacting an employee after working hours. On call should require corporations to pay hefty overtime. This is a compromise because really and truly corporations should be illegal. Employee owned co-ops are more humane.
> What success looks like differs by industry, and a rigid, one-size-fits-all measurement would have made the findings less applicable to the real world [...] Burnout emerged as a major theme in the findings.
This is the actual problem to discuss, not the days per week.
Stressors vary a lot by industry and experience level. A senior manager in IT may do more than 40 hours a week plus be on-call with almost no stress as long as their projects are doing well. Meanwhile, there may be no sane amount of overtime pay that will convince a young guy doing roofing in his first year, and he's highly stressed out either way.
Anyone spinning this as a political issue is plain ignorant.
Now do 3, 2, 1, and perhaps 0 days... but seriously, this probably just resulted in employees squeezing out some of the slack time they would otherwise have with an extra day.
Working based on time i.e. 5 days a week is already problematic. We all see the pay by the hour workers like pool cleaners, vendor machine stocking people etc spending lots of time dragging out their work as they get paid by the hour. It makes perfect sense from their perspective and yes not everyone drags the work.
Fixing the work week to just 5 days have similar issues. Some weeks will be less work and other weeks more work but you spend the same five days there. So the what you learn that matters is to spend 5 days physically there and perform a minimum workload so you don't get fired. You drag the weeks with less work and pick up inefficient habits as a result. That is what a 5 day working week teaches. Again there will be exceptions.
Now assuming this study is correct I am not surprised with the results. You just incentivized workers to get the same amount of output done with the condition that you gain 1 day off. Off course workers will find better and quicker ways of working to get that day off.
Even if we did a 4 working day week the problem of working based on time either fixed or paid by the hour remains. The incentivisation is the problem.
Take all that AI productivity and found a one-day work week company. One day of focused collaboration each week, let bots and brains chew on stuff in the interim.
Given the gargantuan amount of data showing productivity relative to wage gains, or productivity relative to time worked, or productivity relative to physical office proximity, and the absolute staunch refusal of business to listen to any of it, I can only assume one thing:
The point was never productivity, it was about humiliation and control.
If it were about productivity, workers would be paid substantially more to reflect the immense productivity gains we’ve created through automation; we are not.
If it were about effective time management or efficiency, we would be on four-day, 32 hour work weeks to reflect the real productive output of labor; we are not.
Just like how RTO excuses of “mentoring Juniors” and “improving team cohesion” went out the door for mass layoffs, despite data showing that a flexible schedule adapting to the needs of the team rather than whims of leadership have better outcomes and higher productivity; we now pay higher commute costs, fuel costs, energy costs, and opportunity costs so real estate investments don’t invert.
It’s all bullshit and lies, and this is one more study to add to the Alexandria-esque library of research proving that there is no single good way of working, and the insistence of refusing to change how we work is ultimately costing us more than if we just learned to adapt.
Here in NL lots of people do 32 hour weeks (legally your employer cannot deny you this if you ask for it), and I've literally never seen it be an issue productivity/team-wise, and people's QoL raises dramatically having an entire extra day free to themselves.
Glancing through the study, I'm curious about both sample bias, and the lack of formal measurement. I'm not an expert in this type of thing, not even an amateur. I'm poking holes to see what's left.
"Participants were identified via media reports featuring Australian firms trialling the 100:80:100 model, in addition to companies listed on recruitment sites that specialise in 4DWW jobs. In other instances, eligible organisations were recommended by the participants themselves."
I'd expect organisations with positive results will be the ones recommended by other participants - "talk to these people, it worked for them too!"
I'm also interested in whether or not organisations converted all staff to 100:80:100, or if it was optional. Is the performance driven by peer pressure?
Finally, the participants' measures of productivity will have significant lag time in them, so it depends on trial's length, e.g. "revenue", "profit", "csat", "projects delivered on time", "net promoter score".
Table 1 has "Duration", but the units are unlabelled, if it's weeks, it's less than a year, months is probably better for seeing performance changes.
It's an interesting qualitative study, I'd certainly like a four day work week with no change in comp.
Hopkins, J., Bardoel, E.A. & Djurkovic, N. The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of the 100:80:100 model. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07536-x
I was contacted this week for a position that was openly 6 days a week. We need to end H1B in this country as soon as possible and keep the 996 schedule firmly out of the United States.
They call you lazy for not wanting to compete against the entire world in your own country.
If you look at Australian IT companies they're management and consultant heavy. Roles like architects, review boards, program managers etc., exceed actual engineering roles. In such a set up it takes forever to get any real work done.
Then Australian real wages have also declined. So there is already low motivation to work beyond the minimum expectation.
Australia also has strong social security, at least until now, and there are plenty of odd jobs due to the real estate and tourism industries, so there is little pressure to survive unless you owe too much credit.
Automation and technology adoption also lags behind. For example, people still wait thirty minutes on a call to get an appointment with a doctor instead of making an online booking.
For all of these reasons productivity has been low and declining. An extra day off work is a strong stimulus for squeezing what gets done into the rest of the days.
In my opinion this is an extreme, just as the work yourself to death culture in India and China is. On a scale of a few decades economies where people worked agressively harder have grown tremendously but at the expense of the long-term wellbeing of the people. Places like Australia that were well off and felt little pressure to compete have sustained good quality of life but at the expense of having no competetitve edge anymore.
39 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 56.3 ms ] threadI see the opposite in most startups that have a 6 day work week to get ahead of the "slowly moving" 5 day work week competition.
Calling it a study is a disservice to science. As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
I appreciate Feynman’s contributions—and in fact have been recently revisiting the Messenger lectures—but that seems like an unnecessary jab. The use of “usually” is also a convenient cop-out which makes the remark meaningless because the speaker can pick and choose in any conversation so they always win.¹
I thought about it and picked the first thing which came to mind: Natural science. From Wikipedia²:
> Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances.
Seems pretty scientific to me. But alright, let’s check the article to give it a fair shot in context. The only time the word “science” comes up is “Social Sciences”. Again from Wikipedia³:
> Social science (or the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, sociology, culturology, and political science.
That’s a wide range. Are all of those “not science”?
¹ Assuming your rephrasing is accurate and not missing important context.
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_science
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science
The word 'study' is no sacred possession exclusive to the natural sciences, and there is nothing wrong with properly conducted surveys as a method in sociology, economics or psychology.
If surveys targeting the very people responsible for optimising their businesses' productivity, with no incentive to falsify their conclusions, is good evidence. Without any other way to systematically measure the change in productivity across a plethora of different businesses implementing a four-day workweek, it is as good as it gets — much better than purely theoretical assumptions that productivity must have dropped.
You can find the study here if you wish to critique its methods: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x
This is such an absurd thought-terminating cliche. Science suffixation seems more an indicator of the age of the field, not its scientific rigour. Are "climate science" and "computer science" not science?
On the flip side, just because it says "ology" at the end of a word does not mean it's a science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Related to it we have novelty effect and bunch of other psychological effects that are hard to isolate in human science. In this sector, a lot of studies cannot be repeated.
>!!
Junk science slop blog. Nice.
87.3%
AI GPT
zerogpt.com
https://i.imgur.com/9lT1VSp.jpeg
This is the actual problem to discuss, not the days per week.
Stressors vary a lot by industry and experience level. A senior manager in IT may do more than 40 hours a week plus be on-call with almost no stress as long as their projects are doing well. Meanwhile, there may be no sane amount of overtime pay that will convince a young guy doing roofing in his first year, and he's highly stressed out either way.
Anyone spinning this as a political issue is plain ignorant.
Fixing the work week to just 5 days have similar issues. Some weeks will be less work and other weeks more work but you spend the same five days there. So the what you learn that matters is to spend 5 days physically there and perform a minimum workload so you don't get fired. You drag the weeks with less work and pick up inefficient habits as a result. That is what a 5 day working week teaches. Again there will be exceptions.
Now assuming this study is correct I am not surprised with the results. You just incentivized workers to get the same amount of output done with the condition that you gain 1 day off. Off course workers will find better and quicker ways of working to get that day off.
Even if we did a 4 working day week the problem of working based on time either fixed or paid by the hour remains. The incentivisation is the problem.
Take all that AI productivity and found a one-day work week company. One day of focused collaboration each week, let bots and brains chew on stuff in the interim.
The point was never productivity, it was about humiliation and control.
If it were about productivity, workers would be paid substantially more to reflect the immense productivity gains we’ve created through automation; we are not.
If it were about effective time management or efficiency, we would be on four-day, 32 hour work weeks to reflect the real productive output of labor; we are not.
Just like how RTO excuses of “mentoring Juniors” and “improving team cohesion” went out the door for mass layoffs, despite data showing that a flexible schedule adapting to the needs of the team rather than whims of leadership have better outcomes and higher productivity; we now pay higher commute costs, fuel costs, energy costs, and opportunity costs so real estate investments don’t invert.
It’s all bullshit and lies, and this is one more study to add to the Alexandria-esque library of research proving that there is no single good way of working, and the insistence of refusing to change how we work is ultimately costing us more than if we just learned to adapt.
"Participants were identified via media reports featuring Australian firms trialling the 100:80:100 model, in addition to companies listed on recruitment sites that specialise in 4DWW jobs. In other instances, eligible organisations were recommended by the participants themselves."
I'd expect organisations with positive results will be the ones recommended by other participants - "talk to these people, it worked for them too!"
I'm also interested in whether or not organisations converted all staff to 100:80:100, or if it was optional. Is the performance driven by peer pressure?
Finally, the participants' measures of productivity will have significant lag time in them, so it depends on trial's length, e.g. "revenue", "profit", "csat", "projects delivered on time", "net promoter score".
Table 1 has "Duration", but the units are unlabelled, if it's weeks, it's less than a year, months is probably better for seeing performance changes.
It's an interesting qualitative study, I'd certainly like a four day work week with no change in comp.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x
Hopkins, J., Bardoel, E.A. & Djurkovic, N. The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of the 100:80:100 model. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07536-x
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02259-6
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/19/four-day-week-...
https://www.4dayweek.com/research
Same as every study of open-plan offices shows that they suck.
The psychopaths in charge do not care.
They call you lazy for not wanting to compete against the entire world in your own country.
Then Australian real wages have also declined. So there is already low motivation to work beyond the minimum expectation.
Australia also has strong social security, at least until now, and there are plenty of odd jobs due to the real estate and tourism industries, so there is little pressure to survive unless you owe too much credit.
Automation and technology adoption also lags behind. For example, people still wait thirty minutes on a call to get an appointment with a doctor instead of making an online booking.
For all of these reasons productivity has been low and declining. An extra day off work is a strong stimulus for squeezing what gets done into the rest of the days.
In my opinion this is an extreme, just as the work yourself to death culture in India and China is. On a scale of a few decades economies where people worked agressively harder have grown tremendously but at the expense of the long-term wellbeing of the people. Places like Australia that were well off and felt little pressure to compete have sustained good quality of life but at the expense of having no competetitve edge anymore.