I always find it funny when there are so many articles about how CEOs etc. work like 80+ hours a week.<p>It's very different sitting in meetings and organising the activities of other for 80+ hours a week than it is writing bug-free (or at least relatively free) production grade code.<p>Doing the latter for 80 hours is more likely to result in errors and mistakes that will just cost more money and time to fix than has been saved.<p>I suspect the engineers at his startup still only do 32 hours of actual focused work.
The title sounds like it killed the work ethic of his employees, but a quote from the interview makes it rather sound like it killed his work ethic:<p>> It created this lack of work ethic in me that was fundamentally detrimental to the business and to our mission […]<p>I'd really like to know what he means by "lack of work ethic" and why he thinks a 32 hour week contributed to that.
As a species, we have been moving towards "less hours, more work done" for centuries. Just a few hundred years ago, most of humanity worked every waking hour creating food for themselves in order to not die of starvation.<p>The logical end point of this progress is 0 hours work per year and we still get everything we want. We're not quite there yet, but we're already much closer to that point than "work all the time to survive".<p>We should do something about resource distribution, though. I'm not saying that we would be there already if the 1% didn't steal everything, but we'd certainly be closer. Not communism or anything close to that, though, we already know that crap has no chance of working. But just something not quite so unbalanced.
“It created this lack of work ethic in me that was fundamentally detrimental to the business and to our mission”.<p>He as CEO took the 32 hour week and decided that it was bad for the run and mill.
Just because that particular CEO couldn't manage the 4day approach does not reflect badly on the approach - it reflects badly on him.
Other can make it work, he can't. It doesn't mean that the approach is flawed.
Maybe we should just stop focusing on how many hours we work, and concentrate on what we want to do and on whether we've achieved it. I feel that not focusing on the hours just works better.<p>One day I feel tired, and I'm not advancing? I go home. The next day I feel energized, and I want to keep working? I can work 12 hours straight.<p>No limits, nobody tells me what I can or I cannot do, and when I should do it.<p>Of course, we may need a bit of tracking hours in order to understand what we're doing and how we're spending our time, but we can use a more coarse granularity (like "half days").
I've realized that different people work differently. I'm a "rhythm" worker. I work best when I have minimum breaks. The longer break I have between work days, the longer it takes me to become productive.<p>A three day weekend would mean I would spend Monday just ramping up into productive mode. I wouldn't reach proper productivity until Tuesday.<p>So really, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Perhaps giving workers the freedom to design their own work habits would work best
I think solving hard problems requires working hard. There are processes that happen while you sleep and dream that I don't know the explanation for, which really help you progress on an extremely difficult problem. In my experience those processes happen only when you're very focused on your problem, it occupies your thought 80% of your waking hours and it's the last thing on your mind before going to sleep.<p>I remember I saw a video on it from a more credible source than I, but I can't find it.
I can see how advertising a 32-hour work weeks attracts a class of people who view work as something that supports their other interests, whereas a 40-hour work week attracts more traditional workers who derive a large part of identity from their work. It might be in your personal best interest to be in the former group. But if the mentality that work comes second defines the company's culture, that company is not going to win.
This sounds like he'd spent time low-balling on salaries until he'd collected a cadre of people only barely interested in their work. It doesn't take much to make those people completely disinterested in doing more than marking time.<p>If you're hiring people who are engaged and genuinely interested in what they're doing and giving them a reasonable workload(!), they're likely to just treat that day as a day they can work from home with the option to not do work if life suddenly has plans for them.<p>XKCD-style admins, for instance, are likely to just spend that day spitballing ways to reduce downtime (which make the other 32 hours less annoying) and hardening infrastructure without having to worry about producing results. Planning is everything for that sort of work. My occasional work-from-home days were frequently days when I'd get a positively lurid number of things done just because of fewer interruptions.
I found it very interesting, we only hear about the successes of working less, and self steering teams. Ryan explains why this both didn't work for his company, and made company results drop.<p>This is the full interview: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJcTdA55aWA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJcTdA55aWA</a>
You have to check what you can do.<p>I can't write or program longer than 2h a day.<p>But you have to allow you to see other things as work too.<p>Learning about work related topics (business, tech, design, news, etc)<p>Answering mails and talking to other people in general.<p>I think the problem is not that people want to work less, it's that they want flexibility and not wasing away in offices, when they aren't abel to work anymore.
I looked up the company on Crunchbase and they're in the 100-250 range. I think having a lax work policy is something that doesn't scale. Having gone through growth at company where it grew from ~100 to ~300, work starts getting less personal at around 150+ (personal opinion backed by zero facts). When work becomes less personal, I think it's easier to become complacent. You do the 9-5 -- do your job and go home. If the company policy says you can take Fridays off, hell why not take it off? I don't think there's a way to keep up work output with an overly lax work policy.
Per the article: the CEO of a small company made an organizational change, gave up a year later, and then says the change is unviable generally. Meanwhile, in paragraph 10, one other company tried the same change and it worked great.<p>TLDR; nothing. This article has essentially zero information.
Wow, it's almost as if workers will have to fight for better work-life balance themselves rather than relying on the mercy of their benevolent broscience-inspired bosses
Was curious how that experiment was going to turn out, been following it for a few years. Not unexpected result, although I was going to give it more of a 60/40 in my mind.
One person’s “lack of work ethic” is another’s “having a life”. Just let it go, everything will be fine. Consider this your secret weapon for talent retention. Nobody actually does even 32 hours of real, actual software engineering work in a week on a routine basis.