Why don't companies want to employ people on 4 day per week contracts?

Great question. I run a productivity software startup, and my cofounder brought up the 4-day week idea. We opted not to pursue it. It came down to a few things:

- Onboarding / Collaboration overhead (this compounds) An additional dev is one more to manage, one more to onboard, one more to keep happy, buy hardware and software licenses for, and all that for the same number of man-hours.

- Work compounds. A programmer working on a system or feature for 10 days does the deepest learning in days 7-10. The internals, nitty-gritty stuff. For a 3 day a week employee, the same insights are gained in week 4 (10 days) instead of week 2 (10 days). Of course, I used 10 days as an example, but true expertise is built and compounded over months. It doesn’t matter how many 3-day-a-week hires we have, this process won’t be sped up.

- Compensation / Performance - how do we do this in an equitable way? Again, comes down to compounding impact. If 5 day a week employee makes 5/8 of the impact at the same productivity rate as 3 day a week employee - does that mean they get promoted / rewarded at a different rate?

- Availability / Scheduling - 30 hours is about 3.5 work days a week. It’s an added pain to manage and track who is going to be working when. If your company uses a system for taxes, payroll, vacation accrual, insurance, etc, chances are it is built for 8 by 5 employees first and foremost.

- Various laws around part time and full time workers, based on hours in some jurisdictions. I think 28 hours is the cutoff here in Ontario?

Boundaries are messy. Even in startups it's hard to say "this is my time" and this is "company time" especially with remote work becoming more common.

I've always taken the approach of not apologizing when I'm "not available" on days I requested off or when it's late at night. If I have significant equity, I'll care. But if I'm just salaried or at a BigCorp you can fuck off if it's after 10pm. I never understood why I knew co-workers at Amazon who would pull all nighters on weekends to "fix issues". Basically, I don't want to work for a company that rewards that kind of thing - time is worth too much. Hustle is worth it when you know how much skin you have in the game and can benefit from it more than your employer.

> Isn't 5 software developers @ $80k / 30hrs just the same as 4 @ $100k / 38hrs?

No, there's overhead that comes with just having someone as an employee. That overhead doesn't scale linearly with the employee's working hours. I don't think that this is the primary reason for not getting responses though. Why would a company do it? And why would they listen to a random person who contacted them? Did you just sent out an email to random contact@company.com address? Do you understand how this looks to anyone who receives that kind of communication? I suspect that you're missing a lot of knowledge about the internal power structure in each company which is necessary to make a real change. And there need to be a lot of strong incentives for any big change to happen.

If a year ago, you sent every software company in the world an email asking them to move to remote work, I suspect that you would change 0 minds too. The incentive from the pandemic had to be "work remotely or not at all" for many companies' power structures to open up to the idea.

In the Netherlands, by law, you can request to reduce your working hours to 32/week. Since you are still considered a full-time employee, you can even do so on a work visa. Unless the company has a valid reason to refuse, they have to accept your request.

I don't know why and it would be awesome to investigate it. However I have some random ideas :

- there is a lot of work to be done, and balanced coder can be considered as taking a place of a full-time coder

- companies when cooperating talk about full time equivalent. So it may be hard for some of such companies to change contracts with their clients to include balanced time equivalent

- some cultures promote quantity over quality. It means the aim is to onboard as many devs as possible to gain more profits. Because they earn per hour of work not per project

- some projects are poorly managed, so every dev has to be available all the time to be able to get all info needed and also share info with other devs

So this is my guess. But I think the idea is great and in many ways beneficial. I'd market it as a way to hire 10x developers who do more in 4 days than others in a month. That it is a great platform to seek for such developers who care deeply about their life balance. Also, maybe startups would be better to adopt to the concept.

We at croit.io do let the employee decide how much time a day, week, and on what days of the week he will work. Of course the employee can change the decision when ever it pleases.

Never had an issue, got lots of positiv Feedback and will continue to do so.

Agree with almost everything you are doing/saying, except 4 devs @ 38 hrs/week =\= 5 devs @ 30 hrs per week.

Development is one of those weird things where often adding more resources does not translate into less project time (in fact some time it increases it).

System/solution entanglement and complexity are the root cause. I’d suggest reading The Mythical Man Month if you’re interested in the topic.

Try pitching to founders that just raised a round and have yet to build a team. They could start with just 28hr workers.

Integrating 1x 28hr worker in an existing environment of 38hr+ workers seems just a mess to me, definitely not worth the 20% discount.

Another recommendation is to ask them "why not". Change your pitch so that most of the call it's them talking vs you.

Thanks for all the feedback, it's been really useful.

I'm now thinking of 4 potential ways forward:

1. Contacting companies and asking them if they would consider compressing their 5 day role into 4 longer days (e.g. 4 x 10 hours) - certainly not my ideal but a slight improvement

2. Flipping the problem on its head: A website which (anonymously) lists developers who are looking for 4 day / week positions (e.g. A dev is searching for remote Java backend roles @ $50k for 30hrs per week)

3. Continuing on the path I'm already on but changing my pitch slightly

4. Giving up and trying something completely different

Thoughts?

If you prefer to contact privately, feel free to add me on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phil-mcparlane-80606727/

I’d target startups <20 people. They’re both desperate enough for devs and willing to try different working styles. Large companies with recruiting and HR functions will not be able to even consider this arrangement unless they have existing policies in place.

A major expense for employers are benefits. So your 80% number is reasonable strictly from a salary standpoint. You may need to take a further 10% cut to cover the benefits so that your total compensation or cost to the company is 80% overall.

From your website:

    Do these jobs pay less?
    Yes and no. You'll be working less, so you can maybe expect to get paid slightly less than a 40hr salary. On the other hand, you'll pay less tax, meaning your effective hourly salary will increase.

    Maybe instead you should ask yourself: "do I want to work more, or live more?"

This is a bad pitch. Just tell people that it's less and by how much and why. The last thing that people want is for someone to talk down to them, to give ambiguous non-answers or to suggest that they ask themselves different questions, especially when it comes to salary.

I worked part-time (32 hours a week) for 7 years. What I discovered is that most larger companies simply don’t do this schedule because the larger a company is the higher the competition. That’s why I only use CL for applying to jobs because I have more leverage to negotiate my hours.

Also, even though you may be able to start part-time, as the company grows, you will become a more integral employee, and your responsibilities will grow which materially implies you’ll be expected to go full time eventually. The best way to get around this is to work 5 days a week but fewer hours each day.

Risk of being stereotyped as "lazy" by people who've invested in your company or use your product.

The internal benefits are honestly great, but as soon as folks external hear about this (and they will), they may have a different reaction, especially if your product isn't stable yet.

Alternatively, what if you could make it easier for folks to live a sustainable lifestyle through consulting? What's preventing talented folks from just taking consulting jobs?

Is anyone offering 8 extra hours for a 20% raise? I don't know if software salaries in the US have gotten so high that people will happily take these pay cuts, or whether those people are a small vocal minority, or just people in a later stage in life that have different priorities, but as a late 20s person outside of the US, the last thing on my mind is how to convince my employer to give me a 20% pay cut.

Have you worked with accountants and HR professionals when putting this together? Your site says employees will work a maximum of 28 hours but will receive all the benefits of a full time employee. Most companies cannot do this as there are many contractual, legal, and regulatory requirements based on hours worked.

Can you remarket the devs who want even less hours?

- Before: Software engineer (38hrs) $100k

- After: Software engineer (3hrs) $8k

Clickable link to side project: https://www.28hrworkweek.com/