I need to know if you'd work longer hours to have more time off

[andrewducker]

Poll

Context: Amazon is apparently doing this for all permanent staff.

Personally, I'm torn. Part of me would love this, but I also find it hard to juggle things as it is, particularly around Julie and her chemo-drugs/fasting. I can see it making life harder for some people with kids (or other caring needs) too.

Comments

[sashajwolf]

SEWIWEIC: If I only had myself to consider, I'd jump at this. In practice, given the current states of health and work/study commitments in our household, it would only work if aegidian were well enough to do the early-evening dogwalks, and ideally the Wednesday morning one so that I could move my Wednesday evening workout to the morning. Neither is likely to be possible for some time.

[woodpijn]

I'd rather just do four normal-length days for 80% pay (and I did this for a year or so).

[heyokish]

hell yes. Would agree to this so fast. Though, nine-and-a-half hour days, as I'm contracted for 37.5 rather than 40.

[drplokta]

Ten-and-a-half hour days, since you have to have an hour's lunch break (unless your employer has a canteen on the premises, when it's half an hour).

[heyokish]

ok, nine and a half hours of work, in a ten to ten and a half hour day, depending on lunch...would still say yes in a heartbeat.

[chaos_monkey]

What woodpijn said.
I loved it when I had an FTE 0.8 job and had Fridays off. It was amazing.
But my current relaxation and social activities would actually be harmed by squeezing a full time week into 4 days.
I wouldn't be able to climb on Mondays, dance on Tuesdays, game on Wednesdays, or climb on Thursdays, or fit in a morning run on top of all that three times a week.
I actually usually don't do anything on a Friday night.

[atreic]

I think from an employers point of view 4 10 hour days can be really different to 5 8 hour days. I mean, if your job is to put boxes on shelves or answer a phone, probably not so much. But there are definitely jobs where people have about 4 hours of 'do difficult stuff' in them every day, (not to say they're not doing lots of other useful but less-difficult stuff with the rest of the day) so if they go to four long days instead of five short ones, that's a 20% productivity drop in the most important bits of their job...

[alitheapipkin]

Yeah, I think this is more or less why no-one in the software development team I work in works PT despite about 1/2 of them having kids.