Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/19/four-day-week-trial-study-finds-lower-stress-but-no-cut-in-output <comment><USER2> At Mobile Jazz (7 years old now) and Bugfender (4-5 years old now) we always had the rule, that people could choose to work as much as they want and when they went. As long as the output and quality was there. Obviously to achieve high quality output you need to be there at certain times (overlap with other team members) and you need to do a certain amount of hours. The problems we had because of this are almost no-existent (specific people that then ended up not staying very long in the company) and the advantages by far outweigh the "loss of control". In the end myself as a business owner and managers have far less stress by trusting people and empowering them to do great work.

With this framework, people will take breaks whenever they feel like. They go doing sports, play with their kids, run errands. They even take whole days off to go surfing or skiing. And I really don't mind. Because I do the same.

But then, if a server goes down late at night, people all the sudden show up by themselves and fix problems. Also on a rainy Saturday or Sunday, people will all the sudden be online and working.

Give people the opportunity to be in charge of their own work schedule, give them the responsibility, make them feel that they're actually responsible and they will shine.

We also just released our company handbook which goes in a lot of detail on how we run a 20+ people remote business:

* [https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook](https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook) (landing page, if you want to get email updates)

* [https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-com...](https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-company-handbook.pdf) (direct link to the PDF)

EDIT: Added some more details

<comment><USER3> How do employees know when good is good enough? When things get stressful and overwhelming at work, I look to my contractual hours per week and remind myself not to overdo it.

<comment><USER4> This is actually the downside of these "you decide" plans and why I absolutely hate "unlimited PTO" policies. Whenever it's up to me I end up taking less vacation than if I just had an allotted amount. People shortchange themselves because they don't want to inconvenience their team. And as an added insult, the company gets out of paying you for unused vacation when you finally burn out.

<comment><USER5> I've just started my first job with unlimited PTO, and I've never understood complaints like these. I can see how it isn't as amazing as a naive what's-on- the-tin reading would imply, but it seems to me that you can just set your bar at what a normal amount of vacation would be, plus a little bit if you feel like, since they're marketing it as "unlimited PTO". Eg, decide that three weeks is an appropriate, comparable amount, and then take three weeks off.

As I mentioned upthread, I've never had a job where I didn't work when and how much I wanted, go into the office when I felt like it, etc etc. I'm subject to the same pressures you describe, but it turns out they're really easy to handle: keep a rough eye on how many hours you're working.

The other day they had a rare beer release I wanted to go to in the middle of the day, on a Friday. I didn't have any meetings, so I "WFH" and worked 3-4 hours that day and spent the rest of the day drinking and getting dinner with a couple funemployed friends, including checking my email and responding to important ones for a few minutes every couple hours during the workday. I could've (and have in the past) written off those four lost hours of work as coming out of my effective productivity, but since this is a new job and I'm trying to hit the ground running, I just made it up in dribbles of an hour or two over the next week.

The dirty secret when people talk about being pressured at work is that 90% of the time, your employers are relying on you to do the work of pressuring yourself. If my employer wants me to work extra and go above and beyond, I make sure that it's explicit and metaphorically "on the record". Pulling all- nighters during crunch time or forgoing vacation for a long time should be banked as something you can draw on, giving you cover for taking a longer vacation or working shorter days after crunch time.

It's really up to you to set your work life balance, and the fears most people have about the consequences of doing so are largely (but not entirely) illusory.

The one major caveat here that I haven't ever had to face is if you're both at an abusive company and highly replaceable (eg feel like you couldn't get a similar quality job). In this case of effectively having a better job than you'd otherwise get, the power dynamic is markedly shifted and employers can get away with a lot. The only saving grace in this situation is if your more in-demand coworkers have healthy attitudes about work/life balance, since it's hard for management to crack down on individuals in a way that's perceived as unfair.

<comment><USER6> Come back in a year and tell us how this went.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"... a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done."_

The result/claim makes intuitive sense to me but..... The problem trying to study this is that "productivity" of many/most white collar workers is basically impossible to measure.

Some do. Customer support can be benchmarked (and prodctivity-pushed) But... customers support jobs don't lend to this 4d workweek thing. The jobs that do lend to it, don't lend to measurement.

This difficulty can lead to all sorts of wierdness. Tyler Cowen claimed that office worker productivity has not been (measurably) increased by office computerization. IE, going from secretaries, fax and typwriters to Google docs hasn't produced any economic gains.

Strange claim. Difficult to measure. David Graeber (anarchist that reckons most office work is pointless busy-work) quotes the same stat this white paper quotes, people spend about 2/8 hrs working and the rest procrastinating on social media.

Measurement is also not incidental here. Measurablity changes everything. Once an employees job productivity is measurable, it can be optimized and already has been.

It's a Shrodinger's product evangalist problem...

That said, I like the jist.Lets shorten the workweek. Science-wise... well...

<comment><USER8> "a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five- day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done"

And soon some genius will come in and think "How about we worked a few hours more? This would give us even more output" and soon we are back to normal.

<comment><USER9> This is so true. Over years I have realised that my productivity is pretty much similar if I worked 7/8/9 hours. Over time the longer I work the less productive I am. There was a nice quote I once read on HN - everyone have fixed budget for quality thinking. working longer does not increase that.

<comment><USER10> You can refresh the fixed budget via a siesta power nap

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We work a 4 Day, 32 hour week, and have done so since 2015. During that time, our team grew from a small office of ~20 in Edinburgh to where we are today (3 offices in Edinburgh Scotland, Bozeman USA, and Beirut Lebanon) with about 80 people.

We have consistently been one of the fastest growing tech companies in Scotland (and in the UK). When we implemented the 4 day policy, we didn't change our financial targets, or our team metrics. Instead, we explained it was an experiment that we wanted to run, and we believed that by being more efficient and more intentional about how we worked, we could still achieve our goals.

Turned out that was true.

Our motivation was primarily work/life balance, but also the realisation that most startups take 10-15 years to get to where they want to go, and we have a long journey ahead of us! It's a marathon, not a sprint. We still pay a 5 day wage, and we actually "buy" all 5 days, because we wanted to make sure that team members weren't tempted to moonlight on the 5th day.

Overall I think it's been a really great thing for our team, and perhaps most importantly, I think we've proved that ambitious goals, hard work, and a strong drive to succeed is not at odds with a 4 day week. Over the last few years we've spent probably hundreds of hours talking with various organisations and the media about the benefits of the 4 day week, and I'm hopeful it'll continue to catch on more and more.

<comment><USER12> 1\. how did you start the experiment? Did you apply it to everybody from the start or did you run it on a small sample?

2\. What do you mean "buy all 5 days" and "moonlight on the 5th day"? (not a native speaker)

<comment><USER11> Good questions!

1\. We started by doing some research, actually - I spent some time finding studies that supported my thesis that productivity would go up (thus making sure our output would stay the same, more or less). Then I discussed with our management team, who thought I was nuts, but was supportive. Then I presented it to our board, who was also supportive. We applied it to everyone at the start, but some teams took a bit longer to get it implemented, as one of our criteria was he had to maintain 5 day coverage for our customers (ie, some have Mondays off, some have Fridays, etc.). To this day we leave the coverage patterns and rotations up to each team/department to decide.

2\. In our contracts, we are paying you for 40 hours of work, 5 days a week, but we give you one of them back. Moonlighting meaning working for another company "on the side".

<comment><USER13> What does "give you one of them back" mean, if it doesn't mean I can do what I want with that time?

<comment><USER14> They pay you for _not_ working during that day. Without any requirement to be in the office to _not_ work.

To be honest, it seems a bit disingenuous to me. A day off should be a day off. What I do with that time is nobodies business.

<comment><USER15> It is the business' business if you work hours 33-40 anyway. The whole point of the 32 hour workweek is the idea that those extra 8 hours decreases your productivity in the first 32.

Yes, it's still possible you'll work on a side gig / for someone else in the weekend, but that's much less likely than if you have business hours available for that.

<comment><USER14> I'd argue that outside of the time I'm being paid for, the business has zero influence over what I do with my life.

If I can spend my whole Monday night playing WoW, coming in completely destroyed the next morning, why couldn't I do some personal work during the day on a Thursday and come in refreshed and happy on Friday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is not the first article about how people get the same amount of work done, even more, in four days instead of five. But another thing they have in common is that they never ask the question, what about three?

Or what about two? One? Surely at zero, productivity will not match the old standard of 40 hours a week. But it seems like the next logical question to me. If employees are just as productive at 32 hours as 40, at what point does productivity fall? Maybe 32 just happens to be that breaking point. Or it might turn out to be 25 or even 15. But let's at least ask the question.

I'm talking about averages, of course.

<comment><USER17> Actually, Tim Ferris wrote a book called "The 4-Hour Workweek" with the goal of more people achieving the title. It is more oriented at breaking free of normal work habits than a scientific study of optimal productivity though.

<comment><USER18> Something tells me Tim Ferris works a lot more than 4 hours a week himself.

<comment><USER19> His podcasts had him on for about six hours weekly iirc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If I'm going to believe anything, I'd need a longitudinal study of about 5 years.

I find 5 years to be a good hallmark to see whether something had an actual strong impact in my own life (e.g. regarding reading self-help books such as Search Inside Yourself [1] or Steve Pavlina's blog post on how to rock at university [2] -- sorry for being slightly off-topic but these two things changed my life).

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Search-Inside-Yourself-Unexpected- Ach...](https://www.amazon.com/Search-Inside-Yourself-Unexpected- Achieving/dp/0062116932)

[2] [https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/10-tips-for- colleg...](https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/10-tips-for-college- students/)

<comment><USER21> Where did Steve Pavlina go to school? Not sure if some of those triaging strategies would have worked at U Chicago...

<comment><USER20> It definitely worked wonders for me (VU University Amsterdam), definitely during my psychology bachelor.

I experienced the following conditions.

> In every student's schedule, some classes are critical while others are > almost trivial.

True, the most funny ones were social psychology and e-business, common sense almost helped you to pass the course.

> For some classes attendance was necessary, but for others it didn't make > much difference.

True for me as well, reading the book within 30 minutes would save 75 minutes of time since the class would take 105 minutes.

> I could simply get the notes from another student if needed, or I could > learn the material from the textbook.

We had a notes Facebook group and there was a Dutch startup dedicated to summaries.

> If it wasn't necessary for me to attend a particular class (based on my > goals for that class)

Having a good goal is tantamount if your goal is to learn everything possible, then triaging becomes almost impossible. If your goal is to just get by with the lowest grade possible, then triaging is a must.

> If I felt an assignment was lame, pointless, or unnecessarily tedious, and > if it wouldn't have too negative an impact on my grade, I would actually > decline to do it.

I did this with my thesis, for example (again psychology). I _could_ check for normality and do all the right statistical things, but it would only get me 5% extra points. So I assumed normality and everything else needed for multiple linear regression, tested nothing and reported the results.

> Maybe I'd estimate it would take me 20 hours to do an A job but only 10 > hours to do a B job.

Heh, I did this so many times. I had side jobs, a girlfriend, friends and other activities that I could spend my time on.

> I often thought in this Machiavellian fashion back then, and often to my > surprise I found that my B-quality papers would come back with As anyway.

Oh yes, one time I even published a paper that I rushed through as a homework exercise, because my synthesis of using psychology, neuroscience and game studies for a game studies paper was apparently unparalleled for a master student (the field simply doesn't have many people, so you easily shine). Think about that, I rush a paper writing it in 20 hours and it gets published and nominated for best paper award. Before those 20 hours, I knew nothing of the topic.

Triaging was a lot harder for my computer science programs though, it simply has less bullshit, contained more moving parts and has therefore been intellectually tougher. In that sense, if you triage a lot, it is some indication that your university program isn't of high quality, unfortunately (there are quite a bit of exceptions).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been working four-day workweeks for the past 4 years or so, and love it. I can't say I have the same output (nor would I want to, since I took a 20% pay cut for it). I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I don't think I'll be able to work 5-day weeks again. I tried it a few times and I found myself very unhappy, 5 days were too long and the weekend too short. The 4/3 split is ideal, four days isn't enough to get tired of work and a three-day weekend feels like ages.

I can believe that there would be no cut in output if people said "okay we're going to get the same amount of tasks done, just in four days instead of five", so everyone would work 20% more each day. I don't know what side- effects that might have, but I don't find it impossible. However, it seems very unlikely to me that you'd work at the same rate for fewer days and still get the same done. I also don't know why people who work fewer days would increase their rate of work, but it's certainly plausible.

<comment><USER23> That schedule is called a 4-10 - 4, 10 hour work days, and every Friday off.

9/80 is that you work 9 hours a day, and every other Friday is off.

They're both popular in defense and aerospace.

<comment><USER24> So decreasing productivity even further, even though you could achieve the same amount of finished work with 4 8h days. Why?

<comment><USER25> > popular in defense

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I definitely want to believe this is a good measure of the impact of moving to a four day week. However, I wonder if this is an example of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect).

Maybe people are being more productive each day because they're aware that the company is going to be measuring their productivity.

<comment><USER27> There's also the "do work on the day off because it's a week day and people still expect a quick reply" habit people in customer facing roles (which sounds like quite a lot of Perpetual's staff) will be tied to. I took a four day week for six month in a regular corporate sales job because it was the most practical way of using my holiday entitlement without losing sales and contact with customers in a tough market, and sure, it didn't really affect my weekly productivity, but that's because I never made many important outbound calls on a Friday and still dealt with all the customer email on my Blackberry anyway, so all I was really missing out on were internal meetings...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The same might hold true for cutting down from 4 days to 3 days.

Everytime we humans try something new, we are excited and energized. Since the average office worker is only productive 3 hours per day, there always is a lot of room for increasing output for some time.

</comment><comment><USER29> I worked at a state govt job that allowed for 4 day weeks. Being govt, and with my manager in particular, time was closely managed.

It worked, but it was HARD! The difference between an 8 hour day and a 10 hour day is having to find a second wind, on demand, 4 days in a row.

Every time I would say I was going to drop, and then the three day weekend hit and I had time to get personal stuff done, time to relax without feeling like I had to prepare to start work again, and then I thought it was all worth it. Then the cycle would repeat.

Now I'm in a tech job with far more flexibility. I think a similar schedule would still be hard: some 10 hour days are easy, but to do it on demand, repeatedly?

<comment><USER30> The article is about dropping the hours to ~32 a week, not working 10 hour days to still do 40 hours in four days.

Switching to 10 hour days would be a terrible idea - that's just asking for burnout. Anyway, I find it really hard to believe more than a small percentage of workers would be able to be actually productive for even two thirds of the day when consistently working that long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> That's never going to happen. Regardless of what 'studies show'. If Jesus comes down from heaven and tells everyone we need to work less, it will still never happen. Was reading 'Bullshit jobs' by David Graeber and frankly I am starting to believe the conspiracy theory that there is an inherent interest of society to keep people busy as much as possible. Because if you give people more free time, don't keep them on their toes and stressed, they may start thinking about building guillotines.

<comment><USER32> I agree that Jesus stopping by and asking us wouldn't change this, but _collective bargaining has already changed this in the past_

It's not impossible! It requires people working together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been on a four day work week for quite a while, working Monday through Thursday [1]. It definitely makes the off days better.

• If it has been a rough week at work, I can spend all day Friday relaxing, and still have a full two weekend days for my interests and hobbies.

• I can do things on Friday, such as shopping, that most others have to do on the weekend, thus avoiding the weekend crowds.

• With three days to work on personal projects, I can do a day of getting things going and getting productive, a day of good in the zone work, and then a day of picking a good stopping point and reaching that and setting things up for resumption next week. With a conventional two day weekend, it's that in the zone time that loses.

• Three days is long enough that by Monday I'm ready and want to get back to my job.

I find the lower stress thing quite plausible based on the above. It's enough time to do my stuff without it feeling rushed, meaning my relaxing things can actually be relaxing. A two day weekend is more likely to result in the classic stressing out over trying to relax.

I also find the no cut in work output plausible, because of the lower stress thing. Stress should lower productivity. If your weekend is not lowering stress as much as it could, you are going to be less productive than you could be. If three days off lowers stress more, you productivity rate should be higher back at work. But a three day weekend means a shorter work week. So we have one effect trying to raise output and one trying to lower it. Given the fuzziness of productivity measures, I'm not surprised by a finding of no change in output.

[1] I started taking every other Friday as a vacation day, because I had so much accumulated vacation that I had hit my employer's accumulation limit. Later, when the big recession hit the company needed to reduce expenses to avoid layoffs, and I offered to take a 5% pay cut in exchange for every other Friday off, which when combined with the every other Friday vacation gave me a four day week.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if the productivity is maintained as we can only think for so many hours a day. If you look at famous writers such as Hemingway they only worked for a few hours a day. So the question is how does this translate to work that has a less cognitive load ? Has anybody done experiments with programing and hours worked ?

<comment><USER34> Plus your brain will crunch things in the background. How many time as a developer have you "solved" a problem you've been stuck on for hours or days while showering or traveling to work. Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.

<comment><USER35> I share your experience. But, I've recently read a book, The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater, a psychologist, wherein he argues that your brain does not crunch anything in the background, and only does what it focuses on.

However, the situation you outlined still occurs because you can get stuck in a certain paradigm (e.g. "this name that I can't remember definitely starts with 's'"), which you effectively reset, in addition to simply returning re- energised. Still a good argument for breaks and less strenuous working hours.

<comment><USER36> I call this the "attractor basin hypothesis" of problem solving- your mental state is in one attractor basin and you need to be in a different one; a break gives you another chance to enter the right one. If true, it may be possible to get the same benefit as taking a break and returning to the work by doing something that jolts you out of your current attractor basin. Maybe that just means asking the right question (c.f. oblique strategies).

<comment><USER35> Interesting idea. I'm currently learning German, which is rather similar to my native Dutch. Yet I'm learning most of it through English, because that's simply the language people tend to use for instruction material.

Every now and then when I'm doing English to German translation, I find myself puzzled and then have to remind myself "think about the Dutch word" only to then immediately understand/recall the German cognate. I'm sure someone talking to me in Dutch could have the same effect, and more broadly speaking, another 'attractor basin' may be activated by random chance, like the tired cliche of someone in a movie figuring out the 'case' as a result of their spouse or child mentioning something unrelated yet apparently analogous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have a feeling this would vary depending on the person. Someone with big stressors outside of work may benefit from the shorter work week. Others may outperform them on a normal week. Just speculation.

</comment><comment><USER38> I switched to a 4 day working week a couple of years ago, and took a 20% pay cut in the process.

I'm certain that I don't actually produce any less than I did when working 5 days, and my stress levels are definitely lower. All in all, the company got a pretty good deal, since I now have the same output, but get paid less!

<comment><USER39> You should ask for a raise based on the value you're providing, and get your comp back up to where it was before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I worked in Germany we had a union mandated 35 hour week with no option for overtime. One thing I noticed was that back then most people actually worked most of their hours at the office and decisions were made rather quickly and decisively. Now I work with no set time limit and I feel that a lot of people are wasting time with going over the same thing multiple times, hesitating in making decisions and calling huge meetings that achieve nothing.

I feel that part of it is that by working less people are fresher and think clearer. Whenever I worked 50+ hours per week for longer time I was more in a foggy state and couldn't think clearly.

Also, by limiting working hours management needs to be decisive and conscious of wasting people's times with unnecessary stuff.

<comment><USER40> I think a big difference between the American work mentality and the Euro work mentality is that Americans often seem to relish the "I'm too busy for everything" state of mind (as if it were a badge of honor). Unfortunately, it will take huge macro-level behavioral changes to undo that kind of damage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is there a real paper linked to this study? All I can find is this rubbish [1] which is a collection of info-graphics without any p-value.

[1] [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3e9f3555b02cbca8b01...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3e9f3555b02cbca8b01aab/t/5c6639880d929730b229a363/1550203293110/Four- Day+Week+White+Paper+February+2019+final.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER42> Seems a bit to good to be true... working 20% less, and still have 'increased productivity'?

I myself work 4 days a week, which I really enjoy. However, sometimes with a major bug I make extra hours, the work has to get done! You can do more in 6 days than in 4.

For that sake, how much further can you push it, can you increase productivity 20% by working 3 days instead of 4?

</comment><comment><USER43> Obviously, even if the study is to believed, this won't work for all jobs (try callcenters or POS ...).

Thorough studies would evaluate other models as well, like 6, 7 or 3-day weeks.

As a former entrepreneur I can guarantee that my output would suffer greatly in a 4 day week, since I'd rediscover hobbies and other distractions.

<comment><USER44> Why wouldn't it work for call centers? Just pay them for 4 days of work and hire More people.

<comment> frosted-flakes Because work that call centre workers do can't be compressed. That means each person is working 32 hours each week (no gain in productivity), but still getting paid for 40. Whereas a computer programmer might still be able to complete 40 hours-worth of work in 32 hours by increasing productivity.

<comment><USER44> I don't think it's unreasonable to hypothesize that while the quantity of work wouldn't change, the quality would increase. I presume to pay for 32 hours if they work 32 hours.

<comment><USER18> Then they will go work for someone else. If the quality of work goes up, then the price should go up, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> We should switch, not because it raises or maintains productivity, but because it's the right thing to do. Framing the debate in terms of productivity plays into the hands of those who would maintain the status quo. If laborers were properly organized, we could dictate the 4-day or 3-day workweek,

<comment><USER16> > because it's the right thing to do

On what principle? I had always thought that a job and its pay arose strictly from negotiation. But if you say one way is "right" and another isn't, that implies some reason that transcends anyone's preference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Of all industries, you would think software companies would use some of the efficiency gains and insane profit margins to work less?

This is the logic we have at Monograph (hiring engineers btw) and we've had 4 day 32-hour work weeks for over three years now. One engineer on the team likes to take Wednesdays off which we affectionately call the "mid-weekend".

If you have more interest HuffPo and Lynne from Key Values wrote a bit about or working style: [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/four-day-working- week-o...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/four-day-working-week- overwork-life-balance_us_5c360351e4b0f5aba7da3d5a)

[https://www.keyvalues.com/monograph](https://www.keyvalues.com/monograph)

</comment><comment><USER47> How does the science on this compare to the science which got us the 40 hour work week? There seems to be a lot of anecdotes in the article.

I'm not sure I could gauge my productivity well from one day to the next. There's too many variables. There's other people, luck, different issues, strengths, weaknesses, shrimp gumbo, BBQ shrimp, shrimp soup...

I do know I give it my all during the week and I crash into the weekend. It's invigorating and exhausting at the same time. Getting over a rough week seems to take as long as getting over a bad hangover. Two days for sure, and sometimes I need a third.

<comment><USER48> What science got us the 40h work week? It seems to me we just went from making people work as much as humanly possible to less and less (to 40 today in the US) as workers got more power through unions.

I don't think science was much involved here.

<comment><USER49> 40h was first most widely implemented by Henry Ford, because of equal productivity with fewer mistakes than the 10-16 hour days that were then the norm. So there is some empirical evidence that it's better than more hours, and some empirical evidence that it's better than fewer hours in some cases, and plenty showing no change with fewer hours. The fairest characterisation is that there was considerable back and forth between legislation, unions and capitalists seeking better workers.

<comment> barry-cotter Please provide a citation to some scholarly or historical work to that effect. The last time I looked into this any way seriously there was nothing suggesting 40 hours was chosen for reasons of productivity. One of the extremely few studies that was decent was of productivity on building sites which found that total (not average) productivity increased up until 60 hour weeks.

<comment><USER47> Thanks, this was my point.

I'm skeptical that this study is any better than whatever studies may have got us here in the first place. 4 day work weeks seem as arbitrary as as what we have now. If happiness and well-being is productive, then a 3 day work week might even be better. Some might be more productive by never working at all.

> One of the extremely few studies that was decent was of productivity on > building sites which found that total (not average) productivity increased > up until 60 hour weeks.

Taylorism?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I wonder what the lowest limit on work-time is for productivity. That would be interesting to know. Also, companies could only pay people for that many hours.

</comment><comment><USER51> It may be that they were simply paid less than optimal salaries before and increasing their wages per hour actually improved their productivity, incentivizing them to accomplish in 4 days what they previously accomplished in 5. It would be interesting to do a parallel test with the same groups, have a control group, have a 4 day group that keeps the same pay, and a 5 day group with a 20% pay increase.

<comment><USER52> It depends on the salary of the employee, and their personal goals. Personally, I find a 20% decrease in working hours is worth a lot more than a 25% increase in pay. The hourly wage remains the same, but getting a full day back per week is significantly more valuable than more money that I'm already not spending

<comment><USER51> I agree. I wish there were more jobs like that, where you could work 3-4 days, at the same rate per hour. Maybe if we solve for a lot of the additional per- worker costs around healthcare and such we would be able to see that emerge in the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I took a proper look at this study and it didn't show what this article claims it showed: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/15q3hdJI2SxDBcOsn2Cqk8bMg...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15q3hdJI2SxDBcOsn2Cqk8bMgLRDV- mP3R5UOrhms5Bc/edit)

</comment><comment><USER54> It really seems to depend on the company stage. If the answer to, "did you do everything you could?" is, "well, we could have put %20 more time and effort into it with no additional cash burn," I could see how that could be interpreted as negligence from a fiduciary perspective.

On the other hand, %20 less office time could be an honest signal that you are taking risks commensurate with the return level your investors are looking for. If as a founder or leader, you are careful and incremental, I don't think that's what investors put money into VC funds for. The number of stories I read here and elsewhere about investors saying, "I don't want this money back, I want a huge return or nothing, because I don't want to learn I put it behind someone who wasn't committed enough to fail hard."

Investors aren't paying you and your team to work, they are paying for the privilege of getting a piece of a massive outcome. You achieve the outcome they want exposure to the best way you know how, and if imposing a risk constraint like %20 less office time does it, great. In this view, you are not their employee, you are their dealer.

I could see how it would be hard to persuade investors you were working in their best interest with an attitude like that, but on the other hand, it could be one that is necessary to enable the best possible outcome. It sounds crazy, but the investors themselves are the correlation factor in their portfolio, and the point of putting money into a diversified portfolio of startups is to hedge that correlation, so the more opinionated the investor is about your office culture or other aspects of the business, it's likely the worse they are going to do.

No clear answer, but really interesting question.

</comment><comment><USER55> doing work != measurable output

Not to mention that the definition of what work, productivity or deliverables is varies vastly from company to company or industry to industry.

Not working for an entire day per week or having sporadic / limited hours of operation could also end up being a huge pain for a client or anyone not in your company you may be working with.

I'm definitely a proponent of the sentiment of this article, however, I can confirm that working with a remote team in another country where nobody seemed to work more than 25hrs per week on their technical team was annoying as hell. Not only did this make solving problems harder, they also had notably lower productivity and output of meaningful contributions...

</comment><comment><USER56> This is a deeply flawed experiment. Of course the employees want a 4-day workweek, which is why they will work extra hard during the trial. I doubt this would be reproduced if employees were told the 4-day weeks were permanent no matter the outcome.

</comment><comment><USER44> Talk of lower work hours doesn't always come with clear expectations around pay. Ignoring the large fixed cost of providing healthcare, I bet companies would be more willing to drop hours from a schedule if compensation also dropped.

<comment><USER57> "Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay."

<comment><USER44> That's nice for perpetual guardian but I don't see it happening as a mainstream movement without an incentive.

<comment><USER58> Sure, it will be a tough sell, but the incentive should be less stressed, healthy, happy employees that deliver the same productive output as their 5 day week counterparts. It's a competetve advantage on the job market for employers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I suspect this may only be true for jobs that have a lot of "busy work", which must be pretty common in a financial services company. There's no way I could get the same amount done in 4 days as in 5.

</comment><comment><USER60> I could do my job in 2 of the 5 workdays

(I need a new job)

I spend time learning, reading, etc at work

</comment><comment><USER61> Well no flamin' poo.

Why do we need study after study that tells that we're living beings that shouldn't be consigned to a cage of guilt and shame.

This is stupid. We know what feels good or not, but our barbaric system divorces our natural function from our consciousness - starting in childhood.

Worst part is that we see that we have power to shape the world, but nobody believes that with same power comes the ability to create a comfortable environment for everybody where they can operate without guilt or shame or fear.

What a monstrous machine we've created for ourselves.

Love y'all. Peace out.

</comment><comment><USER62> The hawthorne effect should be factored in here. I am a proponent of 4 day weeks but depends on the situation industry etc.

</comment><comment><USER63> Treehouse used to do 4/10s and from what I remember listening to Ryan Carson's podcast with Jason Calacanis, it didn't work out for them. So I don't think this should apply to every workplace. For more mature companies, it makes sense. For startups, I don't think so.

<comment><USER64> This isn't proposing 4/10s, it's 4/8s. Basically, you're probably just faffing about for 8 hours a week anyway, so do it at home instead of at work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Just make a mandatory 5 weeks a year. "Unlimited" PTO is a gimmick.

</comment><comment><USER66> written by a journalist who only wants to work four-day week.

</comment><comment><USER66> that's cos they are slacking off anyway...

</comment><comment><USER67> This is great, but 8 weeks is far too short to measure such fickle things.

</comment><comment><USER68> If you work more hours than you sleep, you are doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER69> Business people should constantly be all over this, why do we have to wait decades for them to come up with anything remotely useful.

All they do is invent more things for everyone to be miserable and for them to get a larger piece of the pie.

Business degrees are shit, get your act together, looking at you Harvard, Yale et. al.</comment>


Most of our CS students suck at CS - <AUTHOR> http://bluntobject.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/most-of-our-cs-students-suck-at-cs/ <comment><USER2> Most CS students don't care about CS, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Our society shouldn't look down on trade schools so much. There's too much of an importance placed on the prestige of graduating from a university, making everyone feel pressured to go to a university. These kids are wasting their time (and their parents' money) if they don't care about the material and are never going to use the material anyway. They're just there to get the rubber stamp from the university to impress their family, friends, and employers.

This emphasis on the college degree as a sign of prestige has a toxic side effect: the people who _do_ care about the material get a diluted version of the material to better serve the university's goal of graduating as many people as possible.

I want to see more schools in the style of Digipen. Digipen offers a rigorous degree in "Real Time Interactive Simulation" -- in other words, Game Programming. They really do learn to code, and they really do learn the relevant mathematics for 3D graphics, physics simulation, etc. They probably don't sit through irrelevant courses on the theory of computation or programming language theory. Why aren't there similar programs for programming in general? You should be able to go to a trade school or university and get a solid and comprehensive degree in programming. And society should respect you for it.

Sidenote: I do think that it's possible to do this without devolving into a technology-specific curriculum. You can (and should) still teach at a conceptual level, with individual languages and APIs considered implementation details. I'm not advocating creating a degree in ".NET Programming" or "Ruby on Rails Programming" that'll be obsolete in 2 years.

<comment><USER3> While I agree that trade schools are a Good Thing ™, I have to respectfully but strongly disagree with your assertion that theory of computation and programming language semantics and implementation are somehow unimportant for any student of programming, whether vocational or theoretical.

True, it may not be terribly illuminating for a game programmer to rigorously prove historical theorems in computability or complexity theory. However, understanding the practical importance of big-O notation, the equivalence of any Turing-complete language, (as well as the lambda calculus, partially- recursive functions, etc.) and compiler design will all be of _massive_ benefit when they're looking to actually distinguish themselves from the rest of the assembly-line game coders.

Overall, though, +1 on the idea of a solid two-year "Computer Programming" degree. Leave CS as a truly academic realm, and give those who are just looking for a solid white-collar career path a respectable path there.

<comment><USER2> I do think that Big-O notation and computational cost should be covered in a practical and intuitive way, but I'm not convinced of the utility of teaching Turing computability, programming language theory, or compiler design. You say that this "will all be of massive benefit when they're looking to actually distinguish themselves from the rest of the assembly-line game coders", but I think that anyone who wanted to get that real depth of knowledge and set themselves apart from the crowd should get a CS degree and (most importantly) continue learning on their own. What I'm envisioning for the trade school is purely what you describe as "a solid white-collar career path". I think there's a lot of people who are looking for a career that pays well and that they enjoy, but aren't interested in becoming an expert in their field, or making their career also their hobby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm getting tired of this suck-up ego parade about "how everyone sucks (except 'us')."

<comment><USER5> What I find most frustrating is that people don't talk about the importance of application-level creativity. It's all about implementation.

The secret is that implementation is not interesting nor rewarding -- whether it's done in Java or C or whatever. It only becomes interesting when you are innovating at the application level.

And so, CS as a whole is a depressing field. Most jobs are unrewarding since you are told what to implement.

It's sort of like being asked to translate a novel from one language to another or to improve its grammar. I would rather write my own novel.

<comment><USER6> "implementation is not interesting nor rewarding"

I disagree, and I don't think I could write code for a living otherwise, 9-5 or startup.

<comment><USER7> your own startup or working for "a startup own by someone else"?

I've been through the 2nd one and it's just the same as working 9-5 believe it or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting about the mention of a relationship between building Legos and CS. The correlation between the two has been a theory of mine for a while. At least I have not yet found a hacker who enjoys building legos (or did as a child) that sucks at or doesnt enjoy building software. I have a feeling the mindsets required for both are strongly correlated.

<comment><USER9> When I was a wee lad, I didn't know what software was, but I had a huge box of legos and an imagination. My parents would buy me the playsets, and I'd build them to get ideas about how "masters" built things and would proceed to immediately take them apart and build new things with the pieces and the knowledge. This also happens to be what good hackers do. Hackers are always reading code, reading about code and learning what the "masters" do. Then they piece together all that they learned and create something new. It's the same exact process, and that is why your theory is correct.

<comment><USER10> I never had enough legos to built anything creatively substantial. It was like writing a program in ASM with only ADD, JUMP, and LOAD.

<comment><USER2> Add a jump-if-zero instruction and that might actually be Turing complete (assuming your ADD instruction will eventually overflow).

<comment><USER11> Actually, if the JUMP instruction allows an indirect address, then it is already Turing-complete. I know X86 treats indirect jumps as a separate instruction, but it's not hard to imagine an assembly language where the two use the same instruction.

EDIT: Nope, we forgot there is no STORE instruction. Thus, no way whatsoever of writing output.

<comment><USER2> Oops, good point about the indirect JUMP instruction.

Maybe we don't need a STORE. The ADD instruction could operate directly on memory operands. Then I guess we can ditch LOAD too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As much as I'd like to say I could do low-level CS, I'm honestly not that good at algorithms. Quick sort? I'm good at problem solving, which is what I think matters.

Before I knew better, I used to laugh at those people who found careers doing boring stuff with corporate applications (databases, etc.). The best part of my job is creating something from scratch - a blank screen of an IDE (when not fixing issues). And if we have excess energy after the workday/or on the weekend, we can always exert our creativity on open-source or personal projects. I love software development for the development aspect. How cool is it to say (or not say) to your friends that you could build a cool web startup (the tech is not that hard, except with exceptions)?

<comment><USER13> _As much as I'd like to say I could do low-level CS, I'm honestly not that good at algorithms. Quick sort? I'm good at problem solving, which is what I think matters._

What's the difference between algorithms and problem solving?

<comment><USER5> It's a particularly difficult subset of problem solving.

<comment><USER14> ... an algorithm is a series of steps to solve a problem. If he is good at problem solving, he should have no problem with algorithms.

Now, I think a lot of people are bad at remembering every algorithm they are taught in a class. Unless you use it a few times, it's not likely you will be able to implement it off the top of your head, but that is what the internet and all those useful CS books are for.

<comment><USER5> I mean it's difficult to discover non-trivial algorithms on your own.

<comment><USER13> But seeing examples of non-trivial algorithms makes what you once considered non-trivial, trivial. A lot of algorithm design seems to be a kind of poetry to me - where one draws on similarities to algorithms she's seen before, as a poet would draw on metaphors or imagery they've experienced elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What would happen if one school actually decided that they would go the other way, and fail anyone who "sucked"? Wouldn't that school then get a good reputation for graduating only "great programmers," pushing any aspiring programmer to apply there--a virtuous cycle? The top schools in any field graduate the best simply because the best apply there, and the best apply there simply because "the best" are known to graduate from there.

</comment><comment><USER16> I know this is amateur question, but I am taking my intro to programming class this quarter, and we are learning with Python(and pseudo-code, if that counts) am I doomed to being a crappy programmer? I was notorious for being a Lego addict when i was a kid, and i am taking the classes because i need a formal education on programming, so i would like to think I am not part of this group, but am I getting off on the wrong foot?

<comment><USER17> No, python is great to learn on.

What school do you go to?

<comment><USER4> MIT recently changed their curriculum from Scheme to Python.

If it's good enough for MIT...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Remember when people actually posted constructive compsci/programming articles that covered a wide variety of topics? Neither do I.

This current obsession with programming supremacy and geek dick waving is absolutely pointless.

If Universities started churning out uber hackers that were "20x more efficient" than last years model all these guys would start crying about how they can't get a decent paying job.</comment>


New research indicates 'Unicorns' are overvalued - <AUTHOR> https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/silicon-valleys-unicorns-are-overvalued <comment><USER2> The key issue is that a lot of startups use various contractual terms -- things like options on exit, liquidation preferences and others -- to take money into into the business at high nominal valuations, while still offering downside protection (optionality) to investors. The public at large usually just quotes the nominal valuation and goes from there. However, the optionality of those terms has substantial financial value, so the nominal valuation is often far from the truth.

These authors have developed a system to tease out the optionality using standard financial methods (using methods like Black-Scholes, for example), which can give us all a better understanding of the true worth of these companies. Far overdue in my opinion.

<comment><USER3> >" while still offering downside protection (optionality) to investors."

I'm not familiar with tern "optionality" can you say what that is and how it provides downside risk protection to investors? Thanks.

<comment><USER4> The optionality in startup investing has mainly to do with the "limited liability" in Limited Liability Corporation (other types of corporations and partnerships also have limited liability). That is, if you invest a dollar in a corporation, your losses are capped at a dollar. But, your gains are potentially infinite. Another instrument that has that characteristic--limited downside and infinite upside--is an option. The startup equity isn't actually an option, but it is useful to discuss its "optionality" because it does have some similar characteristics.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the explanation.

A related question I have then is would RSUs be considered as providing downside risk(but no upside) for employees then as the value is independent of the companies actual performance?

<comment><USER5> I'm far from an expect, but unless I'm misunderstanding your question, no, that's not it. RSUs negate some of the downside risk for an employee (vs an option), but have similar upside. With an RSU, it has value as long as the company has value, with an option, it has no value unless the sell price is above the strike price.

<comment><USER3> I probably didn't articulate that as well as I could have. You answered my question though thanks. I actually don't hear about RSUs as much except for some unicorns that seem to be staying private for longer and longer.

<comment><USER5> Many publicly traded companies issue RSUs over options these days. But yeah, many startups don't.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I think that RSUs are the most common form of stock grants for publicly traded companies. I think FB might hae been one the first SV companies to use it for employees pre-IPO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The average unicorn, the researchers note, has eight stock classes for > different types of investors, including founders, employees, venture > capitalists, mutual funds, and others.

As an aside, this is why I think that any effort of a prospective employee to divine the value of a stock option package is likely in vain. Without a detailed accounting of the ins and outs of the preferred stock that is senior to your common shares, it is nigh impossible to tell how much the common shares (and options thereon) are worth.

<comment><USER6> This is why I always recommend to individuals that when a startup offers equity in lieu of cash compensation to ask every financial/equity question imaginable. (what are you valued at today? how much investment have you taken? what's been diluted? etc etc)

People don't like to have that conversation because they think it's inappropriate. However, it's more inappropriate for a founder to tell you that you're getting equity in lieu of compensation and explain nothing about the value of that equity and potential future value of that equity based on the current state and future state assumptions.

<comment><USER7> 90% of my engineer/designer friends have no clue what every financial/equity question imaginable even look like, and even if they had a list of them, they'd have no clue about how to interpret any of the results, or how to tell if the company is feeding you BS.

I mean, I was the first employee at a startup, involved with fund raising, and then founder at a startup, and even I would have a hard time with that.

Not to mention that even if you have a very solid understanding of what things are like when you get hired, it can all change dramatically in subsequent fundraising.

This is just one of many instances where the employee/employer relationship is heavily biased against the employee. And unless clear disclosure requirements understandable by the average worker are put in place, it'll stay that way. As an employee, your options are inscrutable lottery tickets which value can be redefined in many ways at many points in time, and there's not much you can do against that.

<comment><USER6> > 90% of my engineer/designer friends have no clue what every financial/equity > question imaginable even look like

Totally - I've been thinking about actually putting on a "equity master class for engineers looking to join startups" type seminar in the bay area if people are interested.

<comment><USER6> Seems like there's some interest for this. If people legitimately want to know more, please let me know here:

[https://goo.gl/forms/j70V7ew5Dds7AoOt1](https://goo.gl/forms/j70V7ew5Dds7AoOt1)

If there's enough interest I'll put something on.

PS - By way of background, I work in tech M&A and regularly see cap tables, equity packages, salaries etc. both in and out of SV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think when a model is presented like this, it should also show the examples where it fails. In the article, they show Square (Series E valuation at 6 B, pre-IPO 2.66 B) where the "fair valuation" correctly models closer to pre-IPO at 2.2 B.

However, let's look at another example. Take Nutanix (Series E valuation at 2 B, pre-IPO at 2.1 B). This model values it at 0.8 B on their table, almost a third of the IPO price.

There is no explanation forthcoming in this article as to why that's the case. This makes it seem like the Square example was cherry-picked.

I picked NTNX at random, so I don't know if it's the one exception. I'm not going to exhaustively check every result, however. I expect them to do that for me and not sell me a story without pointing out the terrible exceptions.

<comment><USER4> This is why the myth of "market capitalization" is so persistent. Often what you have at an IPO is a conversion of preferred shares to common shares. So effectively the 8 classes of preferred shares do become the same as the common, and the "simple" market capitalization number becomes real.

However.

How many startups never IPO? 99%? 99.9%? In acquisition or liquidation scenarios, those common shares are often worth a lot less than preferred. And because these scenarios make up a large proportion of the probability distribution, it means the expected value of common shares is a lot lower.

Even unicorns that are far more likely to IPO can raise bridge rounds that cause major dilution for the common shares, rendering previous market capitalization numbers useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The deal terms for unicorn investment rounds are less about company fundamentals, and more about the scarcity of great startups.

There's more money than there are good deals in Silicon Valley, so later stage investors are forced to offer more money for less equity in order to beat other term sheets. This ends up looking like sky-high valuations, since investors that offer fair-market-valuations are unlikely to get picked. Founders naturally gravitate towards minimizing dilution.

<comment><USER10> _There 's more money than there are good deals in Silicon Valley, ..._

Is that true? VCs aren't acting the way they would if they really believed it. If they did, they would refuse funds from potential LPs, since they really can't find professionally responsible places to invest it. But that's not what they do. Alternately, they might take the LPs' money, warn them carefully that they could be investing in some real longshots, and then be willing to invest on fairly generous terms in any number of startups that look to be competently run and pursuing plausible opportunities. But that's not what they do, either.

Something doesn't add up.

<comment><USER11> The VCs of course need to maintain return but they are under some pressure to push money out the door and invest, as their fee is a percentage of funds invested.

There are many funds structured in a way where it's better for the fund (not necessarily for the investor) to invest 2x in questionable companies, than just 1x in great companies, lest they lose fees on the remainder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you are looking for the table of companies, like I was, then download the report via [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455) and skip to page 48.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was fundraising last year for the company I work at and one of the investors asked me if I'd consider doing XYZ. I said, well that would put our share price to such that you would create a massive valuation on the business, so no. They seemed confused and said but wouldn't you want to make the company that valuable. I smiled and ended the meeting. What they wanted would introduce an enormous amount of risk to the business because Valuation != valuable. I would imagine this type of conversation is how founders end up on that list. I think our business is great, but I'm not delusional.

<comment><USER14> Was this DO you were fundraising for? I would think sky high valuation for something that large would be exactly what founders want.

<comment><USER13> No, fundraising for DO wasn't like I've ever seen before as the revenue growth and customer growth was straight up and to the right when I joined (~employee 15). This was for the startup I founded after I left DO: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/24/stae-helps-cities-take- adv...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/24/stae-helps-cities-take-advantage-of- their-data/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The key thing here isn't about the fact that they are overvalued. It's more important to discuss the repercussions and what anyone is doing about it. It's not just Sillicon Valley, it's the startup scene all over the world.

How much is something really worth. Well how much is the next person willing to pay, that's really what this is all about. I've been down the road of VCs, exits etc... before and to be honest most of it is just fluff people make up, loop holes in the way things are valued, forget basic business and accounting they literally are making this up as they go.

Most VCs I feel have a detrimental effect on startups, the only thing a lot of them provide is money, which isn't always what a startup needs. It doesn't matter to the VCs that they are mostly wrong, they just have to be right once.

The question we need to ask here is what happens when it all crumbles down, due to the fact that all this is going on. How valuable something is ultimately depends on how many lives it improves. Whether something is valuable or not is measured by the amount of pain inflicted on society if the startup didn't exist, and ultimately if something is not needed, it wont survive anyway. The market is cruel like that, and having VC money shields entrepreneurs away from that crucial factor. All this fluffed up valuation has nothing to do with the survival of a business anyway.

<comment><USER16> _> The question we need to ask here is what happens when it all crumbles down, due to the fact that all this is going on._

The problem there is that anyone riding right up until the very end has a pretty substantial return advantage over the folks who stepped off early and turtled up.

Which gives a perverse incentive to stay all in, which gives everyone an incentive to keep the wheel spinning for as long as possible, which is probably why crashes only tend to happen with an external spark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Square is valued at 8.69B in [https://beta.finance.yahoo.com/quote/sq](https://beta.finance.yahoo.com/quote/sq)

So if this article is to be trusted it is overvalued by 4.4 B $. that is another square.

</comment><comment><USER18> May I recommend anyone wishing to understand more about valuation read the book Venture Deals?

[https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer- Capitali...](https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer- Capitalist/dp/1119259754/ref=dp_ob_title_bk)

The subtitle is tongue in cheek but also gives you a sense of how much you can learn and how rare company you are in once you understand the details.

</comment><comment><USER19> If you've been an employee at a unicorn and have common shares/options, check out table 8 (page 48) that lists common share valuations according to their model.

AIUI, the common share FMV they list should be comparable to the 409A common share valuations you may have gotten. Roughly speaking, assuming the funding round in the table is close in time to the 409A valuation.

</comment><comment><USER20> New research indicates lottery tickets are overvalued.

</comment><comment><USER21> Evergreen: [https://m.signalvnoise.com/press-release-basecamp- valuation-...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/press-release-basecamp-valuation- tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment-c221d8f86ad7)

</comment><comment><USER22> The subject title seems about right, but I take issue with the use of the word "new". they just found this out?

Nevertheless, it's not that much: 50-100%. that's hardly a dot-com bubble bust.

</comment><comment><USER23> Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of what is essentially a new IT bubble? After all, it bears all the traits of the last bubble so all that's missing is a trigger.

<comment><USER24> Will be probably happen. I guess the trigger will be something like Twitter going down under and not getting VC the payment that they WILL WANT in some close future. I guess then comes a few years of VC being a lot more cautious where it's going to be harder to sell your company idea to them. It's phases all the time and we're on a high right now.

<comment><USER23> Although right now money is so cheap and there isn't really any alternative if you want ROI. That said, US interest rates are on the rise more so than those in Europe so perhaps the end might come sooner than most people think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> More details on how they calculated everything would be nice. A better place went bankrupt!

</comment><comment><USER26> Maybe all asset classes are undervalued relative to the currencies they are priced in.

</comment><comment><USER27> TL;DR it is not fair to take the per-share valuation at the last round of funding and apply it to all stock if the newly issued stock has preferential rights.

10 apples are worth $100. 90 oranges are not therefore worth $900.

<comment><USER28> Well, also that the act of creating the apples devalued the oranges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> You don't say?

</comment><comment><USER30> news at 11

</comment><comment><USER31> Bears shit in woods. Pope catholic.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow, in other news - sky is blue!

</comment><comment><USER33> This is what Edgser Dijklmnopqstra was saying back before these unicorns existed.

We have drifted far from the vision of people building up computing.

</comment><comment><USER34> you know how Nigerian scammers write bad English on purpose so they don't draw smart people by mistake and waste time dealing with them?

unicorn valuation is the same mechanism.

do it so obviously wrong that you only draw dumb people who think they are the only ones smart enough to see the valuation is off so they buy thinking they can profit from their clever and unique insight. and the scam is complete.

</comment><comment><USER35> Yeah, when fucking websites are worth more than real estate it takes a genius to figure out there is something amiss. /s</comment>


IKEA To Sell Solar Panels In UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.wbur.org/npr/227790364/no-assembly-required-ikea-to-sell-solar-panels-in-u-k <comment><USER2> > _" 'We know that our customers want to live more sustainably and we hope > working with Hanergy to make solar panels affordable and easily available > helps them do just that,' said Joanna Yarrow, Ikea's head of sustainability > in the UK and Ireland."_

Semi-disposable furniture doesn't feel particularly sustainable. I guess it'd be better if they included a sensible reuse / recycle programme, and avoided some of the unpleasant materials they sometimes currently use.

They also have some scummy tax shenanigans. Avoiding tax is fine, but it's awkward when you also claim to be socially responsible.

Having an ex-Nazi for a leader is also troubling for some people.

([http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/8772...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/8772007/IKEA- founder-pledges-1bn-to-charity-following-Nazi-past-revelations.html))

> _The move follows last month's revelations that Mr Kamprad at the age of 17 > had been an active recruiter and a registered member of the Svensk > Socialistisk Samling (SSS), the successor to the Swedish Nazi party._

</comment><comment><USER3> At least they are already flat pack.</comment>


The only way to hit net zero by 2050 is to stop flying - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/e00819ba-4814-11ea-aee2-9ddbdc86190d <comment><USER2> Netzero has never been a good internet provider anyway.</comment>


The Nitty Gritty of "Hello World" on macOS (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.reinterpretcast.com/hello-world-mach-o <comment><USER2> I wrote a blog post on a similar topic that goes into a bit more detail in some areas: [https://adrummond.net/posts/macho](https://adrummond.net/posts/macho) There have also been some significant changes since 2014.

</comment><comment><USER3> First time I've seen that style of visualization for the byte code. Really effective way of breaking it down though, and allows a good way of visually seeing sections of code.

<comment> fake-name It's a pretty well known technique. BinViz.io[1] is a online viewer that lets you view arbitrary binaries, Veles[2] is a stand alone viewer.

They're super neat for first-pass "is this structured or random data" analysis of binary files.

1: [https://binvis.io/](https://binvis.io/) 2: [https://codisec.com/veles/](https://codisec.com/veles/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shouldn't this be

        fwrite("Hello, world!\n", 1, 14, stdout)

instead? After all, the string is 14 characters in length, not including the terminating NUL char. What does writing a NUL char to stdout do, anyways?

<comment><USER5> You are correct!

To answer your question, writing a NUL char to stdout is no problem. Some utilities can actually use it as a delimiter since it's so uncommon. I think most shells would just print nothing on the screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Prior discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8576901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8576901)</comment>


Building binary deb packages: a practical guide - <AUTHOR> https://www.internalpointers.com/post/build-binary-deb-package-practical-guide <comment><USER2> Wow, this is horrible advice. I'm a Debian Developer and an Ubuntu Core Developer. What this will do is create a package that doesn't properly handle dependencies and be incredibly fragile.

Debian and Ubuntu automatically resolve shared library dependencies are build time through dpkg-shlibs and friends. Debian's maintainer manual is likely the most detailed guide: [https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint- guide/start.en.html](https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint- guide/start.en.html)

However, it's a bit hard to grok, so I'm going to point people at the guide that got linked in the comments before I got here: [https://saveriomiroddi.github.io/Learn-to-prepare-PPA- packag...](https://saveriomiroddi.github.io/Learn-to-prepare-PPA-packages-by- setting-up-a-Ruby-PPA/)

<comment><USER3> It's not horrible advice, and none of the links is helpful if you want to achieve the stated goal in the article: Simply distributing a binary.

It's completely fine to package them in a deb. You especially should know that debs are really simple and work quite well for that. You place the binary along with the needed resource files (configuration for example) in the relative directory structure, add a minimal amount of meta information, and call one command to create the .deb. Easy and fast, and the result is very reliable, it will work everywhere.

And then you have the official way of abstraction over abstraction, "explained" with completely unreadable documentation, needing a dozen helper tools and environment variables, guided by documentation that fails to explain even just the basics of what it is you'd actually do if you followed that documentation.

No, the simple way shown by the submitted article is exactly correct.

Start with that. If it works, then you maybe take the next step later and set up a PPA, assuming the deb is not only for yourself.

<comment><USER4> I think it's bad advice, but not necessarily for the same reason. For the simple case of "I want to distribute a binary", there are far easier ways to make a deb - I use FPM, but there are other tools that will also do it in a one-liner.

For someone new to this, the article's 5-steps are certainly not "practical".

<comment><USER3> Well, a binary often needs at least one configuration file, so it's probably not just that. I think it's easy enough: You just precreate the directory structure, place the files, add DEBIAN/control, and then it's one command. If it can be even easier that's really cool :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It should be noted that none of this article applies to actual development that goes on in the Debian distribution from [https://www.debian.org](https://www.debian.org)

Official Debian development, being FOSS oriented, proceeds from Debian source packages instead, and one never creates a binary package from scratch as described in the article. Instead, we use `dpkg-buildpackage` and other similar tools. The creation of the source package is the hard part, having to follow all the aspects of Debian policy, including technical matters around quality.

<comment><USER6> Is there a guide on doing things that way? I've read some of the guides for making .deb packages (as I had to do so recently) and I have to be honest, what I encountered was "messy", articles and documentation that would work if followed but they didn't look even slightly similar.

I'm too embarrassed to even link to the sources that I created.

<comment><USER7> The official entry point for getting packages into Debian is here:

[https://mentors.debian.net/intro- maintainers](https://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers)

Debian packaging documentation is unfortunately a swamp, since people continue to write new guides instead of improving existing ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I still go to FPM ([https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm](https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm)) for any distro-native packaging needs I have.

<comment><USER9> For user apps on Linux I would prefer to use portable _AppImage_ , instead of regular packages.

<comment><USER10> I misread your post at first because, once upon a time, portable meant that software would work on Linux _and_ other platforms.

<comment><USER9> > _portable meant that software would work on Linux _and_ other platforms._

"portable" and "crossplatform" ("multiplatform") are different degrees of software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this guide glosses over the most difficult aspect: writing a package whose executables are generated reasonably reproducibly, using tools from other Debian packages. I've been a satisfied Debian user for over ten years, but I gave up on trying to package my own software. I could certainly figure out how to manually create a `.deb` with an executable and some man pages, but not how to automate the creation of that `.deb` in a way that lives up to my expectations of quality.

In contrast, I managed to submit software to Homebrew after two weeks of macOS, and to Nixpkgs within two _days_ of running NixOS.

<comment><USER5> As I mentioned in the other comment, the creation of a Debian source package has a lot of barriers, some of them good and for quality purposes, some of them bad and due to historical cruft. Documentation is also not very newbie- friendly. The actual automatic reproduction of a binary from a source package is simple - `dpkg-buildpackage`.

The tradeoff you get with other distributions being quick, is less quality assurance. Also, Debian still has a policy of working on 10 architectures, and this slows things down significantly sometimes. The other distributions you mentioned don't have this constraint.

<comment><USER12> > _The tradeoff you get with other distributions being quick, is less quality > assurance_

The crux of the problem is that all current official Debian packaging methods supported by Debian are sufficiently arcane and obtusely documented to the point that it's a high barrier to entry for people to do it right.

Personally, I've been doing RPM and Debian packaging for over a decade now, and it boggles the mind how much more complicated doing _correct_ Debian packaging is for essentially the same that happens on an RPM distribution like Fedora or openSUSE.

One of the reasons that I started using debbuild[1] for building Debian packages years ago was that I felt like I could get something that closely resembled a policy-compliant Debian package without impossible amounts of guesswork. Combined with macros adapted from Fedora and other distros[2] as an interface for Debian packaging policies, I can package things rather easily for Debian/Ubuntu using the much more straightforward guidelines from Fedora as a base.

As it turns out, it doesn't take that much effort to make packages that comply with Fedora/openSUSE Packaging Guidelines and Debian Policy with this tool, and it has drastically simplified my ability to maintain software across distributions in a way that still cleanly integrates with the distribution platform.

I wish that debbuild would be an officially supported mechanism in Debian, but it's probably unlikely without a Debian Developer advocating for it (and I suspect no one there would, as they probably like the existing system...).

[1]: [https://github.com/debbuild/debbuild](https://github.com/debbuild/debbuild)

[2]: [https://github.com/debbuild/debbuild- macros](https://github.com/debbuild/debbuild-macros)

 _(Disclaimer: I am now the current developer of debbuild and debbuild-macros, though I wasn 't when I first started using it)_

<comment><USER7> Getting debbuild into Debian would be relatively simple, but getting folks to switch existing packages away from debhelper is unlikely to be easy.

[https://mentors.debian.net/intro- maintainers](https://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is better: [https://github.com/phusion/debian-packaging-for-the- modern-d...](https://github.com/phusion/debian-packaging-for-the-modern- developer)

(someone with the applicable knowledge please fork and continue it)

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2019-pragmatic-debian- pack...](https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2019-pragmatic-debian-packaging)

<comment><USER15> Ironically, that gets the service management wrong.

The memcached people have provided a systemd service unit since 2011, for 8 years at the time that M. Bernat wrote that article. One quite clearly does _not_ use the -d and -P options, nor Type=forking. memcached is Type=simple per its authors.

Indeed, Type=forking in a systemd service unit is a good indicator that its author does not understand service management. It is invariably wrong because almost _no_ programs actually speak the forking readiness protocol. (They fork for rather different reasons, which do not in fact adhere to the requirements of the forking readiness protocol.) See it, and you know to treat pronouncements about how daemonization works from that source with a great deal of suspicion.

One such here is "memcached is started with the -d flag and will fork when it is ready to accept requests". In fact, memcached with -d forks before pretty much _all_ of its initialization, and _long before it is ready_ to accept requests. It hasn't even opened its listening sockets, or opened any data files or started any worker threads, at that point. Client services started because "memcached is ready" can fail to even connect to it. It might indeed yet fail whilst initializing, and _never become_ ready.

Really, memcached should have been runnable under inetd as a "wait" service from the start, which it unfortunately is not. That could have been adapted into a program that speaks the LISTEN_FDS protocol; and it would have a memcached.socket unit, with Accept=No and some ListenStream and ListenDatagram settings, and a Type=simple memcached.service unit. Then clients would have been able to reliably connect to the socket as soon as the service was started, and queue up until the service begins to accept() them when it becomes ready. Early socket opening in action.

* [https://github.com/memcached/memcached/blob/c460f0e13a35dcec...](https://github.com/memcached/memcached/blob/c460f0e13a35dcec26c71311dae6f31acec79f66/scripts/memcached.service)

* [http://jdebp.uk./FGA/unix-daemon-readiness-protocol-problems...](http://jdebp.uk./FGA/unix-daemon-readiness-protocol-problems.html#NooneSpeaksForking)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> <plug>

I've written a book about Debian packaging that spends most of its page count on building Debian packages with debhelper/dh, the approach that most (or all?) official packages use.

Here's a link for the HN crowd to get it for free: [https://leanpub.com/debian/c/pm](https://leanpub.com/debian/c/pm)

Happy to answer any questions as good as I can :-)

</plug>

</comment><comment><USER17> Debian packaging lacks a practical guide that is comprehensive enough to cover all modern use cases, but at the same time doesn't lack focus and goes to the point. The official docs are very extensive, but then they lack self- references to guide the reader to the interesting parts, or surprisingly lacks information that one would expect to find in there.

You will read about debian/rules file, but then open one from any example project and only see a single rule calling "dh". Turns out debhelper is there doing things for you. On to read about debhelper. But now sometimes you'll see some rules file that uses the target "override_dh_autoreconf", which was not explained, not even hinted, in the previous docs. On to read more.

Did you think you got everything? Not so fast!

You'll document yourself about debian/control files and see that using some variable-like names are common in lots of projects. For example this is used a lot:

 _Depends: ${misc:Depends}, ${shlibs:Depends}_

On with the same issue. For some reason (which new users reading the docs shouldn't really have to care), "shlibs:Depends" seems to be used all over the place, but it is not mentioned, hinted, or _even suggested_ in a mere "see also" paragraph in the docs about debian/control. If you are thorough enough you'll end up seeing a quick mention in a different section (8. Shared Libraries), and turns out the actual definition of this variable has to be checked out from "dpkg-shlibdeps", an independent package.

Now how to _actually_ build a package?

In the old days, the debian/rules file contained all the steps, but all is now helpfully abstracted by simply calling debhelper (dh). But calling debian/rules itself is abstracted also by dpkg-buildpackage. Calling dpkg- buildpackage is itself covered by debuild. And debuild is possibly covered by calling git-buildpackage. There is a crazy pile of tools calling tools calling other tools, that is nothing but extremely confusing for newcomers.

For the 99% of times you just want a local package for local installation, dpkg-buildpackage is what you want. But getting to that conclusion is not something you get pointed to from a brief introduction from an official manual. You get to that conclusion after either studying all tools and putting order to all scattered knowledge in your head, or after blindly following some random blog of forum post (which tend to be correct because thankfully all this tooling doesn't change much over time)

EDIT to stress that _all information is there_ , but the official docs lack a good enough effort of linking or including everything in such a way that it follows a logical learning process for newcomers.

<comment><USER18> Where do Debian maintainers collect their institutional knowledge, these days?

In the past it felt like DSCs uploaded to the FTP queues were the equivalent of committing code on a software project. Are they all in one git repository now, that can be tracked outside the project?

Nothing beats being able to read the code for learning how a system actually works.

<comment><USER19> DD here.

apt-get install maint-guide ...and then read:

file:///usr/share/developers-reference/index.html file:///usr/share/doc/maint- guide/html/index.en.html

Also look at existing packages and talk to DDs. Avoid random wikis.

I worked on many deployment systems and reading these guides made me a better engineer overall.

<comment><USER18> Thanks!

The problem I saw from parent and other posts was that there's two sets of information you need to build a package:

(1) the sources and debian patches, where the last public release of these is available from packages.debian.org

(2) knowing the right command to run to build the package.

In the old days you could guarantee everything would build via dpkg- buildpackage though you'd need to know to add -r fakeroot.

It sounded like nowadays it's more complicated than that?

<comment><USER17> The process itself seems to be very similar if not exactly the same.

The problem is not that, but the way to get there, and how the information is structured and presented, especially if you start from having no idea, or if you want to build your debian/ files from a blank slate and being able to read in a centralized resource about definitions of every line you add (which I think should be possible to do, for any system in general).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We use the JDeb maven plugin to package up our one-jar. Those are uploaded using Maven Wagon to a Nexus repository that our Ubuntu servers look at. It's beautiful how frictionless our deploys are.</comment>


Deep Tagging, Linking, Searching and Commenting for Videos - <AUTHOR> http://greatdance.com/danceblog/archives/video/000672.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know of any services that provide deep commenting for videos?</comment>


A new role for Qasar - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/a-new-role-for-qasar

<comment><USER2> Qasar has been instrumental in Instavest's development. He gives it to you straight up and has garnered the trust and respect of all YC founders. You can count on him for sage counsel and "gentle reminders" that keep you focused on growth and product. This is a great step for Qasar and an awesome win for YC. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER3> We were lucky to have Qasar as a mentor in W15, he was amazing. Very cool to see him help YC execute even better, well deserved.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, excited to see what is meant by this:

      Qasar will help scale our organization and operations as we tackle bigger and more ambitious projects

My interactions with him at YC left me impressed.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've never gone through YC but I have had a few interactions with Qasar. He is a very intelligent man and in my few interactions he has given me great insight into my own personal projects.

</comment><comment><USER6> When I met this guy in college I knew he was an awesome dude, but lost track of him. Surprised and glad to see he's risen so far in the world!

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome! Couldn't happen to harder-working guy. I'd say Qasar has been selfless with his time and given our team some great advice, even though we weren't a YC-funded company. He just cares. Interesting to see what'll come out of this - I'm sure it'll be great.

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats Qasar! Well deserved. I know you'll kill it!!

</comment><comment><USER9> Congrats Qasar!

</comment><comment><USER10> Book Face? Huh.</comment>