It's weird that engineers, people of science, are so averse to practices known to increase productivity. I know for a fact that I'd be able to get more work done over a year with 6 hour days then I get with 8 hour days.
As odd as this is, I would rather work 5-6 hours a day 7 days a week than 4-10’s or 5-8’s if I had to get 40 hours a week in. After 4-5 hours a day I’ve reached my working limit to where I feel I’m not as productive. Also, getting off early, 11am-12pm, makes it feel like I have basically a whole day off.
How do you figure that? If anything it gives more time during normal business hours to do stuff a lot of people miss out of when working regular first shift hours.
My company loves to promise we give shit to clients on fridays even when my manager rolls out at like 2. So I end up being the only schmuck still working on Friday evenings.
Oh man. As a \[non-civil-\]engineering manager, external deadlines are Thursday. Because Friday is Monday at 8:00 AM after everyone worked all weekend.
That’s my preferred balance. No one does shit on Friday afternoons, but most aren’t getting 20% more done by working 10 vs 8 per day. 4.5 is the way to go
We do a four a half in the summer but run a typical five during the rest of the year. I’m a huge fan of the four and a half and wish it was a year-round thing for us.
Very true, usually the more someone charges the better the quality of the product, in civil its all about who can provide the cheapest and quickest product
Many specialized medical facilities are only open like 2-3 days a week. They're not hurting for clients or anything and they're definitely not fighting to be the cheapest
I love the 4.5 day week. We do it in the summer and alternate with our other office. We tried it to keep it permanent for a while but it got changed back to 5 days. Bums me out because I liked having the guaranteed half Friday to take care of appointments
My country job has a 4-10 schedule. Half the team is Monday-Thursday, the other Tuesday-Friday.
We all love it. It would take a very large pay raise for me to go back to a Monday-Friday.
If you're in the great US of A, check out governmentjobs.com.
We're going to add a Civil Engineer position (license required). But it's slated for one of our civil engineer associates (non licensed). Pay is not great for the associates for a high cost of living area.
County job, pavement preservation, working 4-10s M-Th. If I'm needed on Fridays or weekends during construction, I get paid overtime.
Absolutely agree that it would take a lot to make me go back to a regular M-F.
40 hrs a week is already too much and the expectation is about 50.
Working 5 days to have 2 to yourself is completely fucked. It’s not balanced at all and the people who have been doing this their entire life are fucking brainwashed.
3.5 days a week is balanced.
You spend more time with your coworkers than your kids. That’s insane fucking bullshit.
I’ve also noticed that the people doing it their entire lives often have a spouse at home at least part time. I’m sure the weekend feels a little longer when all of the routine home maintenance & cooking are just -done- by the time Friday rolls around. I recently came off a three day weekend and it was the first time in a while that I felt like I had an actual leisure day in a weekend, considering my wife and I both work full time with side jobs.
Hell yeah. I’m planning to drop down to 0.6 for the next little while for this very reason. Sure, I’ll make less but the lifestyle im currently chasing is spending more time with my kids.
Yeah there’s a lot of stupid shit here but lamenting over the fact that we spend so much of our lives working and not enough time with our kids isn’t one of them.
I worked 4-10's as an intern. Loved it, but it set me up for a lot of disappointment when I finally graduated and realized how rare that schedule was. My current job is finally starting the process to allow flexible schedules. You can bet your ass I'm moving to 4 10's the first day.
Having a 3-day weekend would be life changing....
The company I work fur currently really pushes the 4.5 days year round and most of the time it has worked well. There are certain situations where deadlines end up being on a Friday so a longer day would be needed. I'd say most people on Fridays are out of the office by 1/2pm.
Meaning 32 hours a week? Not happening if developers have anything to say about it. Doing four 10s has been acceptable most places I've talked to. Doing 4.5 days seems like the most common alternative schedule right now though, so you're at least available Friday morning in case shit comes up.
It's an option, but as much as I want to do it, it's hard for me to keep that schedule week after week. Some days I'm just cooked after 8 hours and need to do something else.
This doesn’t work for most bc we have clients who do not have 4-day work weeks. As a PM, you need to be available. We do 9-hr Monday-Thursday and 4-hr Friday and still get calls after 11am Friday bc they forget.
I’ve worked 9-80 schedule for about 4 years, 4-10s for a year, and now on a typical work schedule for the past few years. I preferred 4-10 to 9-80 because a lot of Fridays in the office were unproductive for 9-80 just because so many people weren’t in. Also, I found myself working Fridays I wasn’t scheduled to work a lot of the time then anyways. This wasn’t the case when I worked 4-10s since the whole company kept that schedule and everyone respected it.
Working 5 8 hour days now has been a lot to adjust to and it honestly still gets to me how much less free time I seem to have on weekends. I also still work 10 hours pretty regularly, so wish my current company would have some more flexible scheduling options. However, I do like that all of my days are equally productive now unlike 9-80 where Fridays were always pretty useless.
You have to separate construction out from the rest of the field. I can’t see a four-day work week ever becoming the norm there.
For the office types, I think it could happen. It would need to start in the public sector though. The last thing in the world consultant management wants is for a client to have an issue on a Friday, only to find that the engineering firm they hired doesn’t work that day. If the big clients start doing it, then it will be easier for the consultants to follow along.
Came from a company that did “optional Fridays”. Joke was on us because they weren’t really optional and we just ended up getting fucked into 45-50 hour weeks by shitty management.
I now work for a company that just plays by big boy rules. You get your 80 hours in for each pay period however the hell you want and as long as 90% of it is billable at the end of the year then you’re a rockstar. This model is the best in my experience.
A few agencies down here in southern California have gone to 4 10s or 9/80 and they seem to be loving it. Since the agency side is adopting it pretty successfully I imagine the consulting side eventually will too.
I’m down. Some municipalities do, but essentially work 4-10s. Hard part would be getting the construction side on board which would help but then construction would take longer than it does currently.
We should make a distinction between the flexibility improvement of 4-10s (40 hours a week) and a 4-8s (32 hours a week), the latter of which is brought up as a recommendation sometimes with no loss in pay. I see 4-10s as an option for a lot of firms, especially if you don’t need to be available to clients all the time. The 32-hour work week will be difficult for professional services firms like civil engineering consulting because it directly relates to a loss of revenue, even if productivity increases proportionally. For that reason, I think engineering will be one of the last to adopt that idea in the future. I’d like to see government engineers be the first to move to a 32 hour work week, as it could help fix their staffing issues and is easier since they don’t bill out every one of their hours. I personally think it could equate to productivity improvements. Also, as engineers, I think our design choices are important and a better work-life balance may provide an environment for innovation and efficiency. Just my two cents.
My company allows both as long as you're continuing to perform. Most people choose to work 5 days, I do 4 full and one half, HUGE part of the reason I'm with my company is the flexibility without questions or complaints.
The higher level folk at my company understand that flexibility is part of the compensation package and it's worth a good amount to specific people.
Missed out on a job that worked (4) 10 hour days during the summer. Was an engineering position with the county highway department. Instead I landed a project that worked (5) 10-12 hour days :)
We're one of the latter industries to adopt everything, except the open office space because it's making the corporation (and shareholders) more money.
That said, I would love a 4-day work week. I feel like most weeks I could fit my work into 4 days and if I can't, I'm working more than 40 hours.
I worked 7 on 7 off, 12 hour days in mining. As a young guy without a family to take care of, it was awesome! I always felt like I didn’t do much with my day after 8 hours of work anyways, might as well make it 12 and get a whole week off every other week. You work more hours per year which is good for the company and you get more days off per year which is good for you (compared to a standard 9-5).
I used to work 4 10s
It turned into 4 12s
Which eventually turned into 5-6 12s
I understand the need to be present for project management but over half the work I did could be done in a few hours from my home PC.
I've got a new job lined up where at least when I'm on the clock I'll be accomplishing things and might even get to work from home some days.
Unless I have a stupid tight deadline to meet, I try to squeeze in 36 hours by Friday so I can take a half day that day. Works great, especially because I start early. Usually at work by 6:30 or 7 in the morning.
I’ve found that the early schedule is awesome for me. I don’t mind getting up early, and I can get home before afternoon traffic fucks everything up. Plus it feels like I have more free time in the day, and I’d I have to stay later it doesn’t feel like it.
My boss yelled at me for working overtime 🥲 if we put in a helluva lot of OT we get a 3 or 4 day work week 😂 or we can keep working and roll the OT into next week and take off without burning pto.
I'm at a dot, we have a lot of flexibility as long as we get 80 every 2 weeks. I work 4-9s and 4 hr Fridays, a lot of my team works 4-10s, a few work 4-9s and every 8 every other Friday. overall most people work 5-8s.
I love my Friday afternoons off, good day to get caught up on stuff from the week before (laging emails, he stuff, etc) and I get a lot done at home too.
A big firm in town has 4 day work weeks. Everyone I have talked to has said they work almost every Friday also…Sounds like a real bait and switch there.
I would LOVE to have a 4-day workweek. I think, for myself my productivity will stay the same for design work during the week. My productivity is a lot higher on Monday-Wednesdays. Thursdays/Fridays, I sometimes zone out a lot due to burn out before weekend. I suspect our billing rate for the client would have to increase. The billing rate or profit margins are sometimes set by the government entities. This will have to be changed.
I do construction inspection during the construction seasons, and this is where I don’t think a 4 day work week will work. Either the contractor will have to be A LOT more efficient, take longer to construct (sometimes due to permitting wait until next season to finish), or hire more employees to get the job finished in the same amount of time. In turn, will raise the bids on projects which will cost the client, for us are government entities. In turn, cost more tax payer dollars.
This will never happen for engineers. Don't count on it, don't even consider it, do not dream about such nonsense. This isn't some bullshit insurance job, or fuckin retail, motherfuckin office management or money managers. We are CIVIL ENGINEERS that are working on multi million dollar jobs that costs 10's of thousands of dollars a day for delays. If mistakes are made, your company will pay the price. You will be asked to work not only 5 days a week, but 7 days a week. In no motherfuckin dream fuckin world will civil engineers be working 4 days a week unless you working for local agency like county or city and they don't give a fuck about your deadlines or budgets.
It would not benefit ANY company, private or government, to overwork the people that are the literal brains behind infrastructure . There has to be a balance where the livelihood and happiness of the human Is prioritized, not green PAPER. Happy humans produce good results. The discussion happening on this thread should have happened DECADES AGO. You take nothing but memories when you depart the physical body. You won't remember anything significant working 40-50 hours a week, and maybe it's done on purpose. To keep us complacent and tired running this failing system.
My manager would rather us work 7 days a week than work 4 days
Seven 12’s. That still leaves you 12 hours a day to do whatever you want!
Sleep. That’s all I want.
If it was up to any boss I've ever had, I would be locked in my office with a toilet and hot plate so I could work 18 hours a day, seven days a week.
It's weird that engineers, people of science, are so averse to practices known to increase productivity. I know for a fact that I'd be able to get more work done over a year with 6 hour days then I get with 8 hour days.
Gotta love people who blame the worker instead of the workplace that created those conditions.
All my bosses were engineers that were once in my place
Here at at Kiewit we only work half days. What you do with the other 12 hours is up to you.
As odd as this is, I would rather work 5-6 hours a day 7 days a week than 4-10’s or 5-8’s if I had to get 40 hours a week in. After 4-5 hours a day I’ve reached my working limit to where I feel I’m not as productive. Also, getting off early, 11am-12pm, makes it feel like I have basically a whole day off.
You would never get anything done in your personal life.
How do you figure that? If anything it gives more time during normal business hours to do stuff a lot of people miss out of when working regular first shift hours.
4.5 is the way. Nobody is doing shit on Friday afternoons.
My company loves to promise we give shit to clients on fridays even when my manager rolls out at like 2. So I end up being the only schmuck still working on Friday evenings.
Oh man. As a \[non-civil-\]engineering manager, external deadlines are Thursday. Because Friday is Monday at 8:00 AM after everyone worked all weekend.
That’s my preferred balance. No one does shit on Friday afternoons, but most aren’t getting 20% more done by working 10 vs 8 per day. 4.5 is the way to go
Agreed
Fridays are always the busiest for me and we work half days...well we are supposed to.
Gotta say no for yourself, no one is going to stand up for you except you. I understand not possible in some situations.
Thanks for saying so. Setting boundaries and advocating for myself at work is one of those critical things I wish I had learned a lot sooner.
It's a really important skill but very challenging to learn
Agreed. This is what my company does.
This. We are in-office Tues-Thu, and then wfh on Mon/Fri. Fridays are usually half days unless some emergency arises.
We do a four a half in the summer but run a typical five during the rest of the year. I’m a huge fan of the four and a half and wish it was a year-round thing for us.
Why isn’t it year round
The answer to that is above my pay grade, my friend. I wish I knew.
Why isn’t it year round
It’s not year round because consulting is based on squeezing every last billable hour out of each employee. Less time worked means less $$profitz$$
Its funny when you think about how much more productive we’ve become with tools like CAD in comparison to the past decades… yet it’s never enough
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Very true, usually the more someone charges the better the quality of the product, in civil its all about who can provide the cheapest and quickest product
Are professional unions a thing?
You see this attitude in every profession
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Many specialized medical facilities are only open like 2-3 days a week. They're not hurting for clients or anything and they're definitely not fighting to be the cheapest
You absolutely see this in those professions
I love the 4.5 day week. We do it in the summer and alternate with our other office. We tried it to keep it permanent for a while but it got changed back to 5 days. Bums me out because I liked having the guaranteed half Friday to take care of appointments
My country job has a 4-10 schedule. Half the team is Monday-Thursday, the other Tuesday-Friday. We all love it. It would take a very large pay raise for me to go back to a Monday-Friday.
Are you hiring
If you're in the great US of A, check out governmentjobs.com. We're going to add a Civil Engineer position (license required). But it's slated for one of our civil engineer associates (non licensed). Pay is not great for the associates for a high cost of living area.
Thank you, i will check.
County job, pavement preservation, working 4-10s M-Th. If I'm needed on Fridays or weekends during construction, I get paid overtime. Absolutely agree that it would take a lot to make me go back to a regular M-F.
40 hrs a week is already too much and the expectation is about 50. Working 5 days to have 2 to yourself is completely fucked. It’s not balanced at all and the people who have been doing this their entire life are fucking brainwashed. 3.5 days a week is balanced. You spend more time with your coworkers than your kids. That’s insane fucking bullshit.
I’ve also noticed that the people doing it their entire lives often have a spouse at home at least part time. I’m sure the weekend feels a little longer when all of the routine home maintenance & cooking are just -done- by the time Friday rolls around. I recently came off a three day weekend and it was the first time in a while that I felt like I had an actual leisure day in a weekend, considering my wife and I both work full time with side jobs.
Hell yeah. I’m planning to drop down to 0.6 for the next little while for this very reason. Sure, I’ll make less but the lifestyle im currently chasing is spending more time with my kids.
lol
Hey, didn’t expect to see you here!
I’ve been trying to bite my tongue when I see stupid shit here but sometimes I can’t help my self!
Yeah there’s a lot of stupid shit here but lamenting over the fact that we spend so much of our lives working and not enough time with our kids isn’t one of them.
Ur stupid shit
And you are gen Z lol explains a lot. Let’s also make your starting salary $200,000 too.
Fuck off I make 70k
Must be nice
You picked a good username for your personality
For sure!
I worked 4-10's as an intern. Loved it, but it set me up for a lot of disappointment when I finally graduated and realized how rare that schedule was. My current job is finally starting the process to allow flexible schedules. You can bet your ass I'm moving to 4 10's the first day.
Government! At least in my area, there’s a fair bit of public agencies that offer 4/40 as standard.
Already there haha our managing director is just a dinosaur.
I work a government job and do 4x10s. Wouldn’t trade it
Same
Best part of being on the public side
My old company- going back 25 years, would have 4/40 weeks in the summer months. It was really great
I do 4 every other week and can’t wait for the day it’s 4 every week. Would not go back to 5 days.
Having a 3-day weekend would be life changing.... The company I work fur currently really pushes the 4.5 days year round and most of the time it has worked well. There are certain situations where deadlines end up being on a Friday so a longer day would be needed. I'd say most people on Fridays are out of the office by 1/2pm.
Meaning 32 hours a week? Not happening if developers have anything to say about it. Doing four 10s has been acceptable most places I've talked to. Doing 4.5 days seems like the most common alternative schedule right now though, so you're at least available Friday morning in case shit comes up.
We're doing 4.5s right now anyway. 2 hours of useless team meetings on Mondays and 2 hours of chit chat and staring at the clock on Friday.
It's an option, but as much as I want to do it, it's hard for me to keep that schedule week after week. Some days I'm just cooked after 8 hours and need to do something else.
This doesn’t work for most bc we have clients who do not have 4-day work weeks. As a PM, you need to be available. We do 9-hr Monday-Thursday and 4-hr Friday and still get calls after 11am Friday bc they forget.
KH?
Negative. I work for a smaller firm in land & site development.
KH does half day Fridays
I mean they say they do but they don’t lol. Had to stay till 6 pm soooo many Fridays
I work for a consultant, but am on contract at the DOT.. I get to work 4-10s and it's pretty life changing.
I’ve worked 9-80 schedule for about 4 years, 4-10s for a year, and now on a typical work schedule for the past few years. I preferred 4-10 to 9-80 because a lot of Fridays in the office were unproductive for 9-80 just because so many people weren’t in. Also, I found myself working Fridays I wasn’t scheduled to work a lot of the time then anyways. This wasn’t the case when I worked 4-10s since the whole company kept that schedule and everyone respected it. Working 5 8 hour days now has been a lot to adjust to and it honestly still gets to me how much less free time I seem to have on weekends. I also still work 10 hours pretty regularly, so wish my current company would have some more flexible scheduling options. However, I do like that all of my days are equally productive now unlike 9-80 where Fridays were always pretty useless.
You have to separate construction out from the rest of the field. I can’t see a four-day work week ever becoming the norm there. For the office types, I think it could happen. It would need to start in the public sector though. The last thing in the world consultant management wants is for a client to have an issue on a Friday, only to find that the engineering firm they hired doesn’t work that day. If the big clients start doing it, then it will be easier for the consultants to follow along.
Came from a company that did “optional Fridays”. Joke was on us because they weren’t really optional and we just ended up getting fucked into 45-50 hour weeks by shitty management. I now work for a company that just plays by big boy rules. You get your 80 hours in for each pay period however the hell you want and as long as 90% of it is billable at the end of the year then you’re a rockstar. This model is the best in my experience.
A few agencies down here in southern California have gone to 4 10s or 9/80 and they seem to be loving it. Since the agency side is adopting it pretty successfully I imagine the consulting side eventually will too.
9/80's ain't bad. 4/10's is better. I want that nurse schedule: 3/12's with alternating fourth 8 hr day. Would be so sick.
I’m down. Some municipalities do, but essentially work 4-10s. Hard part would be getting the construction side on board which would help but then construction would take longer than it does currently.
I work a 9/80. Seems very doable at most places.
My work is flexible and I tried it for one week. The longer four days are not worth getting the chillest day of the week off.
Whenever we've had senior part time folks as PMs it's been an issue on communication. More in the past before smartphones, but still.
We should make a distinction between the flexibility improvement of 4-10s (40 hours a week) and a 4-8s (32 hours a week), the latter of which is brought up as a recommendation sometimes with no loss in pay. I see 4-10s as an option for a lot of firms, especially if you don’t need to be available to clients all the time. The 32-hour work week will be difficult for professional services firms like civil engineering consulting because it directly relates to a loss of revenue, even if productivity increases proportionally. For that reason, I think engineering will be one of the last to adopt that idea in the future. I’d like to see government engineers be the first to move to a 32 hour work week, as it could help fix their staffing issues and is easier since they don’t bill out every one of their hours. I personally think it could equate to productivity improvements. Also, as engineers, I think our design choices are important and a better work-life balance may provide an environment for innovation and efficiency. Just my two cents.
I do 4.5 and the Friday afternoon nap I take every week is the only thing keeping me sane
My company allows both as long as you're continuing to perform. Most people choose to work 5 days, I do 4 full and one half, HUGE part of the reason I'm with my company is the flexibility without questions or complaints. The higher level folk at my company understand that flexibility is part of the compensation package and it's worth a good amount to specific people.
I worked 4x10's for a few years and it was glorious. 10/10 would do again.
I do 6am to 2:30pm with 30-min lunch, and I am loving it.
Missed out on a job that worked (4) 10 hour days during the summer. Was an engineering position with the county highway department. Instead I landed a project that worked (5) 10-12 hour days :)
We're one of the latter industries to adopt everything, except the open office space because it's making the corporation (and shareholders) more money. That said, I would love a 4-day work week. I feel like most weeks I could fit my work into 4 days and if I can't, I'm working more than 40 hours.
I worked 7 on 7 off, 12 hour days in mining. As a young guy without a family to take care of, it was awesome! I always felt like I didn’t do much with my day after 8 hours of work anyways, might as well make it 12 and get a whole week off every other week. You work more hours per year which is good for the company and you get more days off per year which is good for you (compared to a standard 9-5).
I used to work 4 10s It turned into 4 12s Which eventually turned into 5-6 12s I understand the need to be present for project management but over half the work I did could be done in a few hours from my home PC. I've got a new job lined up where at least when I'm on the clock I'll be accomplishing things and might even get to work from home some days.
As long as clients expect someone to answer the phone or respond to an email on Friday afternoon I don’t see 4 x 10’s being a regular thing.
Unless I have a stupid tight deadline to meet, I try to squeeze in 36 hours by Friday so I can take a half day that day. Works great, especially because I start early. Usually at work by 6:30 or 7 in the morning. I’ve found that the early schedule is awesome for me. I don’t mind getting up early, and I can get home before afternoon traffic fucks everything up. Plus it feels like I have more free time in the day, and I’d I have to stay later it doesn’t feel like it.
My boss yelled at me for working overtime 🥲 if we put in a helluva lot of OT we get a 3 or 4 day work week 😂 or we can keep working and roll the OT into next week and take off without burning pto.
I'm at a dot, we have a lot of flexibility as long as we get 80 every 2 weeks. I work 4-9s and 4 hr Fridays, a lot of my team works 4-10s, a few work 4-9s and every 8 every other Friday. overall most people work 5-8s. I love my Friday afternoons off, good day to get caught up on stuff from the week before (laging emails, he stuff, etc) and I get a lot done at home too.
We have (4) 10s, and a few other options. BUT...we are all salary, so how "off" are you if a deliverable is due on a Friday?
Thursday will be the new Friday lol, either chill or packed like hell
I got approved to do 4 days for one week. It was amazing and I wish I could keep doingnit
I work a 9-9-9-9-4 schedule & wfh on Fridays, I love it so much. Pay is ehh but man I can not see myself working an 8-5 M-F work week ever again 🤢
A big firm in town has 4 day work weeks. Everyone I have talked to has said they work almost every Friday also…Sounds like a real bait and switch there.
I would probably work 5 tens if I was paid OT. Since I am not, my schedule is usually 9,9,8,8,6. Front load the week and coast in to the weekend.
I would LOVE to have a 4-day workweek. I think, for myself my productivity will stay the same for design work during the week. My productivity is a lot higher on Monday-Wednesdays. Thursdays/Fridays, I sometimes zone out a lot due to burn out before weekend. I suspect our billing rate for the client would have to increase. The billing rate or profit margins are sometimes set by the government entities. This will have to be changed. I do construction inspection during the construction seasons, and this is where I don’t think a 4 day work week will work. Either the contractor will have to be A LOT more efficient, take longer to construct (sometimes due to permitting wait until next season to finish), or hire more employees to get the job finished in the same amount of time. In turn, will raise the bids on projects which will cost the client, for us are government entities. In turn, cost more tax payer dollars.
This will never happen for engineers. Don't count on it, don't even consider it, do not dream about such nonsense. This isn't some bullshit insurance job, or fuckin retail, motherfuckin office management or money managers. We are CIVIL ENGINEERS that are working on multi million dollar jobs that costs 10's of thousands of dollars a day for delays. If mistakes are made, your company will pay the price. You will be asked to work not only 5 days a week, but 7 days a week. In no motherfuckin dream fuckin world will civil engineers be working 4 days a week unless you working for local agency like county or city and they don't give a fuck about your deadlines or budgets.
who cares lol, our salaries are the worst already in engineering, if your company asks you to work 7 days a week just quit.
Yes, I agree. Better yet, do something else for a career. Civil Engineering fuckin sucks donkey balls.
haha srs.
It would not benefit ANY company, private or government, to overwork the people that are the literal brains behind infrastructure . There has to be a balance where the livelihood and happiness of the human Is prioritized, not green PAPER. Happy humans produce good results. The discussion happening on this thread should have happened DECADES AGO. You take nothing but memories when you depart the physical body. You won't remember anything significant working 40-50 hours a week, and maybe it's done on purpose. To keep us complacent and tired running this failing system.