The 40-Week Work Year

I am once again calling for tech companies to adopt a 40-week working year. That breaks down to: two weeks of national holidays, ten weeks of elective PTO that employees can take whenever they prefer. An average of one week off per month.

(This is already the Lumpcorp vacation policy, to be outlined further in our upcoming public employee manual. Subscribe below, and I'll personally email you when it's available.)

Not every tech company should do this, of course; and no matter how sound my advice is, only a tiny fraction will ever act on it, so nobody need worry about American tech generally tanking its productivity with overly permissive PTO policies.

But those rare few who follow Lumpcorp's example will realize the same advantages we have: a massive edge in hiring, which attracts talented people whose exceptional productivity more than compensates for the lost time on the clock.

The math behind this is blindingly obvious:

How much more productive is an excellent engineer than an average engineer? Anyone with industry experience will tell you the difference is not 20 or 30 percent, it's easily 2x or 3x or more (hence the fabled "10x engineer").

By comparison, a 40-week working year only has 20 percent fewer working days than a 50-week working year.

The result is that you're implementing a vacation policy which makes it possible to hire uniformly excellent engineers, who produce 2-3x more and better work than their lesser peers, and are on the clock 20 percent less than is standard. The employer comes out far ahead in that bargain.

The other reason tech companies should do this is because, unlike many other businesses, they can.

Consider, by contrast, a restaurant and its vacation policy for waitresses. When a waitress is on vacation, there must be a replacement, or tables go unserved. In that way, a waitress taking vacation is a burden on the rest of the staff (not to say waitresses shouldn't also get some vacation).

Tech is entirely different. Most days, Lumpcorp's engineering department can ignore our systems, and everything hums along without issue. We want someone available when troubles arise, but we don't need all hands on deck. As a general principle, a system built by 10 engineers can be maintained day-to-day by one.

The relative ease of operating tech products, once they are built and deployed, means you can be generous with your PTO without risking the operation.

And yet: nobody but Lumpcorp does this.

I'm happy to continue accruing that hiring edge that comes from being the only person who ever understood that employees love PTO and will join your company simply because it has a great PTO policy. At this late date, I'm just surprised nobody else has caught on, and that I continue looking like a genius—frankly—for doing something so obvious.