Why aren’t there more 80% jobs? – Evert Pot

There’s been a bit of a trend recently for some companies to move to 4-day
workweeks. This is making a decent amount of noise, but the actual number of
companies offering this still seems pretty few and far between. It’s not hard
to imagine why CEOs might feel this is risky, considering that many don’t even
trust people to work from home.

What I don’t see much are 80% jobs, which are 32 hour jobs, at 80% salary.
This should be a low-risk proposition that I think a lot of people in the tech
industry would take, if it were an option.

My background

I grew up in the Netherlands, but I moved to Canada for my first programmer
job at age 20. I stayed for a few years, moved back and started a job there,
and eventually moved back to Canada again and pretty much settled here.

I got strong roots and professional experience in both places, but there was
one thing that surprised me most in the Netherlands that I haven’t really seen
in North America.

Apparently Netherlands has a very high rate of part-time careers. Statstics
suggest that they are the highest in the world by a large margin. My personal
experience matches this too. I know a number of people in
the Netherlands that don’t work full-time, and I think there are more opportunities
for part-time career jobs. I don’t see them much in North America.

My first-hand experience is when I was interviewing a few years into my
career at a company named Ibuildings in Utrecht, Netherlands. After the
interview I was told I pretty much had the job, and then the interviewer
asked me if I wanted to work 4 or 5 days per week.

I only had Canadian work experience, so I was pretty shocked being asked
this. Picking 4 days seemed like a no-brainer to me.
I would get paid for 32 hours per week, instead of 40 and got to pick a
day of the week I wanted off (I picked Friday). At this company
I believe most people took the 4-day option. So yes, I got paid 20% less,
but with the tax bracket I was in this was closer to 10%.

For me it was great. 5 days actually feels like a lot, and 2 days in a
weekend never feels quite enough. A sentiment so common it’s boring talk
about it. I used the extra time to work on open source, errands, and picked
a few small freelance gigs here and there.

I’m leaning pretty socialist, but even with a capitalist hat on, I’m
surprised this doesn’t happen more. Why not give employees the option to
do this? Not everyone will take the option, but for those that do here’s some
advantages:

Advantages of offering 80% jobs

  • For the salary cost of 4 employees at 40 hours, you get 5 employees at 32
    hours.
  • Those 5 employees are more rested, and may be generally happier.
  • There’s a lower risk of burn-out and attrition.
  • You get the combined experience of 5 people instead of 4.
  • Also I don’t believe for the 80% workers, you only get 80% output. Most
    people just aren’t productive all the time.
  • Advertising this as a benefit in your company may also be attractive to
    candidates for hiring.

There are also some drawbacks. Every employee will have some overhead such as
a laptop, benefits and general admin. Probably a larger expense is the cost
to recruit, although in the long run a lower attrition rate might make up for
that a bit.

But my intuition tells me that this overhead is probably well worth the
benefit of a smarter, larger, happier workforce.

Some notes:

  • I want to stress that working 4 days should be presented as a choice. Some
    people prefer to work more for more money, and you don’t want to scare them.
  • Another, even more lightweight option for irriationally risk-averse
    traditionalists is to offer 90% jobs, resulting in an extra day every 2
    weeks.

PHP 8.3.0 RC 4 available for testing – PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

The PHP team is pleased to announce the release of PHP 8.3.0, RC 4. This is the fourth release candidate, continuing the PHP 8.3 release cycle, the rough outline of which is specified in the PHP Wiki. For source downloads of PHP 8.3.0, RC 4 please visit the download page. Please carefully test this version and report any issues found in the bug reporting system. Please DO NOT use this version in production, it is an early test version. For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive. The next release will be the fifth release candidate (RC 5), planned for 26 October 2023. The signatures for the release can be found in the manifest or on the QA site. Thank you for helping us make PHP better.

Xdebug Update: September 2023 – Derick Rethans

Xdebug Update: September 2023

London, UK
Tuesday, October 10th 2023, 15:00 BST

In this monthly update I explain what happened with Xdebug development in the past month. These are normally published on the first Tuesday on or after the 5th of each month.

Patreon and GitHub supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

You can become a patron or support me through GitHub Sponsors. I am currently 37% towards my $2,500 per month goal, which is set to allow continued maintenance of Xdebug.

If you are leading a team or company, then it is also possible to support Xdebug through a subscription.

In the last month, I spend around 28 hours on Xdebug, with 25 hours funded.

Towards Xdebug 3.3

In September I released a first alpha release of Xdebug 3.3 so that people trying out PHP 8.3 Release Candidates have a compatible Xdebug to test with.

This quickly followed by a second alpha version due to issues with the PECL website. Instead of mangling UTF-8 characters, it stopped accepting them altogether.

I have reintroduced the xdebug.collect_params setting, which I had removed in Xdebug 3.0. Instead of the setting, Xdebug would just always collect functions’ and methods’ arguments while tracing. However, some users were suggesting that this created too much information which was not always needed. With the setting restored, you can now again hide these function arguments from trace files.

As frameworks are getting more complicated, they are more likely to hit Xdebug’s default xdebug.max_nesting_level limit of 256. In Xdebug 3.3, this will now be 512.

The maximum nesting level setting is now less important that it was all these years ago. The PHP engine now uses stack in a more economic way. This feature unfortunately is negated when extensions override PHP’s internal execution method, which is what Xdebug has to do to capture function calls for tracing, profiling, and certain breakpoints.

In PHP 8.1 a new Observer API was added, which would allow extensions to observe user-land function calls without having to override the internal execution method. This means that the stack is used more sparingly again. It also would allow for these extensions to work better with opcache enabled.

I am currently in the process of investigating whether Xdebug can make use of this Observer API as well, while maintaining all its functionality and without BC breaks. I will keep you updated in the next monthly update.

Beyond this, I will continue to work on the features and issues on the 3.3 roadmap, without any guarantees these tickets will be implemented.

Xdebug Videos

I have published one new videos in the last month:

Let me know what you’d like to see!

You can find all previous videos on my YouTube channel.

Business Supporter Scheme and Funding

In the last month, no new business supporters signed up.

Besides business support, I also maintain a Patreon page, a profile on GitHub sponsors, as well as an OpenCollective organisation.

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently intr

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PHP 8.3.0 RC 3 available for testing – PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

The PHP team is pleased to announce the release of PHP 8.3.0, RC 3. This is the third release candidate, continuing the PHP 8.3 release cycle, the rough outline of which is specified in the PHP Wiki. For source downloads of PHP 8.3.0, RC 3 please visit the download page. Please carefully test this version and report any issues found in the bug reporting system. Please DO NOT use this version in production, it is an early test version. For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive. The next release will be the fourth release candidate (RC 4), planned for 12 October 2023. The signatures for the release can be found in the manifest or on the QA site. Thank you for helping us make PHP better.

PHP 8.3.0 RC 2 available for testing – PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

The PHP team is pleased to announce the release of PHP 8.3.0, RC 2. This is the second release candidate, continuing the PHP 8.3 release cycle, the rough outline of which is specified in the PHP Wiki. For source downloads of PHP 8.3.0, RC 2 please visit the download page. Please carefully test this version and report any issues found in the bug reporting system. Please DO NOT use this version in production, it is an early test version. For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive. The next release will be the third release candidate (RC 3), planned for 28 September 2023. The signatures for the release can be found in the manifest or on the QA site. Thank you for helping us make PHP better.