Can the four-day week work for tech?

It's that time of year when the clocks change and the nights draw in, the familiar starts to take on a new aspect as the shadows lengthen, and in the world of IT, trends that have been taken for granted are also starting to take on a new shape.

As countries battle productivity problems, can they replicate the success of Iceland's four-day working week? Elsewhere, developers have started to question just how useful AI coding tools really are, and OpenAI has had another successful funding round – but is interest in the company starting to wain?

In this episode, Jane is once again joined by Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to unpack the most interesting news that October brought.

Highlights

“These trials have been a major success, by all accounts. There's been a lot of chat about the shift to the four-day work week, which I'm sure we won't be moving to anytime soon. But a lot of workers in Iceland have definitely seen benefits in terms of improvements to work-life balance, the obvious reduction in hours. And Iceland hasn't taken a productivity hit in an economic sense, or in terms of the general business performance,”

“If you've got a three-day weekend, then you have one day that's winding down, one day to actually do something, and one day to have the Sunday scaries. But I mean, there are plenty of people probably in the UK, actually, who are already working a de facto four-day week. I work a four-day week, because I compress my hours, into four days.”

“[I]n the end, if there's nothing of any substance there, then it's going to go ‘pop’ eventually. So we'll have to see how – like I say that's not just OpenAI, it's the generative AI market in general that gives me that feel.”

Footnotes

• New four-day week trial kicks off for workers across UK
• Iceland’s four-day working week trials have been a roaring success – economic growth spiked, workers were happier, and burnout plummeted
• The benefits of a four-day week in tech
• UK's four-day week trial ends, leads to reduced burnout and sick days
• OpenAI just raised $6.6bn in funding, but it drove a hard bargain – investors will be stopped from funding rivals
• OpenAI could go bankrupt in 12 months if it doesn’t raise some serious cash – but is the Microsoft-backed AI giant too big to fail?

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