In addition to that, I'm frankly not sure that a 10 hour/week (2 hour/day) savings is going to be worth a 25% pay cut to most people.
I'm not saying two hours per day (or an extra weekday or whatever) is entirely trivial, just that one has to be very fastidious and organised to take advantage of it. Even so, the economics of human task-switching and overhead, particularly in high cognitive load professions like software, are such that the marginal utility of two extra hours is going to be low. Life is not a spreadsheet, where one gets home at 3 PM and $ENJOYMENT or $NECESSARY_ERRANDS immediately commence. I'd probably just catch a breather for a few hours, if lucky, or catch up on the traffic from other life stressors gnawing at me.
Is that worth making 25% less? I don't know about that. I suspect most people would just negotiate a "75%" salary that still makes them reasonably happy.
If they are fair and honest about this (not handing out 40 or 50 hours work and calling it 30), I think that 4 days * 8 hours per week would be pretty nice.
I did a 4 * 10 job one summer when I was a teen. It was REALLY nice to have Friday as "recovery" day before the real weekend started.
I'm not sure how my family would tolerate me being gone 4 * 10, though.
Maybe I've just been self-employed for too long. In this mode of existence, one has immense schedule flexibility and yet is always working, all at the same time, in some weirdly paradoxical way. It's a lot like the life of professors; they don't have to be in the office except when teaching or having office hours, yet they're always busy.
From the vantage point of that mode of existence, an extra day doesn't do anything for me. Nothing I'd take a pay cut for, for sure. I can take a random Wednesday off anyway if I feel like it. On the other hand, I am working at least some time every day, and some days a lot.
I guess if I think back to when I was W-2 employed my butt had to be in some cube farm at 9 AM every day, a Friday off might seem more valuable.
I'm not saying two hours per day (or an extra weekday or whatever) is entirely trivial, just that one has to be very fastidious and organised to take advantage of it. Even so, the economics of human task-switching and overhead, particularly in high cognitive load professions like software, are such that the marginal utility of two extra hours is going to be low. Life is not a spreadsheet, where one gets home at 3 PM and $ENJOYMENT or $NECESSARY_ERRANDS immediately commence. I'd probably just catch a breather for a few hours, if lucky, or catch up on the traffic from other life stressors gnawing at me.
Is that worth making 25% less? I don't know about that. I suspect most people would just negotiate a "75%" salary that still makes them reasonably happy.