Unfortunately, not all jobs require 8h a day of productivity. A lot of my job (IT) is just being available.

Just want to take a minute to say that work is different depending on what you do.

Like, I build out a lot of digital infrastructure. I get paid hourly.

There are literal weeks I do absolutely nothing. Then, something happens. It's still way cheaper to give me overtime for a 55 hour week when that happens and essentially keep me on retainer/expect that I will answer questions in chat 40 hrs a week and attend meetings than it is to contract that out.

Am I underpaid? Sure am. But I'll be damned if it's not the best job I've ever had. I have time to make some cash bug bounty hunting on the side, it makes up for it.

I'm imagining 4 day/5 hour shifts tbh

Not just the paid vacation is cool. I just started a job that does "trust hours", which means that no one ever checks when I come or go. As long as I get a reasonable amount of work done and participate in a reasonable amount of the core meetings management just lets me do my own girl math on whether I have worked an average of 40h per week. Realistically that actually means that I do overtime because I don't keep very close track of how much time I actually spent working and if I don't have any other plans that day I might just stay at work longer. But sometimes when I don't feel like working I just leave at 1pm. That's basically 0.5 vacation days at the cost of 0 vacation days in my head haha