Interview With CTO, Phil McParlane

Tell us a bit more about the business you represent.

4dayweek.io is the world's largest job board for jobs with a better work-life balance. We only list jobs with a 4-day work week where almost all of these jobs are for 32hrs over 4 days and pay 100% salary.

As of June 2023, there are almost 300 companies who've made a switch to this shorter, more intense, working model. 4dayweek.io is not just a job board; it's a movement that challenges the conventional 5-day workweek paradigm, advocating for a flexible approach that benefits both employers and employees. I'm dedicated to try and make this change happen, one company at a time.

Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like to work at Yahoo?

I loved my time at Yahoo. It was a data science internship in Barcelona - one of my favourite cities in the world.

I was researching new machine learning models to improve photo tag recommendations, making sense of massive data sets to enhance the user experience. It was a formative experience, setting a solid foundation for my career in data science. It was also in a pre-GPT era, so the solutions look very naive in comparison to today's models!

Aside from the work, I loved the working culture in Barcelona e.g. daily lunches with the entire team!

Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like to work at Microsoft?

As someone from a small town in Scotland, working at the Microsoft HQ in Seattle was an incredible experience. It felt like Disneyland.

The campus was enormous (it had almost 100 buildings) and even came with a main street complete with hairdressers, laundrettes and flower shop.

From a technical perspective, it was also a humbling experience. I specifically remember running my data science code on a cluster of 10,000 computers - which was about 10,000x more powerful than anything I had worked on before.

Being the Founder, what do your day-to-day responsibilities look like?

Running a business like mine with no full-time employees means wearing many hats, and I'm deeply involved in every aspect of it - from marketing and software development to sales. It makes for a very varied day!

A significant part of my work revolves around finding new companies that offer a 4-day work week and introducing them to our platform. I'm continually on the lookout for companies who've recently made the switch so I can share their jobs with my audience.

How have you evolved as a Founder and leader over time, and what have been some of the biggest lessons you've learned along the way?

Looking back at how I built companies 5 years ago vs now, the biggest lesson I've learnt is that marketing needs to be the majority of the focus and not product development. You can have a great product, but if no one sees it, what's the point?

I've therefore spent a lot of time over the last few years improving my SEO, copywriting, social media marketing & paid ad skills.

For my next business, I'm not going to come up with a business idea first - I'm going to come up with a marketing plan and build a business around it.

What are some of the biggest trends and challenges you see in your industry right now, and how is your company adapting to stay ahead of the curve?

Clearly, AI is the elephant in the room - it's going to change the world. I also think it's another reason the 4 day work week will go mainstream as productivity skyrockets.

To stay ahead of the curve, I'm making sure I fully immerse myself in AI technology. For example, I now use ChatGPT every single day to write code, outline blog posts, draft content etc.

Do your technical teams or do you use log analysis as part of your role? If you do, how do you find this helps day-to-day operations?

Ensuring all errors and issues are logged is critical to my business, but logs are only powerful if you are able to see them, or even better: you are notified when something goes wrong.

To address the second point, I've set up a number of data pipelines (e.g. PostgreSQL + Zapier) to make sure I'm alerted if anything goes wrong. Manual log analysis is there for everything else.

What can we hope to see from your business in the future?

We're going to keep campaigning for a shorter work week, with a strong emphasis on the benefits to the company, employees and the world.

There's a lot of stigma surrounding the 4 day work week (it's seen as "lazy"), but the same stigmas were seen only a few years ago with respect to remote working.

Remember when "remote work" was a synonym for "not working"? That's where I feel we are in the 4-day workweek today, and I'm determined to change this mindset.

Can you tell us what book you are reading currently?

I recently finished reading "Atomic Habits" by James Clear which I'd highly recommend. The book talks about "habit stacking" (i.e. pairing a new habit with an already established one) which I've tried to use this technique in my own work.

For example, I'm a software developer at heart and hate doing sales. So in order to increase my cold outreach, I decided that I was only allowed to begin coding once I had messaged at least three people on LinkedIn. It's a small step, but it's been a tremendous help, and my cold outreach has increased tenfold.

In trust though, I'm not a huge reader - I'm much more into podcasts. My First Million and Indie Hackers are the two which I listen to on an almost daily basis - a great source of knowledge!

If you enjoyed this interview then why not read our articles on SIEM tools or view our Interview with CTO and Co-founder of Speakfully, Nandini Easwar next?