9 ms·

The Advantage of Being a Little Underemployed

225 points by gpresot 9y ago

anotheryou 9y ago
I'm currently trying to find a part-time job as a product owner. It slashes the pool of advertised jobs down to about 1/10th (unless you try to apply to full-time jobs anyways and hope they consider your part-time offer).
peter_vukovic 9y ago
In addition to not having the time to think, we also usually suck at thinking. Our society fails badly at teaching people how to use their brain properly and how to prevent it from going on a bender. The best advice I've heard on this subject so far is to think when there is a specific problem to be solved. Use your brain like a tool, then stop using it after you're done - meditate. Very hard, since thinking (and overthinking) is addictive.
Declanomous 9y ago
>Tell them that your trick is taking a 90-minute walk in the middle of the day, and they says no, you need to work. I'm definitely 'underemployed', but the nice thing is that the work I do is so far beyond what anyone else I work with understands that I report to the director of the company himself. As long as I get my work done, nobody really cares what I do. I work until I feel like I'm not making progress anymore, and then I go for a walk. Generally the walk is about an hour long, but I've found that a 90 minute walk is pretty much perfect for resetting my mind and getting over any hurdles I've been stuck on. The only reason I don't take a 90 minute walk every day is because my desk is near the staff who just punch numbers in to a computer all day, and they start to gossip if I'm not at my desk enough. I objectively finish more work and produce better work when I get up and move around when I get stuck on a problem. The best way I've come to describe the effect of walking is to say it's a meditative act. I don't mean that in a spiritual way, I just mean it helps clear out the useless thoughts and gives you a way to center yourself. One of the reasons I'm still working where I am is because I work in such a great area for walking. I worked in the suburbs for a while, and I'll never do it again. The car-centric design of suburban office complexes honestly feels like torture to me.
- fao_ 9y ago
  Out of curiosity, what job do you do?
  - Declanomous 9y ago
    My basic role is analysis and database marketing for a non-profit foundation. I was hired into a new position for them a little over three years ago into a role that was an amalgamation of a bunch of roles from people who had left. They unified these roles into a single role, and split the unrelated work between other people in the organization. I set the strategy for all of our mailings, run the data, and then analyze the performance. We have 800,000 constituents, and send about 500,000 appeal letters each year, as well as countless emails and other pieces of mail. I've managed to decrease our cost to raise a dollar from about 22 cents to about 6 cents, while improving the overall quality of our appeals, which I'm pretty proud of. We are a really small organization (<50 employees), so I end up doing a really wide variety of tasks. We have a lot of challenges that larger organizations wouldn't have because of our limited manpower. Since nobody had really taken a holistic look at their data before me, I spent the first year cleaning up all of their existing data and automating almost every processes I could get my hands on. I used to spend 3 weeks of every month running recurring processes, and I cut that down to about 15 minutes a week. After that first year my manager left. At this time the Director asked me to come work directly under him because he felt that none of the other managers understood my role well enough to manage me. This allowed me to focus more on the analysis and marketing side of my role. As time has gone on I've been asked to create more processes for speeding up other people's work. I'm not an application designer, and I recognize that the processes I'm creating are pretty fragile. This wasn't a problem when I was automating my own processes, because if they broke I could fix them. Now there are a bunch of people using processes that only I can fix, which makes it very hard to take a vacation or a sick day. This causes me a lot of stress, which is a key reason why my walks have been trending longer. I'm basically somewhere in the middle of the graph from the XKCD comic Automation[1]. I'm starting to look for a new job before fixing broken automation steals the time I need to make a resume (or do the part of my job I really enjoy). So long story short, I basically do anything involving the data or programming for a small-to-mid-size non-profit organization. [1] https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/
ciguy 9y ago
I recently changed jobs, and while negotiating salary with the new company, realized that they weren't going to be able to match my salary expectations. The work was interesting though and very well suited to my skillset so I asked to work a 30 hour week instead so I could do a little freelancing on the side and make up the difference. 6 months later I haven't started freelancing at all, and I simply enjoy the extra time I have to pursue other interests. The unexpected part though is that I am undeniably more productive than I've ever been while working less actual hours. I definitely use some of the free time for thinking, but I think I also end up being vastly more efficient when I'm in work mode as well.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  My best work experience was when I had a job where a 35 hours week was mandatory and strictly enforced. I had time and energy for other things and was super motivated at work. Nobody wasted time with unproductive stuff like never ending meetings.
  - ghostly_s 9y ago
    I'm reading this as a mandatory maximum, yes? How does a strictly-enforced 35 hour week work in practice? And in what industry would you encounter such a thing?
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      In my current role I'm a "cloud security architect" where my employer has a hard stop at 40 hours per week. When those 40 hours are exhausted, I'm done for the week. Company provides critical financial infrastructure in the US.
      - majewsky 9y ago
        How are incidents handled? Does your company have admins that take shifts on call?
ciguy 9y ago
I recently changed jobs, and while negotiating salary with the new company, realized that they weren't going to be able to match my salary expectations. The work was interesting though and very well suited to my skillset so I asked to work a 30 hour week instead so I could do a little freelancing on the side and make up the difference. 6 months later I haven't started freelancing at all, and I simply enjoy the extra time I have to pursue other interests. The unexpected part though is that I am undeniably more productive than I've ever been while working less actual hours. I definitely use some of the free time for thinking, but I think I also end up being vastly more efficient when I'm in work mode as well.
borplk 9y ago
The only way around this is working for yourself. Then you don't have to explain to anyone. I experienced the power of this when I was working for myself. On some days I worked for 16 hours, other days only 3. Some of the best ideas I had was while lying down on the bed and staring point blank at the ceiling. I'm no stranger to "getting in the zone" but this was some next level stuff. I wish I could sustain myself that way. One day.
- sbko 9y ago
  hammock driven development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
- swalsh 9y ago
  Of course working for yourself also means instead of selling yourself for 6 hours once every few years, you've now taken on a full time gig selling yourself. Owning a business is 80% about sales, the other 20% is the thing you sell. If you're consulting you can take some time off selling for a few months depending on how long the contract is, but I've found that I need to constantly be on the look out to plant a seed.
  - borplk 9y ago
    Consulting can sometimes be arguably worse than the job in that aspect. At least with a salaried job some ups and downs is expected, with consulting if you are charging by the hour people demand value by the hour. I was thinking more in terms of running a SaaS or similar. What I love about that is that you have long-term goals but it doesn't matter how you get there in the short term. So you can work like a horse for 4 days and rest for the remainder of the week. Or maybe another week you work a little bit 7 days a week.
    - pmoriarty 9y ago
      "with consulting if you are charging by the hour people demand value by the hour" You don't have to charge by the hour. You could charge by the day, week, month, or project.
6d6b73 9y ago
I could do my 8 hour job in 4 hours, but I have to work 40 hours a week, because that's the minimum expected from me. This wasted time is the main reason why I'm working on starting my own company this year.
- kentt 9y ago
  Same issue and conclusion for me. I'm leaving the 40 hour work force in 4 months.
- fivestar 9y ago
  Eh, one some contracts I've had there was a lot of slack time and so I did the same thing--some would consider that to be double-dipping, but I just call it "using my time to its best advantage." Chuck Palahniuk wrote much of "Fight Club" while sitting in useless meetings.
  - kristianp 9y ago
    > Chuck Palahniuk wrote much of "Fight Club" while sitting in useless meetings. I doubt that's actually true. The only reference to it is in the trivia section on imdb.com.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  If I ever finished 8 hours of work in 4 hours, my manager would just give me more work.
  - wayn3 9y ago
    thats why employment is messed up. if youre too productive, you just get more work. if the company manages to fuck up and generates too much work, you just get to do overtime. no incentive to be efficient.
  - s73ver 9y ago
    That's the problem: You're telling him that you did.
twodave 9y ago
If I am taking a shower, and the solution to a work problem comes to me, am I at work or not? In thought-oriented jobs (especially software engineering), the lights are never really out. I regularly wake up in the middle of the night with an idea. I don't take my desk-hours too seriously because I know that while I'm out running errands, exercising, taking a shower, sleeping, etc. I continue to chew on problems, and sometimes taking the slow path to a solution produces a much more mature one.
- thegayngler 9y ago
  I am totally in agreement here. Many of my best ideas came about as I was in between sets of 225lbs on the incline bench press. I don't actually give up on problems just because I'm not at work. I am trying to get new ways of looking at a problem by doing something else and giving my mind time to come up with a solution that I am happy with.
  - rjeli 9y ago
    Wow, I can't imagine engaging in deep thought during a work set. I'm pretty much an unthinking fury machine at that point.
- dasmoth 9y ago
  I don't take my desk-hours too seriously because I know that while I'm out running errands, exercising, taking a shower, sleeping, etc. I continue to chew on problems, and sometimes taking the slow path to a solution produces a much more mature one. That's a perfectly reasonable point of view, but in office environments it can quickly run up against crab-mentality people who make awkward comments about anyone whose hours don't match or exceed their own. And at least in the software industry, current trends (stand ups, pair programming, etc.) are pushing away from flexible hours and focus on results.
ThomaszKrueger 9y ago
Unfortunately many management schools of thought still take the 8 hour as gospel. I worked at a company where my manager's words were "I expect 8 solid hours from developers". Well I gave him 8 solid hours of my physical body, but I allowed my mind to wander whenever if felt like. In a way I was not officially underemployed but I didn't give them "solid 8 hours" - I made sure time expanded to fill up estimates.
- pram 9y ago
  Wow letting your mind wander, rebel without a cause here.
  - shakestheclown 9y ago
    I'm currently working on a device that tracks employee's brain waves to make sure they are working. Any period of daydreaming is deducted from their daily timesheet. I already have 600 million USD in preorders.
- fivestar 9y ago
  Sure, but the trouble with that is you still have to be someplace--either at an office or at home. It's not like you can actually enjoy life more. Which is what this is really all about--being able to be free of "work" for as long as possible each week and still manage to eke out a living.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  If you only have to work 8 hour days, consider yourself very lucky.
  - Retra 9y ago
    Why is that lucky?
- thegayngler 9y ago
  I've had that happen to me as well. I just nodded my head in agreement and did whatever the hell I wanted to anyway.
kentt 9y ago
Is this article being intentionally ironic? I agree with the idea that not questioning the 40 hour work week is crazy. However, it seems like the author is substituting 40 hours of butt-in-chair work for 35 hours of the same and 5 hours of more relaxed pontificating work. I feel like 30 hours is plenty and 20 hours is sufficient for many jobs. That would be a more direct challenging of the 40 hour belief.
fivestar 9y ago
I'm not sure what being "underemployed" has to do with the actual blog post? The post talks about railroad workers and how the 40hr. work week got started, but I should point out that it's only in the US, really--other nations have other conventions. The Japanese seem to be trying to work themselves to death, for one (sad) example. The only concern I would have about being underemployed is that we only get a certain fixed number of years to save for retirement and if you're chronically under-saving during your years of maximum earning potential, the back end of your life may be pretty ugly. Then again, I am a pragmatist and I figure "life" can be as long or short as you desire it to be, right?
dba7dba 9y ago
> This was during World War I, when transporting military equipment by rail was vital to national security. President Woodrow Wilson, desperate to get the trains moving, asked congress to write an eight-hour railroad work day into law This reminded of how the USA PATRIOT Act came into existence.
rb808 9y ago
It seems people that work fewer hours often work on side projects in their spare time. Does that mean such a developer is working too much or employers are leaving money on the table by letting employees leave early?
- GlickWick 9y ago
  I don't think so. I can only speak for myself and some of what I've observed in my colleagues, of course. From what I've seen, you can only work on one thing so much before you grow to resent it. You need to take time off from it, even if that time is working on another software project. Companies like Google have tried to emulate this effect with their "20% time" initiative, but from what I've heard it doesn't really work, since people still consider it to be part of their main body of work. Some of my best revelations for solving problems at work have come from entirely unrelated projects. As someone who does game development as a hobby on the side, I've actually discovered solutions to major enterprise software problems while working on a random indie game. It's important to let yourself do this.
- Retra 9y ago
  Neither of those is true. The work I do on side projects is work I would not do for my employer. If my employer wanted me to give them this extra work, they need to grant me full authority over all aspects of the project in perpetuity. Or pay me like that's what they're taking from me.
rb808 9y ago
How many serious jobs allow only 40 hours a week? I haven't seen many.
- Adamantcheese 9y ago
  Please define "serious jobs" for me, because I can think of plenty of jobs that require 40 hours a week, regardless of if they are "serious" or not.
- anotheryou 9y ago
  Here in euuerope at least it's quite strictly 40h/week. If you do more hours you can often "redeem" them later or at least get payed for them.
pwm 9y ago
I have managed to do hour+ long midday walks pretty much all my working life. It's not something I pre-negotiate and the degree of said freedom varies from place to place. Nevertheless I rarely had any problems from this habit and the benefits for me hugely outweigh the occasional confrontation. I might be lucky but it seems these companies clearly care more about results than dogma.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  How do you get lunch in, in addition to your mid-day walk? Do you get more than an hour for lunch?
  - kcorbitt 9y ago
    Not the OP, but I have similar habits. My workplace expects me to be productive, and taking 40-90 minutes off in the afternoon once in a while to walk and think helps me be more productive than I otherwise would be, as well as less stressed. My workplace may be an outlier here (they also provide nap pods and game rooms, so obviously condone taking breaks) but I've never had anybody confront me about it -- not sure that my coworkers notice, and if they have I doubt they care.
  - lostcolony 9y ago
    Unless you're required to clock in/out, or you -never- have meetings away from your desk, no one notices. It's only if you have issues delivering that a manager is going to start paying attention to when you're not at your desk and notice you're gone longer than an hour.
BadassFractal 9y ago
Could use some help here. I have years of experience as an individual contributor, manager, technical lead and founder at a medium-sized not-unicorn-but-not-too-bad-either VC-backed startup. Say I were to exit one day, is there anything I can do for say, 20 hours a week, that would still pay the bills? I wouldn't expect to make as much as I do working 60 hours, but I wouldn't ever want to do that again tbh. I can see myself being extremely valuable as an advisor or a part-time C-level person, but I don't know how frequent or how well paid those positions are. Also it's completely not obvious if anybody would be willing to pay for an entrepreneur's time if that person is not.. entrepreneuring, the people who need our advice the most can't actually afford it. Any advice?
- ghaff 9y ago
  I suppose in part it depends what "pay the bills" means. From my observation, some experienced people do stitch together a combination of advisory roles, maybe some teaching on the side, speaking, etc. that adds up to meaningful money without working too hard. To give you some ballpark figures, an industry analyst will charge something like $10K for speaking at an event or a day-long advisory session. Of course, they have a lot of non-billable hours in order to get those types of rates. (Same applies to expert witnesses.) For me, one of the issues would be that 20 hours per week isn't that big a win versus a more conventional workweek. The bigger win would be taking months off and that's more difficult because you get out of the loop and behind on tech.
  - BadassFractal 9y ago
    Agreed, 20h a week is still a job, although at this point even 40h feels like a vacation sometimes :) You raise a good point, I wonder what someone in that position could do to work a couple of days a month here and there and still have a huge amount of flexibility.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      I think that's hard. It probably requires either: Some fame in an area that allows you to collect on big dollar speaking gigs in spite of limited ongoing involvement. Eminence grise sort of thing. Widely recognized world-class expertise in some relatively slow-moving technology area. You're an expert in really gnarly ball bearing problems. $10K/day for a couple weeks is a bargain. Obviously these don't apply to a lot of people :-)
crispytx 9y ago
"a lot of workers have thought jobs without much time to think." I think this is why big companies have trouble innovating. They get filled up with hard workers who spend little time time thinking because they're too busy working.
- norea-armozel 9y ago
  Or we create bullshit jobs for folks like David Graeber talks about in his essays. It seems to me that half of the private sector is busy work kind of work in the fashion that public institutions have. I'll never understand the fascination that certain managers have with adding useless jobs to the roster.
  - convolvatron 9y ago
    right? the only thing I can think of is that "you're asking me to do too much with too little" is a very easy thing for an underperforming manager to say. which means that when that head gets assigned, there isn't anything to do but give them busywork.
mathgenius 9y ago
After having worked in the US for a few years I've come to realize what this "work ethic" BS is all about: it's a fetish. It's unquestioned emotional baggage left over from the pioneering days. You can work 80 hour weeks if you are on to something, but most of what i've seen is just monkeys at keyboards. Total waste of time and energy.
- bpodgursky 9y ago
  The "work ethic BS" built the economy which is the reason you came to the US for a job.
  - burke 9y ago
    So did coal mines, baseball, and slavery. That doesn't mean they're inherently relevant or worthwhile constructs.
  - Banthum 9y ago
    Everybody complains about how terrible work ethics are, but everyone wants to migrate towards peoples with strong work ethics. It's like small government in that respect.
- the_cat_kittles 9y ago
  its the same thing as the college classic: "i havent slept in 2 weeks / ive been working on this paper for 3 days straight". its also the same in that, generally, its a lie, and most of the time is spent not really working.
norea-armozel 9y ago
Well, I don't mind an 8 hour shift myself since often I just use some or most of the time doing research on the particular technology I'm going to use in the software I maintain or enhance. Or even just looking over code to see if it needs cleaning up or improved documentation. But I think the idea that shifts make sense for certain businesses is odd to me. It seems more out of tradition than productivity.
placeybordeaux 9y ago
Good article, but as others have pointed out, it is strange to say that what he is suggesting is "underemployment". It seems that he is actually suggesting structured downtime.
dmartinez 9y ago
I tend to think that substituting time thinking on walks is the greatest time spent during a workday. I can think much more clearly taking frequent 20-minute walks throughout the day.
the_cat_kittles 9y ago
vague corollary: i wish people would really value inaction. so so often the winning move is not to play. just like you learn to love deleting code, you learn to love not even writing it to begin with. i dont think we are naturally wired to understand this, but its become one of my greatest joys. the old platitude that jazz is "the notes you dont play" applies here i think. i think we could all stand to relish saying "no" and avoiding problems all together more.
dkarapetyan 9y ago
These types of posts are preaching to the choir. Most managers don't get this. They'd rather have you sitting and doing nothing but being in their line of sight instead of being up and about and thinking. Without concerted pressure this is not going to change any time soon. IBM just recently announced it wanted all employees to be on-site. It is a tactic to cut back their workforce but the fact that they can do this unchallenged means something about worker rights is broken.
mcv 9y ago
I work 4 days (32 hours) a week, and have done so for years. I don't think my brother has ever worked 5 days a week. In Netherland, many people with kids work one day less, to be with their kids. On most projects I've worked, most team members worked 4 days. I've only once had to reject a job because they insisted on a 5 day work week. Working less than 5 days is entirely uncontroversial here. In fact, I believe Netherland is world champion part-time work. And personally, I think it makes total sense. If you've got a good job, the extra time is often worth more than the extra money. We need time to enjoy life. Life is more than work.

225 points by gpresot 9y ago

I'm currently trying to find a part-time job as a product owner. It slashes the pool of advertised jobs down to about 1/10th (unless you try to apply to full-time jobs anyways and hope they consider your part-time offer).

peter_vukovic 9y ago

In addition to not having the time to think, we also usually suck at thinking. Our society fails badly at teaching people how to use their brain properly and how to prevent it from going on a bender. The best advice I've heard on this subject so far is to think when there is a specific problem to be solved. Use your brain like a tool, then stop using it after you're done - meditate. Very hard, since thinking (and overthinking) is addictive.

Declanomous 9y ago

>Tell them that your trick is taking a 90-minute walk in the middle of the day, and they says no, you need to work. I'm definitely 'underemployed', but the nice thing is that the work I do is so far beyond what anyone else I work with understands that I report to the director of the company himself. As long as I get my work done, nobody really cares what I do. I work until I feel like I'm not making progress anymore, and then I go for a walk. Generally the walk is about an hour long, but I've found that a 90 minute walk is pretty much perfect for resetting my mind and getting over any hurdles I've been stuck on. The only reason I don't take a 90 minute walk every day is because my desk is near the staff who just punch numbers in to a computer all day, and they start to gossip if I'm not at my desk enough. I objectively finish more work and produce better work when I get up and move around when I get stuck on a problem. The best way I've come to describe the effect of walking is to say it's a meditative act. I don't mean that in a spiritual way, I just mean it helps clear out the useless thoughts and gives you a way to center yourself. One of the reasons I'm still working where I am is because I work in such a great area for walking. I worked in the suburbs for a while, and I'll never do it again. The car-centric design of suburban office complexes honestly feels like torture to me.

fao_ 9y ago
Out of curiosity, what job do you do?
- Declanomous 9y ago
  My basic role is analysis and database marketing for a non-profit foundation. I was hired into a new position for them a little over three years ago into a role that was an amalgamation of a bunch of roles from people who had left. They unified these roles into a single role, and split the unrelated work between other people in the organization. I set the strategy for all of our mailings, run the data, and then analyze the performance. We have 800,000 constituents, and send about 500,000 appeal letters each year, as well as countless emails and other pieces of mail. I've managed to decrease our cost to raise a dollar from about 22 cents to about 6 cents, while improving the overall quality of our appeals, which I'm pretty proud of. We are a really small organization (<50 employees), so I end up doing a really wide variety of tasks. We have a lot of challenges that larger organizations wouldn't have because of our limited manpower. Since nobody had really taken a holistic look at their data before me, I spent the first year cleaning up all of their existing data and automating almost every processes I could get my hands on. I used to spend 3 weeks of every month running recurring processes, and I cut that down to about 15 minutes a week. After that first year my manager left. At this time the Director asked me to come work directly under him because he felt that none of the other managers understood my role well enough to manage me. This allowed me to focus more on the analysis and marketing side of my role. As time has gone on I've been asked to create more processes for speeding up other people's work. I'm not an application designer, and I recognize that the processes I'm creating are pretty fragile. This wasn't a problem when I was automating my own processes, because if they broke I could fix them. Now there are a bunch of people using processes that only I can fix, which makes it very hard to take a vacation or a sick day. This causes me a lot of stress, which is a key reason why my walks have been trending longer. I'm basically somewhere in the middle of the graph from the XKCD comic Automation[1]. I'm starting to look for a new job before fixing broken automation steals the time I need to make a resume (or do the part of my job I really enjoy). So long story short, I basically do anything involving the data or programming for a small-to-mid-size non-profit organization. [1] https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/

ciguy 9y ago

I recently changed jobs, and while negotiating salary with the new company, realized that they weren't going to be able to match my salary expectations. The work was interesting though and very well suited to my skillset so I asked to work a 30 hour week instead so I could do a little freelancing on the side and make up the difference. 6 months later I haven't started freelancing at all, and I simply enjoy the extra time I have to pursue other interests. The unexpected part though is that I am undeniably more productive than I've ever been while working less actual hours. I definitely use some of the free time for thinking, but I think I also end up being vastly more efficient when I'm in work mode as well.

maxxxxx 9y ago
My best work experience was when I had a job where a 35 hours week was mandatory and strictly enforced. I had time and energy for other things and was super motivated at work. Nobody wasted time with unproductive stuff like never ending meetings.
- ghostly_s 9y ago
  I'm reading this as a mandatory maximum, yes? How does a strictly-enforced 35 hour week work in practice? And in what industry would you encounter such a thing?
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    In my current role I'm a "cloud security architect" where my employer has a hard stop at 40 hours per week. When those 40 hours are exhausted, I'm done for the week. Company provides critical financial infrastructure in the US.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      How are incidents handled? Does your company have admins that take shifts on call?

ciguy 9y ago

borplk 9y ago

The only way around this is working for yourself. Then you don't have to explain to anyone. I experienced the power of this when I was working for myself. On some days I worked for 16 hours, other days only 3. Some of the best ideas I had was while lying down on the bed and staring point blank at the ceiling. I'm no stranger to "getting in the zone" but this was some next level stuff. I wish I could sustain myself that way. One day.

sbko 9y ago
hammock driven development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
swalsh 9y ago
Of course working for yourself also means instead of selling yourself for 6 hours once every few years, you've now taken on a full time gig selling yourself. Owning a business is 80% about sales, the other 20% is the thing you sell. If you're consulting you can take some time off selling for a few months depending on how long the contract is, but I've found that I need to constantly be on the look out to plant a seed.
- borplk 9y ago
  Consulting can sometimes be arguably worse than the job in that aspect. At least with a salaried job some ups and downs is expected, with consulting if you are charging by the hour people demand value by the hour. I was thinking more in terms of running a SaaS or similar. What I love about that is that you have long-term goals but it doesn't matter how you get there in the short term. So you can work like a horse for 4 days and rest for the remainder of the week. Or maybe another week you work a little bit 7 days a week.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    "with consulting if you are charging by the hour people demand value by the hour" You don't have to charge by the hour. You could charge by the day, week, month, or project.

6d6b73 9y ago

I could do my 8 hour job in 4 hours, but I have to work 40 hours a week, because that's the minimum expected from me. This wasted time is the main reason why I'm working on starting my own company this year.

kentt 9y ago
Same issue and conclusion for me. I'm leaving the 40 hour work force in 4 months.
fivestar 9y ago
Eh, one some contracts I've had there was a lot of slack time and so I did the same thing--some would consider that to be double-dipping, but I just call it "using my time to its best advantage." Chuck Palahniuk wrote much of "Fight Club" while sitting in useless meetings.
- kristianp 9y ago
  > Chuck Palahniuk wrote much of "Fight Club" while sitting in useless meetings. I doubt that's actually true. The only reference to it is in the trivia section on imdb.com.
pmoriarty 9y ago
If I ever finished 8 hours of work in 4 hours, my manager would just give me more work.
- wayn3 9y ago
  thats why employment is messed up. if youre too productive, you just get more work. if the company manages to fuck up and generates too much work, you just get to do overtime. no incentive to be efficient.
- s73ver 9y ago
  That's the problem: You're telling him that you did.

twodave 9y ago

If I am taking a shower, and the solution to a work problem comes to me, am I at work or not? In thought-oriented jobs (especially software engineering), the lights are never really out. I regularly wake up in the middle of the night with an idea. I don't take my desk-hours too seriously because I know that while I'm out running errands, exercising, taking a shower, sleeping, etc. I continue to chew on problems, and sometimes taking the slow path to a solution produces a much more mature one.

thegayngler 9y ago
I am totally in agreement here. Many of my best ideas came about as I was in between sets of 225lbs on the incline bench press. I don't actually give up on problems just because I'm not at work. I am trying to get new ways of looking at a problem by doing something else and giving my mind time to come up with a solution that I am happy with.
- rjeli 9y ago
  Wow, I can't imagine engaging in deep thought during a work set. I'm pretty much an unthinking fury machine at that point.
dasmoth 9y ago
I don't take my desk-hours too seriously because I know that while I'm out running errands, exercising, taking a shower, sleeping, etc. I continue to chew on problems, and sometimes taking the slow path to a solution produces a much more mature one. That's a perfectly reasonable point of view, but in office environments it can quickly run up against crab-mentality people who make awkward comments about anyone whose hours don't match or exceed their own. And at least in the software industry, current trends (stand ups, pair programming, etc.) are pushing away from flexible hours and focus on results.

ThomaszKrueger 9y ago

Unfortunately many management schools of thought still take the 8 hour as gospel. I worked at a company where my manager's words were "I expect 8 solid hours from developers". Well I gave him 8 solid hours of my physical body, but I allowed my mind to wander whenever if felt like. In a way I was not officially underemployed but I didn't give them "solid 8 hours" - I made sure time expanded to fill up estimates.

pram 9y ago
Wow letting your mind wander, rebel without a cause here.
- shakestheclown 9y ago
  I'm currently working on a device that tracks employee's brain waves to make sure they are working. Any period of daydreaming is deducted from their daily timesheet. I already have 600 million USD in preorders.
fivestar 9y ago
Sure, but the trouble with that is you still have to be someplace--either at an office or at home. It's not like you can actually enjoy life more. Which is what this is really all about--being able to be free of "work" for as long as possible each week and still manage to eke out a living.
pmoriarty 9y ago
If you only have to work 8 hour days, consider yourself very lucky.
- Retra 9y ago
  Why is that lucky?
thegayngler 9y ago
I've had that happen to me as well. I just nodded my head in agreement and did whatever the hell I wanted to anyway.

kentt 9y ago

Is this article being intentionally ironic? I agree with the idea that not questioning the 40 hour work week is crazy. However, it seems like the author is substituting 40 hours of butt-in-chair work for 35 hours of the same and 5 hours of more relaxed pontificating work. I feel like 30 hours is plenty and 20 hours is sufficient for many jobs. That would be a more direct challenging of the 40 hour belief.

fivestar 9y ago

I'm not sure what being "underemployed" has to do with the actual blog post? The post talks about railroad workers and how the 40hr. work week got started, but I should point out that it's only in the US, really--other nations have other conventions. The Japanese seem to be trying to work themselves to death, for one (sad) example. The only concern I would have about being underemployed is that we only get a certain fixed number of years to save for retirement and if you're chronically under-saving during your years of maximum earning potential, the back end of your life may be pretty ugly. Then again, I am a pragmatist and I figure "life" can be as long or short as you desire it to be, right?

dba7dba 9y ago

> This was during World War I, when transporting military equipment by rail was vital to national security. President Woodrow Wilson, desperate to get the trains moving, asked congress to write an eight-hour railroad work day into law This reminded of how the USA PATRIOT Act came into existence.

rb808 9y ago

It seems people that work fewer hours often work on side projects in their spare time. Does that mean such a developer is working too much or employers are leaving money on the table by letting employees leave early?

GlickWick 9y ago
I don't think so. I can only speak for myself and some of what I've observed in my colleagues, of course. From what I've seen, you can only work on one thing so much before you grow to resent it. You need to take time off from it, even if that time is working on another software project. Companies like Google have tried to emulate this effect with their "20% time" initiative, but from what I've heard it doesn't really work, since people still consider it to be part of their main body of work. Some of my best revelations for solving problems at work have come from entirely unrelated projects. As someone who does game development as a hobby on the side, I've actually discovered solutions to major enterprise software problems while working on a random indie game. It's important to let yourself do this.
Retra 9y ago
Neither of those is true. The work I do on side projects is work I would not do for my employer. If my employer wanted me to give them this extra work, they need to grant me full authority over all aspects of the project in perpetuity. Or pay me like that's what they're taking from me.

rb808 9y ago

How many serious jobs allow only 40 hours a week? I haven't seen many.

Adamantcheese 9y ago
Please define "serious jobs" for me, because I can think of plenty of jobs that require 40 hours a week, regardless of if they are "serious" or not.
anotheryou 9y ago
Here in euuerope at least it's quite strictly 40h/week. If you do more hours you can often "redeem" them later or at least get payed for them.

pwm 9y ago

I have managed to do hour+ long midday walks pretty much all my working life. It's not something I pre-negotiate and the degree of said freedom varies from place to place. Nevertheless I rarely had any problems from this habit and the benefits for me hugely outweigh the occasional confrontation. I might be lucky but it seems these companies clearly care more about results than dogma.

pmoriarty 9y ago
How do you get lunch in, in addition to your mid-day walk? Do you get more than an hour for lunch?
- kcorbitt 9y ago
  Not the OP, but I have similar habits. My workplace expects me to be productive, and taking 40-90 minutes off in the afternoon once in a while to walk and think helps me be more productive than I otherwise would be, as well as less stressed. My workplace may be an outlier here (they also provide nap pods and game rooms, so obviously condone taking breaks) but I've never had anybody confront me about it -- not sure that my coworkers notice, and if they have I doubt they care.
- lostcolony 9y ago
  Unless you're required to clock in/out, or you -never- have meetings away from your desk, no one notices. It's only if you have issues delivering that a manager is going to start paying attention to when you're not at your desk and notice you're gone longer than an hour.

BadassFractal 9y ago

Could use some help here. I have years of experience as an individual contributor, manager, technical lead and founder at a medium-sized not-unicorn-but-not-too-bad-either VC-backed startup. Say I were to exit one day, is there anything I can do for say, 20 hours a week, that would still pay the bills? I wouldn't expect to make as much as I do working 60 hours, but I wouldn't ever want to do that again tbh. I can see myself being extremely valuable as an advisor or a part-time C-level person, but I don't know how frequent or how well paid those positions are. Also it's completely not obvious if anybody would be willing to pay for an entrepreneur's time if that person is not.. entrepreneuring, the people who need our advice the most can't actually afford it. Any advice?

ghaff 9y ago
I suppose in part it depends what "pay the bills" means. From my observation, some experienced people do stitch together a combination of advisory roles, maybe some teaching on the side, speaking, etc. that adds up to meaningful money without working too hard. To give you some ballpark figures, an industry analyst will charge something like $10K for speaking at an event or a day-long advisory session. Of course, they have a lot of non-billable hours in order to get those types of rates. (Same applies to expert witnesses.) For me, one of the issues would be that 20 hours per week isn't that big a win versus a more conventional workweek. The bigger win would be taking months off and that's more difficult because you get out of the loop and behind on tech.
- BadassFractal 9y ago
  Agreed, 20h a week is still a job, although at this point even 40h feels like a vacation sometimes :) You raise a good point, I wonder what someone in that position could do to work a couple of days a month here and there and still have a huge amount of flexibility.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I think that's hard. It probably requires either: Some fame in an area that allows you to collect on big dollar speaking gigs in spite of limited ongoing involvement. Eminence grise sort of thing. Widely recognized world-class expertise in some relatively slow-moving technology area. You're an expert in really gnarly ball bearing problems. $10K/day for a couple weeks is a bargain. Obviously these don't apply to a lot of people :-)

crispytx 9y ago

"a lot of workers have thought jobs without much time to think." I think this is why big companies have trouble innovating. They get filled up with hard workers who spend little time time thinking because they're too busy working.

norea-armozel 9y ago
Or we create bullshit jobs for folks like David Graeber talks about in his essays. It seems to me that half of the private sector is busy work kind of work in the fashion that public institutions have. I'll never understand the fascination that certain managers have with adding useless jobs to the roster.
- convolvatron 9y ago
  right? the only thing I can think of is that "you're asking me to do too much with too little" is a very easy thing for an underperforming manager to say. which means that when that head gets assigned, there isn't anything to do but give them busywork.

mathgenius 9y ago

After having worked in the US for a few years I've come to realize what this "work ethic" BS is all about: it's a fetish. It's unquestioned emotional baggage left over from the pioneering days. You can work 80 hour weeks if you are on to something, but most of what i've seen is just monkeys at keyboards. Total waste of time and energy.

bpodgursky 9y ago
The "work ethic BS" built the economy which is the reason you came to the US for a job.
- burke 9y ago
  So did coal mines, baseball, and slavery. That doesn't mean they're inherently relevant or worthwhile constructs.
- Banthum 9y ago
  Everybody complains about how terrible work ethics are, but everyone wants to migrate towards peoples with strong work ethics. It's like small government in that respect.
the_cat_kittles 9y ago
its the same thing as the college classic: "i havent slept in 2 weeks / ive been working on this paper for 3 days straight". its also the same in that, generally, its a lie, and most of the time is spent not really working.

norea-armozel 9y ago

Well, I don't mind an 8 hour shift myself since often I just use some or most of the time doing research on the particular technology I'm going to use in the software I maintain or enhance. Or even just looking over code to see if it needs cleaning up or improved documentation. But I think the idea that shifts make sense for certain businesses is odd to me. It seems more out of tradition than productivity.

placeybordeaux 9y ago

Good article, but as others have pointed out, it is strange to say that what he is suggesting is "underemployment". It seems that he is actually suggesting structured downtime.

dmartinez 9y ago

I tend to think that substituting time thinking on walks is the greatest time spent during a workday. I can think much more clearly taking frequent 20-minute walks throughout the day.

the_cat_kittles 9y ago

vague corollary: i wish people would really value inaction. so so often the winning move is not to play. just like you learn to love deleting code, you learn to love not even writing it to begin with. i dont think we are naturally wired to understand this, but its become one of my greatest joys. the old platitude that jazz is "the notes you dont play" applies here i think. i think we could all stand to relish saying "no" and avoiding problems all together more.

dkarapetyan 9y ago

These types of posts are preaching to the choir. Most managers don't get this. They'd rather have you sitting and doing nothing but being in their line of sight instead of being up and about and thinking. Without concerted pressure this is not going to change any time soon. IBM just recently announced it wanted all employees to be on-site. It is a tactic to cut back their workforce but the fact that they can do this unchallenged means something about worker rights is broken.

mcv 9y ago

I work 4 days (32 hours) a week, and have done so for years. I don't think my brother has ever worked 5 days a week. In Netherland, many people with kids work one day less, to be with their kids. On most projects I've worked, most team members worked 4 days. I've only once had to reject a job because they insisted on a 5 day work week. Working less than 5 days is entirely uncontroversial here. In fact, I believe Netherland is world champion part-time work. And personally, I think it makes total sense. If you've got a good job, the extra time is often worth more than the extra money. We need time to enjoy life. Life is more than work.