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Curious to find out if anyone is able to achieve strong career satisfaction working less than less than 20 hours a week. For me, I've always looked at the exch

Curious to find out if anyone is able to achieve strong career satisfaction working less than less than 20 hours a week. For me, I've always looked at the exchange of time for money. The problem with that is that you can't exchange money for time, only time for money. Realizing this, I set work to 0. There seems to be a step function at 40 hours - the "full time job", but I haven't heard of many people that are successful in traditional software engineering jobs with a 20 hour work week, aside from perhaps those that work for themselves and have their project in "maintenance".

mLuby 5y ago
> you can't exchange money for time, only time for money. Most of the money people spend is to save them massive amounts of time. - Don't want to farm for a season to eat? Go buy food at the market. - Don't want to build yourself a small cabin on the outskirts? Buy or rent a home somewhere convenient. - Don't want to walk from NYC to SF like the pioneers? Buy a plane ticket and be there in 6h. - Don't want to make some item yourself? Buy it from a store and pay extra for delivery. - Don't want to (learn to) do some maintenance task yourself? Hire a handyperson.
granshaw 5y ago
I was a fulltime employee for about a decade. Quit to attempt to launch some products with a friend. Wasn’t very successful and started to get stressed out about savings going down so managed to find a 6hr/day contracting job, with the rest of my time still working on my own products Have been doing that for close to a year now, and am trying to raise rates so I can move to a 3-full-day workweek instead, which I feel I can utilize better Motivation hasn’t been great lately, feel like I’m at a crossroads as to what to do with my career and feel like need to decide soon. If you reply with your email would be happy to chat more about it!
- blobbers 5y ago
  Probably not a good idea to post my email on hackernews. Thanks for the reply. I understand motivation can be tough. I'm also at the point where I'm wondering if I should go back to the more traditional route. Have you shipped any of your products? I feel like that's pretty key to being to able to talk about your accomplishments in the event of failure.

mLuby 5y ago

> you can't exchange money for time, only time for money. Most of the money people spend is to save them massive amounts of time. - Don't want to farm for a season to eat? Go buy food at the market. - Don't want to build yourself a small cabin on the outskirts? Buy or rent a home somewhere convenient. - Don't want to walk from NYC to SF like the pioneers? Buy a plane ticket and be there in 6h. - Don't want to make some item yourself? Buy it from a store and pay extra for delivery. - Don't want to (learn to) do some maintenance task yourself? Hire a handyperson.

granshaw 5y ago

I was a fulltime employee for about a decade. Quit to attempt to launch some products with a friend. Wasn’t very successful and started to get stressed out about savings going down so managed to find a 6hr/day contracting job, with the rest of my time still working on my own products Have been doing that for close to a year now, and am trying to raise rates so I can move to a 3-full-day workweek instead, which I feel I can utilize better Motivation hasn’t been great lately, feel like I’m at a crossroads as to what to do with my career and feel like need to decide soon. If you reply with your email would be happy to chat more about it!

blobbers 5y ago
Probably not a good idea to post my email on hackernews. Thanks for the reply. I understand motivation can be tough. I'm also at the point where I'm wondering if I should go back to the more traditional route. Have you shipped any of your products? I feel like that's pretty key to being to able to talk about your accomplishments in the event of failure.