5 ms·

There was a time during the first shut down when my company decided to reduce peoples hours and also reduce their salaries instead of laying off more employees.

There was a time during the first shut down when my company decided to reduce peoples hours and also reduce their salaries instead of laying off more employees. I end up working 20 hours a week (instead of my normal 35) with a reduced salary (and I was even able to collect partial California unemployment benefits for the remainder of the reduced hours under a special program called Workshare). Honestly it was amazing - made me really want to find a job that was less pay but also that low in hours. Working less than 40 is nice but once you get down to 20 you have whole DAYS where you can do whatever you want. You sometimes start work at noon or end at noon and then have the remainder of your weekday to yourself or in the company of others. It was an odd experience seeing my neighbours and friends going through so much stress and pandemic related BS while I was (temporarily at least) having revelations about how much I wanted to work in life. Fortunately and unfortunately it was very short lived.

j7ake 5y ago
This sounds great. Ideally for me is that I am able to choose stretches of the year where I work 50% and stretches where I work 100%, and small number of weeks where I work 150%.
npsimons 5y ago
> made me really want to find a job that was less pay but also that low in hours This was a very large factor in why I quit - old job wouldn't let me cut back hours, even at reduced pay, even framing it as "leave without pay", so I had no choice but to quit to get my time back, and I had enough money. As it is, I'm content staying in that "learning and broadening" mode, even though I'm 20-ish years in on my career. I don't think I'll go back, unless I absolutely have to, or a project catches my interest, but even then, no amount of money is going to convince me to work so many hours or ever in an office again (another reason I quit was they wanted us back in the office, despite my being much more effective working from home).
- shoo 5y ago
  > old job wouldn't let me cut back hours, even at reduced pay, even framing it as "leave without pay", I was curious what your role was, at what the incentives might have been for your old job to refuse this. In your about page I see: > Previously a programmer in the DoD world speculation: were you working for a contractor that needed to bill your time out by the hour to the government? So if you weren't working maximum billable hours, they weren't making maximum profit margin on your hours, compared to someone else who would?
  - npsimons 5y ago
    No, I was in civil service. Something I've had explained to me since is that even if my boss wanted to (he didn't; very old-school thinking), they couldn't because my position wasn't "coded" for part time. This was a problem I also bumped up against quite often as someone who has been doing "DevOps" things since before that term was coined, but the government very much wants to pigeonhole people and couldn't wrap it's head around someone with IT experience who was also a software engineer. Even with certs that I basically earned blindfolded, they wouldn't grant me a sysadmin letter, and I didn't want to re-code to IT/IM because I saw how burned out sysadmins got. The turnover in government IT was insane. If I really wanted, I could go be a government contractor, but I've seen they still want even contractors on-site, and it's completely unnecessary. For now, I'm just "re-tooling" to tech stacks that have piqued my interest, exploring my options (eg, my brother the designer wants to build games with me). Honestly, I'm not the first, and from people I've kept in touch with, I'm far from the last. Government agencies need a serious kick in the pants if they want to keep good talent. It's not so much about the money, that's always going to be below market rate due to the tradeoff in stability and benefits (and even benefits are dwindling), it's more about recognizing that WFH is a right, not a privilege, and being flexible in hours and horizontal job duty changes. I've watched many a better engineer than myself leave for greener pastures (Micron, Blue Origin, etc), and middle management is still in denial because they've been in the same role for 30+ years and think "nothing has changed", or if they do adopt business practices, it's always the worst ones (open floor plans, etc). FFS, I couldn't get the last project I worked on to enable CI on their GitLab instance.
shoo 5y ago
Some companies have flexible work policies that give employees the option of switching to part time. My current employer (megacorp, not tech) has such a policy documented internally, not really widely advertised. I read about it, discussed it with manager, I framed it as "it doesn't make sense for me to work full time any more. I'm still open to doing part time. Can we switch to part time, per company policy?". Manager agreed, I negotiated with managers of project I was allocated to, to let them lock in the 3 days a week they wanted me at work, provided it left me with a contiguous 4 day weekend. I've been part time for over a year now, 4 day weekends every week. It is pretty great. I don't do anything much productive with my days off, but that's okay. I worked full time for about a decade prior to this point. Perhaps part of this is having negotiating power to frame the switch to part time not as a request, but instead implicitly framing it as "we need to figure out a part time arrangement or I'll need to find another employer that does", rather than requesting a switch to part time. Part of the negotiating power is being good enough at what you do for your skills to be in demand, and having resources or alternatives to fall back on if company is not willing to agree to a part time arrangement.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  >Part of the negotiating power is being good enough at what you do for your skills to be in demand, and having resources or alternatives to fall back on if company is not willing to agree to a part time arrangement. but that's the thing: there aren't many jobs past entry level that even give such an option for part time. Consulting is the closest factor but even than can have some strict time requirements (too strict at times). So for (I wager) 90+% of people, the only fallback is "I can quit and never work a day in my life again" sorts of situations. That or you are playing some high stakes career haggling should the employer decide to try and train a replacement that will work full tim.
- ketzo 5y ago
  I appreciate that you acknowledge the negotiating power required to make that kind of a move. That sounds like a great move for you, and I'm really curious about your experience. Do you find that you're more "out of the loop"? Naively, I would expect you to become a lot more of a satellite employee, less involved in any decisionmaking. How has that gone?
nickjj 5y ago
> Working less than 40 is nice but once you get down to 20 you have whole DAYS where you can do whatever you want I spent around 10 years working about 20 hours a week doing freelance work. It's good until it's not. Basically, yes you do have a lot of time and often times you can decide to be done at noon if you'd like. Taking entire days off is also possible unless it's expected to do something in a timely fashion such as meet with someone or produce results by XYZ day. I found in practice it wasn't possible to really drop off the grid for continuous 4 day weekends. I came to the conclusion this lifestyle is only really worth it when you have more money than you would likely ever have if you worked this schedule for a long time. For example, if you only worked 3 days a week but had millions of dollars then this would be super interesting because you could go and do fun things all the time. Having $5,000 a month to spend guilt free to do whatever would be amazing if it didn't cut into any type of retirement fund because you're already set. But if you're working for half a salary chances are you don't have millions of dollars tucked away unless remarkable things have happened to you. So what you really end up doing is finishing at noon some days and then procrastinating on everything while you do nothing productive or fun because you've done everything you could with your budget 100 times over after years of this lifestyle. At least that's what happened to me. Your mileage may vary. I realized I'm happier when I feel like I'm maximizing my time. That doesn't mean always working but it means feeling like I'm making enough to where when I want to take off 2 weeks a few times a year to do something really fun it's fully enjoyed. Then I fill in the gaps between trips doing assorted fun but not crazy things. With 40 hours of payments this becomes less of a financial burden. Only problem now is having less time to do them.
- wildmanx 5y ago
  > So what you really end up doing is finishing at noon some days and then procrastinating on everything while you do nothing productive or fun because you've done everything you could with your budget 100 times over after years of this lifestyle. This indicates that you are tying "free time" closely with "spending money" by doing some costly activity. Perhaps that's the issue right there. Just sitting in the sunshine at a lake with a book, or with a cappuccino in a cozy coffee place downtown chatting with friends, neither costs significant money. Or go running or biking or swimming or rock climbing. Or hack a cool side project in Haskell, whatever floats your boat. I'm not sure what you are aiming for to do with your free time, but if anything that doesn't cost significant money you book as "just procrastinating" instead of enjoying the free time, then that's the issue here.

j7ake 5y ago

This sounds great. Ideally for me is that I am able to choose stretches of the year where I work 50% and stretches where I work 100%, and small number of weeks where I work 150%.

npsimons 5y ago

> made me really want to find a job that was less pay but also that low in hours This was a very large factor in why I quit - old job wouldn't let me cut back hours, even at reduced pay, even framing it as "leave without pay", so I had no choice but to quit to get my time back, and I had enough money. As it is, I'm content staying in that "learning and broadening" mode, even though I'm 20-ish years in on my career. I don't think I'll go back, unless I absolutely have to, or a project catches my interest, but even then, no amount of money is going to convince me to work so many hours or ever in an office again (another reason I quit was they wanted us back in the office, despite my being much more effective working from home).

shoo 5y ago
> old job wouldn't let me cut back hours, even at reduced pay, even framing it as "leave without pay", I was curious what your role was, at what the incentives might have been for your old job to refuse this. In your about page I see: > Previously a programmer in the DoD world speculation: were you working for a contractor that needed to bill your time out by the hour to the government? So if you weren't working maximum billable hours, they weren't making maximum profit margin on your hours, compared to someone else who would?
- npsimons 5y ago
  No, I was in civil service. Something I've had explained to me since is that even if my boss wanted to (he didn't; very old-school thinking), they couldn't because my position wasn't "coded" for part time. This was a problem I also bumped up against quite often as someone who has been doing "DevOps" things since before that term was coined, but the government very much wants to pigeonhole people and couldn't wrap it's head around someone with IT experience who was also a software engineer. Even with certs that I basically earned blindfolded, they wouldn't grant me a sysadmin letter, and I didn't want to re-code to IT/IM because I saw how burned out sysadmins got. The turnover in government IT was insane. If I really wanted, I could go be a government contractor, but I've seen they still want even contractors on-site, and it's completely unnecessary. For now, I'm just "re-tooling" to tech stacks that have piqued my interest, exploring my options (eg, my brother the designer wants to build games with me). Honestly, I'm not the first, and from people I've kept in touch with, I'm far from the last. Government agencies need a serious kick in the pants if they want to keep good talent. It's not so much about the money, that's always going to be below market rate due to the tradeoff in stability and benefits (and even benefits are dwindling), it's more about recognizing that WFH is a right, not a privilege, and being flexible in hours and horizontal job duty changes. I've watched many a better engineer than myself leave for greener pastures (Micron, Blue Origin, etc), and middle management is still in denial because they've been in the same role for 30+ years and think "nothing has changed", or if they do adopt business practices, it's always the worst ones (open floor plans, etc). FFS, I couldn't get the last project I worked on to enable CI on their GitLab instance.

shoo 5y ago

Some companies have flexible work policies that give employees the option of switching to part time. My current employer (megacorp, not tech) has such a policy documented internally, not really widely advertised. I read about it, discussed it with manager, I framed it as "it doesn't make sense for me to work full time any more. I'm still open to doing part time. Can we switch to part time, per company policy?". Manager agreed, I negotiated with managers of project I was allocated to, to let them lock in the 3 days a week they wanted me at work, provided it left me with a contiguous 4 day weekend. I've been part time for over a year now, 4 day weekends every week. It is pretty great. I don't do anything much productive with my days off, but that's okay. I worked full time for about a decade prior to this point. Perhaps part of this is having negotiating power to frame the switch to part time not as a request, but instead implicitly framing it as "we need to figure out a part time arrangement or I'll need to find another employer that does", rather than requesting a switch to part time. Part of the negotiating power is being good enough at what you do for your skills to be in demand, and having resources or alternatives to fall back on if company is not willing to agree to a part time arrangement.

johnnyanmac 5y ago
>Part of the negotiating power is being good enough at what you do for your skills to be in demand, and having resources or alternatives to fall back on if company is not willing to agree to a part time arrangement. but that's the thing: there aren't many jobs past entry level that even give such an option for part time. Consulting is the closest factor but even than can have some strict time requirements (too strict at times). So for (I wager) 90+% of people, the only fallback is "I can quit and never work a day in my life again" sorts of situations. That or you are playing some high stakes career haggling should the employer decide to try and train a replacement that will work full tim.
ketzo 5y ago
I appreciate that you acknowledge the negotiating power required to make that kind of a move. That sounds like a great move for you, and I'm really curious about your experience. Do you find that you're more "out of the loop"? Naively, I would expect you to become a lot more of a satellite employee, less involved in any decisionmaking. How has that gone?

nickjj 5y ago

> Working less than 40 is nice but once you get down to 20 you have whole DAYS where you can do whatever you want I spent around 10 years working about 20 hours a week doing freelance work. It's good until it's not. Basically, yes you do have a lot of time and often times you can decide to be done at noon if you'd like. Taking entire days off is also possible unless it's expected to do something in a timely fashion such as meet with someone or produce results by XYZ day. I found in practice it wasn't possible to really drop off the grid for continuous 4 day weekends. I came to the conclusion this lifestyle is only really worth it when you have more money than you would likely ever have if you worked this schedule for a long time. For example, if you only worked 3 days a week but had millions of dollars then this would be super interesting because you could go and do fun things all the time. Having $5,000 a month to spend guilt free to do whatever would be amazing if it didn't cut into any type of retirement fund because you're already set. But if you're working for half a salary chances are you don't have millions of dollars tucked away unless remarkable things have happened to you. So what you really end up doing is finishing at noon some days and then procrastinating on everything while you do nothing productive or fun because you've done everything you could with your budget 100 times over after years of this lifestyle. At least that's what happened to me. Your mileage may vary. I realized I'm happier when I feel like I'm maximizing my time. That doesn't mean always working but it means feeling like I'm making enough to where when I want to take off 2 weeks a few times a year to do something really fun it's fully enjoyed. Then I fill in the gaps between trips doing assorted fun but not crazy things. With 40 hours of payments this becomes less of a financial burden. Only problem now is having less time to do them.

wildmanx 5y ago
> So what you really end up doing is finishing at noon some days and then procrastinating on everything while you do nothing productive or fun because you've done everything you could with your budget 100 times over after years of this lifestyle. This indicates that you are tying "free time" closely with "spending money" by doing some costly activity. Perhaps that's the issue right there. Just sitting in the sunshine at a lake with a book, or with a cappuccino in a cozy coffee place downtown chatting with friends, neither costs significant money. Or go running or biking or swimming or rock climbing. Or hack a cool side project in Haskell, whatever floats your boat. I'm not sure what you are aiming for to do with your free time, but if anything that doesn't cost significant money you book as "just procrastinating" instead of enjoying the free time, then that's the issue here.