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Could you describe #4 in more detail? From adding this all up, I figure you must be working 30-35 hours a week between those two jobs, so less than 20 hours a w

Could you describe #4 in more detail? From adding this all up, I figure you must be working 30-35 hours a week between those two jobs, so less than 20 hours a week each. What is the process by which you limit your capacity to only fill a small number of hours? Do the teams believe you to be slower than you are? Is this an explicit understanding that you'll only work half time? I have never had a job where there is not more than enough to be done, such that I could always fill more hours than I have with useful work.

xxEightyxx 4y ago
Yeah it's right around 30-35 hours per week. Not to toot my own horn but I am very good at what I do, which is software & data engineering. Most importantly, both are jobs that have a large and talented support system of fellow engineers, scrum masters, product owners, and management. In fact, that's precisely why I took these two. My previous jobs were extremely stressful and left me no time for anything outside of my immediate work and I ended up switching jobs last year as a result. Both employers allow me a lot of leeway and flexibility so long as I can continue to deliver products on schedule, which to this day, I have never been late. So number of hours worked is fairly inconsequential to actual work that is done in both jobs.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  I'm sorry but I still don't get it. I've never had a job where being very good at it left a lot of free time during which to be very good at another job. It just left free time to move more things along more quickly or improving things. Like, I think mechanically I understand what you're saying; I think you're saying that each week or couple weeks or month or whatever, you commit to projects sized to fill about 50% of your time, and then you finish those commitments. But if I were your manager or tech lead or teammate and I knew you were employed full time at the company, I would instead want you to commit more than 50% of your time, like improving things or doing more projects or and same projects faster or helping other people with their projects or any number of other things, but not just, "welp, I got my tickets done, that's it for me!". So I still don't really get it, are you working part time at these companies, or are your managers happy to pay you for a full time job despite you working half time, or do they think you're actually filling all your time?
  - randomopining 4y ago
    How so hard to understand? There’s an acceptable level of work at a company and this guy is meeting it without having to use 40 hours a week.
    - jachee 4y ago
      I kinda get where they’re coming from. Those kinds of companies are really rare. Generally management wants to squeeze as much out of labor as humanly possible, to the point where they demand exclusive access to one’s entire labor availability. The fact that xxEightyxx has found not one, but two companies willing to pay six figures for a functionally part-time employee is pretty mind-boggling.
      - barry-cotter 4y ago
        > The fact that xxEightyxx has found not one, but two companies willing to pay six figures for a functionally part-time employee is pretty mind-boggling. There’s an entire internet subculture of people devoted to doing this. Check out r/overemployed. And there are far, far more people who do similar things entirely above board as consultants and contractors.
        sanderjd 4y ago
        Working by project with set deliverables as a consultant/contractor makes perfect sense to me. What makes less sense is doing so as a full time employee.
      - Atlas22 4y ago
        The rarity of these companies varies widely on sector. I agree that it will be difficult to find typical tech startups that wont try to squeeze the maximum amount of time out of you. If you want high chance of relaxed workloads, look for large corporations that exclusively contract with government out of a large budget. For example, the defense industry (e.g., the few companies designing and manufacturing planes, radars, avionics, communication equipment, guidance systems) is the biggest supplier of these type of roles that I know of. The pay in these roles is usually market competitive or better. At least from my experience, only about 20% of time or less is actually spent "working on something", much of which is sitting in irrelevant meetings. I would only recommend it if you are purely looking to collect an easy paycheck and you have a high tolerance for boredom, bureaucracy, internal politics and incompetence at all levels. Post-covid remote work that much of government and contractors have moved to (permanently?) has likely also made it significantly easier to have multiple "full time" jobs. Management does not care about anything in this sector except that hard deadlines are met (the real deadlines, very rarely even gets close), soft deadlines are missed (used to justify "needing" more money), and nothing is completed too quickly (they want to give the illusion that hard work is being done).

xxEightyxx 4y ago

Yeah it's right around 30-35 hours per week. Not to toot my own horn but I am very good at what I do, which is software & data engineering. Most importantly, both are jobs that have a large and talented support system of fellow engineers, scrum masters, product owners, and management. In fact, that's precisely why I took these two. My previous jobs were extremely stressful and left me no time for anything outside of my immediate work and I ended up switching jobs last year as a result. Both employers allow me a lot of leeway and flexibility so long as I can continue to deliver products on schedule, which to this day, I have never been late. So number of hours worked is fairly inconsequential to actual work that is done in both jobs.

sanderjd 4y ago
I'm sorry but I still don't get it. I've never had a job where being very good at it left a lot of free time during which to be very good at another job. It just left free time to move more things along more quickly or improving things. Like, I think mechanically I understand what you're saying; I think you're saying that each week or couple weeks or month or whatever, you commit to projects sized to fill about 50% of your time, and then you finish those commitments. But if I were your manager or tech lead or teammate and I knew you were employed full time at the company, I would instead want you to commit more than 50% of your time, like improving things or doing more projects or and same projects faster or helping other people with their projects or any number of other things, but not just, "welp, I got my tickets done, that's it for me!". So I still don't really get it, are you working part time at these companies, or are your managers happy to pay you for a full time job despite you working half time, or do they think you're actually filling all your time?
- randomopining 4y ago
  How so hard to understand? There’s an acceptable level of work at a company and this guy is meeting it without having to use 40 hours a week.
  - jachee 4y ago
    I kinda get where they’re coming from. Those kinds of companies are really rare. Generally management wants to squeeze as much out of labor as humanly possible, to the point where they demand exclusive access to one’s entire labor availability. The fact that xxEightyxx has found not one, but two companies willing to pay six figures for a functionally part-time employee is pretty mind-boggling.
    - barry-cotter 4y ago
      > The fact that xxEightyxx has found not one, but two companies willing to pay six figures for a functionally part-time employee is pretty mind-boggling. There’s an entire internet subculture of people devoted to doing this. Check out r/overemployed. And there are far, far more people who do similar things entirely above board as consultants and contractors.
      - sanderjd 4y ago
        Working by project with set deliverables as a consultant/contractor makes perfect sense to me. What makes less sense is doing so as a full time employee.
    - Atlas22 4y ago
      The rarity of these companies varies widely on sector. I agree that it will be difficult to find typical tech startups that wont try to squeeze the maximum amount of time out of you. If you want high chance of relaxed workloads, look for large corporations that exclusively contract with government out of a large budget. For example, the defense industry (e.g., the few companies designing and manufacturing planes, radars, avionics, communication equipment, guidance systems) is the biggest supplier of these type of roles that I know of. The pay in these roles is usually market competitive or better. At least from my experience, only about 20% of time or less is actually spent "working on something", much of which is sitting in irrelevant meetings. I would only recommend it if you are purely looking to collect an easy paycheck and you have a high tolerance for boredom, bureaucracy, internal politics and incompetence at all levels. Post-covid remote work that much of government and contractors have moved to (permanently?) has likely also made it significantly easier to have multiple "full time" jobs. Management does not care about anything in this sector except that hard deadlines are met (the real deadlines, very rarely even gets close), soft deadlines are missed (used to justify "needing" more money), and nothing is completed too quickly (they want to give the illusion that hard work is being done).