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Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

• mproud 12y ago
  The good news is yes, these do exist! They’re called “part-time jobs.”
• mark_l_watson 12y ago
  I am in my early 60s and I am retired now except for a little consulting and writing a book or two a year. That said, starting in the early 1970s working at a large defense contractor, I got in the habit of only working 32 hours a week (took Mondays off). I continued this process with several other companies until about 15 years ago when I converted to having a lifestyle 1-man consulting business. The deal is however, it is really important to realize that it is not in a company's interest to have a part time employee in many cases so I really tried hard to add value when I was at work. I have never regretted getting 20% less salary when I only worked four days per week.
  • delinka 12y ago
    Why is it not in a company's interest to have part-time employees? By anecdotal accounts, it seems that part-time employees are less expensive than full-timers (such anecdotes generally refer to mandated benefits for full-time workers as the major cost difference.)
    • mark_l_watson 12y ago
      Good question. Every company I worked for had to provide me with an office that was empty one day a week. In most of the companies I worked for, employees who worked a minimum of 30 hours a week got full fringe benefits :-)
      • delinka 12y ago
        Thanks. "Square-footage" is one of those things I always forget when calculating the expense of employees. (Probably one reason I'm an employee and not an employer.)
  • tren 12y ago
    This is great to hear from someone who did this for a considerable amount of time. I started working 4 days per week 2 years ago (I'm 33) and so far it's proving to be an excellent decision. I'd also say I'm more effective than I used to be at my job, partly because I'm more refreshed from the time off. With the extra day it has allowed me to complete 2 contract projects, help a couple of non-profits with their tech issues and it has proved extremely useful because it's allowed me to complete chores that are usually so onerous because they involve visiting people during business hours.
  • Nav_Panel 12y ago
    How did you make the initial leap from the 40 to the 32 hour week? Did you just ask your manager if it was okay, given a proportional pay cut? Or was there already a policy in place?
• gexla 12y ago
  Four hours per day of work where you are in high focus is about normal. You will see that professionals across many creative fields only work 4 hours per day. There are a lot of posts here from developers talking about how they are more productive than their peers working less hours. Really, they probably have the same capacity for hours, but the less productive developers are carrying a lot of baggage in attempting to manage themselves (trying to push themselves when they shouldn't be.) I think you could actually put in more. The trick is to observe your own natural rhythm. For example, energy and your ability to focus is like a wave through the day. For most, I think the time of the most energy is early in the morning and then it declines from there. You aren't burning hours so much as you're burning that fuel in your brain. But if you put in your 4 hours early, then you could probably take a good break and get another good 90 minute session. You could also find other tasks that are much less cognitive demanding to fill your day. If you put in your 4 hours that you believe are more productive than what your peers put in, then fill out the rest of the day with things that are lighter and less "forced." If you are running a business, then after your creative work you still might have email, quotes, meetings, marketing, billing and a long list of other things to do. It could be pretty easy for a business manager to knock out 4 hours of creative work per day and then still fill out the rest of a normal working day with other tasks. If you didn't have these other sorts of tasks, then maybe you could work out a side project with your employer. After you do the "forced" work, then maybe there is something that you could work on which is more a "scratch an itch" type of project. This could be something that you see as a glaring problem for the business which also happens to be something that you are highly interested in. Maybe it's something that's a different area of expertise that you might want to move into in the future. Or maybe your 4 hours is all you can do without burning out.
  • gedrap 12y ago
    Totally agree. 9-5 (or 9-6) engineering jobs are a bit crazy - no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact. Many managers understand that and are cool with people just not doing work while at work... However, I would still prefer to go home than sitting and waiting for 5 or 6pm so I could do something more meaningful, because e.g. side-projects is a gray area while at work and that's fair. Even so, some non-technical higher-ups might think that the engineer is not working hard and just slacking off because everyone else is at the office till 6 or 7. Some companies recognize that (e.g. Netflix, Twitter, etc) and they don't care where and what are you do, as long as you get stuff done. In an ideal world, every company would treat engineers like that :)
• paul 12y ago
  I love this idea. If someone figures out how to successfully run a company like this, it'll be huge, as it will attract a lot of top talent who would prefer these hours. In my experience, the biggest obstacle is the amount of time dedicated to communication/coordination overhead like email and meetings. If you're already spending 20 hours/week on that, then you're left with only -4 hours/week for productive work. This is likely the reason why it worked well for an independent, "greenfield" project.
  • percept 12y ago
    I've seen several (smaller) companies hiring developers for a 4-day workweek. At least it's a start...
• mmaunder 12y ago
  You've described the perfect job for most developers. No one wants to maintain old code. Everyone wants plenty of free time. Everyone wants low pressure with an opportunity to outperform. These jobs are more common in startups and almost never found in going concerns for obvious reasons (there is no green field). It's worth pointing out that hopping from one greenfield project to the next with low pressure isn't going to expose you to world-changing opportunities. http://youtu.be/Ji_me74Xvg0?t=12s http://youtu.be/Ji_me74Xvg0?t=12s
  • wyan 12y ago
    It's worth pointing out that not doing so probably won't expose you to world-changing opportunities either.
• jahaja 12y ago
  Why is it so unusual that employers compete with less hours rather than with larger wages? Is it because granting someone with less work would probably make other employees require the same? I feel that after a certain amount it would be much more enjoyable to get less hours rather than a raise. However the latter seems to be much easier, if not the only one, to get.
  • marcosdumay 12y ago
    Manager's calculations tend to have this format: Person X produced me $A amount in 40 hours. His salary is $B. B being much smaller than A[1], I can increase it without much an impact on the bottom-line. But, again, B being much smaller than A, if he worked less hours, I'd reduce A much more than I reduce B. [1] It has to be, otherwise, will all the overhead a business has, I'd go broke.
  • aidenn0 12y ago
    I don't know the answer, but I have a few ideas: 1) Puritanical roots of America (Idle hands are the devil's workshop) still linger as the ideal is you spend most of your time working. 2) Hiring more people is hard; furthermore the larger the team, the less efficient (per person) the team is. Therefore you want to get maximum value out of the people you have any way possible. A 25% boost in output of each person on the team is easily worth as much as (if not more than) hiring twice as many people. Similarly a perceived loss of 20% of productivity per person would be like halving the size of your team. I could easily believe that a 16 hour week has 20% lower output than a 40 hour week. 3) Lots of companies do offer lower hours for lower pay. They just typically don't hire people into that situation for some reason (I'm open to suggestions why that is so). However, no good place I've ever worked would fail to do that for an employee they want to keep.
    • jahaja 12y ago
      I agree with point 1 - sad but true. Not only in America as well. I like that you say "perceived loss of 20%". I wonder how substantial the actual difference in productivity is. I wouldn't want to compare at this day to 16 hours, but rather something like 30 hours.
• mdotk 12y ago
  Try being a lawyer.... 16 hours days standard and when you are being charged out at $500 / hour (and receiving maybe 20% of that) your boss isn't expecting 4 hours of real work and 12 hours of admin... they want 16 hours of extreme concentration. Gotta be one of the worst careers you can choose.
  • ClassicFarris 12y ago
    The OP was talking about 16h weeks. Not 16h days. I can certainly feel for you if you're the one working 16h days week in and week out.
    • mdotk 12y ago
      Sorry got that, was more replying to the guys saying that in your average 8-10 hour day you'll only do 4 hours of intense work anyway (so that a 4 hour "actual work" day is kinda normal).
  • jqm 12y ago
    20% of $500 an hour is a pretty solid salary. Especially if you are putting in 16 hour days. I would expect to give a little blood for that kind of money.
  • walshemj 12y ago
    no they want 16 hours of billable time :-) that fact that for those 12 hours you put down as reading case notes you spent 1 of them arranging your holiday and 1 gossiping is neither hear nor there
• blablablaat 12y ago
  Sounded good untill I read: "I sincerely think it is quite unrealistic to ask a knowledge worker". What is this with you programmers that you think that you're the best thing that has happend to this world? It's just a job. No more a job then any other one. Same thing as that bullshit as companies that want every employee to program. Do you see CEO's with a background as a carpenter writing blogposts about how everybody should build at least a chair every month? Self obsessed rich kids.
  • elbear 12y ago
    I don't see anything constructive in your comment, just a rant and personal attacks. If you meant to actually provide something useful to the discussion, you failed.
  • nitrogen 12y ago
    What motivates your disdain? What is this with you programmers that you think that you're the best thing that has happend to this world? It's just a job. No more a job then any other one. ...as evidenced by the equivalent years of training required to, say, use a shovel? Self obsessed rich kids. Don't assume that all of us are rich, or even solidly middle class. Sometimes startup founders (unwisely) spend years at or below poverty (been there, done that). Do assume that anybody with ~average intelligence and above average motivation could become a programmer, though.
  • nknighthb 12y ago
    I spent most of my childhood raised by a single mother below the poverty line thanks to a borderline-deadbeat dad, save for the period I lived with an abusive junkie stepfather. Today I help support disabled family members on my below-market salary. Come call me a "self obsessed rich kid" to my face.
  • a-saleh 12y ago
    Knowledge worker is not limited for programmers :-) I.e. it is not as hard to imagine, that the guy asking for 16/h job could be mathematician, engineer, architect, or even some product manager in some financial institution ... and this debate with motive "maybe if we worked less hours/day, but with consistency and focus" is much older than programming craft. Ford started this with his 8h/day instead of 10h/day for his factory workers ...
• a-saleh 12y ago
  20hour/week, my first job, working at RedHat while still at school. Of course, they paid me by the hour, but I don't think I would have managed to finish my masters thesis on 40h/week job :) RedHat is a large corporation, so mostly your work conditions depend on managers around you. I.e.: I started as an intern and after a year manager asked me, if I want to become a regular employee, and I had a condition to remain on 20h/week. Friend of mine had just the option of intern or full-time (40h/week).
• dlevine 12y ago
  At the moment I'm a freelance software developer, and I take on multiple projects at once. Right now, I'm working on three projects, and typically end up spending 4-6 hours a day on billable work. I can put in more, but after a point, I can feel my productivity drop off. Realistically, I end up completing 20-25 hours of billable work a week (and probably another 10-15 doing stuff that isn't directly billable). I could spend more time working on billable stuff, but I find that there are heavily diminishing returns after that point. Sure I can get in more productivity for a brief period (a few weeks max), but there is always debt to repay. A lot of people tell me that they are looking for someone who is "half time", which to them means 20 hours a week. I've tried to explain to them that I don't schedule 40 hours of work in a week, and that for me "half-time" is 10-15 (productive) hours. A lot of people won't accept that. I'm finding that it's easier to tell them that I'll work half-time, get more work done in 10-15 hours than most people would in 20, and then bill them for the time that I actually worked. If I'm getting the project done, then they aren't going to complain that I'm billing them for too few hours. That obviously doesn't work if they are expecting me to be on-site 20 hours a week, but in my case (where I work in my own office), it seems to be ok.
  • capisce 12y ago
    A comfortable level of 20-25 hours of billable work per week seems to fit my experience in freelancing too. In the long run I don't think I'd want to try to push much beyond that.
• capisce 12y ago
  I too am looking to work less than the standard 40 hours a week for similar reasons. Only committing to 4-6 hours in a given day also gives me more freedom to take a large break in the middle of the day to go for a walk or a run, which can be useful in the Scandinavian winter when the sun is only up for a relatively limited time each day. There are some political parties in Norway and Sweden who want to make a six hour work day the norm. There are many good arguments for significantly reducing the amount of time the average person works, both for the benefit of individuals and community: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours
• uhmmmm 12y ago
  I want to work less hours for an employer / a client also because I want to invest productive hours in my own self improvement and personal projects. There should be a lot more flexibility from the employer side in how many hours an employee commits to working. It should probably be negotiable and explicitly stated in the employment contract.
• eswat 12y ago
  I’m doing a 4/5 schedule now for client projects. It was a lot easier to do this since going freelance and charging based on the value I generate, instead of an hourly rate. While more “free time” has been a bonus (realistically I just work and study things that improve my business or my clients indirectly). The best benefit I’ve found from this work schedule is the push to get the day’s work done within those few hours. This doesn’t mean cutting corners or half-assing the work done, but rather figuring out solutions that get the most bang for the buck and being ruthless as to what details to sweat afterwards.
• robertlf 12y ago
  Typical Millenial
• cenhyperion 12y ago
  My main question would be salary. You really can't reasonably expect your employer to pay you the same salary as someone working more than twice the hours. Are you comfortable making less than half the salary of a programmer working 40 hours a week instead of 16?
  • Ramp_ 12y ago
    What if you are more effective/productive in 16 hours than they are in 40? Wouldn't this warrant a higher salary?
  • aianus 12y ago
    If you can work remotely you can move somewhere far and cheap and live outrageously well on half an American engineer's salary. Plus you now have the free time to actually enjoy it.
• mahyarm 12y ago
  You don't work in full focus for the full hours. Other hours your are doing relatively low focus things such as code reviews, answering questions, eating lunch, attending meetings, interviewing, talking about the direction and design of the project, etc. They want you around as an on-call 'consultant' so you can unblock other people more quickly. When it's just yourself green fielding a project, you don't really need to be anyone's consultant then, so you can just work the productive hours. Some companies unfortunately care about face time too :/
• fizx 12y ago
  You didn't say what you do. We have a remote team and would do this for any of the following skillsets: server Java, Rails, FE/JS, designer, sysadmin.
• hopeless 12y ago
  I worked 20-25hrs / weeks for about 2 years as a consultant but then, probably against my better judgement, joined a company in March doing the standard 37+hrs. I'm unhappy, unfocused and RescueTime tells me that my efficiency has dropped about 20%. After only a few months, I'm going back to consulting with a 20-25hr week. If you haven't tried it, you probably don't realise the universally positive effects it will have.
  • huffer 12y ago
    probably off-topic: you mention 37h/w so I'm guessing (Western) Europe... Do you find it reasonably easy to find consultancy jobs that allow for ~20h/w (and still make enough for sustenance)? To me it looks like freelancers are generally accepted by companies only if hiring permanent staff is not feasible, and once they decide to pay the (usually higher) daily rate, they would squeeze so much out of that day that half-day jobs would be blasphemy - unless you're very well known for your expertise in your field/niche, of course...
• JshWright 12y ago
  A lot of emergency services (fire, EMS) are 4-on/4-off, but they're generally 4 12 hour shifts...
• Thiz 12y ago
  25 hours a week is for me the perfect schedule, dedicating four hours a day to full coding and one hour to fuck off with management about brainstorming, requirements, proposals, design, and boring meetings. Once they're happy, I say goodbye for the day and immerse myself in my editor. Not a single fly tries to cross between me and my monitor while coding.
• pentasec 12y ago
  I think it is not easy nowdays....
• NickSharp 12y ago
  To answer your question, this is almost impossible to find. I tried for 12 years in the Bay Area with no real success. I'm a highly skilled software engineer with a solid qualifications. I never had any problem getting full time job offers with huge salaries, even in bust times; but god forbid I ask for Fridays off, I'd be shown to the door real quick. Finally I started my own company. Most people work 16-20 hours/week and no one works more than 30 (other than myself sometimes for a crunch.) Everyone is happy, and I get great value for my money. As a bootstrapped start up, that value per dollar is vital.
  • capisce 12y ago
    > god forbid I ask for Fridays off, I'd be shown to the door real quick They must be really afraid of the precedence it sets - that other employees would also start to negotiate for reduced work hours.
• mathattack 12y ago
  I have never seen this. I've seen actual productivity in those amounts. (4 hour push in the morning, less productive afternoon, nothing gets done on Friday) If you can find it and pull it off, all the more power to you, because it is hard to stay productive after 4 hours of mentally draining creative intense thinking.
• dennisgorelik 12y ago
  HN readers are well informed about decline in productivity in case of burnout. But if number of working hours is significantly lower than 40 hours per week, then productivity deteriorates too, for the following reasons: 1) In order to solve complex task, programmer need to load all relevant details into his mind. That takes time. If working day is too short, then most of the time is spend on such loading and there is not enough time to actually accomplish something. 2) Shorter working hours usually means less expertise long term. Less expertise means less productivity. 3) Shorter work time means it's harder to meet with coworkers, because there is not enough work hours to meet. Less meetings with coworkers means lower productivity, because work in isolation usually mean working on wrong problems and less knowledge exchange. So, on one side we have burnout risks. On another size we have incompetence risks. Our society tried various working schedule and worked out 40 hours work week as the one that is closest to the optimum. Note though, that 40 hours work week does not mean 40 hours per week coding. There are many other things that developer should do at work.
  • UweSchmidt 12y ago
    Good points, except: Our society hasn't really tried various working schedules to find an optimum work week for programmer productivity. The 8 hour day was an achievement by the unions, down from the insane workdays during the industrialization. If it were optimized, it would have been optimized for assembly-line style manual labor.
• k0t0n0 12y ago
  > I have had an extremely good experience doing a 4 hour per day. me too.
• mike_esspe 12y ago
  If you can't find such job, there is a simple hack: work one year, then take a year off.
  • cerberusss 12y ago
    That requires you to save 50% of your income. For most of us, that requires relocating to a cheaper home, or telling your significant other that she'll need to chip in just as much as you do. Both are pretty big hurdles. However if you can pull it off, it's great.
    • mike_esspe 12y ago
      But if you are working 16 hours week, you are forfeiting 50% of your income too.
• brainless 12y ago
  Let me share how I am trying to work more per day and still have better focus than I even had in my life. I have always considered working lower hours per day to stay more focused. I have many failures in projects, many of them I could relate to my issues with being able to focus and finding love in my work. Recently I have been ill and was without work for about 4 months. I used to lead a stressful like, like many entrepreneurs. But my physical issues started making things more problematic. Thus I started figuring out how to solve them and yet work at decent 8 - 10 hours each day with very good attention. After trying a different timing routines, I finally am working with this - I get start work at about 9:30 - 10 AM. Work till about 2 PM. Then I take a good break till about 5 PM. I take my lunch and a short but comfortable power nap. I take a shower before heading back to work at 5 PM. Then I work till about 9 - 10 PM as my situation permits. I sleep usually at 11 - 11:30 PM and wake up at about 7:30 AM. The major benefit I get is that I have 2 * ~ 4 hour slots every day. I understand it is difficult for many folks to commit this much time. But I have very few options left. I need put in good, focused work each day and the amount of work I have can not, sadly be finished in 16 hour work weeks. Hope this helps someone.
• brittonrt 12y ago
  The only correct work schedule is the one you are able to work out with your employers and customers which works for you and for them. If those conditions are met it's a legitimate schedule, even if it's only 1 hour a day one day a week.
• goblin89 12y ago
  So at 9-to-5 job in an average US company, if you work only 9-to-1, and spend the rest of the time doing what you like and chatting with coworkers, but produce the expected results—you'll be considered not working hard enough? Sounds like Japan. I doubt that's true, though—I bet OP can just find any job and work comfortable hours (provided OP delivers). Any decent company in our field shouldn't judge you by how hard-working you appear throughout the whole work day. Just find a decent company.
• spektom 12y ago
  Did you think about your work beyond these four hours a day? I you did, then it makes a lot of sense. Normally, thinking should take a half of the work time, the rest is dedicated for the implementation. So, if the four hours a day is the implementation net time, and another four (may be more) you were chewing all possible solutions, architecture, optimization, learning new technologies to apply, then totally it becomes much more than 16 hours per week job. I work in a big company now, and I try to split my time exactly the same: four hours - I'm thinking/reading/learning, another four or less - I'm typing some code. And this scheme is proving itself as much more optimal comparing to a daily 10 hours implementation rush in a start-up where I worked before.
• cerberusss 12y ago
  Actually I wouldn't value the 16-hours so much, but rather the freedom to divide 32 hours over four days. We've got a toddler and I don't want to be a parent that has to race from/to the day care. I'm quitting my day job and starting freelancing in October this year, in iOS development in The Netherlands, Europe. I'd really welcome a project.
• ivanhoe 12y ago
  As a freelancer I've also found that 3-4 hours sessions are perfect, although I usually go for 2 x 3-4h a day and then one slower day every couple of days. That's just necessary to counter those periods when you have to work around the clock and save yourself from more serious burnouts..
• lily2014 12y ago
  I'd like to know too
• mou5trap 12y ago
  Crazy it is to sit steadily for 8 hours for even a fresh out of the college guy like me. I am currently into the training phase, but my employers are not providing the training. Nevertheless I have to sit 8-9 hours no matter what! I don't find it productive at all, I might read all day about things but that sure ain't propelling me anywhere ahead in work. Scenario is that after a certain hours of sitting you do loose the consciousness quotient. Might as well be that it drops only by a percentage. According to some people here, they do see their colleagues working for 8-9 hours daily, whereas what they don't know is that they are paid to do so just like you are, only difference being that they are more afraid stand out and relax during work as it might decrease their chances of a salary hike.
• lsalamon 12y ago
  1,600 Chinese die daily from overwork. That is the cause of the china selling very cheap stuff.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• torq101 12y ago
  Jumping on this thread a little late, but a lot of the points raised here and in the comments resonate quite strongly with me. It sounds like many of the comments here from people who have achieved a shortened work week are from consultants/freelancers. So I have a few general questions towards that end, for anyone that would be willing to answer them: 1) How did you get into consulting/freelancing? 2) Have you always managed to work at a reduced work week(< 40 hrs/wk), or were there times in the beginning where you were working more, and if so, why? 3) It sounds like much of this depends on finding good clients to work for. How did you go about finding those clients? How long did it take? How did you know they were good clients? 4) What resources did you find most helpful when you were first starting out consulting/freelancing? I'm really interested in achieving this goal, I'm just not sure how to get started or where to look for information. Any help/discussion would be greatly appreciated!
• vardy 12y ago
  4hr day PHP job opportunity We're Looking for a knowledge PHP/LAMP/Symfony2/MVC/CSS developer to join our niche dating startup on 4hr/day 5 days a week basis. Offering £30k/yr and based out of London. Remote working is a possibility for the right person. The current team of 4 is spread between London and Birmingham. We've spent the past 12 months turning around an exiting business into the leader in it's niche and have big plans for broadening the business over the next year. Email me if you're interested and would like more details about the job/business/team: contact dot vardy at gmail dot com Thanks, James
• Sindrome 12y ago
  Are there countries where working ~20 hours a week in Tech is acceptable?
• linohh 12y ago
  No, I've been working 20h weeks for years. Companies are very desperate to find decent people and it's better to have one for 20 hours compared to 0 hours. (I'm in Germany where students are not allowed to work more than 20 hours / week if they want to keep cheap student rates with the mandatory health insurance)
• justizin 12y ago
  I've found that schedule flexibility on that level is rare unless doing freelance work, which has tons of accompanying challenges like actually getting people to pay and maintaining enough work to fill the hours you want without selling more than you want. I agree with all of your points, though.
  • ChrisAntaki 12y ago
    Choose your clients well, and always deliver yourself, and they'll tend to as well.
    • cerberusss 12y ago
      And solidify the client relationship with a good contract.
• NathanKP 12y ago
  In the startup industry you'll find lots of greenfield projects, but very few where working only 4 hours a day is acceptable. Startups tend to need to get a lot of work done, relatively quickly, with a very small team. This is just the most effective way to build a business during the startup phase. However, you will also find lots of startups have very flexible work hours as long as you get a reasonable amount of work done every week. Additionally, depending on your skill level and role within the startup it is likely that you'll be working on lots of different types of projects from day to day, which for me personally has always been enough to keep me enjoying what I do for a living, even though I'm usually working 40+ hours per week. And some startups are very open to you contributing code back to the open source community. (Especially Node.js startups, where publishing NPM modules is just part of being a member of the ecosystem.) For me personally this also gives me that feeling of pleasure that ordinary work related coding might not always.
• primitivesuave 12y ago
  I coordinate 14 summer camp locations for kids every summer, it allows me to take the rest of the year off for travel or really whatever. Being a developer helps because you can build and sell web products to keep yourself working on something constructive, but nowadays most of my projects are random tasks that I've always wanted to do (construct a Wing Chun dummy, bike all the way to SF, build a go-kart, Lego rubiks cube solver, etc)
• ef4 12y ago
  I don't think it's too difficult to find such opportunities if you're willing to be a freelancer/consultant. I've gone for periods at as little as 5 hours a week. In that case I was mentoring more junior programmers, rather than owning a software project myself. It worked out great and the client was happy. As you saw, at 16 hours you can easily own a software project and get great results. There's no reason you can't bid for freelance work at that level of commitment.
  • radikalus 12y ago
    Definitely. Typically, the types of projects I'd outsource to a consultant are non mission critical and the pacing is such that a 1/2 time consultant is totally fine.
  • justizin 12y ago
    For what periods of time have you been able to sustain your needed income? I did this for a few years, but found that it often took a significant portion of time to line up the gigs, and some customers would hold payment for extra work. Do you ever end up with only 5h of work when you want / need more? The economy was diff a few years ago, though..
    • ef4 12y ago
      I had some relatively steady long-term clients. Sometimes they were slow to pay, but they always paid eventually. I had enough cushion from the previous job not to worry too much about short term cashflow. Otherwise it can be a problem.
• NDizzle 12y ago
  I negotiated a 4/5 work week with an ex-employer of mine at 80% of that previous salary. I'd say work somewhere, prove your worth, then negotiate a better arrangement.
  • user3487 12y ago
    I'm tired, but isn't 4/5 the same as 80%? How is that a better arrangement other than working less?
    • jabits 12y ago
      As an independent, paid hourly, On many gigs over the years I have tried to to get 4 day (28 or 32 hrs) work weeks, but most client companies still insist on a 40 hour week. I work mostly in the northern midwest for mostly large enterprises, and these clients are "conservative", and 40 hours is "what is needed". I don't try to bill fewer hours at a higher rate.
    • cldellow 12y ago
      The way OP was using 4/4 was to mean 4 days per week, 4 hours per day. So 4/5 would be 50% of the hours for 80% of the pay.
• brickmort 12y ago
  I think it's a very interesting concept and it should be experimented with more, especially with so many things now being facilitated by being automated. I think a big factor for this idea not catching on is the grey area of what qualifies as 40h workweek labor. Some jobs like customer service positions make sense, but what about jobs that require a 24h standby? What about positions with fluctuating periods of downtime through the year? what about jobs that could be 8h workdays, but they haven't yet been confirmed that they could in fact be more effective as a 6h or 4h workday? It's a by-product of modern times not quite catching up with modern technology. We certainly have the ability to think up algorithms that would better suit certain positions based on these factors, but the idea of it right now is too drastic and 'unfair' sounding. Ideally, in time, with the right evidence proving it's effectiveness, workdays would be shortened, quality of lives would bump up and robots would gradually take over.
• mrottenkolber 12y ago
  I do this kind of week as a consultant. I think its the perfect work week.
  • threepipeproblm 12y ago
    Similar here.
    • cerberusss 12y ago
      What kind of consulting are you guys doing? Sounds really nice.
• patio11 12y ago
  Many of my small business buddies [+] start with their first few programmers on this sort of schedule. It generally fits within their/our budgets, gets them continuity versus project-based freelancers, and doesn't cause them to have to compromise on their quality of life through managing you constantly. It isn't my place to mention the salaries I've heard but, anecdotally, they're a) more than anything I earned prior to going into business for myself and b) a substantial discount to market rates for FTE programmers. So that's one option for you. Another is to be very good at making companies money and then, in negotiations, trade access to you for flexibility. Still another option is to own the company you're negotiating with. [+] Context: solo founders or married couples running software small businesses with revenue in six to seven figures and no investor mandate to radically change the character of the business.
  • nhaehnle 12y ago
    Why don't you want to talk about salaries? Lack of data is a huge problem in this space. I don't think anybody expects you to name the names of the people involved.
    • gexla 12y ago
      I think what Patio11 would typically say to this is that you shouldn't base your expectations / negotiations on "market rates." The problem with a set salary (or getting paid per hour) is that your pay is tied to a set unit no matter what value you are creating for the employer. We only have one shot in this life. We have chosen development as our professional practice. We should be looking to take that practice to the highest level that we can reach. Basing our salary on market rates is basing our value on industry average (or the level of mediocrity if you are more the glass half empty type of person.) Ultimately, your place is to make money for the company. This is what you should be basing your value on. There is $X on the line and you have great influence on moving that number. If you aren't in this position, then keep looking so that you can get max value out of the lifetime of your profession.
    • patio11 12y ago
      I'm a let-it-all-hang-out kind of guy, but there exists adequate specificity in my comment to narrow it down to less than five identifiable people. Neither they nor their employers have OKed me putting their salary on the public Internet. Accordingly, I politely decline to be more specific than I am currently being. (The bookends I mentioned earlier were intended to communicate "Between $30k and $100k.")
• tslathrow 12y ago
  Well I have a lot of experience with 16 hour/day work weeks (have worked at banks most of my life). Yeah, you're right, it's not fun. It really comes down to the time-sensitivity of your work. For someone in their 20s, I think the perfect balance is less than 80 hours/week but more than 40-50. If you're being paid two standard deviations over US median household income ($120k+), you're going to be expected to put some work-life balance on hold. "Knowledge worker" makes you sound like you think programming is rocket surgery. VC is actually much closer to knowledge work than programming, and could more realistically have 16-hour work weeks.
  • seivan 12y ago
    I down voted you for the VC being closer to knowledge work than writing software. Sorry but that is just plain wrong - on both ends. Hen is right that expecting 40 hours out of a software engineer is ridiculous.
    • Cederfjard 12y ago
      I'm not sure that "hen" has spread quite so much yet that you can expect to use it in English conversation. Nu undrar ju folk varför du kallar OP för en höna. ;) If anyone is curious what I'm on about, "hen" is a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish that has had a resurgence in the last few years. It's partly politically motivated and a little controversial, since we generally only use gender-specific ones. Sorry for this very off topic aside.
      • seivan 12y ago
        I don't care. Will still use it and educate. I am aware that it might mean höna for some, but I am expecting curiosity to get the better of 'em and hope they look into it.
        • Cederfjard 12y ago
          I think it's a bit weird to be honest. Are other Swedes doing this, trying to shoehorn "hen" into other languages? I've seen "they", in the singular, used as a gender-neutral English pronoun pretty extensively, perhaps that's worth looking into. Either way, kudos.
• anupshinde 12y ago
  I do 20-24 hours a week as a freelancer/consultant. And it is definitely productive experience. I have at times hopped to 40+ hours and never enjoyed it. I tried 30 per week but that was not better either. These 20-24 hours are highly productive and I spend the rest of the time with family/friends - or reading/experimenting. The downside though - I sometimes feel I am wasting my time (because not many do so) and occasionally worry about opportunity costs.
• atemerev 12y ago
  I do hire on such terms. I believe it will become more and more widespread in the course of years. James Altucher is right — in the future, there will be only business owners and temp staffers/freelancers instead of our usual "permanent" office jobs, with lots of legal obligations.
  • coldtea 12y ago
    In the future there will be less jobs, and more unemployment, including more broke "business owners". In other words, business owners would be commoditized and not mean much at all...
    • atemerev 12y ago
      Yes, sure. We are already commoditized. Capital is the commodity. Startup talent is a commodity. Ideas, of course, were a commodity since the very beginning. The stage is set, the only option is to play.
• pling 12y ago
  If you're good, this is what good contract work is like. Many times I got hired for a 3 month stint and got it all done in a couple of weeks with one eye shut. I tended to chip in and help with any other bits lying around that needed doing rather than sitting there playing solitaire. Builds a good reputation. This is how I started my current permanent job. They decided they wanted to keep me so I'm getting paid a contractor's salary for a permanent job now and have a 25h week flexible time as a technical advisor and general devops guy.
• akamaka 12y ago
  Thanks for posting this! I've been looking for the same thing, but my most recent attempt failed. I was asked to come back to a company that I used to work for, and I insisted that I would only come back if I could do a 3 day work week. I'm convinced my productivity would have been similar to when I used to work a 40 hour week with them, because rarely put in more than 3 hours of actual work per day. Unfortunately, they didn't hire me, because they said that absolutely needed someone full time to be able to complete the project on schedule. I think they rejected the idea because everyone else there is on a 40-hour week, and they simply can't contemplate the idea of someone doing less work. They've been slogging away at the same never-ending project for 2 years now, and they aren't looking for someone to get work done efficiently. They want someone who will join in their suffering. Going forward, I'm going to keep looking for a part time opportunity, but not waste time trying to convince people that it's good idea. I think I need to find people who already just get it.
  • corford 12y ago
    There will be people lurking here who 'get it', but it's difficult to make someone aware of part time opportunities without any contact info in their profile :)
• rfrey 12y ago
  For those that would enjoy such a situation: what would you consider to be a fair renumeration arrangement? Not I. Raw numbers but in comparison to traditional 40 hour/week gigs.
  • aianus 12y ago
    I'm doing about 20-25h a week and make roughly 40% of the standard full-time bigco offers I turned down. No benefits either (but I'm 22 and single so I wouldn't be using them anyways).
• techdebt5112 12y ago
  People are probably willing to pay you to do this, but not advertising it so much. Most tech companies (at least in the US) are desperate for work. Less than 40 hours is a week is a tough sell because many people feel the onboarding process eats up a lot of time. Primarily, since it's the norm to work 40+ hours (and believe me, it's not difficult to do this and be actually writing code more than 50% of the time) employers expect it. > I sincerely think it is quite unrealistic to ask a knowledge worker consistently deliver at full throttle for 40 hours every week (never mind the enslaving 60+ hours on many companies) I really disagree with this. Have you tried before?
  • sheepmullet 12y ago
    > I really disagree with this. Have you tried before? The problem is everybody has widely different ideas of full throttle productivity. Lets take salary as a decent proxy for productivity: At every company I have worked the "norm" is 15-20 productive hours a week. Standard salary is ~$110-$140k/year for a senior dev working these hours. So as a rule of thumb if you can work a consistent 40 productive hours a week you should be able to earn at least $220k+/year (and in reality closer to $300k/year). I do know developers earning more than $250k/year. It is possible if you are top .1% or if you organize your entire life around work. However, it is not easy, and nor should it be expected as the "norm".
  • jamesaguilar 12y ago
    Yeah, I buy that marginal productivity drops as you add more hours, but I would be shocked to find that sixteen hours is the point at which diminishing returns make additional work pointless. I guess for me the diminishing returns start kicking in closer to thirty hours of hard focused work, and I am by no means the best worker I know.
    • CapitalistCartr 12y ago
      You are talking as if the employer's point of view is all that matters. Simply because you can produce a bit more useful work, that is, your marginal utility to the company is positive, doesn't mean you should. Marginal value is fine for a piece of machinery, or for the company to decide if they want you to work more, but it shouldn't be your reason to work more. Having fun, want the money, helping a friend; these are employee reasons.
• mgmeyers 12y ago
  I've worked 25 hours a week for the past ~6 years as a web developer, and I can't imagine a better work schedule. I've noticed that I'm just as productive on average, if not more so, than my 40-hour-per-week coworkers. I do find it difficult to progress in my career, however. I've been trying desperately to transition into a full-stack, part-time position, but I feel pretty stuck as a senior level front-end dev. In my experience, this is because I need some weight to throw around when I request working only part-time.
  • notduncansmith 12y ago
    Apologies as this is a bit off-topic, but where does one have to fall on the skill scale to be considered a senior-level front-end dev? I find myself doing a lot of front-end architecture work at my day job, educating my coworkers, and overall the "go-to" guy for front-end work; however, I'm at a junior developer's salary. I don't just do front-end either - I'm actually a full-stack developer, just the most instructive when it comes to front-end work or design.
    • mgmeyers 12y ago
      Sounds like you're senior to me. If you can quantify how you're the "go-to" guy, then you're in a position to ask for a raise. To explain my stance vaguely, if you can make critical decisions about abstract concepts, then I'd consider you senior. For instance, I recently saw that some of my coworkers were using an HTML tag in a way that was technically correct, but in a situation where a different tag is more suitable based on the context of the page. This is something I've learned through my studies and experiences as a front-end dev, and as such, contributes in a small way to my "senior-ness".
      • notduncansmith 12y ago
        Yeah, I do run into situations like that fairly often. Most of the guys I work with are really talented back-end engineers, and just do enough front-end work to get by. > If you can quantify how you're the "go-to" guy Pretty much when anyone has front-end problems they can't figure out (either by themselves or even after Googling), I'm the one they come grab. Mostly "Why won't this div go where I want it to go?" or "How do I make this stop overlapping that?" - or my favorite, "Can you help me make this work in IE8?". Not to portray my coworkers as whiny, btw. I think they just want to be done with the front-end stuff as quickly as possible, so they can get back to the back-end. You did say quantify, so I'll say I probably provide front-end help to a coworker at least 4 times a week. One coworker maintaining the last project I worked on consistently expresses his gratitude for laying the foundation that I did on that project (front and backend). This is starting to sound like I'm bragging (trying hard not to make it sound that way), so I'll stop here.
• drcross 12y ago
  I have been working as a high tier network engineer for the past few years for 40 hours per week (but always looks to go out on my own with a startup idea). I'm starting to really find that 40 hours per week make no sense and i'm actively going to try to find alternatives. Life slips by and there is little point in spending 1/3 of your working day dealing with monotonous bullshit.
  • mgmeyers 12y ago
    This. If I was working somewhere I was 100% passionate about, I would have no problem working 1/3 of my life. But, it's rare to find a position that completely matches one's values and professional desires.
• gingerlime 12y ago
  To me this makes total sense, and I can't figure out why it isn't the norm for hired freelance developers. For most people I know, myself included, you're at your best productivity before lunchtime. Afterwards you might get a few bits and pieces done, but generally it's a waste of time.
• perplexes 12y ago
  We offer flexible work schedules (half time, full time, anywhere in-between) with benefits. 1. A. In my experience it's hard to find unless you're contracting or have extremely rare knowledge. 1. B. We're a rails shop, (mostly) b2b edtech. 2. Not at all just greenfield. Having flexible schedules means that you have to be realistic with scheduling and expectations. You have to work out what will work best with the team and when they need to synchronize with you. In some cases your work is orthogonal to main development critical paths, so the need for synchronization is less (still important though for staying synced with the culture).
• xiaoqibo 12y ago
  yes
• xiaoqibo 12y ago
  yes
• cjauvin 12y ago
  Thank you very much for this, I think it strikes a major chord with many in the "knowledge worker" community at large, and I hope it stays in the top spot for a while, and spawn a healthy discussion. For my part I've been doing a mix of freelance and salaried work in the last few years (as a data scientist), and I have reached the conclusion that a strict 40-hour week is not an easy thing to handle. I think it stems from the fact that the "knowledge worker"/hacker ethos is often deeply rooted in a self-driven and motivated agenda of learning and experimenting with new things on a constant basis, very often just for the sake of it. This can easily conflict with a regular work schedule in terms of number of hours and commitment. But the point is that it really shouldn't, because very often, those two "modes" nourish each other, which can result in a stronger, more robust and ultimately more meaningful and happier work like. I've been trying to convince my current boss that a 3-day week would be a more efficient and compressed use of my time, while giving me more time to pursue other contracts and projects. But it seems that there are some cultural barriers that makes it a difficult message to pass. I actually intend to use that thread to show that I'm not the only one in that situation, that such a culture really exists, and thus that it must be taken into account somehow. It might be somewhat cliché, but I really believe that this mentality is a glimpse of the future in terms of work ethics.
  • mistercheese 12y ago
    How did you find your mix of freelance work initially? Do you go through agencies? If so, how did you find the best agencies starting out?
  • VLM 12y ago
    "I've been trying to convince my current boss that a 3-day week would be a more efficient and compressed use of my time" I do four tens per week on flextime to avoid commute traffic and one major "cultural impedance mismatch" is discussing this face to face with people who are at their workplace (note that I don't describe that as working, merely being at a certain location), perhaps five twelves or even six fourteens per week on salary. Its possible to be polite on the internet, but face to face they tend not to take it very well.
    • 12y ago
• cs02rm0 12y ago
  No reason only greenfield projects should be suited to this. Contracting is the only viable route I've found. Otherwise you just won't get paid enough. The downside of that is you need to be (loosely provably) good and experienced enough to (i) pick up contracts and (ii) that they'll flex to your schedule. I've worked 16 hour days before with a manager literally sat behind me telling me to keep coding. They didn't care that half the next day would be correcting the mistakes of the previous. I don't miss those days.
• asdfologist 12y ago
  I sometimes wonder if, for mind-intensive, non-repetitive jobs such as programming (the good ones, anyway), lowering the number of work hours per week may actually increase overall output. It's well known that people tend to become more efficient the less time they're given to complete a task. So if people were to work fewer hours and use the rest of the time to get more sleep, relax with their family, etc. - hence keeping their mind refreshed and maintaining motivation - perhaps they'd get much more done over the course of the year than otherwise. It's the reason I deliberately choose not to work late nights or during weekends, even if I feel the urge to. I'm afraid that it may actually end up hurting my overall output in the long run.
  • krashidov 12y ago
    I don't know how it works in other industries, but I would bet for software you're right. Sometimes you need to step away from a problem and it let it process in the background. I've had moments where I'll work on something for hours late into the night only to realize the next morning that I didn't need to or that I can do it using some other method in only a couple of minutes. If I had stopped and went to bed earlier I would've saved a lot more time.
  • mattm 12y ago
    During the war, Kellogg's moved to a 30-hour work week. An overwhelming majority of employees preferred it. Despite the reduced hours, Kellogg's found that overall productivity actually went up.
• PeterGriffin 12y ago
  I'm very happy to see people working 16-25 hour work weeks, and it's probably very good for their personal life. Just one question, don't you feel guilty going like that? I'd feel guilty, as if life gave me this time to get as much work done as I can, and I just don't. I know, I know, weird question. But I'm serious.
  • coldtea 12y ago
    >Just one question, don't you feel guilty going like that? I'd feel guilty, as if life gave me this time to get as much work done as I can, and I just don't. Life gave you time to live. Not to get "work done". Especially the bullshit kind of non essential busy work most people in the West do. Now, if you built houses or basic infrastructure, or were a doctor that'd be something different. The nth BS enterprise CRUD app, or some BS social service? Not so important in the grand scheme of things.
  • surreal 12y ago
    This is an interesting point, but it assumes that one's 'purpose' in life is to work. That's a pretty sweeping assumption, and one which the guilt is predicated on. Any idea why you feel this way? Would it not be just as valid to say that one's purpose in life might be, for example, enjoyment? Or helping others (not necessarily through a job)? In which case you should feel pretty guilty about going to work for 40 of your precious hours each week..! I'm certainly not saying there's a right answer here, by the way.
    • PeterGriffin 12y ago
      I'm not sure it's bad to feel guilty about this. I'm more interested how people who don't feel guilty see life. I mean surely at some point having aimless fun starts looking a bit like wasted time in someone's life, no? We live to give our tiny contribution to humanity, and we do it by creating something through work. That also brings joy, and we do it to help each other (deviations notwithstanding). But it's a meaningful joy. If I'd work 16 hours a week all my life, I'd have some serious regrets on my death bed.
• scarecrowbob 12y ago
  I work 4/5, mostly on either crappy wordPress projects (whcih, for all their crappiness, can be kind of fun, since we're not grinding) or on a bespoke PHP framework (which can be a bit frustrating, because I can't just find already answered questions on a list or StackOverflow). My strategy was to cycle through a bunch of agencies looking for freelance, overflow workers and then be super good at performing... until I found a couple that were a good fit (interesting projects, real pay, smart folks). A big part of the strategy is that a) the agencies know I have other contracts, so they understand if I can't commit to 60 hours of work in a week, b) they don't know when the "other agencies" are my kids or my wife or my jazz band. I have worked on all kinds of things, so I don't think it is just for greenfield projects... though often I think that new or redevelopment work seems to be the norm, as if there were a massive effort underway people seem to have/want employees.
  • mistercheese 12y ago
    As a complete newbie to contract/freelance work, how did you first get started finding good agencies to work with?
    • chudi 12y ago
      If you don't get someone to recommend you to a good agency, you just have to try until you got a new one. There are some signs that might help you, like that they do have an office, down payment, etc.
    • scarecrowbob 12y ago
      As horrible as it sounds, I started with the Austin, TX craigslist for my first groupings of folks, which paid terrible and had horrible projects. I'm not in Austin, but I could meet folks in town. But I did cycle through a lot of folks, and I also tried to leverage every project into a better project. Also, I answer questions on a facebook group, and that has led to new work contacts. Just being generally helpful and occasionally asking for work netted me a lot of work. Finally, I just generally network, talk about what I do, make a point to talk to other folks who do what I do when I meet them in my larger life. That's created my best connections. One guy I met doing audio on a movie set hooked me up with a company that turned into a high 5 figure client. I find it especially valuable to be able to hook up folks I know who are looking for work with people who need work done, at whatever level. People generally find that super useful... it is harder to do when just starting out, but I still get work from the guy I got hired to replace me at the first of my crappiest jobs. I do that mostly because it makes me happy to see my friends find work or folks fill a need in their businesses, but folks don't usually forget people who build good relationships for them. So, IMO, it is good to know other freelancers or people who want to freelance... you get a lot more calls if most times that you turn down a project you can shuffle it to someone else :D
• ycwes 12y ago
  If you work on your own you can do it. I did it for a year or two and traveled.
• gregpilling 12y ago
  I offered 12 weeks vacation to my staff in exchange for lower wages (but paid during 12 weeks off). Nobody was interested, and they wanted to stay with the current two weeks paid. So as an employer, I have never had anyone interested in doing a 16 hour week. I have had many ex-employees (and an ex-partner) who were paid for 40 hours a week, but only worked 16. To answer your questions directly. 1. They are not easy to find, nor are they often demanded. 2. I don't think it has to be greenfield.
  • prawn 12y ago
    Do you know if matching up holiday allowances with staff partners was an issue? e.g., I could get away with taking months off or working on the road, but my wife only has the typical 20 days allowance here in Australia with about a week of it fixed at the end of the year when their office closes.
  • a_c_s 12y ago
    What was the difference in pay with the 12 weeks of vacation? Given the norms in the USA I, as an employee, would never initiate such an arrangement. I feel like it would result in at the very least an indelible assumption of laziness by my new employers, if not a retraction of the original job offer.
  • mikegillman 12y ago
    Interesting. If the staff thought they would have to work through those 12 weeks of vacation anyway... or that it would be impractical to actually take 3 months vacation (or every Friday off), they probably wouldn't risk taking the salary cut. In our society the money feels more valuable than the time.
    • gregpilling 12y ago
      its a small manufacturing business. They would not have had to work the 12 weeks.. They simply weren't interested. I was surprised, since it is a rule I wanted for myself. So I made the rule anyway. My engineer wants to take a month off, but she is doing it as a unpaid leave. She had already saved her living expenses for the time she would be off, so it didn't matter to her.
• comment3323 12y ago
  0.)the entire system or MATRIX design basis is wrong 1.)standard work hours are for industrial revolution and mass manufacturing of low quality items 2.)over age 58 and it is EASIER (yes, to those who are ignorant) IT IS EASIER to understand complex software. Obviously, that is why all the piano GENIUSES are under age 9! 3.)hours make no difference except for the sprint or "Death March" as per Yourdon or do or die. Sure, my best is less than 42 hours straight, but that's because I can avoid mistakes. 4.)There are old pilots. Bold Pilots. and in the USA there are old, bold and "ignore it, deny it" pilots. But there are no old AND bold pilots. 5.)Simple portfolio theory diversification. I want 2.5 jobs time 16 hour work week. SUDDENLY FIRE ME! Oh well, I have my good garden (self taught using OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE) and my 0.5 job. So, I often tell the boss the truth, even if it is a pain in the 'tookus.' - See Capitol Steps song. 6.)Small companies with diversified part-times including some OLD and WISE like me, who have seen MANY MANY failures.. ahhhh what is a dot-com? something with a dot-bomb? how does mergers destroy value and the corporate souls? 8.)I continue on my peripatetic ways. As long as Windows is around, there will be a need for human jobs... err Unix? errror BSD, Solaris... good by Java now that the founder had some public and not nice comments about the BIG O - ra // cle. 14.)LESSON OF LIFE - how strange. take a full time job and boss must DEMAND extra hours. It is not about productivity, but POWER and CONTROL. (in old days, this is called SLAVERY, yesss massah! go to consultant. go part-time. Suddenly the time is VALUABLE. - too much travel. - real simple - Yahoo CEO must work from the office - simply SHUN these types of companies. 18.)As a BOSS, Founder, Open source comrade, I do not want you spreading your cough and sneezes at my office. I only want to see you at the conference where we try to avoid laughing at the competition as they try to hide their pathetic ways of doing business. 19.)yes i am into hobby of strength training, par-kours, informal soccer and so this is play... not work and no, i do not talk about work when I play, u that ignoree 20.)FIRE ALL HR personnel. I personally assign myself 4 hour work week JOBS (55 weeks a year). I am a math flunkout and so I continually CREATE extra time and get MUCH MORE done. Peter Principle - make work expands like in the GREAT USSR COMMUNE SYSTEM to fill the time that is DICTATED from above. right, COMRADES? We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us We pretend to 16 hour work week, while sending our mind through remote viewing and THEY pretend to take jail attendance.
• comment3323 12y ago
  0.)the entire system or MATRIX design basis is wrong 1.)standard work hours are for industrial revolution and mass manufacturing of low quality items 2.)over age 58 and it is EASIER (yes, to those who are ignorant) IT IS EASIER to understand complex software. Obviously, that is why all the piano GENIUSES are under age 9! 3.)hours make no difference except for the sprint or "Death March" as per Yourdon or do or die. Sure, my best is less than 42 hours straight, but that's because I can avoid mistakes. 4.)There are old pilots. Bold Pilots. and in the USA there are old, bold and "ignore it, deny it" pilots. But there are no old AND bold pilots. 5.)Simple portfolio theory diversification. I want 2.5 jobs time 16 hour work week. SUDDENLY FIRE ME! Oh well, I have my good garden (self taught using OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE) and my 0.5 job. So, I often tell the boss the truth, even if it is a pain in the 'tookus.' - See Capitol Steps song. 6.)Small companies with diversified part-times including some OLD and WISE like me, who have seen MANY MANY failures.. ahhhh what is a dot-com? something with a dot-bomb? how does mergers destroy value and the corporate souls? 8.)I continue on my peripatetic ways. As long as Windows is around, there will be a need for human jobs... err Unix? errror BSD, Solaris... good by Java now that the founder had some public and not nice comments about the BIG O - ra // cle. 14.)LESSON OF LIFE - how strange. take a full time job and boss must DEMAND extra hours. It is not about productivity, but POWER and CONTROL. (in old days, this is called SLAVERY, yesss massah! go to consultant. go part-time. Suddenly the time is VALUABLE. - too much travel. - real simple - Yahoo CEO must work from the office - simply SHUN these types of companies. 18.)As a BOSS, Founder, Open source comrade, I do not want you spreading your cough and sneezes at my office. I only want to see you at the conference where we try to avoid laughing at the competition as they try to hide their pathetic ways of doing business. 19.)yes i am into hobby of strength training, par-kours, informal soccer and so this is play... not work and no, i do not talk about work when I play, u that ignoree 20.)FIRE ALL HR personnel. I personally assign myself 4 hour work week JOBS (55 weeks a year). I am a math flunkout and so I continually CREATE extra time and get MUCH MORE done. Peter Principle - make work expands like in the GREAT USSR COMMUNE SYSTEM to fill the time that is DICTATED from above. right, COMRADES? We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us We pretend to 16 hour work week, while sending our mind through remote viewing and THEY pretend to take jail attendance.
• orbitingpluto 12y ago
  I think the four hour/day jobs are something you have to navigate yourself towards. At my current job I've automated almost everything with bash, Perl, PHP, Latex, Prolog, Powershell and way too much VBA. Whenever I had a spare moment I would spend it automating something. I've now reached a point where I only need work 30 minutes to 4 hours/day. But of course, since I'm getting paid for a full day and I would feel guilty reading HN all day, I end up in this positive feedback loop where I continue to automate which gives me more time to automate. My next step is to start using Selenium to automate those tasks for which 'external partners' have not provided an API. My contract is coming up and I'm going to negotiate for slightly less money in exchange for a four hour work day. It's not in my employer's natural inclinations to permit this, however they would have to hire several unskilled workers to do my work or another programmer for 8 hrs/day. The tl;dr is: Make yourself indispensable so that a 4hr/day position is an option.
  • asdfologist 12y ago
    If you're indispensable, you should ask for a raise, not a pay cut.
    • sliverstorm 12y ago
      A raise and a 3/5ths reduction in expected hours would be one hard sell.
      • bshimmin 12y ago
        I once managed a 50% raise and a reduction to a four day working week, with one of those days remote. I patted myself on the back a lot for achieving that, but I was cheating, a bit, because I went from permanent to contract with the same company. Not very strangely, the reasons that I wanted to leave my permanent position at the company in the first place - terrible, confused, and often obnoxious management - still hurt just as much even on more money and with fewer days. I quit again for good after another three months.
      • asdfologist 12y ago
• ethnt 12y ago
  This concept is great for students especially. I'm lucky enough to have a job where I can set my own hours, so during the school year I can work about this much. It's nice to have some income, especially while working a job relevant to my field of study.
• neilsharma 12y ago
  I'd really love something like this, but haven't heard of any companies that hire for less than 40. Some companies (like Google) occasionally hire part-time, but they get proportionally lower salary and none of the benefits. I'm a big believer that the 40 hours you'd spend at work has a lot of unproductive time and drains too much energy to do meaningful activities or work afterwards. Here's a great piece on why 21 hours is the best work schedule: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours If anyone knows any great jobs that hire 4/4 or some other similar schedule, love to get a thread going about that :)
  • VLM 12y ago
    The linked to piece has a lot of "post carbon era" talk, but we currently live in the pre-"post carbon era" and all this 4/5 or whatever would seem to burn a lot of extra gasoline and irreplaceable commute time. I'd rather work 10/2 and not spend so much time sitting in a car burning expensive non-renewable gasoline. Invert the work week and the week end!
    • reustle 12y ago
      The primary point of this thread is that it is hard to be very productive for 6 or 7 hours a day, let alone 10. Also I gather most people here are talking about working remotely.
      • VLM 12y ago
        I take a long lunch (yeah flextime!) and if at all possible, exercise during lunch, and I have enough simultaneous projects that the silver lining is I do different stuff before and after lunch. I tend to code/deploy more in the morning and design/test more in the afternoon (only a lunatic deploys five minutes before going home, no matter how well tested...) So its more like two separate five hour working shifts. I get the feeling this kind of lifestyle is pretty unusual here and people just code, continuously, for 18 straight hours, and think thats productive, or whatever. Like most hacker types my home life is more interesting than my work life and I do totally agree with the assessment that its impossible to grunt out even 7 productive hours on one individual task. (and edited to add that at the cutting edge I don't think its possible to work more than 4 continuous hours. Either its not really cutting edge or you're not being productive. I can do mindless yardwork reinstalling my paver brick patio for 12 hours, but there is no way to be productive when interfacing a new DDS synthesizer to a rasp-pi which as far as I could tell has never been done before, I could sit at the bench for 12 hours but I won't get any more done than just 4 hours, I'm just a little more honest about it than some, maybe most. At home I can do whats "right" not what is "management approved") Another interesting aspect is a lot of design work is thinking and surfing the net for new ideas and inspiration and I can see from outside my brain that looking fairly unproductive. Or from a noob perspective, noobs not understanding that a half hour staring off into space might save five hours of coding despite not feeling like its as productive.
• Jhsto 12y ago
  I've been working independently for some time now and I've noticed exactly the same thing - productiveness is significantly better when working less. However, I do handle many projects at the same time, but for each project I only hand the time when I've thought out what I'm going to build and how. I've also found that doing so gets you straight into the coders high. It's like that once you've set your mind onto the project you end up writing cleaner, simpler and better code. I now honestly believe that something like coding cannot be worked efficiently from 9 to 17 five days a week. Only downside is that the people who have hired me have started to doubt whether I've deserved the pay. I had this client who were really astonished how much I had got done in only two weeks, but once they started asking for the hours spent on the project, they answered me that they might need to haggle the price a little bit. I'm bit new to this whole entrepreneur thing and I've been naive enough to not really count any hours spent on a project. I just work on them when I feel like my mind is set and the code I write is not gibberish. Anyhow, when I later count my hourly wage from the amount of hours I came up with at the clients office, I realize that my blunt estimation had set my wage to 44€, which is kind of high even in my opinion. Though I believe that the client probably wont drive the price down a lot, as just before they asked for the hours they had told me how the application has everything they initially asked for and can't find room for improvement. It really seems that the idea of working less is not that open for everyone, so I can see reason if there's not many agencies which promote it.
  • bermanoid 12y ago
    44€/hr is low, that's pretty much entry level for quality work. People routinely charge multiples of that amount; if I was to go back to contracting now, I'd be charging at least twice that much, probably more. Also, you should not allow a client to try to renegotiate price after the work has been delivered. Especially on a fixed bid project where they're satisfied with the results (BTW, you probably shouldn't be doing fixed bid until you're a lot more experienced, if even then - hourly is much safer until you know how to deal with problem clients). If you are going to do fixed bid, you shouldn't need to count your hours, unless you're personally curious. I'd just hope that you have a seriously tight set of acceptance criteria put down in writing that legally binds them to a definition of "done". Nothing in that document should involve your hours: the only reason to take on fixed bid work is that you're betting you can do it in fewer hours than they're implicitly estimating it will take. If you win that bet, then that's great, the client should still be happy with the agreed upon amount but there's no need to show them how the sausage is made.
• zackmorris 12y ago
  I have been working 25 hour weeks for a little over a year now, but agonizing over finding a good number for years before that. I've found that for difficult problems to crack, I may only work 1 or 2 hours per day. But for easier stuff like initial setup, a little refactoring, translating wireframes to layouts, etc, I can easily manage 6 or 7 hours per day. 8+ is too much, and working 3 or more days in a row at that level has a taxing effect on my health. I just don’t think humans are built to be sedentary with high levels of cortisol. So short prolific bursts interspersed with long hours of introspection seems to be the best route to writing the least amount of code for me. I would say 50-75% of my efforts are subconscious, so I spend 5 or 10 minutes as I’m falling asleep thinking about the problems to be solved the next day, and the answers either come to me or suggest some way in which I misframed the problem (wow misframe is not in the Mac OS 10.9.2 dictionary, but I digress). I spend my off hours with a few dozen windows open with 50 or 100 tabs each, basically a web of interests. I use Javascript Blocker in Safari to reduce overhead, and periodically turn off Javascript and Flash then force quit and relaunch to restore my workspace. It’s crude but until I have an indexed, version controlled browser with everything I’ve ever viewed, it gets the job done. The number of days since I’ve viewed HN is a good barometer for either how far in the zone I’m in (if I’ve been using the computer) or how disconnected I feel (if I haven’t). I would go to professional conferences for the people, not the subject matter. That’s probably my biggest regret with dabbling in the anarchism of autonomy, because without a safety net there isn’t a lot of disposable income. So my big goal now is to remedy that, either directly or by spreading the word if I learn something. Stumbled onto this a couple days ago: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/programmers-dont-need-a-union-we-need-a-profession/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/programmers-d...
  • prouticus 12y ago
    An excellent link, and great points.
  • capisce 12y ago
    Hehe, the web of interests sounds very familiar. I'm using pocket (getpocket.com) to cut down on the number of tabs though, maybe it would be useful for you as well.
• notastartup 12y ago
  This is a great way to increase efficiency at our job. At my first job as a developer, it was literally a sweatshop. We literally could not go home because if a project was not delivered on time, we would get fired, and this was worry was back in all of our heads. People would get sick from working 50+ hours (weekends too sometimes) , no overtime pay, lower end of salary in the area. At one point, the manager would call me at 1 AM in the morning while I was going home after leaving at 10PM and press on about the work. All you got from this guy was a handshake and a "Thank you come again". The company was rated fastest growing, the tech startup to look out for, featured in magazine. The company had 100+ people and they kept on hiring new people whenever people quit or got burnt out and got fired.
• VLM 12y ago
  A request: Does anyone have actual scientific data from archeologists / biologists / doctors on what the human body was evolved to do? Not interested in commentary on what strategy maximizes profit to owners of peasants or moral/ethical arguments. Strictly looking for hard science like biochemist XYZ found human butts and spines are not operationally effective for sitting for longer than X hours due to scientific reason A, B, and C, or brain biochemistry shows indications of wearing out after Y hours of concentration or whatever? It would be interesting to find out the science of optimized productivity rather than anecdotes. If we had consultative doctors like pro athletes had doctors...
  • capisce 12y ago
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2013/02/09/why-sitting-increases-your-risk-of-dying-sooner/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2013/02/09/why-sit... Though that's more of an argument for using a standing desk instead of sitting the whole day.
    • VLM 12y ago
      Unfortunately thats more "recent research and anecdotes" I'm looking for something with a summary like "archeologists, biologists, and orthopedic surgeons recently cooperated on a paper indicating that biologically identical humans spend the years 200K to 100K BC walking around 50% of the time, sitting about 25% of the time, and 25% of the time doing everything else, based on electron microscope analysis of microwear patterns on fossilized hip joints and computer simulation" With the obvious unstated conclusion that millenia of evolution has optimized the innards of biologically identical modern humans to sit no more than 25% of the time. Assuming evolution did successfully optimize innards, which is kind of an open question WRT spinal design and appendixes and things like that.
  • ZeroFries 12y ago
    According to Chris Ryan (PhD and author of Sex at Dawn), hunter gatherers work around 20-25 hours per week, in line with the comments above of what they found was near ideal for happiness, productivity, and concentration. There really isn't much hard science when it comes to things like human productivity standards, in the same way there's not too much hard science on ideal diet. Too many variables, highly individualized, and like all multi-objective optimization, highly context dependent.
• nolite 12y ago
  As an enrepreneur, having to now hire developers for my startup, I don't see how this could work practically. As a company, there are objectives you need to meet by a certain time frame. If there's a task that needs to be done in 3 weeks, and there are 2 weeks of full time work estimated in order to do it, you're not going to hire someone and let it take 4-6 weeks just because they don't feel like working a full week. For programming projects especially, its much simpler to have one person work on a given task, than splitting out an assignment over 2+ people - it lowers complexity, and keeps the process coherent. So 1 person, needs to get the work done in the time frame. I personally don't care how much time the person spends doing the task, as long as its done properly, and on time. And its not always possible to see so far in advance what needs to be done that you can afford to let people take twice as long to do it (also taking into account the difficulties with estimating software project durations when work is done full time). So working 16-20 hrs a week sounds GREAT in principle. But in practice, as an employer, I don't see a practical interest from my perspective EDIT: I'm not a pointy-haired manager either.. Prior to starting my own company, I was full-time lead developer (and very well paid) for several years in a startup environment. My work pushed the envelope forward at the company, so I have a deep understanding of software development projects, and how development teams function as a whole, all first-hand experience
  • nthj 12y ago
    > But in practice, as an employer, I don't see a practical interest from my perspective I'd venture that may be because you view programmers as interchangeable cogs. Rather, for one developer, a project may take two 16-hour weeks, and for a less talented developer, it may take three 40-hour weeks. If you need it done in 2 weeks but the price tag is the more talented developer only works 16-hour weeks, and you accept, everyone wins. [P.S.: I'm not sure this is a valid thread for the "10x programmers" debate, and I would hate to derail a very interesting topic. But I would say that if your goal is to only work 16-hour weeks, it's in your interest to attempt to demonstrate you can provide at least as much value as an average 40-hour-per-week-developer.]
    • Smudge 12y ago
      > if your goal is to only work 16-hour weeks, it's in your interest to attempt to demonstrate you can provide at least as much value as an average 40-hour-per-week-developer. I'm not convinced that's true. Most developers, 1x and 10x alike, are not evenly productive across a 40-hour week. If, in 20 hours, you can get even half the work you get done in 40 hours, you're already just as valuable based on time worked and should get compensated accordingly for that time. And I'd argue that in 20 hours you can get far more than half the work done, since the other 20 hours are likely the tail end of your productivity anyway. So your value-to-time ratio goes up, even if you aren't providing as much value as a 40-hour-per-week developer.