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Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

#251

Post by webmaven »

capisce wrote: post #123
zackmorris wrote: post #55

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…

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.

I use Pocket for a different use-case (basically, saving long-form stuff for perusal later). For taming the too-many-tabs problem I use Tabs Outliner: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

#252

Post by webmaven »

Cederfjard wrote: post #239
seivan wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

English has some invented gender-neutral pronouns as well, such as Zie, Hir, etc.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...

Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

#253

Post by oohaba »

patio11 wrote: post #149
nhaehnle wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.")

I'm surprised no one has asked yet, but the next question is, are your small business buddies hiring? I'd be interested in 10/20/30 hours per week continuous employment at a below-market rate, provided it was remote.

Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

#255

Post by eastbayjake »

woah wrote: post #245
eastbayjake wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if I wanted to work productively for 8 hours straight, most of the low-level office tasks I'm required to do keep me from doing it -- explain to marketing why X product from Y vendor won't work for our situation, responding to email, meetings that always take up an hour no matter how short the agenda, etc. I think most of the engineers I know have employer-created hurdles that limit them to 4-6 hours daily of tr…

Sounds like most of these things are pretty important for the business (except for maybe the overly long meetings). We'd all like to code in a bubble, but there are other things involved in running a business.

I wasn't arguing that they're unimportant or that I expect to code in a bubble, just that I'm paid to work 40 hours/week and roughly half that time is non-creative and non-coding. It's unreasonable to expect eight straight hours of productive creativity when business needs also require you to do TPS reports with your time at the office.

Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

#256

Post by Nav_Panel »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #75

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…

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?

Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

#257

Post by scarecrowbob »

mistercheese wrote: post #178
scarecrowbob wrote: post #39

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…

As a complete newbie to contract/freelance work, how did you first get started finding good agencies to work with?

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

Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

#258

Post by percept »

paul wrote: post #81

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. Thi…

I've seen several (smaller) companies hiring developers for a 4-day workweek.

At least it's a start...

Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

#259

Post by Confusion »

localhost3000 wrote: post #169
gedrap wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

"no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact" tell that to a medical resident...or just about any in-hospital physician, for that matter. many, many people work long shifts and are entirely productive.

No, they are not. They make more mistakes than during shorter shifts, especially towards the end of the shift. An aggravating factor is that they actually believe they can still perform as well after 16 hours of working. This is all well known from research, it's just that it's hard to break ingrained traditions. Look at how long it took for doctors to start washing their hands, after research decisively proved it reduced the number of deaths and complications. In a few decades we will look back on this time and shake our heads at the ridiculousness of doctors, of all people, working 16 hours straight.

Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

#260

Post by mapt »

localhost3000 wrote: post #169
gedrap wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

"no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact" tell that to a medical resident...or just about any in-hospital physician, for that matter. many, many people work long shifts and are entirely productive.

"Entirely productive" - but would you look at the mistake rate for the first two hours on-shift versus the last two hours on-shift?

If you do, don't tell anybody. They'd probably quit.

The collective ego and conscience of the medical profession, the way we treat them, tells them they should be unfallable, and mistakes are not only unforgiveable, but actionable. Medical residents should need no sleep whatsoever, should have no downtime et cetera, et cetera.

If we gave them a sane number of hours per shift (by the standards of the rest of the economy) and a reasonable margin to communicate patient status from shift to shift (rounds twice or thrice a day), we would increase labor requirements by 25%. If we gave them a sane number of hours per week, we would increase labor requirements by another 100%.

Work standards initiatives that have been successful include "Towards an 80 hour workweek" (down from 90+): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours#Tow...

Do you want your heart surgeon to have worked 80 hours in the last week, and 24 hours in the last day? Myself, I wouldn't want my doctor using the same public road network as I do, in such conditions.

How many people has this policy killed?

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