Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

That’s fair, 4x9 is indeed more the standard these days.

On real part-time: I think once it moves below 3 days a week it works better for transactional roles. E.g. I know dentists that work for a few days per week in a practice, people with 8-16h per week in chat-support, 3-day/wk secretaries, etc. Most of these roles measure their work in calls/appointments/hours rather than longer running projects though.

But with the right culture it can be done in IT as well, I think Gumroad is a good example.

Eh, it's just people being people. It's similar to how when you're learning first aid, they always tell you to not say "Someone call 911!" but rather point at one specific person and say, "You, [distinguishing characteristic of said person], call 911!"

> But 2008-11 was a formative experience for me, so maybe I'm just bitter.

Sounds like an interesting and potentially insightful story...

Saying you like helping people contradicts the earlier statement that you don't care. You care about helping people. That's actually how most of us get through the day. We may not believe in the product(s) our companies make. But we care about the people who do, and helping them achieve something they believe in can be good enough as a career.

Fantastic question and something I can relate to entirely.

How many times can you write the same stuff on different PowerPoint slides? How often can you help an organisation to reorganise their marketing campaign structure (that all perform the same anyways)? How often can you reengineer the same problem over and over again and always end up with roughly the same output?

That's just all precious time down the drain. Your time is so much better invested doing things that actually make you happy: Spend time in nature, push yourself in sports activities you enjoy, discover new places around where you live, start gardening, read a bunch of books, learn how to cook, or improve your DIY skills. Whatever helps make you you - that's how we should be spending our time!

I work in IT consulting and here's what I found works for me to some extent:

1. Be knowledgable in your field of work, courteous, and command some amount of respect towards you - be there when people need you (but don't be there for them too much, see my third point),

2. Delegate, delegate, delegate. Never offer straight away to take care of stuff for people just because you know you can solve their issue. Verbally, be knowledgable yet unreachable. Compliment others on their skills and delegate right into their smothered egos, and

3. Information asymmetry. You didn't take their call because you were out for a walk - you were on another call with some client, or colleague. You've only found time to respond to their messages or e-mails late in the evening or early morning (late night or early morning e-mails / messages are a great power play in general) because you were relaxing in your backyard - this other project got super busy today so you just didn't find the time! You don't need to end the call right now because you're bored of the conversation or want to go have lunch - you need to end the call right now because there's another call you gotta jump on.

I believe a lot of people really crave interacting with folks that are both knowledgable (once they get a hold of them) and yet appear perpetually busy or overworked. Noticing this pattern and using it to your advantage is one key towards greater personal freedom.