101–109 of 109 posts
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You need to get used to it. Use a kitchen timer, then every time you finish something input the time precisely.
There's an app and site called Toggl that makes this easier.
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I never hit 40 hours a week. Thirty seemed like a good balance between work/life. Eventually, working on a CRUD app didn't peak my interest anymore and I moved onto some other projects. Company was sold a few years later.
How did you track your time? I kind of love this idea but time tracking is a pain in the ass. Seems like maybe you could use "day" or "half day" granularity?
I used to be super granular about it until I realized I was billing the equivalent of 8 hours of work as a full time engineer, as 2.5 hrs or whatever, due to the nature of granular billing. Turns out I'm hella unproductive when I spend all day at the office. So I switched to more like dedicating some chunk of my day to work, then billing that chunk, even if some of the time I was making coffee or like, going on a quick walk break.
In all honesty with how much more productive I am as a contractor I could probably justify billing flat 8 hours a day but I'm just too honest or something.
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This rarely works in fields where they hire full time salary employees. The reason being that the part time employee is still very expensive in a lot of fixed ‘per employee’ cost areas like hardware and licenses combined with the fact that the full time salary person is supposed to be available to get the job done even it that involves some overtime or just off hours work, things part time people are notorious for be…
It's worked for me for the past 10 years, part-time in engineering at Google, Makani, and Elemeno Health. Not wanting or being able to work a lot of hours doesn't necessarily mean not being flexible on hours. I've known a number of other part-time people at e.g. Google, and they were generally people I'd trust to get stuff done. Often they're time-management masters , due to necessity. Sure, there's more overhead per…
I worked for a company once that was very remote friendly. You could disappear for a month and then pop into Slack and ask, what’s next in the issues queue? Then work on issues for however long you wanted, billed hourly at a generous rate. Several times I disappeared for weeks to travel and climb and was always welcomed back. That company was minting money and wasn’t worried about deadlines. I wish more work was stru…
Besides being generally nice, it's also a total godsend when you have other things going on - I'm currently working towards a CS degree and there's no way I could've balanced the two if I had a "regular" job.
We're one of the few industries where we are not only able to work like this, but also have the tools to do it efficiently (because we built them!). Yet, inexplicably, the majority of companies still insist on cubicles, strict working times and constant synchronous communication.
To be clear, there are definitely disadvantages to this and we need to be very careful to not let this idea turn into a gig economy type situation where if the company doesn't have work for us, we don't get paid (stable pay is often far more important than how high it is), where an individual's slice is too small to live off of and where people turn into expendable "work processors", but if done correctly, this really does seem like the way forward.
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It's worked for me for the past 10 years, part-time in engineering at Google, Makani, and Elemeno Health. Not wanting or being able to work a lot of hours doesn't necessarily mean not being flexible on hours. I've known a number of other part-time people at e.g. Google, and they were generally people I'd trust to get stuff done. Often they're time-management masters , due to necessity. Sure, there's more overhead per…
Were you working at an hourly rate at those companies? A salary at reduced hours/pay?
I worked for a company once that was very remote friendly. You could disappear for a month and then pop into Slack and ask, what’s next in the issues queue? Then work on issues for however long you wanted, billed hourly at a generous rate. Several times I disappeared for weeks to travel and climb and was always welcomed back. That company was minting money and wasn’t worried about deadlines. I wish more work was stru…
I had an analogous arrangement. I would pop in and out, identifying/building high impact projects, in a mix of web dev, PM, and analyzing data. I was usually available for brainstorming/chats during my sometimes months of off cycle, including at non-regular hours. I'm hopelessly neural atypical with on/off cycles of productivity and haven't found a way to make myself more regular. I was paid as a full time employee d…
I doubled my salary between last year and this one and I'm still not even halfway to 130k/y (and I'm happy because it's remote).. .and I live in the most expensive city in South America (more expensive than US midwest & Texas, cheaper than NY / SF of course).
I thought USD 130k/year was a good offer even in the US, I think it's roughly what the Texas-based developers I work with make.
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How did you track your time? I kind of love this idea but time tracking is a pain in the ass. Seems like maybe you could use "day" or "half day" granularity?
I used RescueTime when I was freelancing. It's an app you install and it tracks what you're working on down to the second. It works by reading the titlebar of your current app, so it works well for development, and you can set up filters in the web dashboard to divide by projects and so on. Of course there's a privacy trade-off to consider as it's a SaaS.
I worked for a company once that was very remote friendly. You could disappear for a month and then pop into Slack and ask, what’s next in the issues queue? Then work on issues for however long you wanted, billed hourly at a generous rate. Several times I disappeared for weeks to travel and climb and was always welcomed back. That company was minting money and wasn’t worried about deadlines. I wish more work was stru…
This is pretty much my current arrangement and it really is a great way to work. Just today I popped into Slack after a week-long break, completed some low-hanging fruit issues and assigned myself a big one to work on for the rest of the week. Our boss occasionally sends us priority updates and of course there are high-priority issues that need to be dealt with immediately by someone, but for the most part, it really…
I’m at the half way mark of a MS in CS and trying to get a feel for the commonality of flexible positions in the industry, particularly for non-senior roles.
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I had an analogous arrangement. I would pop in and out, identifying/building high impact projects, in a mix of web dev, PM, and analyzing data. I was usually available for brainstorming/chats during my sometimes months of off cycle, including at non-regular hours. I'm hopelessly neural atypical with on/off cycles of productivity and haven't found a way to make myself more regular. I was paid as a full time employee d…
Wow, this offhand comment reminds me that there's a vast gulf between US compensation and elsewhere... 130k/y as a "below market" offer... I doubled my salary between last year and this one and I'm still not even halfway to 130k/y (and I'm happy because it's remote).. .and I live in the most expensive city in South America (more expensive than US midwest & Texas, cheaper than NY / SF of course). I thought USD 130k/ye…
But if you go FAANG and/or atypical role, the limit is much higher.