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Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

#251

Post by Fr3dd1 »

krageon wrote: post #200
Fr3dd1 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context: I do recruiting as a team lead. I am happy you found what you were looking for. But from my pov, if you want to work less than fulltime and thats a non negotiable thing for you, please be open up front with the people who interview you. Typically when a full time position is offered, the workload of a full person is needed (lets not discuss if 8h of work a day results in better or more output than less hours…

Telling a recruiter things you'd like usually leads to them telling you to fuck off, so this advice is very good for getting zero jobs. If you get through a whole interview process (i.e. you like them) and the fact that they don't want to sit in your (virtual) office for five days a week is still a complete deal breaker you have a poor process. If you feel like that realisation wastes your time, I think you have some…

Actually telling things you like is a good thing. Why would it be a bad thing? Getting zero job offers is mostly, at least from my experience, a result of lacking the needed soft or hard skills (sadly errors can occure here - false negatives) or someone who doesnt meet organizational requirements (like the things we discussed here). In my process I tell in the first contact, that I am looking to fill a full time position in my team. If the candidate neither at the end of this call or in the organzation process for the second meeting says, that working full time is not an option, well sorry, thats just unfair. My opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

#252

Post by Fr3dd1 »

ericd wrote: post #221
daniel_iversen wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and potentially the 3-5 other people who interviewed them as well! That would get me a bit fired up if they didn't ask me that until the end of the process.. as bad as when people tell me they want a remote role when it's clearly advertised as an in-city office-first role!

Do you tell them the salary and % of the company they’ll get up front?

% in company not a thing here. I ask for a salary range from the candidate. If that meets the range I can potentially offer, I say so. If it is too high, I also say so. If it is lower than usual and it is a final match, our offer will be higher. If the candidate "refuses" to name it (acutally didnt happend in the last years) I can only assume that I would say my budget. Guess its fair or what would you say?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

#253

Post by bkberry352 »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #251
krageon wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling a recruiter things you'd like usually leads to them telling you to fuck off, so this advice is very good for getting zero jobs. If you get through a whole interview process (i.e. you like them) and the fact that they don't want to sit in your (virtual) office for five days a week is still a complete deal breaker you have a poor process. If you feel like that realisation wastes your time, I think you have some…

Actually telling things you like is a good thing. Why would it be a bad thing? Getting zero job offers is mostly, at least from my experience, a result of lacking the needed soft or hard skills (sadly errors can occure here - false negatives) or someone who doesnt meet organizational requirements (like the things we discussed here). In my process I tell in the first contact, that I am looking to fill a full time posi…

Telling this first is a good way to have every company think that 5 days/week is an organizational requirement and brush off the candidate. Having the candidate wait until after the interview puts them in a much stronger negotiating position, namely it forces the company to assess whether or not 5 days a week is a legitimate requirement or not. Many parts of the interview process are unfair to candidates, such as not advertising salary ranges in advance, forcing candidates to take vacation time to attend interviews, etc. This is merely a way to balance the scales away from the company, which generally holds almost all of the power in a negotiation, especially at the start, before an offer is made.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

#254

Post by ericd »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #252
ericd wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you tell them the salary and % of the company they’ll get up front?

% in company not a thing here. I ask for a salary range from the candidate. If that meets the range I can potentially offer, I say so. If it is too high, I also say so. If it is lower than usual and it is a final match, our offer will be higher. If the candidate "refuses" to name it (acutally didnt happend in the last years) I can only assume that I would say my budget. Guess its fair or what would you say?

Yeah, that’s fair. It’s very common that candidates get surprised on the downside at the end of the process, though, so I think it’s generally fair for the candidate to hold back some information until you’re sold on them. Though it’d be nice if they didn’t have to.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

#255

Post by Apreche »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #180
Apreche wrote: post #19

I just recently started a 32 hour a week salaried job. Here’s my story. I was at a very good job. My ultimate goal is to just go to the beach and not work at all. I realized that’s too big of a leap, so I set a shorter term more realistic goal of working 4 days a week. My employer at the time rejected the idea, so instead of ignoring recruiters like usual, I answered them. If a job wasn’t immoral, the interview proce…

Context: I do recruiting as a team lead. I am happy you found what you were looking for. But from my pov, if you want to work less than fulltime and thats a non negotiable thing for you, please be open up front with the people who interview you. Typically when a full time position is offered, the workload of a full person is needed (lets not discuss if 8h of work a day results in better or more output than less hours…

I consider the hours worked as part of compensation. It's something to be discussed during the negotiation phase. The company decides the structure of the hiring process. If you don't want to waste time, nothing stops you from moving the negotiation phase to the very start of the hiring process. I would personally prefer it if you did that as well. As an applicant it seems very awkward and unprofessional to come in and try to negotiate right from the start unless the company makes it clear that is what they want.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

#256

Post by Apreche »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #252
ericd wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you tell them the salary and % of the company they’ll get up front?

% in company not a thing here. I ask for a salary range from the candidate. If that meets the range I can potentially offer, I say so. If it is too high, I also say so. If it is lower than usual and it is a final match, our offer will be higher. If the candidate "refuses" to name it (acutally didnt happend in the last years) I can only assume that I would say my budget. Guess its fair or what would you say?

Instead of asking for range from them, why not tell them your budget first? Or at least both write them down on pieces of paper and reveal simultaneously.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

#257

Post by Apreche »

scruple wrote: post #150
Apreche wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a software engineer. I'm working at a startup now after basically refusing to work at start-ups, or any kind of tech company, my entire career prior. I always worked at normal stable trustworthy non-tech companies that happened to need software engineers. I would still prefer to go back to the non-tech non-startup industry, but the offer was too good. The process took less than a year. I entertained pitches from…

> I would still prefer to go back to the non-tech non-startup industry. As someone who has spent > 15 years in the tech-only industry, both in massive corporations and startups, I'm curious to know how someone finds these roles. I think I'd quite like something like this when I am ready to move on from my current (startup) role.

I live in NYC. NYC has a lot of companies in various industries such as entertainment, fashion, finance, advertising, etc. Some of those industries I refuse to work in, like finance and advertising, but you may find them acceptable. All of them have computers and software engineers because it's the year 2022. At bare minimum, those companies are buying SaaS products, but they still need experts to glue the APIs together with their internal systems. You get those jobs the same way you get any other job. Applying or being recruited.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

#258

Post by Apreche »

gitgud wrote: post #128
Apreche wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a software engineer. I'm working at a startup now after basically refusing to work at start-ups, or any kind of tech company, my entire career prior. I always worked at normal stable trustworthy non-tech companies that happened to need software engineers. I would still prefer to go back to the non-tech non-startup industry, but the offer was too good. The process took less than a year. I entertained pitches from…

> Most of them I rejected immediately because the jobs were beneath my high moral standard. Earlier you mentioned > Eventually a place made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Did you need to sacrifice morals for this offer? Or is there some other reason you took the offer?

I did not need to sacrifice my moral standards for this current job. If that was the case, I would not have accepted for any realistic amount. However, if you ignore the compensation, which includes the reduced working hours, I must admit I would give a slight edge to my previous job just out of personal preference.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

#259

Post by Nimitz14 »

nhooyr wrote: post #36
Nimitz14 wrote: post #25

Yup, in switzerland. The work-life balance is amazing. I asked for it when negotiating the job offer, employer had to accept since there were no other candidates and I was a perfect fit. Tired of being the most knowledgeable person in the room though, so accepted a full-time position in the US I will change to soon.

Will you miss Switzerland?

yup, the QoL is amazing. I can understand non-sporty people not liking it though.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

#260

Post by lucyferzyr »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #180
Apreche wrote: post #19

I just recently started a 32 hour a week salaried job. Here’s my story. I was at a very good job. My ultimate goal is to just go to the beach and not work at all. I realized that’s too big of a leap, so I set a shorter term more realistic goal of working 4 days a week. My employer at the time rejected the idea, so instead of ignoring recruiters like usual, I answered them. If a job wasn’t immoral, the interview proce…

Context: I do recruiting as a team lead. I am happy you found what you were looking for. But from my pov, if you want to work less than fulltime and thats a non negotiable thing for you, please be open up front with the people who interview you. Typically when a full time position is offered, the workload of a full person is needed (lets not discuss if 8h of work a day results in better or more output than less hours…

I work as a developer, and recruiters emails me in a daily basis. We all should try to minimize the recruiting efforts, but the amount of secrets that recruiters won't tell is just annoying... Sometimes even the company name they're recruiting for is a secret until you pass 1 or 2 interviews.

I know, there must be reasons for that, but from my point of view, it makes me lost a lot of time, and just for context, I spend 3 months looking for a job (with several interviews each week), this is just the proper market research everyone should do. And the end I was able to double my salary, work less, and get a lot bunch of great benefits.

And of course, the most annoying thing from this, was all the wasted time because recruiters 1) didn't wanted to handle me the proper information (like salary ranges or benefits) and 2) recruiters didn't make their own job, there was like 3-4 companies I applied for where, at the end of the process they wanted to hire me, but we're not able to do it since they have a contract with my previous company. Recruiters (or somebody else) should check that info before starting the process.

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