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.
Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
51–60 of 267 posts
Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
#52I 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 g…
If you're indispensable, you should ask for a raise, not a pay cut.
A raise and a 3/5ths reduction in expected hours would be one hard sell.
Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
#53I'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
If anyone knows any great jobs that hire 4/4 or some other similar schedule, love to get a thread going about that :)
Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
#54I'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.
Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
#55I 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-d...
Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
#56Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
#57People 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) empl…
Yes, I tried it several times, both working for other people, as well for my personal projects. I managed to pull out some full weeks of full-time, full-throttle work, but it is completely unsustainable. This is, social life, other activities, having out of the box solutions and ideas, friends, family are all strayed aside as secondary, weekend concerns. Work was the primary concern. That progressively led to loosing…
Sounds like adult life.
Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
#58Well 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 som…
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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
#59I 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.
I'm tired, but isn't 4/5 the same as 80%? How is that a better arrangement other than working less?
Re: Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
#60Thank 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…
"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.