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Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

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

#61

Post by glesica »

mikegillman wrote: post #43
gregpilling wrote: post #41

I offered 12 weeks vacation to my staff in exchange for lower wages (but paid during 12 weeks off). Nobody was interested, and they wanted to stay with the current two weeks paid. So as an employer, I have never had anyone interested in doing a 16 hour week. I have had many ex-employees (and an ex-partner) who were paid for 40 hours a week, but only worked 16. To answer your questions directly. 1. They are not easy t…

Interesting. If the staff thought they would have to work through those 12 weeks of vacation anyway... or that it would be impractical to actually take 3 months vacation (or every Friday off), they probably wouldn't risk taking the salary cut. In our society the money feels more valuable than the time.

If the staff thought they would have to work through those 12 weeks of vacation anyway...

This is something I wonder about. I have found that, for whatever reason, social norms maybe, managers tend to view working part-time as somehow "cheating", even if they are paying less. So, when you clock out early, before everyone else, there is pressure to stick around and not "abandon" the rest of the team. I could see this being a major problem for a lot of people and a disincentive to accept a part-time offer like the one mentioned above.

Also, I wonder how many of those employees were afraid they would appear "lazy" and be evaluated poorly if they accepted the offer.

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

#62

Post by glesica »

mgmeyers wrote: post #24

I've worked 25 hours a week for the past ~6 years as a web developer, and I can't imagine a better work schedule. I've noticed that I'm just as productive on average, if not more so, than my 40-hour-per-week coworkers. I do find it difficult to progress in my career, however. I've been trying desperately to transition into a full-stack, part-time position, but I feel pretty stuck as a senior level front-end dev. In m…

How did you get the part-time gig in the first place?

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

#63

Post by notastartup »

This is a great way to increase efficiency at our job. At my first job as a developer, it was literally a sweatshop. We literally could not go home because if a project was not delivered on time, we would get fired, and this was worry was back in all of our heads. People would get sick from working 50+ hours (weekends too sometimes) , no overtime pay, lower end of salary in the area. At one point, the manager would call me at 1 AM in the morning while I was going home after leaving at 10PM and press on about the work. All you got from this guy was a handshake and a "Thank you come again". The company was rated fastest growing, the tech startup to look out for, featured in magazine. The company had 100+ people and they kept on hiring new people whenever people quit or got burnt out and got fired.

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

#64

Post by corford »

akamaka wrote: post #20

Thanks for posting this! I've been looking for the same thing, but my most recent attempt failed. I was asked to come back to a company that I used to work for, and I insisted that I would only come back if I could do a 3 day work week. I'm convinced my productivity would have been similar to when I used to work a 40 hour week with them, because rarely put in more than 3 hours of actual work per day. Unfortunately, t…

There will be people lurking here who 'get it', but it's difficult to make someone aware of part time opportunities without any contact info in their profile :)

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

#65

Post by VLM »

neilsharma wrote: post #53

I'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 h…

The linked to piece has a lot of "post carbon era" talk, but we currently live in the pre-"post carbon era" and all this 4/5 or whatever would seem to burn a lot of extra gasoline and irreplaceable commute time.

I'd rather work 10/2 and not spend so much time sitting in a car burning expensive non-renewable gasoline. Invert the work week and the week end!

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

#66

Post by scribu »

PeterGriffin wrote: post #49
surreal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting point, but it assumes that one's 'purpose' in life is to work. That's a pretty sweeping assumption, and one which the guilt is predicated on. Any idea why you feel this way? Would it not be just as valid to say that one's purpose in life might be, for example, enjoyment? Or helping others (not necessarily through a job)? In which case you should feel pretty guilty about going to work for 40 of…

I'm not sure it's bad to feel guilty about this. I'm more interested how people who don't feel guilty see life. I mean surely at some point having aimless fun starts looking a bit like wasted time in someone's life, no? We live to give our tiny contribution to humanity, and we do it by creating something through work. That also brings joy, and we do it to help each other (deviations notwithstanding). But it's a meani…

> We live to give our tiny contribution to humanity, and we do it by creating something through work.

A lot of people consider their contribution to humanity to be their family or the activity in their (local or online) community. For them, paid work is just a means to an end.

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

#67

Post by VLM »

A request:

Does anyone have actual scientific data from archeologists / biologists / doctors on what the human body was evolved to do?

Not interested in commentary on what strategy maximizes profit to owners of peasants or moral/ethical arguments.

Strictly looking for hard science like biochemist XYZ found human butts and spines are not operationally effective for sitting for longer than X hours due to scientific reason A, B, and C, or brain biochemistry shows indications of wearing out after Y hours of concentration or whatever?

It would be interesting to find out the science of optimized productivity rather than anecdotes. If we had consultative doctors like pro athletes had doctors...

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

#68

Post by glesica »

techdebt5112 wrote: post #23

People 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…

...and believe me, it's not difficult...

This is why I feel the productivity argument is really very weak. There are many people who seem to be quite productive even working 40-50 hours per week.

I think a much, much better argument is that working 40 hours a week is a waste of my life. I value my time quite highly because I have numerous and varied interests. So even if my productivity (and therefore, at least theoretically, my income) was maximized at 40 hours per week, I still wouldn't want to work that much.

No employer is going to index my salary to the marginal value of my time, they use the marginal value of my output (just as they should). So in a world where my choices are to work full-time or to work part-time at a greatly reduced hourly rate, it is impossible for me to optimize the amount that I work relative to the marginal value of my time. I, and I suspect many others, always end up at a sub-optimal equilibrium.

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

#69

Post by nolite »

As an enrepreneur, having to now hire developers for my startup, I don't see how this could work practically. As a company, there are objectives you need to meet by a certain time frame. If there's a task that needs to be done in 3 weeks, and there are 2 weeks of full time work estimated in order to do it, you're not going to hire someone and let it take 4-6 weeks just because they don't feel like working a full week.

For programming projects especially, its much simpler to have one person work on a given task, than splitting out an assignment over 2+ people - it lowers complexity, and keeps the process coherent.

So 1 person, needs to get the work done in the time frame. I personally don't care how much time the person spends doing the task, as long as its done properly, and on time. And its not always possible to see so far in advance what needs to be done that you can afford to let people take twice as long to do it (also taking into account the difficulties with estimating software project durations when work is done full time).

So working 16-20 hrs a week sounds GREAT in principle. But in practice, as an employer, I don't see a practical interest from my perspective

EDIT: I'm not a pointy-haired manager either.. Prior to starting my own company, I was full-time lead developer (and very well paid) for several years in a startup environment. My work pushed the envelope forward at the company, so I have a deep understanding of software development projects, and how development teams function as a whole, all first-hand experience

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

#70

Post by cldellow »

user3487 wrote: post #59
NDizzle wrote: post #9

I 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?

The way OP was using 4/4 was to mean 4 days per week, 4 hours per day. So 4/5 would be 50% of the hours for 80% of the pay.
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