Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

But the original question was about whether these jobs exist. Given that there are significant coordination and communication costs as the number of people on a team increases, it's in the employer's best interest to get more (productive) hours from a smaller number of people. If someone working a 16-hr work week incurs more communication overhead than useful product, employers won't hire someone who only wants that arrangement.

The good news is yes, these do exist!

They’re called “part-time jobs.”

> But in practice, as an employer, I don't see a practical interest from my perspective

I'd venture that may be because you view programmers as interchangeable cogs. Rather, for one developer, a project may take two 16-hour weeks, and for a less talented developer, it may take three 40-hour weeks. If you need it done in 2 weeks but the price tag is the more talented developer only works 16-hour weeks, and you accept, everyone wins.

[P.S.: I'm not sure this is a valid thread for the "10x programmers" debate, and I would hate to derail a very interesting topic. But I would say that if your goal is to only work 16-hour weeks, it's in your interest to attempt to demonstrate you can provide at least as much value as an average 40-hour-per-week-developer.]

Four hours per day of work where you are in high focus is about normal. You will see that professionals across many creative fields only work 4 hours per day.

There are a lot of posts here from developers talking about how they are more productive than their peers working less hours. Really, they probably have the same capacity for hours, but the less productive developers are carrying a lot of baggage in attempting to manage themselves (trying to push themselves when they shouldn't be.)

I think you could actually put in more. The trick is to observe your own natural rhythm. For example, energy and your ability to focus is like a wave through the day. For most, I think the time of the most energy is early in the morning and then it declines from there. You aren't burning hours so much as you're burning that fuel in your brain. But if you put in your 4 hours early, then you could probably take a good break and get another good 90 minute session. You could also find other tasks that are much less cognitive demanding to fill your day. If you put in your 4 hours that you believe are more productive than what your peers put in, then fill out the rest of the day with things that are lighter and less "forced."

If you are running a business, then after your creative work you still might have email, quotes, meetings, marketing, billing and a long list of other things to do. It could be pretty easy for a business manager to knock out 4 hours of creative work per day and then still fill out the rest of a normal working day with other tasks.

If you didn't have these other sorts of tasks, then maybe you could work out a side project with your employer. After you do the "forced" work, then maybe there is something that you could work on which is more a "scratch an itch" type of project. This could be something that you see as a glaring problem for the business which also happens to be something that you are highly interested in. Maybe it's something that's a different area of expertise that you might want to move into in the future.

Or maybe your 4 hours is all you can do without burning out.

44€/hr is low, that's pretty much entry level for quality work. People routinely charge multiples of that amount; if I was to go back to contracting now, I'd be charging at least twice that much, probably more.

Also, you should not allow a client to try to renegotiate price after the work has been delivered. Especially on a fixed bid project where they're satisfied with the results (BTW, you probably shouldn't be doing fixed bid until you're a lot more experienced, if even then - hourly is much safer until you know how to deal with problem clients).

If you are going to do fixed bid, you shouldn't need to count your hours, unless you're personally curious. I'd just hope that you have a seriously tight set of acceptance criteria put down in writing that legally binds them to a definition of "done". Nothing in that document should involve your hours: the only reason to take on fixed bid work is that you're betting you can do it in fewer hours than they're implicitly estimating it will take. If you win that bet, then that's great, the client should still be happy with the agreed upon amount but there's no need to show them how the sausage is made.