101–110 of 267 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A raise and a 3/5ths reduction in expected hours would be one hard sell.
Only if they find someone cheaper and equally productive.
Try being a lawyer.... 16 hours days standard and when you are being charged out at $500 / hour (and receiving maybe 20% of that) your boss isn't expecting 4 hours of real work and 12 hours of admin... they want 16 hours of extreme concentration. Gotta be one of the worst careers you can choose.
The OP was talking about 16h weeks . Not 16h days. I can certainly feel for you if you're the one working 16h days week in and week out.
I'm very happy to see people working 16-25 hour work weeks, and it's probably very good for their personal life. Just one question, don't you feel guilty going like that? I'd feel guilty, as if life gave me this time to get as much work done as I can, and I just don't. I know, I know, weird question. But I'm serious.
Life gave you time to live. Not to get "work done". Especially the bullshit kind of non essential busy work most people in the West do.
Now, if you built houses or basic infrastructure, or were a doctor that'd be something different.
The nth BS enterprise CRUD app, or some BS social service? Not so important in the grand scheme of things.
RedHat is a large corporation, so mostly your work conditions depend on managers around you. I.e.: I started as an intern and after a year manager asked me, if I want to become a regular employee, and I had a condition to remain on 20h/week. Friend of mine had just the option of intern or full-time (40h/week).
Realistically, I end up completing 20-25 hours of billable work a week (and probably another 10-15 doing stuff that isn't directly billable). I could spend more time working on billable stuff, but I find that there are heavily diminishing returns after that point. Sure I can get in more productivity for a brief period (a few weeks max), but there is always debt to repay.
A lot of people tell me that they are looking for someone who is "half time", which to them means 20 hours a week. I've tried to explain to them that I don't schedule 40 hours of work in a week, and that for me "half-time" is 10-15 (productive) hours. A lot of people won't accept that.
I'm finding that it's easier to tell them that I'll work half-time, get more work done in 10-15 hours than most people would in 20, and then bill them for the time that I actually worked. If I'm getting the project done, then they aren't going to complain that I'm billing them for too few hours. That obviously doesn't work if they are expecting me to be on-site 20 hours a week, but in my case (where I work in my own office), it seems to be ok.
I do hire on such terms. I believe it will become more and more widespread in the course of years. James Altucher is right — in the future, there will be only business owners and temp staffers/freelancers instead of our usual "permanent" office jobs, with lots of legal obligations.
In other words, business owners would be commoditized and not mean much at all...
Why is it so unusual that employers compete with less hours rather than with larger wages? Is it because granting someone with less work would probably make other employees require the same? I feel that after a certain amount it would be much more enjoyable to get less hours rather than a raise. However the latter seems to be much easier, if not the only one, to get.
1) Puritanical roots of America (Idle hands are the devil's workshop) still linger as the ideal is you spend most of your time working.
2) Hiring more people is hard; furthermore the larger the team, the less efficient (per person) the team is. Therefore you want to get maximum value out of the people you have any way possible. A 25% boost in output of each person on the team is easily worth as much as (if not more than) hiring twice as many people. Similarly a perceived loss of 20% of productivity per person would be like halving the size of your team. I could easily believe that a 16 hour week has 20% lower output than a 40 hour week.
3) Lots of companies do offer lower hours for lower pay. They just typically don't hire people into that situation for some reason (I'm open to suggestions why that is so). However, no good place I've ever worked would fail to do that for an employee they want to keep.
Sounded good untill I read: "I sincerely think it is quite unrealistic to ask a knowledge worker". What is this with you programmers that you think that you're the best thing that has happend to this world? It's just a job. No more a job then any other one. Same thing as that bullshit as companies that want every employee to program. Do you see CEO's with a background as a carpenter writing blogposts about how everyb…
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…
I've worked for Google, Salesforce, and an early stage startup. In none of these companies did I feel like I was making a meaningful contribution to humanity. Either the product was of unclear societal value (Enterprise CRM), the work was so far removed from the value that the link to benefit was tenuous at best (second tier technical support for AdWords), or the ultimate results were no value generated (early stage startup where we scrapped everything after 20 months of development).
I've also taken gaps between jobs to focus on my own goals. In my free time I have volunteered with local food related organizations (serving meals in a soup kitchen, tending a community garden, etc), developed an iOS app used by 3,000+ artists, and bolstered my relationships with my wife and family. I've also taught myself several programming languages, enriched my world view through extensive travel and reading, and improved my personal well being through exercise.
In my opinion the contributions I've made through these "non-work" experiences and projects dwarf anything I've done working 50 hours/week for a salary.
It's possible that there's a job out there that would pay a decent salary and give me a similar sense of having made a contribution, but I haven't found it yet. I recently co-founded an ed-tech startup with this goal in mind, but time will tell if I'm able to move any needles.
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…
It leads to the same conclusion -- 4 hours of work is about the maximum for any creative or intellectually rigorous field of work.