Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by eswat » Sun, Jul 06, 2014, 8:53 PM UTC

I’m doing a 4/5 schedule now for client projects. It was a lot easier to do this since going freelance and charging based on the value I generate, instead of an hourly rate.

While more “free time” has been a bonus (realistically I just work and study things that improve my business or my clients indirectly). The best benefit I’ve found from this work schedule is the push to get the day’s work done within those few hours. This doesn’t mean cutting corners or half-assing the work done, but rather figuring out solutions that get the most bang for the buck and being ruthless as to what details to sweat afterwards.

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

#122

Post by randallsquared » Sun, Jul 06, 2014, 8:54 PM UTC

Smudge wrote: post #77

nolite wrote: post #69

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…

The practical interest for you , as the employer, is the quality of your team and of the work produced -- something you should be optimizing for regardless. Say you find a dev who nails all of your interviews, is passionate about the kind of work your team does, and intuitively gets your company's mission. And then you find out he or she is only available for 16-20 hours a week. You must decide whether hiring them fo…

> Say you find a dev who [...] is passionate about the kind of work your team does

What does this mean to you? To me, being passionate about doing something means I want to do more of it, quite literally. Leaving other motivations aside, someone who is trying to negotiate less time is less passionate, right?

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

#123

Post by capisce » Sun, Jul 06, 2014, 8:57 PM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #55

I 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…

Hehe, the web of interests sounds very familiar. I'm using pocket (getpocket.com) to cut down on the number of tabs though, maybe it would be useful for you as well.

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

#124

Post by robertlf » Sun, Jul 06, 2014, 9:01 PM UTC

Typical Millenial

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

#125

Post by twelvechairs » Sun, Jul 06, 2014, 9:01 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #113

twelvechairs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. OK I'll bite. What are these fields? I think it is fanciful to call 4 hours per day 'normal'.

Any office job ever. As much as 50% of the time in an 8 hour day can be spent chatting with coworkers or inadvertently zoning out.

This is a completely different argument. This is "most people aren't efficient, therefore because I am I should be able to work less" where OP's was "creative people can't (and don't) work above 4 hours" (yet can somehow do so on their own side project).

I'll agree with you in general on this one (though perhaps then you should be happy with s 'standard job' salary), but disagree with OP.

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

#126

Post by capisce » Sun, Jul 06, 2014, 9:03 PM UTC

dlevine wrote: post #105

At the moment I'm a freelance software developer, and I take on multiple projects at once. Right now, I'm working on three projects, and typically end up spending 4-6 hours a day on billable work. I can put in more, but after a point, I can feel my productivity drop off. 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 coul…

A comfortable level of 20-25 hours of billable work per week seems to fit my experience in freelancing too. In the long run I don't think I'd want to try to push much beyond that.

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

#127

Post by cenhyperion » Sun, Jul 06, 2014, 9:03 PM UTC

My main question would be salary. You really can't reasonably expect your employer to pay you the same salary as someone working more than twice the hours.

Are you comfortable making less than half the salary of a programmer working 40 hours a week instead of 16?

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

#128

Post by mahyarm » Sun, Jul 06, 2014, 9:04 PM UTC

You don't work in full focus for the full hours. Other hours your are doing relatively low focus things such as code reviews, answering questions, eating lunch, attending meetings, interviewing, talking about the direction and design of the project, etc. They want you around as an on-call 'consultant' so you can unblock other people more quickly.

When it's just yourself green fielding a project, you don't really need to be anyone's consultant then, so you can just work the productive hours.

Some companies unfortunately care about face time too :/

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

#129

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 06, 2014, 9:05 PM UTC

techdebt5112 wrote: post #97

tspike wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of simplistic response that prevents our society from progressing. "It's just the way it is" terminates any rational discussion or critical analysis of why we do things the way we do. There's no actual reason for everyone to be either unemployed or working themselves to the point of exhaustion against their will; it's "just" a structural and cultural problem. As soon as people start openly discussing…

I was suggesting that this is a fine way for things to be.

[deleted]

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

#130

Post by nhaehnle » Sun, Jul 06, 2014, 9:07 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #13

Many of my small business buddies [+] start with their first few programmers on this sort of schedule. It generally fits within their/our budgets, gets them continuity versus project-based freelancers, and doesn't cause them to have to compromise on their quality of life through managing you constantly. It isn't my place to mention the salaries I've heard but, anecdotally, they're a) more than anything I earned prior…

Why don't you want to talk about salaries? Lack of data is a huge problem in this space. I don't think anybody expects you to name the names of the people involved.