Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

I take a long lunch (yeah flextime!) and if at all possible, exercise during lunch, and I have enough simultaneous projects that the silver lining is I do different stuff before and after lunch. I tend to code/deploy more in the morning and design/test more in the afternoon (only a lunatic deploys five minutes before going home, no matter how well tested...) So its more like two separate five hour working shifts. I get the feeling this kind of lifestyle is pretty unusual here and people just code, continuously, for 18 straight hours, and think thats productive, or whatever.

Like most hacker types my home life is more interesting than my work life and I do totally agree with the assessment that its impossible to grunt out even 7 productive hours on one individual task.

(and edited to add that at the cutting edge I don't think its possible to work more than 4 continuous hours. Either its not really cutting edge or you're not being productive. I can do mindless yardwork reinstalling my paver brick patio for 12 hours, but there is no way to be productive when interfacing a new DDS synthesizer to a rasp-pi which as far as I could tell has never been done before, I could sit at the bench for 12 hours but I won't get any more done than just 4 hours, I'm just a little more honest about it than some, maybe most. At home I can do whats "right" not what is "management approved")

Another interesting aspect is a lot of design work is thinking and surfing the net for new ideas and inspiration and I can see from outside my brain that looking fairly unproductive. Or from a noob perspective, noobs not understanding that a half hour staring off into space might save five hours of coding despite not feeling like its as productive.

The above, and I'm on call 24x7x365 although I only get a call about once a month.

Also both the company and I have a motto of fail gracefully. So the automated testing system and the ticketing system decide they're not on speaking terms anymore, well, we could all set our hair on fire and run around and scream, or just buckle down and do it manually, 5x as slow and much more error prone than my integration system.

They expect me to fix anything 24x7 or have an excellent excuse (most recent excuse was my kid is in surgery so I'll go home and log in later) but they only expect me to invent or create new stuff in a much more restricted set of working hours (And the end users have absolutely no idea what those hours are...). Actually they're pretty pissed off at me if I make any production changes outside of certain work hours, unless I have an excellent excuse, so in the ebb and flow of work sometimes I have to read HN until I get the mgmt thumbs up if there's nothing else on my plate.

Enlightened self interest provides a strong motivation to automate the hell out of all error recovery and have backups to the backups. My systems for error recovery and resumption of production are much more complicated than the actual production itself, most of which is fairly simple although on a very large scale. I literally can't remember the last time I was woken up at 2am, although it could very well happen tonight...

(Oh and edited to add, I don't work in Ops. A drive fails in the NAS, a vmware server needs rebooting, they take care of it, that type of thing. The problems I get involved in after hours are higher level than ops, like somebody thought it would be funny to upgrade the software on a testing machine removing my access, or they changed firewall rules without telling anyone, that kind of thing, big fun)

Typically single- or multi-product SaaS businesses, largely selling B2B software on a low-touch model with a 3~5 column pricing grid at prices between $29 and $499 a month, sometimes with a side of infoproducts (e-books, courses delivered online, etc). As to what the SaaSes do, "fixes 'boring' business problems" covers most of them.

1,600 Chinese die daily from overwork. That is the cause of the china selling very cheap stuff.

Ha, I do pretty much the same!

After a lot of tinkering I settled on switching between two 'modes' that in combination make me feel good not just about my days, but also about my weeks and months (not sure about years yet - we'll see!). Took me a while to get there.

One mode is the 'many tabs open, free association' mode. It's the time when I print articles that I want to annotate on any one of the many (disparate) topics that I am deeply interested in. It's the time when I read a book, go to specific or general events. It's the time where I read tons of articles that tickle my fancy (and that's a lot, and not all useful). I've organically developed a process for filtering this overload of information. Much of it goes into an 'information gathering' program, some of it I process manually, and some of it I hang on walls or leave, printed out, around the house, and might percolate in some central document or database.

I call this my 'information gathering' mode.

The other mode consists of working and obsessively tinkering with something. Often this is a framework, particular script or little app. It's a lot of coding, reading and 'comprehending' to the point mild headaches, late nights, lots of coffee, and forgetfulness (no leaving the house, or no shaving, sometimes). A few weeks, for example, I simultaneously dove into Koa.js (without even being very well versed in node.js), React.js, and agonized over the ideal server-side/client-size approach for React. I also tried a bunch of other 'reactive' approaches and somehow found myself reading up on Haskell beyond the random HN article I would find.

I call this my 'obsessive tinkering' mode, although tinkering doesn't always do it justice. It's always immensely useful, even if I never use whatever stack/framework/language/topic I dive into.

I find that over time I tend to be in one mode predominantly, and switch to the other mode intermittently. If I ever get stuck in one mode, bad things eventually happen.

In a way I try to model myself after the (possibly highly romanticized) image of the 'renaissance man' who seems to just have a great amount of curiosity and knowledge, and then translates this to obsessive projects, and occasionally applies this just to make money. This approach seems workable, for now, in this tech world I inhabit, and I've never been so happy (but YMMV).