221–230 of 267 posts
I've found that schedule flexibility on that level is rare unless doing freelance work, which has tons of accompanying challenges like actually getting people to pay and maintaining enough work to fill the hours you want without selling more than you want. I agree with all of your points, though.
Choose your clients well, and always deliver yourself, and they'll tend to as well.
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I agree that not every hour is super productive, but not that 4 hours is 'normal' as said above. Nor that you could be 100% productive in a 4 hour job timeslot. There's also productivity losses if you have 2 people working on a project half the time rather than 1. I agree people should probably work less and have more time for their own projects but there is nothing normal about this in other professions apart from t…
When we're talking about programming/system engineering etc, there's the part where you might spend 4 hours doing "measurable" work -- ie: producing artefacts. Be that designs, code, documentation -- and in your "free time" your brain is still working on the problems in the background. I think part of the idea is that (to paraphrase Greenspun[1]) there's no point in keeping people from having fun while they're thinki…
HN readers are well informed about decline in productivity in case of burnout. But if number of working hours is significantly lower than 40 hours per week, then productivity deteriorates too, for the following reasons: 1) In order to solve complex task, programmer need to load all relevant details into his mind. That takes time. If working day is too short, then most of the time is spend on such loading and there is…
The 8 hour day was an achievement by the unions, down from the insane workdays during the industrialization.
If it were optimized, it would have been optimized for assembly-line style manual labor.
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…
Totally agree. 9-5 (or 9-6) engineering jobs are a bit crazy - no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact. Many managers understand that and are cool with people just not doing work while at work... However, I would still prefer to go home than sitting and waiting for 5 or 6pm so I could do something more meaningful, because e.g. side-projects is a gray area while at work and that's fair. Even so,…
its not ideal productivity but its better than missing a deadline and losing money
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Apologies as this is a bit off-topic, but where does one have to fall on the skill scale to be considered a senior-level front-end dev? I find myself doing a lot of front-end architecture work at my day job, educating my coworkers, and overall the "go-to" guy for front-end work; however, I'm at a junior developer's salary. I don't just do front-end either - I'm actually a full-stack developer, just the most instructi…
Sounds like you're senior to me. If you can quantify how you're the "go-to" guy, then you're in a position to ask for a raise. To explain my stance vaguely, if you can make critical decisions about abstract concepts, then I'd consider you senior. For instance, I recently saw that some of my coworkers were using an HTML tag in a way that was technically correct, but in a situation where a different tag is more suitabl…
> If you can quantify how you're the "go-to" guy
Pretty much when anyone has front-end problems they can't figure out (either by themselves or even after Googling), I'm the one they come grab. Mostly "Why won't this div go where I want it to go?" or "How do I make this stop overlapping that?" - or my favorite, "Can you help me make this work in IE8?". Not to portray my coworkers as whiny, btw. I think they just want to be done with the front-end stuff as quickly as possible, so they can get back to the back-end.
You did say quantify, so I'll say I probably provide front-end help to a coworker at least 4 times a week. One coworker maintaining the last project I worked on consistently expresses his gratitude for laying the foundation that I did on that project (front and backend). This is starting to sound like I'm bragging (trying hard not to make it sound that way), so I'll stop here.
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Totally agree. 9-5 (or 9-6) engineering jobs are a bit crazy - no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact. Many managers understand that and are cool with people just not doing work while at work... However, I would still prefer to go home than sitting and waiting for 5 or 6pm so I could do something more meaningful, because e.g. side-projects is a gray area while at work and that's fair. Even so,…
"no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact" tell that to a medical resident...or just about any in-hospital physician, for that matter. many, many people work long shifts and are entirely productive.
My girlfriend is a medical student from France and did some internship in the US. She is always annoyed by the fact that in the US, the medical employees (especially the residents) work way more than in France, but are also a lot less productive than in France. I do not like to generalize from examples, but saying that they are entirely productive is not true. Also medical professions cannot be easily compared to engineering (not the same type of work, and most of the time the issues are more important in their field (human lives at stakes...)).
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> no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact How do you know this? Are you sure you aren't extrapolating your own energy levels and assuming everyone else feels as you do? I know plenty of people with phenomenal drive, focus and energy who are extremely productive for much longer work days. My own situation is a counterexample. I am at my desk at 6:30am most days, can easily work 14+ hour days vir…
Could you tell us what field you work in, some details about the specifics of your job, your age, and maybe why you want to dedicate all your waking hours to working rather than something else? Do you understand that what you're describing is anomalous behaviour and ability. In Europe we have legislation to protect people against being forced to work for more than 12 hours at a time because this has been seen to be d…
If you can't find such job, there is a simple hack: work one year, then take a year off.
That requires you to save 50% of your income. For most of us, that requires relocating to a cheaper home, or telling your significant other that she'll need to chip in just as much as you do. Both are pretty big hurdles. However if you can pull it off, it's great.
To answer your question, this is almost impossible to find. I tried for 12 years in the Bay Area with no real success. I'm a highly skilled software engineer with a solid qualifications. I never had any problem getting full time job offers with huge salaries, even in bust times; but god forbid I ask for Fridays off, I'd be shown to the door real quick. Finally I started my own company. Most people work 16-20 hours/we…
They must be really afraid of the precedence it sets - that other employees would also start to negotiate for reduced work hours.