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Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

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Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

#1

Post by thy_inquisitor »

I have had an extremely good experience doing a 4 hour per day, 4 day per week job, in which I was mainly doing a greenfield project for a startup company.

Hands down, it was best work experience I have ever had. I was asked to do little every week, so I always had an extreme desire to outperform expectations, which led to an extreme drive to work, great work / life balance, and a very(!) productive throughput every single workday!

Another curious side-effect was to (on several occasions) actually work beyond the required ~16 hours per week, out of sheer pleasure.

I still remember that the same day I started working full time for that same company, my energy/happiness/productivity levels plunged, to only be lowered along the years.

I sincerely think it is quite unrealistic to ask a knowledge worker consistently deliver at full throttle for 40 hours every week (never mind the enslaving 60+ hours on many companies)

So my questions are the following:

- Are these 4/4 jobs easy to find? In which areas / programming language domains?

- Only greenfield projects make sense for this kind of work schedule?

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

#2

Post by linohh »

No, I've been working 20h weeks for years. Companies are very desperate to find decent people and it's better to have one for 20 hours compared to 0 hours.

(I'm in Germany where students are not allowed to work more than 20 hours / week if they want to keep cheap student rates with the mandatory health insurance)

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

#3

Post by justizin »

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.

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

#4

Post by NathanKP »

In the startup industry you'll find lots of greenfield projects, but very few where working only 4 hours a day is acceptable. Startups tend to need to get a lot of work done, relatively quickly, with a very small team. This is just the most effective way to build a business during the startup phase.

However, you will also find lots of startups have very flexible work hours as long as you get a reasonable amount of work done every week. Additionally, depending on your skill level and role within the startup it is likely that you'll be working on lots of different types of projects from day to day, which for me personally has always been enough to keep me enjoying what I do for a living, even though I'm usually working 40+ hours per week.

And some startups are very open to you contributing code back to the open source community. (Especially Node.js startups, where publishing NPM modules is just part of being a member of the ecosystem.) For me personally this also gives me that feeling of pleasure that ordinary work related coding might not always.

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

#5

Post by primitivesuave »

I coordinate 14 summer camp locations for kids every summer, it allows me to take the rest of the year off for travel or really whatever. Being a developer helps because you can build and sell web products to keep yourself working on something constructive, but nowadays most of my projects are random tasks that I've always wanted to do (construct a Wing Chun dummy, bike all the way to SF, build a go-kart, Lego rubiks cube solver, etc)

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

#6

Post by ef4 »

I don't think it's too difficult to find such opportunities if you're willing to be a freelancer/consultant.

I've gone for periods at as little as 5 hours a week. In that case I was mentoring more junior programmers, rather than owning a software project myself. It worked out great and the client was happy.

As you saw, at 16 hours you can easily own a software project and get great results. There's no reason you can't bid for freelance work at that level of commitment.

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

#7

Post by radikalus »

ef4 wrote: post #6

I don't think it's too difficult to find such opportunities if you're willing to be a freelancer/consultant. I've gone for periods at as little as 5 hours a week. In that case I was mentoring more junior programmers, rather than owning a software project myself. It worked out great and the client was happy. As you saw, at 16 hours you can easily own a software project and get great results. There's no reason you can'…

Definitely.

Typically, the types of projects I'd outsource to a consultant are non mission critical and the pacing is such that a 1/2 time consultant is totally fine.

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

#8

Post by justizin »

ef4 wrote: post #6

I don't think it's too difficult to find such opportunities if you're willing to be a freelancer/consultant. I've gone for periods at as little as 5 hours a week. In that case I was mentoring more junior programmers, rather than owning a software project myself. It worked out great and the client was happy. As you saw, at 16 hours you can easily own a software project and get great results. There's no reason you can'…

For what periods of time have you been able to sustain your needed income? I did this for a few years, but found that it often took a significant portion of time to line up the gigs, and some customers would hold payment for extra work.

Do you ever end up with only 5h of work when you want / need more?

The economy was diff a few years ago, though..

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

#10

Post by oceanstone »

justizin wrote: post #3

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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