
The Advantage of Being a Little Underemployed - gpresot
http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-advantage-of-being-a-little-bit-underemployed/
======
ciguy
I recently changed jobs, and while negotiating salary with the new company,
realized that they weren't going to be able to match my salary expectations.

The work was interesting though and very well suited to my skillset so I asked
to work a 30 hour week instead so I could do a little freelancing on the side
and make up the difference.

6 months later I haven't started freelancing at all, and I simply enjoy the
extra time I have to pursue other interests. The unexpected part though is
that I am undeniably more productive than I've ever been while working less
actual hours.

I definitely use some of the free time for thinking, but I think I also end up
being vastly more efficient when I'm in work mode as well.

~~~
shas3
I've seen colleagues try < 100% work and what would end up happening is that
they would work the usual hours, but just get part-pay. There are really no
solid checks and balances other than a manager's goodwill when you start
working part-time. The only way you can actually curtail hours is if the
manager says "ok, s/he is working part-time, so I'll give them fewer
responsibilities." Quite often, project deadlines and not-so-nice managers
ensure that you end up working full or more hours even if you are officially
part-time.

~~~
scarecrowbob
There is the whole "I stop working when I hit my hours, because they are
explicitly set at 30 hours" deal... that's been working for me.

Like, I'm on 10-4MF, and they give me a check every two weeks. They have some
good will from me so if I have to put out a fire at 9pm and I can, I do it.

But I'm not a "full time" employee. If the responsibilities don't get met in
the time allotted, they aren't going to get met. It's not like I get to work
less if I figure out how to get my work done in less time... I don't see why
I'd work more just cause they give me assignments that take more than 30 hours
a week.

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Declanomous
>Tell them that your trick is taking a 90-minute walk in the middle of the
day, and they says no, you need to work.

I'm definitely 'underemployed', but the nice thing is that the work I do is so
far beyond what anyone else I work with understands that I report to the
director of the company himself. As long as I get my work done, nobody really
cares what I do.

I work until I feel like I'm not making progress anymore, and then I go for a
walk. Generally the walk is about an hour long, but I've found that a 90
minute walk is pretty much perfect for resetting my mind and getting over any
hurdles I've been stuck on.

The only reason I don't take a 90 minute walk every day is because my desk is
near the staff who just punch numbers in to a computer all day, and they start
to gossip if I'm not at my desk enough. I objectively finish more work and
produce better work when I get up and move around when I get stuck on a
problem.

The best way I've come to describe the effect of walking is to say it's a
meditative act. I don't mean that in a spiritual way, I just mean it helps
clear out the useless thoughts and gives you a way to center yourself.

One of the reasons I'm still working where I am is because I work in such a
great area for walking. I worked in the suburbs for a while, and I'll never do
it again. The car-centric design of suburban office complexes honestly feels
like torture to me.

~~~
pcmaffey
Having a dog is a great excuse to walk a few miles everyday.

Also, walking a few miles everyday is the best possible thing you can do for
your dog.

No one looks at you askance when you say "I have to walk my dog"...

~~~
VladimirGolovin
For me, having a brain is a great excuse to walk a few miles everyday. My
brain is like a dog: if I don't walk it, it just won't let me sleep.

------
mathgenius
After having worked in the US for a few years I've come to realize what this
"work ethic" BS is all about: it's a fetish. It's unquestioned emotional
baggage left over from the pioneering days. You can work 80 hour weeks if you
are on to something, but most of what i've seen is just monkeys at keyboards.
Total waste of time and energy.

~~~
bpodgursky
The "work ethic BS" built the economy which is the reason you came to the US
for a job.

~~~
burke
So did coal mines, baseball, and slavery. That doesn't mean they're inherently
relevant or worthwhile constructs.

------
borplk
The only way around this is working for yourself. Then you don't have to
explain to anyone.

I experienced the power of this when I was working for myself.

On some days I worked for 16 hours, other days only 3. Some of the best ideas
I had was while lying down on the bed and staring point blank at the ceiling.

I'm no stranger to "getting in the zone" but this was some next level stuff.

I wish I could sustain myself that way. One day.

~~~
swalsh
Of course working for yourself also means instead of selling yourself for 6
hours once every few years, you've now taken on a full time gig selling
yourself. Owning a business is 80% about sales, the other 20% is the thing you
sell. If you're consulting you can take some time off selling for a few months
depending on how long the contract is, but I've found that I need to
constantly be on the look out to plant a seed.

~~~
borplk
Consulting can sometimes be arguably worse than the job in that aspect. At
least with a salaried job some ups and downs is expected, with consulting if
you are charging by the hour people demand value by the hour. I was thinking
more in terms of running a SaaS or similar.

What I love about that is that you have long-term goals but it doesn't matter
how you get there in the short term. So you can work like a horse for 4 days
and rest for the remainder of the week. Or maybe another week you work a
little bit 7 days a week.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" with consulting if you are charging by the hour people demand value by the
hour"_

You don't have to charge by the hour. You could charge by the day, week,
month, or project.

~~~
borplk
True but the general point stands correct.

With a consulting engagement there's usually a higher expectation of
consistent proportional value delivered. It's more transactional (we pay $X we
get Y).

As a salaried employee at least in many companies there's some element of the
employee being a long-term asset to the company so the pressure is not as high
or as consistent.

------
fivestar
I'm not sure what being "underemployed" has to do with the actual blog post?
The post talks about railroad workers and how the 40hr. work week got started,
but I should point out that it's only in the US, really--other nations have
other conventions. The Japanese seem to be trying to work themselves to death,
for one (sad) example.

The only concern I would have about being underemployed is that we only get a
certain fixed number of years to save for retirement and if you're chronically
under-saving during your years of maximum earning potential, the back end of
your life may be pretty ugly. Then again, I am a pragmatist and I figure
"life" can be as long or short as you desire it to be, right?

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twodave
If I am taking a shower, and the solution to a work problem comes to me, am I
at work or not? In thought-oriented jobs (especially software engineering),
the lights are never really out. I regularly wake up in the middle of the
night with an idea.

I don't take my desk-hours too seriously because I know that while I'm out
running errands, exercising, taking a shower, sleeping, etc. I continue to
chew on problems, and sometimes taking the slow path to a solution produces a
much more mature one.

~~~
thegayngler
I am totally in agreement here. Many of my best ideas came about as I was in
between sets of 225lbs on the incline bench press. I don't actually give up on
problems just because I'm not at work. I am trying to get new ways of looking
at a problem by doing something else and giving my mind time to come up with a
solution that I am happy with.

~~~
rjeli
Wow, I can't imagine engaging in deep thought during a work set. I'm pretty
much an unthinking fury machine at that point.

------
peter_vukovic
In addition to not having the time to think, we also usually suck at thinking.

Our society fails badly at teaching people how to use their brain properly and
how to prevent it from going on a bender.

The best advice I've heard on this subject so far is to think when there is a
specific problem to be solved. Use your brain like a tool, then stop using it
after you're done - meditate.

Very hard, since thinking (and overthinking) is addictive.

------
kentt
Is this article being intentionally ironic? I agree with the idea that not
questioning the 40 hour work week is crazy. However, it seems like the author
is substituting 40 hours of butt-in-chair work for 35 hours of the same and 5
hours of more relaxed pontificating work.

I feel like 30 hours is plenty and 20 hours is sufficient for many jobs. That
would be a more direct challenging of the 40 hour belief.

------
ThomaszKrueger
Unfortunately many management schools of thought still take the 8 hour as
gospel. I worked at a company where my manager's words were "I expect 8 solid
hours from developers". Well I gave him 8 solid hours of my physical body, but
I allowed my mind to wander whenever if felt like. In a way I was not
officially underemployed but I didn't give them "solid 8 hours" \- I made sure
time expanded to fill up estimates.

~~~
pram
Wow letting your mind wander, rebel without a cause here.

~~~
shakestheclown
I'm currently working on a device that tracks employee's brain waves to make
sure they are working. Any period of daydreaming is deducted from their daily
timesheet. I already have 600 million USD in preorders.

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crispytx
"a lot of workers have thought jobs without much time to think."

I think this is why big companies have trouble innovating. They get filled up
with hard workers who spend little time time thinking because they're too busy
working.

~~~
norea-armozel
Or we create bullshit jobs for folks like David Graeber talks about in his
essays. It seems to me that half of the private sector is busy work kind of
work in the fashion that public institutions have. I'll never understand the
fascination that certain managers have with adding useless jobs to the roster.

~~~
convolvatron
right? the only thing I can think of is that "you're asking me to do too much
with too little" is a very easy thing for an underperforming manager to say.
which means that when that head gets assigned, there isn't anything to do but
give them busywork.

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6d6b73
I could do my 8 hour job in 4 hours, but I have to work 40 hours a week,
because that's the minimum expected from me. This wasted time is the main
reason why I'm working on starting my own company this year.

~~~
pmoriarty
If I ever finished 8 hours of work in 4 hours, my manager would just give me
more work.

~~~
wayn3
thats why employment is messed up. if youre too productive, you just get more
work.

if the company manages to fuck up and generates too much work, you just get to
do overtime.

no incentive to be efficient.

------
anotheryou
I'm currently trying to find a part-time job as a product owner. It slashes
the pool of advertised jobs down to about 1/10th (unless you try to apply to
full-time jobs anyways and hope they consider your part-time offer).

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dba7dba
> This was during World War I, when transporting military equipment by rail
> was vital to national security. President Woodrow Wilson, desperate to get
> the trains moving, asked congress to write an eight-hour railroad work day
> into law

This reminded of how the USA PATRIOT Act came into existence.

------
BadassFractal
Could use some help here. I have years of experience as an individual
contributor, manager, technical lead and founder at a medium-sized not-
unicorn-but-not-too-bad-either VC-backed startup.

Say I were to exit one day, is there anything I can do for say, 20 hours a
week, that would still pay the bills? I wouldn't expect to make as much as I
do working 60 hours, but I wouldn't ever want to do that again tbh.

I can see myself being extremely valuable as an advisor or a part-time C-level
person, but I don't know how frequent or how well paid those positions are.
Also it's completely not obvious if anybody would be willing to pay for an
entrepreneur's time if that person is not.. entrepreneuring, the people who
need our advice the most can't actually afford it. Any advice?

~~~
ghaff
I suppose in part it depends what "pay the bills" means.

From my observation, some experienced people do stitch together a combination
of advisory roles, maybe some teaching on the side, speaking, etc. that adds
up to meaningful money without working _too_ hard.

To give you some ballpark figures, an industry analyst will charge something
like $10K for speaking at an event or a day-long advisory session. Of course,
they have a lot of non-billable hours in order to get those types of rates.
(Same applies to expert witnesses.)

For me, one of the issues would be that 20 hours per week isn't that big a win
versus a more conventional workweek. The bigger win would be taking months off
and that's more difficult because you get out of the loop and behind on tech.

~~~
BadassFractal
Agreed, 20h a week is still a job, although at this point even 40h feels like
a vacation sometimes :) You raise a good point, I wonder what someone in that
position could do to work a couple of days a month here and there and still
have a huge amount of flexibility.

~~~
ghaff
I think that's hard. It probably requires either:

Some fame in an area that allows you to collect on big dollar speaking gigs in
spite of limited ongoing involvement. Eminence grise sort of thing.

Widely recognized world-class expertise in some relatively slow-moving
technology area. You're an expert in really gnarly ball bearing problems.
$10K/day for a couple weeks is a bargain.

Obviously these don't apply to a lot of people :-)

------
placeybordeaux
Good article, but as others have pointed out, it is strange to say that what
he is suggesting is "underemployment". It seems that he is actually suggesting
structured downtime.

------
dkarapetyan
These types of posts are preaching to the choir. Most managers don't get this.
They'd rather have you sitting and doing nothing but being in their line of
sight instead of being up and about and thinking.

Without concerted pressure this is not going to change any time soon. IBM just
recently announced it wanted all employees to be on-site. It is a tactic to
cut back their workforce but the fact that they can do this unchallenged means
something about worker rights is broken.

------
pwm
I have managed to do hour+ long midday walks pretty much all my working life.
It's not something I pre-negotiate and the degree of said freedom varies from
place to place. Nevertheless I rarely had any problems from this habit and the
benefits for me hugely outweigh the occasional confrontation. I might be lucky
but it seems these companies clearly care more about results than dogma.

~~~
pmoriarty
How do you get lunch in, in addition to your mid-day walk? Do you get more
than an hour for lunch?

~~~
kcorbitt
Not the OP, but I have similar habits. My workplace expects me to be
productive, and taking 40-90 minutes off in the afternoon once in a while to
walk and think helps me be more productive than I otherwise would be, as well
as less stressed. My workplace may be an outlier here (they also provide nap
pods and game rooms, so obviously condone taking breaks) but I've never had
anybody confront me about it -- not sure that my coworkers notice, and if they
have I doubt they care.

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mcv
I work 4 days (32 hours) a week, and have done so for years. I don't think my
brother has ever worked 5 days a week. In Netherland, many people with kids
work one day less, to be with their kids. On most projects I've worked, most
team members worked 4 days. I've only once had to reject a job because they
insisted on a 5 day work week.

Working less than 5 days is entirely uncontroversial here. In fact, I believe
Netherland is world champion part-time work. And personally, I think it makes
total sense. If you've got a good job, the extra time is often worth more than
the extra money. We need time to enjoy life. Life is more than work.

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the_cat_kittles
vague corollary: i wish people would really value inaction. so so often the
winning move is not to play. just like you learn to love deleting code, you
learn to love not even writing it to begin with. i dont think we are naturally
wired to understand this, but its become one of my greatest joys. the old
platitude that jazz is "the notes you dont play" applies here i think. i think
we could all stand to relish saying "no" and avoiding problems all together
more.

------
norea-armozel
Well, I don't mind an 8 hour shift myself since often I just use some or most
of the time doing research on the particular technology I'm going to use in
the software I maintain or enhance. Or even just looking over code to see if
it needs cleaning up or improved documentation. But I think the idea that
shifts make sense for certain businesses is odd to me. It seems more out of
tradition than productivity.

------
rb808
It seems people that work fewer hours often work on side projects in their
spare time. Does that mean such a developer is working too much or employers
are leaving money on the table by letting employees leave early?

~~~
GlickWick
I don't think so. I can only speak for myself and some of what I've observed
in my colleagues, of course.

From what I've seen, you can only work on one thing so much before you grow to
resent it. You need to take time off from it, even if that time is working on
another software project. Companies like Google have tried to emulate this
effect with their "20% time" initiative, but from what I've heard it doesn't
really work, since people still consider it to be part of their main body of
work.

Some of my best revelations for solving problems at work have come from
entirely unrelated projects. As someone who does game development as a hobby
on the side, I've actually discovered solutions to major enterprise software
problems while working on a random indie game. It's important to let yourself
do this.

------
dmartinez
I tend to think that substituting time thinking on walks is the greatest time
spent during a workday. I can think much more clearly taking frequent
20-minute walks throughout the day.

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rb808
How many serious jobs allow only 40 hours a week? I haven't seen many.

~~~
anotheryou
Here in euuerope at least it's quite strictly 40h/week. If you do more hours
you can often "redeem" them later or at least get payed for them.

