
Ask HN: How can I find 20-25 hour week programming jobs? - bholabalak
I&#x27;m presently in a full time 40 hour week job. The actual amount of time spent working is hardly every more than 4 hours. Rest is lunch + meetings + other things. I feel I will happier and more productive if take up a 20-25 week job. How can I find such jobs?
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itamarst
Some options:

* Negotiate shorter workweek at your current job. Many people have successfully done this to reduce workweek.

* Become a consultant or contractor. If you do it right (and that's hard!) you can work shorter workweek. Or you can do OK and work shorter workweek and make less money.

* Negotiate shorter workweek at new job. This is much harder, but doable.

In my case, I was a consultant, got part time job with one of my consulting
clients, then negotiated short workweek at new job. First two (consulting,
first job) were <30 hours a week (when I started, at least), second job was 35
hour workweek.

(Also, every once in a while I've seen part time jobs advertised.)

Talk a bit more about this here
([https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/](https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/)),
and a lot more in book which will be available as soon as I write the sales
page (sign up at that page to hear about it).

~~~
bholabalak
ThanksMy company is not very strict about work hours, as in, you can decide to
come and leave at your own timings but everyone stays pretty much 8 hours a
day as a norm. My fear is that I will be seen as someone who doesn't want to
do work if I leave early, but as other comments have suggested if I keep the
expectations from me clear and deliver, reducing work hours shouldn't be an
issue. If they see that I can do the work in only 5 hours a day, I fear they
will increase the work I have. Does this usually happen? I'm a fresh grad so
don't have much experience about how things work in the industry.

~~~
shortoncash
Depends on your manager. If he thinks your work is great and it's solid for 5
hours, he might let you get away with it. If he's a hard-A or has pressure of
his own to get serious deadlines, he'll give you more work. Depends on what
his motivations are. It all depends on where he sees you fitting in achieving
his objectives. If you're non-critical and on the side, it might not matter as
much to him.

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bigmanwalter
You can do it as a consultant/freelancer but you will have to build up your
reputation first.

Expect 1 year of underemployment where you have either no work, or
strategically discounted/pro-bono work so when you are doing something it's 60
hour weeks for shit pay.

Once you have a couple clients in your portfolio you can spend another year or
two making normal consultant wages, but as you will be focusing on becoming
know you can't turn down any work so expect 40-60 hour weeks.

Finally, after 3 years you'll have a solid reputation and if you played your
cards right, work should start to find you. You can put less effort into
marketing and start managing shorter weeks.

Don't go this way if you want something easy though. It's nothing of the sort.
But I can smell the freedom and I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

~~~
abra_kadabra
I'm earlier in my self employed consulting journey then you are and I'm seeing
a similar pattern. When I'm busy I'm extremely busy working lots of hours, but
then I'll have some time off and it usually means marketing/networking, haha,
it's not easy, but I do like the freedom.

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aqpgreendragon
Look for positions with flexible working hours. On paper I work a full 40 hour
work week but to be honest I probably work half of that and just take off when
I'm done for the day. These positions exist, but are seldom advertised as such

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k__
In Germany you can always lower your hours as long as it isn't mission
critical for the company that you are there 40h a week.

But I guess the easiest way is becoming a freelancer. Just tell your clients
you only have 20h a week time.

You also have to ask the question, what is work?

I mean, if you got a dev job, you aren't coding 40h a week. Yes, on a good day
it's 8h, but you probably won't have 5 good days in a row. So, how much do you
really code in your 40h, how often are you doing something else? Also, how
often are you thinking about job related problems while not getting paid?

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clean_send
I would recommend you sitting down with your manager and defining metrics of
success for your job. "If I get this X done then Y is was I am being evaluated
on." By doing this you can essentially cut down your work hours significantly.
You can make the case that as long as your work is being done and your method
of evaluation is progressing upward then there is no reason you can't work
flex hours. This goes industry to industry but I worked at a large tech
company and had success in that.

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anotheryou
I got the same question for a different title: Project Manager or Product
Manager. I feel like the second is a bit easier, because features to work on
can be isolated better and being very close to your team is not so critical,
but for both I see no easy path.

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paines
Maybe Fiverr? You could offer a specific task for some amount of time... Or
vice versa, someone has a task and you offer you service and deliver e.g.
after a week, but worked 50% on it...

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BoiledCabbage
Is the goal to then find a 20-25hr per week job and then only spend 10-12.5hrs
working? Or is the goal to increase the percentage of time at work spent
working?

I don't follow, what's the goal here?

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Samon
Do you not consider the "meetings + other things" work? If that's what is
required as part of your job, how would working less hours help?

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seige
Have you tried your local city's craigslist? I think you might be able to find
employers there that are accommodating on schedule/time.

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fulafel
Where are you located? Have you applied to jobs & asked to work half time?

~~~
bholabalak
I'm located in Mumbai, India. I have searched for jobs but didn't see any
advertisement for part-time jobs. My friends in other companies work much
longer hours than me.

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HD134606c
You can't. Remember the dummies in school who studied 10-12 hours every day?
They're your peers now, and you're expected to behave like them.

~~~
milesvp
Sadly there's some truth to this. I'd really hoped that once I was adult it'd
be easier to distance myself from people who reward effort for effort's sake.

On a related note, it's also really hard to distance yourself from people who
"are doing it wrong" in general. I can't tell you the amount of effort I've
had to waste learning a topic that from a distance I could vaguely tell was
not worth learning, just so I could have reasonable arguments as to why it's
inferior to some other idea. This is particularly frustrating in tech because
of the complexity of many tech stacks, that just getting to a point where you
can sound like an expert just to provide counterpoints can be exhausting.

~~~
davelnewton
That's part of the job, though: deciding on technologies requires some
knowledge. But I'm not sure I get what you're saying: you know it's inferior
_how_? A "feeling" isn't a valid reason for discounting tech.

