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.
My best work experience was when I had a job where a 35 hours week was mandatory and strictly enforced. I had time and energy for other things and was super motivated at work. Nobody wasted time with unproductive stuff like never ending meetings.
I'm reading this as a mandatory maximum, yes? How does a strictly-enforced 35 hour week work in practice? And in what industry would you encounter such a thing?
We had to badge in and out every morning and evening. You could accumulate some overtime for a few weeks but at some point you had to take time off. The industry was manufacturing.
In my current role I'm a "cloud security architect" where my employer has a hard stop at 40 hours per week. When those 40 hours are exhausted, I'm done for the week.
Company provides critical financial infrastructure in the US.
We could work overtime for a while but at some point we had to take the time off. Unless you enjoy working 80hrs/week permanently there won't be a problem.
It's not "unpaid" overtime if I'm a highly-compensated salaried employee. I'm a professional and expect to be treated as such—sometimes I'll barely come into the office at all, sometimes I'll be in a lot. Judge me on my results.
I am sure you know that most of us don't experience it that way. 40 hours is usually the minimum hours worked. And this minimum is enforced. The only allowed deviation is to work more.
I'm in the exact same situations (though maybe 18 months in).
I play a lot of music to make up for it. The gigs don't pay as well as that other 10 hours a week would have paid, but breaking up my work into two separate fields is valuable to me.
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.
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.
If you do something like 3 ten hour days, that makes it much less likely that you will drift into working more than you signed up for. Ten hour days are already longer than the standard 8 (so less social pressure from leaving early or arriving late) and your days out of the office create a bright line that is easier to maintain.
The company I'm working for is European, so they tend to be a lot more realistic about working hours than American companies (I spent most of my career in SF).
That said, I think employees also have a responsibility to push back on insane hours. If you're good at what you do, then you have far more leverage as a developer than just about any other type of employee.
totally! i work 15-20 hrs a week, if that? i firmly believe that software would be a happier, better place if more people did that. i dont make alot of money, but i dont feel the need for alot of money since the extra time has so much value on its own.
Sorry not comfortable sharing the name, but I can say it's a small startup in Europe. In general you'll find startups to be much more open to these types of arrangements.
European startups also tend to be more chill about working hours than American startups (I'm from SF so I've seen it all).
>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.
> 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'm in a similar situation.
PROS: A large amount of autonomy, my work is appreciated and valued, very low-stress, reasonable hours.
CONS: Working on an "enterprise-y" stack, work isn't always the most challenging, concern about job prospects in the future since I'm not working on the trendy stuff always popping up on HN.
I've never been happier at a job though. My previous job was as a consultant where the pros/cons from above were essentially switched, and by the time I left that job I was pretty miserable. I loved the actual consulting company I worked for, but the environments typical to consulting just took their toll on me. Whenever I'm feeling bad about the cons at my current job, I just remember that the grass is always greener and try to focus on learning something new that re-energizes my love for coding.
I know the likelihood is small, but if I knew I could have my current job until retirement, I think I'd gladly accept that fate.
I think my biggest issue is that since some people don't understand my work, they can come to the conclusion that I'm not working as hard as I could be because I don't look stressed enough or busy enough when I'm working. My boss values my work, as do most of the people I work with, but I know for a fact that a lot of the clerical employees think I do basically nothing.
I've never worked in consulting, but I have friends who work as consultants for the Big Four, and it certainly seems like being stressed and working long hours is prioritized over making a meaningful contribution. That's probably a little unfair, but I've read the emails they are responding to a 10 PM at night, and it seems like everyone just stays up all night sending emails so that everyone else knows they are 'working'.
Me and a colleague would go for at least one but often times multiple walks per day. Sometimes just to shoot the breeze but more often than not it was to discuss some work we were doing or the conversation ended up there anyway. The walks were usually around 30-45 minutes.
During those walks we may not have banged out code or written emails or what have you, but damn if it wasn't the most productive time of the day. Usually, we'd go back to either his or my desk and turn the conversations we just had into something concrete.
We did some great work back then, and I don't think it would've been nearly as good if we hadn't gone for those daily walks. It also had the bonus of both of us missing some boring meeting every once in a while, but because those walks almost always ended up in something good we tended to get away with it.
My work to/from work is 25 minutes. I have a habit of walking rather fast but noticed I often get worked up about some issue that's neither urgent nor very important. Only when I force myself to walk at more leisurely pace I find it refreshing.
I like riding my bike to work because driving puts me in the mindset that I need to get to my destination as fast as possible. Riding the L has a similar effect.
The funny thing is that driving is maybe 10 minutes faster each way, but I'm way more productive when I ride by bike. I doubt I could convince anyone to let me work 20 minutes less a day when I ride though.
My basic role is analysis and database marketing for a non-profit foundation. I was hired into a new position for them a little over three years ago into a role that was an amalgamation of a bunch of roles from people who had left. They unified these roles into a single role, and split the unrelated work between other people in the organization.
I set the strategy for all of our mailings, run the data, and then analyze the performance. We have 800,000 constituents, and send about 500,000 appeal letters each year, as well as countless emails and other pieces of mail. I've managed to decrease our cost to raise a dollar from about 22 cents to about 6 cents, while improving the overall quality of our appeals, which I'm pretty proud of.
We are a really small organization (<50 employees), so I end up doing a really wide variety of tasks. We have a lot of challenges that larger organizations wouldn't have because of our limited manpower.
Since nobody had really taken a holistic look at their data before me, I spent the first year cleaning up all of their existing data and automating almost every processes I could get my hands on. I used to spend 3 weeks of every month running recurring processes, and I cut that down to about 15 minutes a week.
After that first year my manager left. At this time the Director asked me to come work directly under him because he felt that none of the other managers understood my role well enough to manage me. This allowed me to focus more on the analysis and marketing side of my role.
As time has gone on I've been asked to create more processes for speeding up other people's work. I'm not an application designer, and I recognize that the processes I'm creating are pretty fragile. This wasn't a problem when I was automating my own processes, because if they broke I could fix them. Now there are a bunch of people using processes that only I can fix, which makes it very hard to take a vacation or a sick day. This causes me a lot of stress, which is a key reason why my walks have been trending longer.
I'm basically somewhere in the middle of the graph from the XKCD comic Automation[1]. I'm starting to look for a new job before fixing broken automation steals the time I need to make a resume (or do the part of my job I really enjoy).
So long story short, I basically do anything involving the data or programming for a small-to-mid-size non-profit organization.
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.
its the same thing as the college classic: "i havent slept in 2 weeks / ive been working on this paper for 3 days straight". its also the same in that, generally, its a lie, and most of the time is spent not really working.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
That's a perfectly reasonable point of view, but in office environments it can quickly run up against crab-mentality people who make awkward comments about anyone whose hours don't match or exceed their own.
And at least in the software industry, current trends (stand ups, pair programming, etc.) are pushing away from flexible hours and focus on results.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, but the trouble with that is you still have to be someplace--either at an office or at home. It's not like you can actually enjoy life more. Which is what this is really all about--being able to be free of "work" for as long as possible each week and still manage to eke out a living.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Eh, one some contracts I've had there was a lot of slack time and so I did the same thing--some would consider that to be double-dipping, but I just call it "using my time to its best advantage." Chuck Palahniuk wrote much of "Fight Club" while sitting in useless meetings.
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).
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless you're required to clock in/out, or you -never- have meetings away from your desk, no one notices. It's only if you have issues delivering that a manager is going to start paying attention to when you're not at your desk and notice you're gone longer than an hour.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Neither of those is true. The work I do on side projects is work I would not do for my employer. If my employer wanted me to give them this extra work, they need to grant me full authority over all aspects of the project in perpetuity. Or pay me like that's what they're taking from me.
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.
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.