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Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
662 points by thy_inquisitor on July 6, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 261 comments
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?




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 to manage themselves (trying to push themselves when they shouldn't be.)

I think you could actually put in more. The trick is to observe your own natural rhythm. For example, energy and your ability to focus is like a wave through the day. For most, I think the time of the most energy is early in the morning and then it declines from there. You aren't burning hours so much as you're burning that fuel in your brain. But if you put in your 4 hours early, then you could probably take a good break and get another good 90 minute session. You could also find other tasks that are much less cognitive demanding to fill your day. If you put in your 4 hours that you believe are more productive than what your peers put in, then fill out the rest of the day with things that are lighter and less "forced."

If you are running a business, then after your creative work you still might have email, quotes, meetings, marketing, billing and a long list of other things to do. It could be pretty easy for a business manager to knock out 4 hours of creative work per day and then still fill out the rest of a normal working day with other tasks.

If you didn't have these other sorts of tasks, then maybe you could work out a side project with your employer. After you do the "forced" work, then maybe there is something that you could work on which is more a "scratch an itch" type of project. This could be something that you see as a glaring problem for the business which also happens to be something that you are highly interested in. Maybe it's something that's a different area of expertise that you might want to move into in the future.

Or maybe your 4 hours is all you can do without burning out.


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, some non-technical higher-ups might think that the engineer is not working hard and just slacking off because everyone else is at the office till 6 or 7.

Some companies recognize that (e.g. Netflix, Twitter, etc) and they don't care where and what are you do, as long as you get stuff done. In an ideal world, every company would treat engineers like that :)


> no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact.

I disagree with your fact. I know many, many people who can do it. The simple fact that you talk about working on "side-projects" makes me think you have productive, creative hours outside the time you spend on work items.

I do agree that in the current market for software developers, you'd be crazy to not try to get some of your creative time to work on what you want to instead of your employer, but I just don't comprehend all the people acting as if 8 hours a day, 5 days a week of productivity is unattainable.


i've worked with a lot of people in a lot of places, and I think you are kidding yourself if you think most people get 8 hours of work done every day. I'm not saying nobody can do it, but most can't and don't. And that's not a problem. Most people are going to need breaks throughout the day. I suspect many of us here check out hacker news at some point during the day. In moderation that is fine as well (IMO).

For me personally, sometimes I put in 10-12 hours a day for a month or two and then I back off to 4-5 hours for awhile. I can do it in spurts, but 8 hours everyday for years at a time sucks. more than 8 is just unreasonable. If we're being honest I suspect most people do between 4-6 hours of work a day. Perhaps if they weren't forced to be in the office for 8 hours, they could fit that 4-6 hours of work in 4-6 hours instead of 8.


The cleverer managers I've worked with typically include a factor of ~ 70-80% on worker office time. So in a typical 8 hour work day, 6 of those hours would be productively spent on a task at hand.

For an engineer who is sitting at his or her desk, focussed on a single task, I think this is reasonably accurate. Obviously there are a lot of things in an office environment which can further conspire to reduce the amount of productivity much, much lower.


Perhaps a more accurate statement is that no-one is able to work productively for 8 hours straight, which is what the 9-5 job tries to make you do.


Even if I wanted to work productively for 8 hours straight, most of the low-level office tasks I'm required to do keep me from doing it -- explain to marketing why X product from Y vendor won't work for our situation, responding to email, meetings that always take up an hour no matter how short the agenda, etc. I think most of the engineers I know have employer-created hurdles that limit them to 4-6 hours daily of truly productive work.


Sounds like most of these things are pretty important for the business (except for maybe the overly long meetings). We'd all like to code in a bubble, but there are other things involved in running a business.


I wasn't arguing that they're unimportant or that I expect to code in a bubble, just that I'm paid to work 40 hours/week and roughly half that time is non-creative and non-coding. It's unreasonable to expect eight straight hours of productive creativity when business needs also require you to do TPS reports with your time at the office.


I've yet to really try it, but I always thought that (being single, without family) it would be more reasonable to work for 5 hours, have (at least) an hour break out of the office, and then work for another 5, for 4 days, is a more sensible approach to a 40 hour work week, than 58 with a (relatively) short break for lunch... I doubt that that would amount to 40 "productive" hours, but then again, I don't think the 85 leads to that either.


It is unattainable, from the perspective of the employer. As an employer, you just won't get those 8 hrs of productive work a day! Even if most employees can and do have more than 8 hrs of productivity, you just won't ever get more than 50% of that, no matter how many hours you pay them for.

...and it is OK. Yes, you have to pay someone for 8 hrs in order to get 4 hrs of useful work for you company out of them! Yes you have to pay for their side projects even if you like to pretend you don't! And yes you have to pay for people slacking at work... otherwise you don't even get that 50%!

So, as an employer, accept this fact, pay up, and motivate your people to create awesome products that delight the consumers and bring record profits, in this limited amount of useful time that you can squeeze out of people!


I'm totally fine with the position that an employer can't reliably get 8 hours of productive work per day from employees. I just am a bit fed up with people repeating over and over again variations on the theme of "nobody doing creative work can consistently be productive for 40 hours per week" which is something I have personally observed multiple counterexamples from across several industries.


> 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 virtually without a break, never sleep more than 5 hours a night, and can keep that up indefinitely. I also fit in 2-3 hours sport a day, which is also technically very demanding and needs full concentration. My body may get physically exhausted but somehow my brain just keeps going.

To be fair, the friends of mine who work such extreme hours are all passionate about their jobs, and are the ones in ultimate control of their working hours. They do it out of choice, not because their boss tells them to. If they didn't like their work, they'd find it hard to stay focused for 8 hours too.


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 detrimental to health. I see no reason why your reported lack of external coercion makes it healthier.

With 3 hours of sport (what sport would that be?) you're describing a day of 17+ hours. 2 hours for meals seems pretty reasonable. Commuting, eg to the location where you do your sport would be extremely unlikely to be less than 30 mins. That leaves you < (!) 4½hrs for sleep, toilet, washing, keeping house, family/friends (except sport and eating with them), entertainment ... you don't tell us how many days a week but "keep that up indefinitely" sounds like you don't bother with weekends?


I too would like to know what field of work he is in. I can't imagine doing that indefinitely.


a la google: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~scs/ ?


If these numbers aren't at least a tiny bit exaggerated (which I doubt), let's see how you think about work days like these after 10 years of doing them.


Actually reduced cognitive ability (lack of sleep) makes the simplest of tasks more entertaining, it's a large part of the reason they give amphetamine analogues to those who are not challenged by school, and why you'll find that those that are passionate about the the long hours of sorting through trash to commit identity fraud also high on meth.

Another great example of how people don't realize how cognitively impaired they are is hypoxia, just look at how passionate the guy becomes trying to put square shapes in square holes, so passionate he believes he no longer needs an oxygen mask to survive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpLi67NdD4w


That was an eye-opening video. I'm not convinced that amphetamines improve attention by decreasing cognition, though. Is there research on that?


This is difficult to quantify, but I'm guessing if we could graph productivity, it would look a lot like a sleep graph. In maybe the first 3 - 4 hours of sleep, you are deep in. That's the most productive sleep. Though you might go through a few cycles in that time, the cycles are deep. Then the cycles get less and less deep until the final hours in which you are barely sleeping. Some freaks of nature may be able to get by with less than 6 hours of sleep. Most need 7 - 8. We probably know those lazy teens who can seem to sleep all day. Some people might break up their sleep by sleeping for 4 hours, waking up to do something for a few hours and then going back down to sleep for another 4. Regardless, we all go through the same basic processes and have the same needs. Again, I think it really helps just to observe yourself and find out what works best for you. Experiment with many different ways and track that however you can. Maybe even just writing in a journal.

As for the side project, I meant working on a project for the employer. For example, if your job is X project on foobar.com then you might open up Y project on foobar.com as something you believe the site needs that you are more interested in. Again, this would most likely be after your 4 hour productivity burst. Maybe it's something you have been intersted in becoming an expert in. Perhaps one day you could jump ship and find a different employer to hire you for that expertise. Win for you, win for the employer.


This is a very personal/subjective issue. I have no problem at all being productive for 8-12 hours a day. Probably in part because I love what I do.


"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.


I've read that Henry Ford came up with the 8 hour work week after doing extensive testing[1]. I think the difference here is that assembly line work is not "creative". So you can do "non-creative work" for longer (8 hours I guess is optimal)... But it seems like this thread is talking about pure creative - e.g. difficult coding - time.

I'm not sure where you draw the line though. Is HTML and CSS mindless enough that it's "not creative"? What about basic unit testing?

I also don't understand how to reconcile this with the countless startup stories of how you spend all your time working... Even PG said he "used to work till 2:00 or 3:00 AM every night, seven days a week." and "During this time you'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be. My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night."[2]. Perhaps he actually did four hours of "intense creative" and the rest was mundane (he does in that same essay claim only 10% of the work was "technically interesting").

[1] http://blog.bufferapp.com/optimal-work-time-how-long-should-... [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html


"Entirely productive" - but would you look at the mistake rate for the first two hours on-shift versus the last two hours on-shift?

If you do, don't tell anybody. They'd probably quit.

The collective ego and conscience of the medical profession, the way we treat them, tells them they should be unfallable, and mistakes are not only unforgiveable, but actionable. Medical residents should need no sleep whatsoever, should have no downtime et cetera, et cetera.

If we gave them a sane number of hours per shift (by the standards of the rest of the economy) and a reasonable margin to communicate patient status from shift to shift (rounds twice or thrice a day), we would increase labor requirements by 25%. If we gave them a sane number of hours per week, we would increase labor requirements by another 100%.

Work standards initiatives that have been successful include "Towards an 80 hour workweek" (down from 90+): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours#Tow...

Do you want your heart surgeon to have worked 80 hours in the last week, and 24 hours in the last day? Myself, I wouldn't want my doctor using the same public road network as I do, in such conditions.

How many people has this policy killed?


I've not worked at a hospital, but I've seen people in somewhat similar circumstances: military exercises, working as leaders at a youth camp -- and while they all get the job done, it's always been clear that they'd do a better job if they had more free time/more sleep -- in short they can work productively (under high strain/stress) for more than 8 hours -- but they'd do better work if they could work fewer hours.

I'd be surprised if the rate of errors didn't go down with work hours (to a certain point) at hospitals as well. And/or patient satisfaction went up.

To put this into (made up) numbers, if we assume that a software architect works either 12, 8 or 4 hours a day, and that at 12 hours a day produces on average 200 "valuedollars" per hour, that's 2400 vd/day. Is it really a stretch to claim that you could, on average, do 3 times better if you only had 4 hours, rather than 12? Paying 3 people 600/hour to work 4 hours a day, you'd get 3 times the value/day (note: note value/pay -- but we all know deadlines are important in projects).


There's plenty of research on this, e.g.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a487169.pdf

For an alternative take:

http://theenergyproject.com/blog/sleep-as-a-competitive-adva...


Humm, I have to disagree with that.

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...)).


No, they are not. They make more mistakes than during shorter shifts, especially towards the end of the shift. An aggravating factor is that they actually believe they can still perform as well after 16 hours of working. This is all well known from research, it's just that it's hard to break ingrained traditions. Look at how long it took for doctors to start washing their hands, after research decisively proved it reduced the number of deaths and complications. In a few decades we will look back on this time and shake our heads at the ridiculousness of doctors, of all people, working 16 hours straight.


"no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact" - this is not a fact at all, where is the proof? Show me the research. I would still challenge it by showing you days when I've easily pulled 12 - 14 hours for 5 and sometimes 6 days of solid work in a week with no burn out. It's all about managing energy and having your internal motivations aligned with the goals and tasks at hand. Not that everyone should be working 12-14 hours but often we need to.


I think you're definitely right that under the right motivation and for certain bursts of time you can work for 12-14 hours of time, but there has been a good amount of research and studies showing long term damage from overworking and undersleeping:

http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-w... http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2012/09/12/why-work... http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/why-the-...


i dunno - its certainly possible to be productive after even 20 hours. some of those last terrible bug fixes that make that thing ship...

its not ideal productivity but its better than missing a deadline and losing money


"all you can do without burning out."

If I may, this sounds to me like if you assumed that everyone should be working just one step below burn out limit. And this seems to be shared by so many people. I wonder what is the rationale behind it? Is it a way to maximise income? or to make sure the 1billionth chance to be a new Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is not lost?

For me, as a French, it seems obvious that we should be very far from the burn out limit most of the time, we should be close to the balance between happiness and boredom, while keeping a sufficient income.


For me, being right below the burn limit is where the most fun is, the most growth is, and where I'm most likely to hit a state of 'flow'. Some of the best weeks of my life have been 16 hour days of coding, taking breaks only for food and recovery walks. (all driven internally).

There's an incredible joy that comes out of pushing yourself exactly as hard as you can tolerate and achieving your exact maximum productivity. And there's a lot of joy that comes from looking at the things you build as a result.

I also did this last summer with hiking. In the space of about two months, I worked my way up from 3-5 mile hikes to day long, 40 mile hikes in 95 degree weather. I enjoyed it immensely.

So perhaps there's no law that "you should work exactly enough that you don't burn out", but there's a lot of value in being able to be in that spot.


If you don't push yourself, then you don't grow fast enough.

Burnout is also bad, so the ideal is to stay exactly one step below burnout.


> you don't grow fast enough.

But what if I do not want to "grow fast enough"?

Or, more precisely, what if I question the direction of this growth? For instance, I certainly should learn more and more, discover more interesting topics, become a better father, cultivate friendships, etc. This is what I would agree to grow, and it means spending more time with kids or friends, or reading books about whatever subject I am interested in at the moment (which happens to be anthropology and history).

This is a "growth" that do not require one dangerous "one step below burn out" mantra.

Moreover, I do not believe that the very few very successful people are more happy than other. I can give two examples: I do not think Steve Jobs was happier than a "normal guy". A closer and easier example is Mojang, creator of Minecraft, which I certainly respect and admire (much more than Jobs): is he happyer now that he got the jackpot? He worked hard, was very lucky, but not that he "arrived there", maybe, just maybe, he has a lot of negative pressure from his success, maybe he has a fear to fail and would rather go back to the happy times when he was coding alone a very raw sim game for <1000 fans.

So, once the soup is assured for long enough, and despite all the essays by PG, why not just say "it is not for me"?


I agree you need to push yourself to grow.

I don't know what "fast enough" is supposed to be measured by, I guess that depends on your personal goals.

But you clearly have never experienced burnout. "One step below" is dangerously close to the precipice. If you cross the threshold (real life is too unpredictable for tight-rope walking), burnout is not a simple matter of taking that one step back. Recovery takes disproportionately more time than that. And you may not notice you've gone too far before you're already well in. You may cause long-lasting damage. You may wreck your career. You will learn an important lesson or two about what is "fast enough" for what is important in life :)

Analogy: Keeping your flammable documents exactly one degree below combustion temperature. While playing with fire.


And there is research to back this up? One step below burn-out sounds miserable to me.


I think if you're miserable, then you're actually at your burn-out.

The notion of one-step below burn-out is that you're still getting enough stuff done (with the assumption that you _like_ your work, I guess).


If its miserable, than it is burnout.


To add to this, there's a great book on the topic regarding the daily rituals of artists: http://www.amazon.ca/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work/dp/03072...

It leads to the same conclusion -- 4 hours of work is about the maximum for any creative or intellectually rigorous field of work.


If you love what you do for work, it is probably sustainable to work for more than 4 hours per day. We all do things during each of the 16 hours of consciousness per day. Some of those things are more enjoyable than others. If you find yourself in a situation where you must work more than 4 hours per day, and it is not enjoyable, there appear to be two options:

1. Find work that you enjoy doing more than 4 hours per day. 2. Learn to love what you do for work.

In the healthy romantic relationships I've seen, partners fall in love, but they also choose to love one another. I wonder if loving work is similar. There is a lot of rhetoric encouraging people to follow their passions to find the jobs they love, but there is little rhetoric about choosing to love the job you have. It's important not to delude yourself that a horrible job is lovable, but it's also important to notice all of the positive aspects of a job and how you can use it to grow and give back.


> 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.

OK I'll bite. What are these fields? I think it is fanciful to call 4 hours per day 'normal'.


Any office job ever. As much as 50% of the time in an 8 hour day can be spent chatting with coworkers or inadvertently zoning out.


Or meetings. Poorly run meetings. Probably because people are tired.


Meetings can be incredibly useful (at least until we invent telepathy), but only if they're run well and held sparingly. Otherwise they turn into an easy way to look busy.

As you suggest, efficient meetings aren't really possible when people are overworked. Even one-on-one conversations can fall apart when sleep deprived. I've had work-related conversations at the end of an overly long 8h day where neither one of us could form coherent sentences about the code we were discussing. In an ideal world, we would have left work two hours prior.


This is a completely different argument. This is "most people aren't efficient, therefore because I am I should be able to work less" where OP's was "creative people can't (and don't) work above 4 hours" (yet can somehow do so on their own side project).

I'll agree with you in general on this one (though perhaps then you should be happy with s 'standard job' salary), but disagree with OP.


This is a completely different argument. This is "most people aren't efficient, therefore because I am I should be able to work less" where OP's was "creative people can't (and don't) work above 4 hours" (yet can somehow do so on their own side project).

Not quite; it's more like "most people aren't effective for more than four single-task focused hours per day, myself included, so everybody should be able to 'work' fewer hours."

Working on a side project might use a different part of the brain or a different sort of willpower reserve, so it's entirely possible that someone will fall asleep after four hours of actual work, but could then go home and spend another two hours on something completely different.


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 the odd artist who may well hover around the poverty line.


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 thinking.

Like the new head of our CS department said: he doesn't really care if his professors spend most of their time in the office or at a cafe -- as long as they're comming up with new ideas and do research (the institute has a very high rate of publication for its size).

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html


This is great. Just that its the rare position of the privelliged profession where staff are in demand (more jobs than workers). It doesn't fly for Architects, Engineers, industrial designers etc who have a similar creativity requirement but have more workers than jobs...


Most engineers don't consider meetings to be "work". It's pretty normal to only "work" for 4 hours (or even less) and spend the rest of your time on overhead - meetings etc.


I've worked in two big Java/.NET consulting shops. They both were OK with 60% productive work. If you performed better, you were able to get bigger bonuses. If lower, then they started to work on your productivity (tutoring etc) or fired you. I usually showed up about 50% of the time and did some work from home. Worked great for me.


Thank you very much for this, I think it strikes a major chord with many in the "knowledge worker" community at large, and I hope it stays in the top spot for a while, and spawn a healthy discussion.

For my part I've been doing a mix of freelance and salaried work in the last few years (as a data scientist), and I have reached the conclusion that a strict 40-hour week is not an easy thing to handle. I think it stems from the fact that the "knowledge worker"/hacker ethos is often deeply rooted in a self-driven and motivated agenda of learning and experimenting with new things on a constant basis, very often just for the sake of it. This can easily conflict with a regular work schedule in terms of number of hours and commitment. But the point is that it really shouldn't, because very often, those two "modes" nourish each other, which can result in a stronger, more robust and ultimately more meaningful and happier work like.

I've been trying to convince my current boss that a 3-day week would be a more efficient and compressed use of my time, while giving me more time to pursue other contracts and projects. But it seems that there are some cultural barriers that makes it a difficult message to pass. I actually intend to use that thread to show that I'm not the only one in that situation, that such a culture really exists, and thus that it must be taken into account somehow.

It might be somewhat cliché, but I really believe that this mentality is a glimpse of the future in terms of work ethics.


"I've been trying to convince my current boss that a 3-day week would be a more efficient and compressed use of my time"

I do four tens per week on flextime to avoid commute traffic and one major "cultural impedance mismatch" is discussing this face to face with people who are at their workplace (note that I don't describe that as working, merely being at a certain location), perhaps five twelves or even six fourteens per week on salary. Its possible to be polite on the internet, but face to face they tend not to take it very well.


Sorry but this all sounds lazy to me. If there are any real customers using the software they are going be rather unforgiving of your desired work ethic. Perhaps in a large org with a staggering of staff this could work... But would be challenging to keep the continuity throughout the work week. Certainly an interesting idea for the larger orgs.


>If there are any real customers using the software they are going be rather unforgiving of your desired work ethic.

So? "Real customers" could also want him to work 24/7/365, and to respond immediately to their every demand and whimsy.


Perhaps his real customers are internal, and his continued employment proves they are satisfied.


The above, and I'm on call 24x7x365 although I only get a call about once a month.

Also both the company and I have a motto of fail gracefully. So the automated testing system and the ticketing system decide they're not on speaking terms anymore, well, we could all set our hair on fire and run around and scream, or just buckle down and do it manually, 5x as slow and much more error prone than my integration system.

They expect me to fix anything 24x7 or have an excellent excuse (most recent excuse was my kid is in surgery so I'll go home and log in later) but they only expect me to invent or create new stuff in a much more restricted set of working hours (And the end users have absolutely no idea what those hours are...). Actually they're pretty pissed off at me if I make any production changes outside of certain work hours, unless I have an excellent excuse, so in the ebb and flow of work sometimes I have to read HN until I get the mgmt thumbs up if there's nothing else on my plate.

Enlightened self interest provides a strong motivation to automate the hell out of all error recovery and have backups to the backups. My systems for error recovery and resumption of production are much more complicated than the actual production itself, most of which is fairly simple although on a very large scale. I literally can't remember the last time I was woken up at 2am, although it could very well happen tonight...

(Oh and edited to add, I don't work in Ops. A drive fails in the NAS, a vmware server needs rebooting, they take care of it, that type of thing. The problems I get involved in after hours are higher level than ops, like somebody thought it would be funny to upgrade the software on a testing machine removing my access, or they changed firewall rules without telling anyone, that kind of thing, big fun)


So your doing 4on4 on call I hope your getting paid for that - must ruin your social life to be tied to a computer.

I assume you on the standard 15 min response and onsite or connected and working on a fix inside an hour.


How did you find your mix of freelance work initially? Do you go through agencies? If so, how did you find the best agencies starting out?


Many of my small business buddies [+] start with their first few programmers on this sort of schedule. It generally fits within their/our budgets, gets them continuity versus project-based freelancers, and doesn't cause them to have to compromise on their quality of life through managing you constantly.

It isn't my place to mention the salaries I've heard but, anecdotally, they're a) more than anything I earned prior to going into business for myself and b) a substantial discount to market rates for FTE programmers.

So that's one option for you. Another is to be very good at making companies money and then, in negotiations, trade access to you for flexibility. Still another option is to own the company you're negotiating with.

[+] Context: solo founders or married couples running software small businesses with revenue in six to seven figures and no investor mandate to radically change the character of the business.


Why don't you want to talk about salaries? Lack of data is a huge problem in this space. I don't think anybody expects you to name the names of the people involved.


I'm a let-it-all-hang-out kind of guy, but there exists adequate specificity in my comment to narrow it down to less than five identifiable people. Neither they nor their employers have OKed me putting their salary on the public Internet. Accordingly, I politely decline to be more specific than I am currently being. (The bookends I mentioned earlier were intended to communicate "Between $30k and $100k.")


I'm surprised no one has asked yet, but the next question is, are your small business buddies hiring? I'd be interested in 10/20/30 hours per week continuous employment at a below-market rate, provided it was remote.


I think what Patio11 would typically say to this is that you shouldn't base your expectations / negotiations on "market rates." The problem with a set salary (or getting paid per hour) is that your pay is tied to a set unit no matter what value you are creating for the employer.

We only have one shot in this life. We have chosen development as our professional practice. We should be looking to take that practice to the highest level that we can reach. Basing our salary on market rates is basing our value on industry average (or the level of mediocrity if you are more the glass half empty type of person.)

Ultimately, your place is to make money for the company. This is what you should be basing your value on. There is $X on the line and you have great influence on moving that number. If you aren't in this position, then keep looking so that you can get max value out of the lifetime of your profession.


Just out of curiosity, what kind of (I assume, software-based) business are they running?


Typically single- or multi-product SaaS businesses, largely selling B2B software on a low-touch model with a 3~5 column pricing grid at prices between $29 and $499 a month, sometimes with a side of infoproducts (e-books, courses delivered online, etc). As to what the SaaSes do, "fixes 'boring' business problems" covers most of them.


I sometimes wonder if, for mind-intensive, non-repetitive jobs such as programming (the good ones, anyway), lowering the number of work hours per week may actually increase overall output. It's well known that people tend to become more efficient the less time they're given to complete a task. So if people were to work fewer hours and use the rest of the time to get more sleep, relax with their family, etc. - hence keeping their mind refreshed and maintaining motivation - perhaps they'd get much more done over the course of the year than otherwise.

It's the reason I deliberately choose not to work late nights or during weekends, even if I feel the urge to. I'm afraid that it may actually end up hurting my overall output in the long run.


During the war, Kellogg's moved to a 30-hour work week. An overwhelming majority of employees preferred it. Despite the reduced hours, Kellogg's found that overall productivity actually went up.


I don't know how it works in other industries, but I would bet for software you're right. Sometimes you need to step away from a problem and it let it process in the background.

I've had moments where I'll work on something for hours late into the night only to realize the next morning that I didn't need to or that I can do it using some other method in only a couple of minutes. If I had stopped and went to bed earlier I would've saved a lot more time.


Thanks for posting this! I've been looking for the same thing, but my most recent attempt failed.

I was asked to come back to a company that I used to work for, and I insisted that I would only come back if I could do a 3 day work week. I'm convinced my productivity would have been similar to when I used to work a 40 hour week with them, because rarely put in more than 3 hours of actual work per day. Unfortunately, they didn't hire me, because they said that absolutely needed someone full time to be able to complete the project on schedule.

I think they rejected the idea because everyone else there is on a 40-hour week, and they simply can't contemplate the idea of someone doing less work. They've been slogging away at the same never-ending project for 2 years now, and they aren't looking for someone to get work done efficiently. They want someone who will join in their suffering.

Going forward, I'm going to keep looking for a part time opportunity, but not waste time trying to convince people that it's good idea. I think I need to find people who already just get it.


There will be people lurking here who 'get it', but it's difficult to make someone aware of part time opportunities without any contact info in their profile :)


I am in my early 60s and I am retired now except for a little consulting and writing a book or two a year.

That said, starting in the early 1970s working at a large defense contractor, I got in the habit of only working 32 hours a week (took Mondays off). I continued this process with several other companies until about 15 years ago when I converted to having a lifestyle 1-man consulting business.

The deal is however, it is really important to realize that it is not in a company's interest to have a part time employee in many cases so I really tried hard to add value when I was at work.

I have never regretted getting 20% less salary when I only worked four days per week.


Why is it not in a company's interest to have part-time employees? By anecdotal accounts, it seems that part-time employees are less expensive than full-timers (such anecdotes generally refer to mandated benefits for full-time workers as the major cost difference.)


Good question.

Every company I worked for had to provide me with an office that was empty one day a week.

In most of the companies I worked for, employees who worked a minimum of 30 hours a week got full fringe benefits :-)


Thanks. "Square-footage" is one of those things I always forget when calculating the expense of employees. (Probably one reason I'm an employee and not an employer.)


This is great to hear from someone who did this for a considerable amount of time. I started working 4 days per week 2 years ago (I'm 33) and so far it's proving to be an excellent decision. I'd also say I'm more effective than I used to be at my job, partly because I'm more refreshed from the time off. With the extra day it has allowed me to complete 2 contract projects, help a couple of non-profits with their tech issues and it has proved extremely useful because it's allowed me to complete chores that are usually so onerous because they involve visiting people during business hours.


How did you make the initial leap from the 40 to the 32 hour week? Did you just ask your manager if it was okay, given a proportional pay cut? Or was there already a policy in place?


I love this idea. If someone figures out how to successfully run a company like this, it'll be huge, as it will attract a lot of top talent who would prefer these hours.

In my experience, the biggest obstacle is the amount of time dedicated to communication/coordination overhead like email and meetings. If you're already spending 20 hours/week on that, then you're left with only -4 hours/week for productive work. This is likely the reason why it worked well for an independent, "greenfield" project.


I've seen several (smaller) companies hiring developers for a 4-day workweek.

At least it's a start...


I work 4/5, mostly on either crappy wordPress projects (whcih, for all their crappiness, can be kind of fun, since we're not grinding) or on a bespoke PHP framework (which can be a bit frustrating, because I can't just find already answered questions on a list or StackOverflow).

My strategy was to cycle through a bunch of agencies looking for freelance, overflow workers and then be super good at performing... until I found a couple that were a good fit (interesting projects, real pay, smart folks).

A big part of the strategy is that a) the agencies know I have other contracts, so they understand if I can't commit to 60 hours of work in a week, b) they don't know when the "other agencies" are my kids or my wife or my jazz band.

I have worked on all kinds of things, so I don't think it is just for greenfield projects... though often I think that new or redevelopment work seems to be the norm, as if there were a massive effort underway people seem to have/want employees.


As a complete newbie to contract/freelance work, how did you first get started finding good agencies to work with?


As horrible as it sounds, I started with the Austin, TX craigslist for my first groupings of folks, which paid terrible and had horrible projects. I'm not in Austin, but I could meet folks in town.

But I did cycle through a lot of folks, and I also tried to leverage every project into a better project.

Also, I answer questions on a facebook group, and that has led to new work contacts. Just being generally helpful and occasionally asking for work netted me a lot of work.

Finally, I just generally network, talk about what I do, make a point to talk to other folks who do what I do when I meet them in my larger life. That's created my best connections. One guy I met doing audio on a movie set hooked me up with a company that turned into a high 5 figure client.

I find it especially valuable to be able to hook up folks I know who are looking for work with people who need work done, at whatever level. People generally find that super useful... it is harder to do when just starting out, but I still get work from the guy I got hired to replace me at the first of my crappiest jobs.

I do that mostly because it makes me happy to see my friends find work or folks fill a need in their businesses, but folks don't usually forget people who build good relationships for them. So, IMO, it is good to know other freelancers or people who want to freelance... you get a lot more calls if most times that you turn down a project you can shuffle it to someone else :D


If you don't get someone to recommend you to a good agency, you just have to try until you got a new one.

There are some signs that might help you, like that they do have an office, down payment, etc.


I worked 20-25hrs / weeks for about 2 years as a consultant but then, probably against my better judgement, joined a company in March doing the standard 37+hrs. I'm unhappy, unfocused and RescueTime tells me that my efficiency has dropped about 20%.

After only a few months, I'm going back to consulting with a 20-25hr week. If you haven't tried it, you probably don't realise the universally positive effects it will have.


probably off-topic: you mention 37h/w so I'm guessing (Western) Europe... Do you find it reasonably easy to find consultancy jobs that allow for ~20h/w (and still make enough for sustenance)?

To me it looks like freelancers are generally accepted by companies only if hiring permanent staff is not feasible, and once they decide to pay the (usually higher) daily rate, they would squeeze so much out of that day that half-day jobs would be blasphemy - unless you're very well known for your expertise in your field/niche, of course...


I have been working 25 hour weeks for a little over a year now, but agonizing over finding a good number for years before that. I've found that for difficult problems to crack, I may only work 1 or 2 hours per day. But for easier stuff like initial setup, a little refactoring, translating wireframes to layouts, etc, I can easily manage 6 or 7 hours per day. 8+ is too much, and working 3 or more days in a row at that level has a taxing effect on my health. I just don’t think humans are built to be sedentary with high levels of cortisol. So short prolific bursts interspersed with long hours of introspection seems to be the best route to writing the least amount of code for me. I would say 50-75% of my efforts are subconscious, so I spend 5 or 10 minutes as I’m falling asleep thinking about the problems to be solved the next day, and the answers either come to me or suggest some way in which I misframed the problem (wow misframe is not in the Mac OS 10.9.2 dictionary, but I digress).

I spend my off hours with a few dozen windows open with 50 or 100 tabs each, basically a web of interests. I use Javascript Blocker in Safari to reduce overhead, and periodically turn off Javascript and Flash then force quit and relaunch to restore my workspace. It’s crude but until I have an indexed, version controlled browser with everything I’ve ever viewed, it gets the job done. The number of days since I’ve viewed HN is a good barometer for either how far in the zone I’m in (if I’ve been using the computer) or how disconnected I feel (if I haven’t). I would go to professional conferences for the people, not the subject matter. That’s probably my biggest regret with dabbling in the anarchism of autonomy, because without a safety net there isn’t a lot of disposable income. So my big goal now is to remedy that, either directly or by spreading the word if I learn something. Stumbled onto this a couple days ago:

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/programmers-d...


Hehe, the web of interests sounds very familiar. I'm using pocket (getpocket.com) to cut down on the number of tabs though, maybe it would be useful for you as well.


I use Pocket for a different use-case (basically, saving long-form stuff for perusal later). For taming the too-many-tabs problem I use Tabs Outliner: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...


Big plus for pocket! It does help that I have longish commute time most of which I use by reading out of pocket on my tablet. At office most of the time is spent in coding, debugging etc., any remotely interesting topic gets "pocketed" immediately; I don't even spend time to decide whether it's worth reading or not.


I can also recommend the OneTab plugin!

I currently use Instapaper for longer articles and stuff I 'must' read, Pocket for more whimsical stuff or resources and things I can safely never read, and OneTab as a 'temporary storage' for everything that doesn't quite fit these other two categories.


Same here :)


Ha, I do pretty much the same!

After a lot of tinkering I settled on switching between two 'modes' that in combination make me feel good not just about my days, but also about my weeks and months (not sure about years yet - we'll see!). Took me a while to get there.

One mode is the 'many tabs open, free association' mode. It's the time when I print articles that I want to annotate on any one of the many (disparate) topics that I am deeply interested in. It's the time when I read a book, go to specific or general events. It's the time where I read tons of articles that tickle my fancy (and that's a lot, and not all useful). I've organically developed a process for filtering this overload of information. Much of it goes into an 'information gathering' program, some of it I process manually, and some of it I hang on walls or leave, printed out, around the house, and might percolate in some central document or database.

I call this my 'information gathering' mode.

The other mode consists of working and obsessively tinkering with something. Often this is a framework, particular script or little app. It's a lot of coding, reading and 'comprehending' to the point mild headaches, late nights, lots of coffee, and forgetfulness (no leaving the house, or no shaving, sometimes). A few weeks, for example, I simultaneously dove into Koa.js (without even being very well versed in node.js), React.js, and agonized over the ideal server-side/client-size approach for React. I also tried a bunch of other 'reactive' approaches and somehow found myself reading up on Haskell beyond the random HN article I would find.

I call this my 'obsessive tinkering' mode, although tinkering doesn't always do it justice. It's always immensely useful, even if I never use whatever stack/framework/language/topic I dive into.

I find that over time I tend to be in one mode predominantly, and switch to the other mode intermittently. If I ever get stuck in one mode, bad things eventually happen.

In a way I try to model myself after the (possibly highly romanticized) image of the 'renaissance man' who seems to just have a great amount of curiosity and knowledge, and then translates this to obsessive projects, and occasionally applies this just to make money. This approach seems workable, for now, in this tech world I inhabit, and I've never been so happy (but YMMV).


> It’s crude but until I have an indexed, version controlled browser with everything I’ve ever viewed

interesting


An excellent link, and great points.


I've worked 25 hours a week for the past ~6 years as a web developer, and I can't imagine a better work schedule. I've noticed that I'm just as productive on average, if not more so, than my 40-hour-per-week coworkers.

I do find it difficult to progress in my career, however. I've been trying desperately to transition into a full-stack, part-time position, but I feel pretty stuck as a senior level front-end dev. In my experience, this is because I need some weight to throw around when I request working only part-time.


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 instructive when it comes to front-end work or design.


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 suitable based on the context of the page. This is something I've learned through my studies and experiences as a front-end dev, and as such, contributes in a small way to my "senior-ness".


Yeah, I do run into situations like that fairly often. Most of the guys I work with are really talented back-end engineers, and just do enough front-end work to get by.

> 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.


How did you get the part-time gig in the first place?


My first gig was at a start-up. They could only afford to pay someone for ~10 hours a week, which fit perfectly with my school schedule. When I left school, they offered me more hours, but I was adamant about working no more than 25 hours, and by that time they had seen how productive I was at just 10 hours a week. There were definitely some rough spots when they had tight deadlines, but for the most part, they scheduled things so they worked with my schedule.

My current gig I got through a personal connection. They were in desperate need of a senior level front-end dev, and I was just upfront with them from the start that I would only be interested in working 25 hours a week. It helps that they have a team of devs to rely on when I'm not there.

My advice: if you want to be part-time, either be an expert in your field, or find an early stage startup that can't afford a full-timer. This sounds kind of shitty, but it's hard to convince people who are ingrained in the 40 hour work week. Also, telling people you're a student helps. I've found that people look down upon me when I tell them I have no desire to work 40 hours, but if I tell them I'm a student, they're all for it.


One of my past employees worked with me for about 6 years, doing four days a week. He asked if it was an option and, while there were days when it was inconvenient given that I run a small business, I didn't mind. He's since moved elsewhere, but I would've kept him on doing three days or fewer hours spread over the week.

I wouldn't feel comfortable paying full rate for part time hours under the guise of it being "just as productive" though. I believe it can be just as productive but it would be too disruptive to face emergency situations or social situations that pop up during work hours.


I agree that the pay shouldn't be the same in terms of annual compensation, but I see no reason why hourly compensation shouldn't be the same, once fixed costs are accounted for (such as health insurance).


Yes, it was a direct comparison in this case. I figure the discount you get for buying time in volume is offset by the arrangement suiting seller.


I offered 12 weeks vacation to my staff in exchange for lower wages (but paid during 12 weeks off). Nobody was interested, and they wanted to stay with the current two weeks paid. So as an employer, I have never had anyone interested in doing a 16 hour week.

I have had many ex-employees (and an ex-partner) who were paid for 40 hours a week, but only worked 16.

To answer your questions directly. 1. They are not easy to find, nor are they often demanded. 2. I don't think it has to be greenfield.


Interesting. If the staff thought they would have to work through those 12 weeks of vacation anyway... or that it would be impractical to actually take 3 months vacation (or every Friday off), they probably wouldn't risk taking the salary cut. In our society the money feels more valuable than the time.


If the staff thought they would have to work through those 12 weeks of vacation anyway...

This is something I wonder about. I have found that, for whatever reason, social norms maybe, managers tend to view working part-time as somehow "cheating", even if they are paying less. So, when you clock out early, before everyone else, there is pressure to stick around and not "abandon" the rest of the team. I could see this being a major problem for a lot of people and a disincentive to accept a part-time offer like the one mentioned above.

Also, I wonder how many of those employees were afraid they would appear "lazy" and be evaluated poorly if they accepted the offer.


its a small manufacturing business. They would not have had to work the 12 weeks.. They simply weren't interested. I was surprised, since it is a rule I wanted for myself. So I made the rule anyway.

My engineer wants to take a month off, but she is doing it as a unpaid leave. She had already saved her living expenses for the time she would be off, so it didn't matter to her.


A: Was it an even trade of days off for pay?

B: What is your unpaid time off policy? Could your employees take 4 weeks off and receive their regular 2 weeks vacation pay? (Specifically, can they do this upon request. I understand that your engineer is doing this, but I don't know if that's available to everyone as a rule.)

If I was given the option of making 100% pay with a relaxed unpaid time off policy, or making 80% pay with a 20% PTO policy, I would choose the former option. That way I can decide exactly how much vacation/unpaid time as I want.


We are very relaxed. An employee could take 4 weeks off, get the normal 2 weeks and just have 2 weeks unpaid.


Do you know if matching up holiday allowances with staff partners was an issue? e.g., I could get away with taking months off or working on the road, but my wife only has the typical 20 days allowance here in Australia with about a week of it fixed at the end of the year when their office closes.


What was the difference in pay with the 12 weeks of vacation?

Given the norms in the USA I, as an employee, would never initiate such an arrangement. I feel like it would result in at the very least an indelible assumption of laziness by my new employers, if not a retraction of the original job offer.


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 not enough time to actually accomplish something.

2) Shorter working hours usually means less expertise long term. Less expertise means less productivity.

3) Shorter work time means it's harder to meet with coworkers, because there is not enough work hours to meet. Less meetings with coworkers means lower productivity, because work in isolation usually mean working on wrong problems and less knowledge exchange.

So, on one side we have burnout risks. On another size we have incompetence risks.

Our society tried various working schedule and worked out 40 hours work week as the one that is closest to the optimum.

Note though, that 40 hours work week does not mean 40 hours per week coding. There are many other things that developer should do at work.


Good points, except: Our society hasn't really tried various working schedules to find an optimum work week for programmer productivity.

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.


If you're good, this is what good contract work is like.

Many times I got hired for a 3 month stint and got it all done in a couple of weeks with one eye shut. I tended to chip in and help with any other bits lying around that needed doing rather than sitting there playing solitaire. Builds a good reputation.

This is how I started my current permanent job. They decided they wanted to keep me so I'm getting paid a contractor's salary for a permanent job now and have a 25h week flexible time as a technical advisor and general devops guy.


We offer flexible work schedules (half time, full time, anywhere in-between) with benefits.

1. A. In my experience it's hard to find unless you're contracting or have extremely rare knowledge.

1. B. We're a rails shop, (mostly) b2b edtech.

2. Not at all just greenfield. Having flexible schedules means that you have to be realistic with scheduling and expectations. You have to work out what will work best with the team and when they need to synchronize with you.

In some cases your work is orthogonal to main development critical paths, so the need for synchronization is less (still important though for staying synced with the culture).


I've been working independently for some time now and I've noticed exactly the same thing - productiveness is significantly better when working less. However, I do handle many projects at the same time, but for each project I only hand the time when I've thought out what I'm going to build and how. I've also found that doing so gets you straight into the coders high. It's like that once you've set your mind onto the project you end up writing cleaner, simpler and better code. I now honestly believe that something like coding cannot be worked efficiently from 9 to 17 five days a week.

Only downside is that the people who have hired me have started to doubt whether I've deserved the pay. I had this client who were really astonished how much I had got done in only two weeks, but once they started asking for the hours spent on the project, they answered me that they might need to haggle the price a little bit. I'm bit new to this whole entrepreneur thing and I've been naive enough to not really count any hours spent on a project. I just work on them when I feel like my mind is set and the code I write is not gibberish. Anyhow, when I later count my hourly wage from the amount of hours I came up with at the clients office, I realize that my blunt estimation had set my wage to 44€, which is kind of high even in my opinion. Though I believe that the client probably wont drive the price down a lot, as just before they asked for the hours they had told me how the application has everything they initially asked for and can't find room for improvement. It really seems that the idea of working less is not that open for everyone, so I can see reason if there's not many agencies which promote it.


44€/hr is low, that's pretty much entry level for quality work. People routinely charge multiples of that amount; if I was to go back to contracting now, I'd be charging at least twice that much, probably more.

Also, you should not allow a client to try to renegotiate price after the work has been delivered. Especially on a fixed bid project where they're satisfied with the results (BTW, you probably shouldn't be doing fixed bid until you're a lot more experienced, if even then - hourly is much safer until you know how to deal with problem clients).

If you are going to do fixed bid, you shouldn't need to count your hours, unless you're personally curious. I'd just hope that you have a seriously tight set of acceptance criteria put down in writing that legally binds them to a definition of "done". Nothing in that document should involve your hours: the only reason to take on fixed bid work is that you're betting you can do it in fewer hours than they're implicitly estimating it will take. If you win that bet, then that's great, the client should still be happy with the agreed upon amount but there's no need to show them how the sausage is made.


I was contracting about two years ago and charged €60/h. I'd charge closer to €100/h or more if I did it now.

you should not allow a client to try to renegotiate price after the work has been delivered

Completely agree. The "Fuck You: Pay Me" video has some good tips on contracts and making sure additional work is billed separately etc. The price should be set in stone before any work begins.


Thank you for your reply! I found it well thought and I'll surely memorize some bullet points for my later career.

I've been very humble with my pricing so far because people don't really take me seriously if I try to pull that kind of wages. You see, I have neither a degree or the age which would do the trick. Past work is kind of there, but instead of URLs the clients I've met in person just want to know whether their software can be done. Peers my age are working in labor jobs for the normal 9to5 and some even brag how they can pull out 17 hours of work in 24 hours. I've noticed that people treat software development with the very same idea, where the young have the endurance to pull out sick work hours and where more hours equals more work done. People seem to be afraid of hiring someone who says their hourly wage is starting from 40€, especially when the person can't, thanks to their lack of experience, say how many hours they'll eventually need. Therefore, for the sake of getting any clients in my first steps of lone entrepreneur, I've decided to stick with the lump sum.

It really is a pity that I can't get around keeping the work hours as my own business, but so far I've found it easier than introducing them completely new way of working, where part of the time is spent on thinking instead of doing work. Until the latest incident, I had never even crossed the idea that the client may think they are getting screwed, thinking that the work they asked was really just that easy to do (because I was left with so little hours).

But about the price negotiation, yes, I agree with you and I'll not let them do that. Our negotiations had no agreement on the hours I should spend, so they have no reason to drive the price down because of that.

I'm going to be honest with you and tell you that I haven't made a single black-on-white agreement on what defines "done". Instead, the idea has been that I'll remain as the lone owner of the software, with the exclusive rights to re-sell it. I'm currently looking for the chance of turning the software into a SaaS, in which the original client has agreed on helping me by referring businesses from the same field to use it. So basically, I'm charging the original client one year worth of the subscription I've been planning on selling it for. By so, I'm basically securing at least one customer for the service for one year. At the same time, I'll basically launch a service which has proven to have at least some kind of demand. Plus I get free marketing from the original client on the same run.

You see, if they would be able to refer even two customers, I'd be glad, as that's the turning point where it's financially sane for me to get a LLC for my programming work (that's a huge thing for me in a country where you lose most of welfare state's benefits by starting one). Everything above that is really just a bonus. But should I get 20 recurring sales, I'd already make enough money that I could live (in theory) the rest of my life with the money I make from the product per month. You could say it's a risky shot, but as long as I can do the thing I like and get paid for it, I'll keep choosing the risk.


44/hour might be ok if that's after tax and after expenses (workstation, office space, insurance, backup, internet access...[edit: ant lets not forget: non-billable-hours, like looking for new work!]). Othwerwise, I'd say double that is entry level pay. Especially if you're (by the clients admission) getting a lot of stuff done in little time.

What does the client care how many hours you've worked, if you've delivered a good product on (or ahead?) of schedule? What are they going to do, hire someone to do worse work, at twice the time, for the same money? How is that any better?


It depends how good you are, but don't sell yourself short. 44 euros is below market rate for a contractor and probably freelancer around large European cities.


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)


I think the four hour/day jobs are something you have to navigate yourself towards.

At my current job I've automated almost everything with bash, Perl, PHP, Latex, Prolog, Powershell and way too much VBA. Whenever I had a spare moment I would spend it automating something. I've now reached a point where I only need work 30 minutes to 4 hours/day. But of course, since I'm getting paid for a full day and I would feel guilty reading HN all day, I end up in this positive feedback loop where I continue to automate which gives me more time to automate. My next step is to start using Selenium to automate those tasks for which 'external partners' have not provided an API.

My contract is coming up and I'm going to negotiate for slightly less money in exchange for a four hour work day.

It's not in my employer's natural inclinations to permit this, however they would have to hire several unskilled workers to do my work or another programmer for 8 hrs/day.

The tl;dr is: Make yourself indispensable so that a 4hr/day position is an option.


If you're indispensable, you should ask for a raise, not a pay cut.


A raise and a 3/5ths reduction in expected hours would be one hard sell.


I once managed a 50% raise and a reduction to a four day working week, with one of those days remote. I patted myself on the back a lot for achieving that, but I was cheating, a bit, because I went from permanent to contract with the same company.

Not very strangely, the reasons that I wanted to leave my permanent position at the company in the first place - terrible, confused, and often obnoxious management - still hurt just as much even on more money and with fewer days. I quit again for good after another three months.


Only if they find someone cheaper and equally productive.


You'd be surprised what stupid managers would do. They could just fire him out of spite, and hire 2 people to do his work clumsily but "keep proper hours".


Those aren't the kinds of managers you'd want to work for anyway.


People are probably willing to pay you to do this, but not advertising it so much. Most tech companies (at least in the US) are desperate for work. Less than 40 hours is a week is a tough sell because many people feel the onboarding process eats up a lot of time. Primarily, since it's the norm to work 40+ hours (and believe me, it's not difficult to do this and be actually writing code more than 50% of the time) employers expect it.

> 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)

I really disagree with this. Have you tried before?


Yes, I tried it several times, both working for other people, as well for my personal projects.

I managed to pull out some full weeks of full-time, full-throttle work, but it is completely unsustainable. This is, social life, other activities, having out of the box solutions and ideas, friends, family are all strayed aside as secondary, weekend concerns. Work was the primary concern. That progressively led to loosing focus with other realities, lack of diversity, and all the things that brings on board.

The main point is, even if had 100% efficiency, would it matter if it was directed towards the wrong thing? A good deal of our work is to judge and be critical of how it will impact others, the world even. And sincerely, I think that it is a major problem on many companies which just fail because everyone is too busy "working", but do not collectively have the opportunity to ponder, to talk to other people, to get different perspectives, and realize as whole that the ship is going full steam ahead for the iceberg.


Sounds like adult life.


This is the kind of simplistic response that prevents our society from progressing. "It's just the way it is" terminates any rational discussion or critical analysis of why we do things the way we do. There's no actual reason for everyone to be either unemployed or working themselves to the point of exhaustion against their will; it's "just" a structural and cultural problem.

As soon as people start openly discussing the possibility of a different way of doing things, there will be subcultures that spring up around the idea. If it ends up working, the subculture can eventually spread to the mainstream. It's a very worthwhile discussion to have.


I was suggesting that this is a fine way for things to be.


This is a terrible way for things to be. Life is a finite resource. I'd rather spend my time doing things for myself, even if it means I'm not rich.


...and believe me, it's not difficult...

This is why I feel the productivity argument is really very weak. There are many people who seem to be quite productive even working 40-50 hours per week.

I think a much, much better argument is that working 40 hours a week is a waste of my life. I value my time quite highly because I have numerous and varied interests. So even if my productivity (and therefore, at least theoretically, my income) was maximized at 40 hours per week, I still wouldn't want to work that much.

No employer is going to index my salary to the marginal value of my time, they use the marginal value of my output (just as they should). So in a world where my choices are to work full-time or to work part-time at a greatly reduced hourly rate, it is impossible for me to optimize the amount that I work relative to the marginal value of my time. I, and I suspect many others, always end up at a sub-optimal equilibrium.


I agree SO much with all this. "Working 40 hours a week is a waste of my life" is also how I feel, but a lot of people will inevitably call you lazy. And yes, it's very infuriating that part-time jobs don't pay enough to live (at least in my country), while full-time ones leave you with money you don't have anything to spend it, but little time.


Yeah, I buy that marginal productivity drops as you add more hours, but I would be shocked to find that sixteen hours is the point at which diminishing returns make additional work pointless. I guess for me the diminishing returns start kicking in closer to thirty hours of hard focused work, and I am by no means the best worker I know.


You are talking as if the employer's point of view is all that matters. Simply because you can produce a bit more useful work, that is, your marginal utility to the company is positive, doesn't mean you should. Marginal value is fine for a piece of machinery, or for the company to decide if they want you to work more, but it shouldn't be your reason to work more. Having fun, want the money, helping a friend; these are employee reasons.


But the original question was about whether these jobs exist. Given that there are significant coordination and communication costs as the number of people on a team increases, it's in the employer's best interest to get more (productive) hours from a smaller number of people. If someone working a 16-hr work week incurs more communication overhead than useful product, employers won't hire someone who only wants that arrangement.


> I really disagree with this. Have you tried before?

The problem is everybody has widely different ideas of full throttle productivity. Lets take salary as a decent proxy for productivity:

At every company I have worked the "norm" is 15-20 productive hours a week. Standard salary is ~$110-$140k/year for a senior dev working these hours.

So as a rule of thumb if you can work a consistent 40 productive hours a week you should be able to earn at least $220k+/year (and in reality closer to $300k/year).

I do know developers earning more than $250k/year. It is possible if you are top .1% or if you organize your entire life around work. However, it is not easy, and nor should it be expected as the "norm".


I do 20-24 hours a week as a freelancer/consultant. And it is definitely productive experience. I have at times hopped to 40+ hours and never enjoyed it. I tried 30 per week but that was not better either. These 20-24 hours are highly productive and I spend the rest of the time with family/friends - or reading/experimenting.

The downside though - I sometimes feel I am wasting my time (because not many do so) and occasionally worry about opportunity costs.


I negotiated a 4/5 work week with an ex-employer of mine at 80% of that previous salary.

I'd say work somewhere, prove your worth, then negotiate a better arrangement.


I'm tired, but isn't 4/5 the same as 80%? How is that a better arrangement other than working less?


As an independent, paid hourly, On many gigs over the years I have tried to to get 4 day (28 or 32 hrs) work weeks, but most client companies still insist on a 40 hour week. I work mostly in the northern midwest for mostly large enterprises, and these clients are "conservative", and 40 hours is "what is needed". I don't try to bill fewer hours at a higher rate.


The way OP was using 4/4 was to mean 4 days per week, 4 hours per day. So 4/5 would be 50% of the hours for 80% of the pay.


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.


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..


I had some relatively steady long-term clients. Sometimes they were slow to pay, but they always paid eventually.

I had enough cushion from the previous job not to worry too much about short term cashflow. Otherwise it can be a problem.


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.


I do hire on such terms. I believe it will become more and more widespread in the course of years. James Altucher is right — in the future, there will be only business owners and temp staffers/freelancers instead of our usual "permanent" office jobs, with lots of legal obligations.


In the future there will be less jobs, and more unemployment, including more broke "business owners".

In other words, business owners would be commoditized and not mean much at all...


Yes, sure. We are already commoditized. Capital is the commodity. Startup talent is a commodity. Ideas, of course, were a commodity since the very beginning. The stage is set, the only option is to play.


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)


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.


And solidify the client relationship with a good contract.


I'd really love something like this, but haven't heard of any companies that hire for less than 40. Some companies (like Google) occasionally hire part-time, but they get proportionally lower salary and none of the benefits.

I'm a big believer that the 40 hours you'd spend at work has a lot of unproductive time and drains too much energy to do meaningful activities or work afterwards.

Here's a great piece on why 21 hours is the best work schedule: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours

If anyone knows any great jobs that hire 4/4 or some other similar schedule, love to get a thread going about that :)


The linked to piece has a lot of "post carbon era" talk, but we currently live in the pre-"post carbon era" and all this 4/5 or whatever would seem to burn a lot of extra gasoline and irreplaceable commute time.

I'd rather work 10/2 and not spend so much time sitting in a car burning expensive non-renewable gasoline. Invert the work week and the week end!


The primary point of this thread is that it is hard to be very productive for 6 or 7 hours a day, let alone 10. Also I gather most people here are talking about working remotely.


I take a long lunch (yeah flextime!) and if at all possible, exercise during lunch, and I have enough simultaneous projects that the silver lining is I do different stuff before and after lunch. I tend to code/deploy more in the morning and design/test more in the afternoon (only a lunatic deploys five minutes before going home, no matter how well tested...) So its more like two separate five hour working shifts. I get the feeling this kind of lifestyle is pretty unusual here and people just code, continuously, for 18 straight hours, and think thats productive, or whatever.

Like most hacker types my home life is more interesting than my work life and I do totally agree with the assessment that its impossible to grunt out even 7 productive hours on one individual task.

(and edited to add that at the cutting edge I don't think its possible to work more than 4 continuous hours. Either its not really cutting edge or you're not being productive. I can do mindless yardwork reinstalling my paver brick patio for 12 hours, but there is no way to be productive when interfacing a new DDS synthesizer to a rasp-pi which as far as I could tell has never been done before, I could sit at the bench for 12 hours but I won't get any more done than just 4 hours, I'm just a little more honest about it than some, maybe most. At home I can do whats "right" not what is "management approved")

Another interesting aspect is a lot of design work is thinking and surfing the net for new ideas and inspiration and I can see from outside my brain that looking fairly unproductive. Or from a noob perspective, noobs not understanding that a half hour staring off into space might save five hours of coding despite not feeling like its as productive.


A request:

Does anyone have actual scientific data from archeologists / biologists / doctors on what the human body was evolved to do?

Not interested in commentary on what strategy maximizes profit to owners of peasants or moral/ethical arguments.

Strictly looking for hard science like biochemist XYZ found human butts and spines are not operationally effective for sitting for longer than X hours due to scientific reason A, B, and C, or brain biochemistry shows indications of wearing out after Y hours of concentration or whatever?

It would be interesting to find out the science of optimized productivity rather than anecdotes. If we had consultative doctors like pro athletes had doctors...


According to Chris Ryan (PhD and author of Sex at Dawn), hunter gatherers work around 20-25 hours per week, in line with the comments above of what they found was near ideal for happiness, productivity, and concentration.

There really isn't much hard science when it comes to things like human productivity standards, in the same way there's not too much hard science on ideal diet. Too many variables, highly individualized, and like all multi-objective optimization, highly context dependent.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2013/02/09/why-sit...

Though that's more of an argument for using a standing desk instead of sitting the whole day.


Unfortunately thats more "recent research and anecdotes"

I'm looking for something with a summary like "archeologists, biologists, and orthopedic surgeons recently cooperated on a paper indicating that biologically identical humans spend the years 200K to 100K BC walking around 50% of the time, sitting about 25% of the time, and 25% of the time doing everything else, based on electron microscope analysis of microwear patterns on fossilized hip joints and computer simulation" With the obvious unstated conclusion that millenia of evolution has optimized the innards of biologically identical modern humans to sit no more than 25% of the time. Assuming evolution did successfully optimize innards, which is kind of an open question WRT spinal design and appendixes and things like that.


Why is it so unusual that employers compete with less hours rather than with larger wages? Is it because granting someone with less work would probably make other employees require the same?

I feel that after a certain amount it would be much more enjoyable to get less hours rather than a raise. However the latter seems to be much easier, if not the only one, to get.


I don't know the answer, but I have a few ideas:

1) Puritanical roots of America (Idle hands are the devil's workshop) still linger as the ideal is you spend most of your time working.

2) Hiring more people is hard; furthermore the larger the team, the less efficient (per person) the team is. Therefore you want to get maximum value out of the people you have any way possible. A 25% boost in output of each person on the team is easily worth as much as (if not more than) hiring twice as many people. Similarly a perceived loss of 20% of productivity per person would be like halving the size of your team. I could easily believe that a 16 hour week has 20% lower output than a 40 hour week.

3) Lots of companies do offer lower hours for lower pay. They just typically don't hire people into that situation for some reason (I'm open to suggestions why that is so). However, no good place I've ever worked would fail to do that for an employee they want to keep.


I agree with point 1 - sad but true. Not only in America as well.

I like that you say "perceived loss of 20%". I wonder how substantial the actual difference in productivity is. I wouldn't want to compare at this day to 16 hours, but rather something like 30 hours.


Manager's calculations tend to have this format:

Person X produced me $A amount in 40 hours. His salary is $B. B being much smaller than A[1], I can increase it without much an impact on the bottom-line. But, again, B being much smaller than A, if he worked less hours, I'd reduce A much more than I reduce B.

[1] It has to be, otherwise, will all the overhead a business has, I'd go broke.


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/week and no one works more than 30 (other than myself sometimes for a crunch.)

Everyone is happy, and I get great value for my money. As a bootstrapped start up, that value per dollar is vital.


> god forbid I ask for Fridays off, I'd be shown to the door real quick

They must be really afraid of the precedence it sets - that other employees would also start to negotiate for reduced work hours.


At the moment I'm a freelance software developer, and I take on multiple projects at once. Right now, I'm working on three projects, and typically end up spending 4-6 hours a day on billable work. I can put in more, but after a point, I can feel my productivity drop off.

Realistically, I end up completing 20-25 hours of billable work a week (and probably another 10-15 doing stuff that isn't directly billable). I could spend more time working on billable stuff, but I find that there are heavily diminishing returns after that point. Sure I can get in more productivity for a brief period (a few weeks max), but there is always debt to repay.

A lot of people tell me that they are looking for someone who is "half time", which to them means 20 hours a week. I've tried to explain to them that I don't schedule 40 hours of work in a week, and that for me "half-time" is 10-15 (productive) hours. A lot of people won't accept that.

I'm finding that it's easier to tell them that I'll work half-time, get more work done in 10-15 hours than most people would in 20, and then bill them for the time that I actually worked. If I'm getting the project done, then they aren't going to complain that I'm billing them for too few hours. That obviously doesn't work if they are expecting me to be on-site 20 hours a week, but in my case (where I work in my own office), it seems to be ok.


A comfortable level of 20-25 hours of billable work per week seems to fit my experience in freelancing too. In the long run I don't think I'd want to try to push much beyond that.


Let me share how I am trying to work more per day and still have better focus than I even had in my life.

I have always considered working lower hours per day to stay more focused. I have many failures in projects, many of them I could relate to my issues with being able to focus and finding love in my work.

Recently I have been ill and was without work for about 4 months. I used to lead a stressful like, like many entrepreneurs. But my physical issues started making things more problematic. Thus I started figuring out how to solve them and yet work at decent 8 - 10 hours each day with very good attention.

After trying a different timing routines, I finally am working with this - I get start work at about 9:30 - 10 AM. Work till about 2 PM. Then I take a good break till about 5 PM. I take my lunch and a short but comfortable power nap. I take a shower before heading back to work at 5 PM. Then I work till about 9 - 10 PM as my situation permits. I sleep usually at 11 - 11:30 PM and wake up at about 7:30 AM.

The major benefit I get is that I have 2 * ~ 4 hour slots every day. I understand it is difficult for many folks to commit this much time. But I have very few options left. I need put in good, focused work each day and the amount of work I have can not, sadly be finished in 16 hour work weeks. Hope this helps someone.


I have been working as a high tier network engineer for the past few years for 40 hours per week (but always looks to go out on my own with a startup idea). I'm starting to really find that 40 hours per week make no sense and i'm actively going to try to find alternatives. Life slips by and there is little point in spending 1/3 of your working day dealing with monotonous bullshit.


This.

If I was working somewhere I was 100% passionate about, I would have no problem working 1/3 of my life. But, it's rare to find a position that completely matches one's values and professional desires.


I think it's a very interesting concept and it should be experimented with more, especially with so many things now being facilitated by being automated.

I think a big factor for this idea not catching on is the grey area of what qualifies as 40h workweek labor. Some jobs like customer service positions make sense, but what about jobs that require a 24h standby? What about positions with fluctuating periods of downtime through the year? what about jobs that could be 8h workdays, but they haven't yet been confirmed that they could in fact be more effective as a 6h or 4h workday?

It's a by-product of modern times not quite catching up with modern technology. We certainly have the ability to think up algorithms that would better suit certain positions based on these factors, but the idea of it right now is too drastic and 'unfair' sounding. Ideally, in time, with the right evidence proving it's effectiveness, workdays would be shortened, quality of lives would bump up and robots would gradually take over.


Jumping on this thread a little late, but a lot of the points raised here and in the comments resonate quite strongly with me.

It sounds like many of the comments here from people who have achieved a shortened work week are from consultants/freelancers. So I have a few general questions towards that end, for anyone that would be willing to answer them:

1) How did you get into consulting/freelancing?

2) Have you always managed to work at a reduced work week(< 40 hrs/wk), or were there times in the beginning where you were working more, and if so, why?

3) It sounds like much of this depends on finding good clients to work for. How did you go about finding those clients? How long did it take? How did you know they were good clients?

4) What resources did you find most helpful when you were first starting out consulting/freelancing?

I'm really interested in achieving this goal, I'm just not sure how to get started or where to look for information. Any help/discussion would be greatly appreciated!


Crazy it is to sit steadily for 8 hours for even a fresh out of the college guy like me. I am currently into the training phase, but my employers are not providing the training. Nevertheless I have to sit 8-9 hours no matter what! I don't find it productive at all, I might read all day about things but that sure ain't propelling me anywhere ahead in work. Scenario is that after a certain hours of sitting you do loose the consciousness quotient. Might as well be that it drops only by a percentage. According to some people here, they do see their colleagues working for 8-9 hours daily, whereas what they don't know is that they are paid to do so just like you are, only difference being that they are more afraid stand out and relax during work as it might decrease their chances of a salary hike.


To me this makes total sense, and I can't figure out why it isn't the norm for hired freelance developers.

For most people I know, myself included, you're at your best productivity before lunchtime. Afterwards you might get a few bits and pieces done, but generally it's a waste of time.


I too am looking to work less than the standard 40 hours a week for similar reasons. Only committing to 4-6 hours in a given day also gives me more freedom to take a large break in the middle of the day to go for a walk or a run, which can be useful in the Scandinavian winter when the sun is only up for a relatively limited time each day.

There are some political parties in Norway and Sweden who want to make a six hour work day the norm.

There are many good arguments for significantly reducing the amount of time the average person works, both for the benefit of individuals and community: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours


I’m doing a 4/5 schedule now for client projects. It was a lot easier to do this since going freelance and charging based on the value I generate, instead of an hourly rate.

While more “free time” has been a bonus (realistically I just work and study things that improve my business or my clients indirectly). The best benefit I’ve found from this work schedule is the push to get the day’s work done within those few hours. This doesn’t mean cutting corners or half-assing the work done, but rather figuring out solutions that get the most bang for the buck and being ruthless as to what details to sweat afterwards.


You don't work in full focus for the full hours. Other hours your are doing relatively low focus things such as code reviews, answering questions, eating lunch, attending meetings, interviewing, talking about the direction and design of the project, etc. They want you around as an on-call 'consultant' so you can unblock other people more quickly.

When it's just yourself green fielding a project, you don't really need to be anyone's consultant then, so you can just work the productive hours.

Some companies unfortunately care about face time too :/


I do this kind of week as a consultant. I think its the perfect work week.


Similar here.


What kind of consulting are you guys doing? Sounds really nice.


No reason only greenfield projects should be suited to this. Contracting is the only viable route I've found. Otherwise you just won't get paid enough.

The downside of that is you need to be (loosely provably) good and experienced enough to (i) pick up contracts and (ii) that they'll flex to your schedule.

I've worked 16 hour days before with a manager literally sat behind me telling me to keep coding. They didn't care that half the next day would be correcting the mistakes of the previous. I don't miss those days.


20hour/week, my first job, working at RedHat while still at school. Of course, they paid me by the hour, but I don't think I would have managed to finish my masters thesis on 40h/week job :)

RedHat is a large corporation, so mostly your work conditions depend on managers around you. I.e.: I started as an intern and after a year manager asked me, if I want to become a regular employee, and I had a condition to remain on 20h/week. Friend of mine had just the option of intern or full-time (40h/week).


As an enrepreneur, having to now hire developers for my startup, I don't see how this could work practically. As a company, there are objectives you need to meet by a certain time frame. If there's a task that needs to be done in 3 weeks, and there are 2 weeks of full time work estimated in order to do it, you're not going to hire someone and let it take 4-6 weeks just because they don't feel like working a full week.

For programming projects especially, its much simpler to have one person work on a given task, than splitting out an assignment over 2+ people - it lowers complexity, and keeps the process coherent.

So 1 person, needs to get the work done in the time frame. I personally don't care how much time the person spends doing the task, as long as its done properly, and on time. And its not always possible to see so far in advance what needs to be done that you can afford to let people take twice as long to do it (also taking into account the difficulties with estimating software project durations when work is done full time).

So working 16-20 hrs a week sounds GREAT in principle. But in practice, as an employer, I don't see a practical interest from my perspective

EDIT: I'm not a pointy-haired manager either.. Prior to starting my own company, I was full-time lead developer (and very well paid) for several years in a startup environment. My work pushed the envelope forward at the company, so I have a deep understanding of software development projects, and how development teams function as a whole, all first-hand experience


The practical interest for you, as the employer, is the quality of your team and of the work produced -- something you should be optimizing for regardless.

Say you find a dev who nails all of your interviews, is passionate about the kind of work your team does, and intuitively gets your company's mission. And then you find out he or she is only available for 16-20 hours a week. You must decide whether hiring them for their time is still a net gain for your business.

In some cases, it may not be, and as you said it certainly makes sense to have more full-timers available to do the day-to-day dirty work. But I'd argue that, in many cases, the quality of output and, yes, even the timeframe in which it gets done, will be higher for some developers given 16-hour weeks than many developers will do in a 40- or 50-hour week.


> Say you find a dev who [...] is passionate about the kind of work your team does

What does this mean to you? To me, being passionate about doing something means I want to do more of it, quite literally. Leaving other motivations aside, someone who is trying to negotiate less time is less passionate, right?


Or it means they recognize that passion is a finite resource that takes time to replenish.

Works too hard for too long at something you are passionate about is a good way to lose the passion for it you once felt.

So someone who is trying to negotiate less time doesn't necessarily mean they are less passionate about their work; it may just mean that they are mature and self aware enough to realize that they'd like to work at a pace that allows them to sustain that passion over the long term.


> But in practice, as an employer, I don't see a practical interest from my perspective

I'd venture that may be because you view programmers as interchangeable cogs. Rather, for one developer, a project may take two 16-hour weeks, and for a less talented developer, it may take three 40-hour weeks. If you need it done in 2 weeks but the price tag is the more talented developer only works 16-hour weeks, and you accept, everyone wins.

[P.S.: I'm not sure this is a valid thread for the "10x programmers" debate, and I would hate to derail a very interesting topic. But I would say that if your goal is to only work 16-hour weeks, it's in your interest to attempt to demonstrate you can provide at least as much value as an average 40-hour-per-week-developer.]


> if your goal is to only work 16-hour weeks, it's in your interest to attempt to demonstrate you can provide at least as much value as an average 40-hour-per-week-developer.

I'm not convinced that's true. Most developers, 1x and 10x alike, are not evenly productive across a 40-hour week. If, in 20 hours, you can get even half the work you get done in 40 hours, you're already just as valuable based on time worked and should get compensated accordingly for that time.

And I'd argue that in 20 hours you can get far more than half the work done, since the other 20 hours are likely the tail end of your productivity anyway. So your value-to-time ratio goes up, even if you aren't providing as much value as a 40-hour-per-week developer.


If the strong developer can get the work done properly in two 16-hr weeks, then I'm in full agreement.. I'd rather have the strong developer, and it would probably even cost less in teh long run, with better developer happiness.

The problem isn't there... The problem is finding that developer in the first place. As you mentioned, that type, is probably closer to the 10x developer profile, and most developers are cross, are (by definition) closer to the average. So the problem is, as an employer, I have to (despite both yours and my own wishes), prepare for the average case scenario, until proven otherwise that I have a 10x developer on my hands


Assuming you half their wages, you eat a small bit of admin and hire two of them. In exchage, you now have redundancy in your dev team and are I suspect gaining more than you lose.


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.


Actually I wouldn't value the 16-hours so much, but rather the freedom to divide 32 hours over four days. We've got a toddler and I don't want to be a parent that has to race from/to the day care.

I'm quitting my day job and starting freelancing in October this year, in iOS development in The Netherlands, Europe. I'd really welcome a project.


25 hours a week is for me the perfect schedule, dedicating four hours a day to full coding and one hour to fuck off with management about brainstorming, requirements, proposals, design, and boring meetings.

Once they're happy, I say goodbye for the day and immerse myself in my editor. Not a single fly tries to cross between me and my monitor while coding.


Did you think about your work beyond these four hours a day? I you did, then it makes a lot of sense. Normally, thinking should take a half of the work time, the rest is dedicated for the implementation. So, if the four hours a day is the implementation net time, and another four (may be more) you were chewing all possible solutions, architecture, optimization, learning new technologies to apply, then totally it becomes much more than 16 hours per week job.

I work in a big company now, and I try to split my time exactly the same: four hours - I'm thinking/reading/learning, another four or less - I'm typing some code. And this scheme is proving itself as much more optimal comparing to a daily 10 hours implementation rush in a start-up where I worked before.


4hr day PHP job opportunity

We're Looking for a knowledge PHP/LAMP/Symfony2/MVC/CSS developer to join our niche dating startup on 4hr/day 5 days a week basis. Offering £30k/yr and based out of London. Remote working is a possibility for the right person.

The current team of 4 is spread between London and Birmingham. We've spent the past 12 months turning around an exiting business into the leader in it's niche and have big plans for broadening the business over the next year.

Email me if you're interested and would like more details about the job/business/team: contact dot vardy at gmail dot com

Thanks, James


You've described the perfect job for most developers. No one wants to maintain old code. Everyone wants plenty of free time. Everyone wants low pressure with an opportunity to outperform.

These jobs are more common in startups and almost never found in going concerns for obvious reasons (there is no green field).

It's worth pointing out that hopping from one greenfield project to the next with low pressure isn't going to expose you to world-changing opportunities.

http://youtu.be/Ji_me74Xvg0?t=12s


It's worth pointing out that not doing so probably won't expose you to world-changing opportunities either.


So at 9-to-5 job in an average US company, if you work only 9-to-1, and spend the rest of the time doing what you like and chatting with coworkers, but produce the expected results—you'll be considered not working hard enough? Sounds like Japan.

I doubt that's true, though—I bet OP can just find any job and work comfortable hours (provided OP delivers). Any decent company in our field shouldn't judge you by how hard-working you appear throughout the whole work day. Just find a decent company.


For those that would enjoy such a situation: what would you consider to be a fair renumeration arrangement? Not I. Raw numbers but in comparison to traditional 40 hour/week gigs.


I'm doing about 20-25h a week and make roughly 40% of the standard full-time bigco offers I turned down. No benefits either (but I'm 22 and single so I wouldn't be using them anyways).


I want to work less hours for an employer / a client also because I want to invest productive hours in my own self improvement and personal projects. There should be a lot more flexibility from the employer side in how many hours an employee commits to working. It should probably be negotiable and explicitly stated in the employment contract.


I have never seen this. I've seen actual productivity in those amounts. (4 hour push in the morning, less productive afternoon, nothing gets done on Friday) If you can find it and pull it off, all the more power to you, because it is hard to stay productive after 4 hours of mentally draining creative intense thinking.


Try being a lawyer.... 16 hours days standard and when you are being charged out at $500 / hour (and receiving maybe 20% of that) your boss isn't expecting 4 hours of real work and 12 hours of admin... they want 16 hours of extreme concentration. Gotta be one of the worst careers you can choose.


20% of $500 an hour is a pretty solid salary. Especially if you are putting in 16 hour days. I would expect to give a little blood for that kind of money.


The OP was talking about 16h weeks. Not 16h days. I can certainly feel for you if you're the one working 16h days week in and week out.


Sorry got that, was more replying to the guys saying that in your average 8-10 hour day you'll only do 4 hours of intense work anyway (so that a 4 hour "actual work" day is kinda normal).


no they want 16 hours of billable time :-) that fact that for those 12 hours you put down as reading case notes you spent 1 of them arranging your holiday and 1 gossiping is neither hear nor there


As a freelancer I've also found that 3-4 hours sessions are perfect, although I usually go for 2 x 3-4h a day and then one slower day every couple of days. That's just necessary to counter those periods when you have to work around the clock and save yourself from more serious burnouts..


This concept is great for students especially. I'm lucky enough to have a job where I can set my own hours, so during the school year I can work about this much. It's nice to have some income, especially while working a job relevant to my field of study.


My main question would be salary. You really can't reasonably expect your employer to pay you the same salary as someone working more than twice the hours.

Are you comfortable making less than half the salary of a programmer working 40 hours a week instead of 16?


What if you are more effective/productive in 16 hours than they are in 40? Wouldn't this warrant a higher salary?


If you can work remotely you can move somewhere far and cheap and live outrageously well on half an American engineer's salary. Plus you now have the free time to actually enjoy it.


The only correct work schedule is the one you are able to work out with your employers and customers which works for you and for them. If those conditions are met it's a legitimate schedule, even if it's only 1 hour a day one day a week.


You didn't say what you do. We have a remote team and would do this for any of the following skillsets: server Java, Rails, FE/JS, designer, sysadmin.


A lot of emergency services (fire, EMS) are 4-on/4-off, but they're generally 4 12 hour shifts...


1,600 Chinese die daily from overwork. That is the cause of the china selling very cheap stuff.


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.


But if you are working 16 hours week, you are forfeiting 50% of your income too.


If you work on your own you can do it. I did it for a year or two and traveled.


Are there countries where working ~20 hours a week in Tech is acceptable?


I think it is not easy nowdays....


I'd like to know too


> I have had an extremely good experience doing a 4 hour per day.

me too.


The good news is yes, these do exist!

They’re called “part-time jobs.”


I'm very happy to see people working 16-25 hour work weeks, and it's probably very good for their personal life.

Just one question, don't you feel guilty going like that? I'd feel guilty, as if life gave me this time to get as much work done as I can, and I just don't.

I know, I know, weird question. But I'm serious.


This is an interesting point, but it assumes that one's 'purpose' in life is to work. That's a pretty sweeping assumption, and one which the guilt is predicated on.

Any idea why you feel this way? Would it not be just as valid to say that one's purpose in life might be, for example, enjoyment? Or helping others (not necessarily through a job)? In which case you should feel pretty guilty about going to work for 40 of your precious hours each week..!

I'm certainly not saying there's a right answer here, by the way.


I'm not sure it's bad to feel guilty about this. I'm more interested how people who don't feel guilty see life. I mean surely at some point having aimless fun starts looking a bit like wasted time in someone's life, no?

We live to give our tiny contribution to humanity, and we do it by creating something through work. That also brings joy, and we do it to help each other (deviations notwithstanding). But it's a meaningful joy.

If I'd work 16 hours a week all my life, I'd have some serious regrets on my death bed.


From what I heard, most people feel regret at their deathbed for working too much, not the other way around. While you seem to have noble motives, I think many jobs out there don't provide much value and don't advance society as a whole. Think about large parts of the entire financial industry. Yes, the financial industry is important for a stable economy and a high standard of living, but there's a substantial amount of jobs that don't do much but redistribute wealth between individuals. It's really silly.

The biggest question is: What do you want from life? And one way to find out is if you answer the question:"Would you be doing the same if money wasn't an issue?". I think contributing to society through work is hard to define and overrated. Do you think all these silly apps make a difference on the grand scheme of things? Probably not. Does society really need smartphones? It all depends on you and your own values. If you do things that bring you joy, you might be doing more for a healthy society than if you create value through some job that you wouldn't do if money wasn't an issue.

Edit: I started to read this blog recently, which tries to answer what makes a life a good life. Maybe, you'll find some inspiration in there: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/


tl;dr: I don't want to work 16 hours a week and then sit on my hands for the other 30. I want to work 16 hours a week and devote the rest of my time doing things that enrich myself and my community in a tangible way.

I've worked for Google, Salesforce, and an early stage startup. In none of these companies did I feel like I was making a meaningful contribution to humanity. Either the product was of unclear societal value (Enterprise CRM), the work was so far removed from the value that the link to benefit was tenuous at best (second tier technical support for AdWords), or the ultimate results were no value generated (early stage startup where we scrapped everything after 20 months of development).

I've also taken gaps between jobs to focus on my own goals. In my free time I have volunteered with local food related organizations (serving meals in a soup kitchen, tending a community garden, etc), developed an iOS app used by 3,000+ artists, and bolstered my relationships with my wife and family. I've also taught myself several programming languages, enriched my world view through extensive travel and reading, and improved my personal well being through exercise.

In my opinion the contributions I've made through these "non-work" experiences and projects dwarf anything I've done working 50 hours/week for a salary.

It's possible that there's a job out there that would pay a decent salary and give me a similar sense of having made a contribution, but I haven't found it yet. I recently co-founded an ed-tech startup with this goal in mind, but time will tell if I'm able to move any needles.


> We live to give our tiny contribution to humanity, and we do it by creating something through work.

A lot of people consider their contribution to humanity to be their family or the activity in their (local or online) community. For them, paid work is just a means to an end.


Isn't that a slippery slope? Even if you worked a "proper" 40-hour week you could always ask yourself why don't you devote 41 (or 42, 43, and so on) hours per week for work. One could argue that your productivity plummets as you work more hours, but in absolute terms you're still getting more work done.

Also, consider this: instead of having two people work 20 hours a week we're having one person working 40. Shouldn't that person feel guilty about taking the opportunity to contribute and being valued from somebody else?

As for creating contribution through work - are we talking about salaried work? What about volunteer work then? If by work we mean anything that adds value whether we get paid for it or not, it's not always so obvious. The lines between enjoyable hobby and work are blurry at times and an author who writes for fun could end up creating a piece which inspires millions.

In the quest for maximizing collective productivity of the humanity we could start introducing teenagers into workforce as soon as possible and scrap the retirement age. Maybe we could even leave out one or two public holidays and add couple of work hours on Saturdays. Some would complain, sure, but overall we would become more productive.

Personally, I don't think that's the way to go. 40-hour work week is a relic of the 19th century and time is a poor indicator of productive contribution.


Well, it's a U shaped slope, because at some point you become less productive, not more productive as you add time.

So it's about finding one's balance. If someone's balance is 16 hours a week, so be it. I just find it a bit unlikely though.


> I mean surely at some point having aimless fun starts looking a bit like wasted time in someone's life, no?

Why would you think that everything outside of work is dominated by aimless fun? Why not have it dominated by politics, volunteer work, education, etc etc?

Sure, if there are only two possible things to do: work or watch tv, then yeah, you should probably work more than you watch tv. But taking an active part in your community takes time and effort, not to get too corny, but spreading love and happiness takes effort. Very few of us can do that while/through (just) work.


No.

There is always some worse condition that I could work under. Most of the crap that I do for money is very useful to other folks, and totally useless to me.

And for what it's worth, it's not like I spend the other hours in the week looking at porn or playing games... I work on getting better at playing music, raise my kids, and enjoy my time with my wife. Why should I feel guilty that I spend more time doing things that are meaningful to me and the people around me instead of pursuing money, which is the alternative?


>Just one question, don't you feel guilty going like that? I'd feel guilty, as if life gave me this time to get as much work done as I can, and I just don't.

Life gave you time to live. Not to get "work done". Especially the bullshit kind of non essential busy work most people in the West do.

Now, if you built houses or basic infrastructure, or were a doctor that'd be something different.

The nth BS enterprise CRUD app, or some BS social service? Not so important in the grand scheme of things.


This is a great way to increase efficiency at our job. At my first job as a developer, it was literally a sweatshop. We literally could not go home because if a project was not delivered on time, we would get fired, and this was worry was back in all of our heads. People would get sick from working 50+ hours (weekends too sometimes) , no overtime pay, lower end of salary in the area. At one point, the manager would call me at 1 AM in the morning while I was going home after leaving at 10PM and press on about the work. All you got from this guy was a handshake and a "Thank you come again". The company was rated fastest growing, the tech startup to look out for, featured in magazine. The company had 100+ people and they kept on hiring new people whenever people quit or got burnt out and got fired.


0.)the entire system or MATRIX design basis is wrong 1.)standard work hours are for industrial revolution and mass manufacturing of low quality items 2.)over age 58 and it is EASIER (yes, to those who are ignorant) IT IS EASIER to understand complex software. Obviously, that is why all the piano GENIUSES are under age 9! 3.)hours make no difference except for the sprint or "Death March" as per Yourdon or do or die. Sure, my best is less than 42 hours straight, but that's because I can avoid mistakes. 4.)There are old pilots. Bold Pilots. and in the USA there are old, bold and "ignore it, deny it" pilots. But there are no old AND bold pilots.

5.)Simple portfolio theory diversification. I want 2.5 jobs time 16 hour work week. SUDDENLY FIRE ME! Oh well, I have my good garden (self taught using OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE) and my 0.5 job. So, I often tell the boss the truth, even if it is a pain in the 'tookus.' - See Capitol Steps song.

6.)Small companies with diversified part-times including some OLD and WISE like me, who have seen MANY MANY failures.. ahhhh what is a dot-com? something with a dot-bomb? how does mergers destroy value and the corporate souls?

8.)I continue on my peripatetic ways. As long as Windows is around, there will be a need for human jobs... err Unix? errror BSD, Solaris... good by Java now that the founder had some public and not nice comments about the BIG O - ra // cle.

14.)LESSON OF LIFE - how strange. take a full time job and boss must DEMAND extra hours. It is not about productivity, but POWER and CONTROL. (in old days, this is called SLAVERY, yesss massah! go to consultant. go part-time. Suddenly the time is VALUABLE. - too much travel. - real simple - Yahoo CEO must work from the office - simply SHUN these types of companies.

18.)As a BOSS, Founder, Open source comrade, I do not want you spreading your cough and sneezes at my office. I only want to see you at the conference where we try to avoid laughing at the competition as they try to hide their pathetic ways of doing business. 19.)yes i am into hobby of strength training, par-kours, informal soccer and so this is play... not work and no, i do not talk about work when I play, u that ignoree

20.)FIRE ALL HR personnel. I personally assign myself 4 hour work week JOBS (55 weeks a year). I am a math flunkout and so I continually CREATE extra time and get MUCH MORE done. Peter Principle - make work expands like in the GREAT USSR COMMUNE SYSTEM to fill the time that is DICTATED from above. right, COMRADES?

We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us We pretend to 16 hour work week, while sending our mind through remote viewing and THEY pretend to take jail attendance.


Typical Millenial


yes


Sounded good untill I read: "I sincerely think it is quite unrealistic to ask a knowledge worker".

What is this with you programmers that you think that you're the best thing that has happend to this world? It's just a job. No more a job then any other one.

Same thing as that bullshit as companies that want every employee to program. Do you see CEO's with a background as a carpenter writing blogposts about how everybody should build at least a chair every month?

Self obsessed rich kids.


What motivates your disdain?

What is this with you programmers that you think that you're the best thing that has happend to this world? It's just a job. No more a job then any other one.

...as evidenced by the equivalent years of training required to, say, use a shovel?

Self obsessed rich kids.

Don't assume that all of us are rich, or even solidly middle class. Sometimes startup founders (unwisely) spend years at or below poverty (been there, done that).

Do assume that anybody with ~average intelligence and above average motivation could become a programmer, though.


Knowledge worker is not limited for programmers :-) I.e. it is not as hard to imagine, that the guy asking for 16/h job could be mathematician, engineer, architect, or even some product manager in some financial institution ... and this debate with motive "maybe if we worked less hours/day, but with consistency and focus" is much older than programming craft. Ford started this with his 8h/day instead of 10h/day for his factory workers ...


I don't see anything constructive in your comment, just a rant and personal attacks. If you meant to actually provide something useful to the discussion, you failed.


I spent most of my childhood raised by a single mother below the poverty line thanks to a borderline-deadbeat dad, save for the period I lived with an abusive junkie stepfather. Today I help support disabled family members on my below-market salary.

Come call me a "self obsessed rich kid" to my face.


Well I have a lot of experience with 16 hour/day work weeks (have worked at banks most of my life). Yeah, you're right, it's not fun.

It really comes down to the time-sensitivity of your work. For someone in their 20s, I think the perfect balance is less than 80 hours/week but more than 40-50. If you're being paid two standard deviations over US median household income ($120k+), you're going to be expected to put some work-life balance on hold.

"Knowledge worker" makes you sound like you think programming is rocket surgery. VC is actually much closer to knowledge work than programming, and could more realistically have 16-hour work weeks.


Honestly for someone in their 20's 50+ hours per week is not a prerequisite for getting to $100k to $120k. Find jobs that are using technologies that are in high demand for companies that respect your work-life balance. Temporary spikes in hours comes with the territory but working 50+ hours a week isn't required. Startup work may have that kind of grind but there are plenty of companies where you can advance your career quickly without sacrificing your work/life balance.

I think the key is learning technologies that are in demand and pay well and choosing jobs where you can build experience in said technologies. Bottom line is that if you spend 60+ hours a week at a job programming in Objective-C for 3 years you're unlikely to make significantly more money than the guy who has 3 years of Obj-C and only worked 40 hours a week. The quality of the experience is what will matter more.


Programming is, or at least can be, rocket surgery. Programmers at SpaceX are building and modifying the (figurative) brains of self-stabilizing rockets...


I down voted you for the VC being closer to knowledge work than writing software. Sorry but that is just plain wrong - on both ends.

Hen is right that expecting 40 hours out of a software engineer is ridiculous.


I'm not sure that "hen" has spread quite so much yet that you can expect to use it in English conversation. Nu undrar ju folk varför du kallar OP för en höna. ;)

If anyone is curious what I'm on about, "hen" is a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish that has had a resurgence in the last few years. It's partly politically motivated and a little controversial, since we generally only use gender-specific ones. Sorry for this very off topic aside.


I don't care. Will still use it and educate. I am aware that it might mean höna for some, but I am expecting curiosity to get the better of 'em and hope they look into it.


Unfortunately, "hen" in English means a female chicken (or other bird, e.g. a peacock is male and a peahen is female), so all you achieve is giving the wrong impression that your language skills are lacking, AND you could be making a sexist remark (hen might be misconstrued as a condescending term for a woman), the complete opposite of what you intended.


I think it's a bit weird to be honest. Are other Swedes doing this, trying to shoehorn "hen" into other languages?

I've seen "they", in the singular, used as a gender-neutral English pronoun pretty extensively, perhaps that's worth looking into. Either way, kudos.


English has some invented gender-neutral pronouns as well, such as Zie, Hir, etc.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...




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