I am more than capable of finding other things I value to do with my time. Not everyone is that way, especially when peoples lives are set up from a very young age to "work" for a third of the hours in their life.

Are you incapable of doing something you actually care about with the freed up 36 hours?

For me it's less about "find a hobby/enjoy life" or more that we're likely in this field because we want to feel necessary and useful.

I WFH with amazing TC and WLB. I do my hobbies all day and then work just a few hours. But I feel like an absolute piece of shit just coasting at work. Doesn't matter how well my hobbies are going, I'll always have the quiet stress of not contributing what I'm capable of doing. The times I feel good about myself are when I actually ship something cool with my team.

People working 4 hours a week still have to pretend to be productive for the other 36 hours though. They still have to sit through meetings, and justify their time, and answer Slack messages, and have reviews. They're not free to work on their own projects - they're just 'not working'. That sounds far worse than spending time working on something you actually care about even if it's not your own idea.

The comment that kicked this off was “ If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important"”

Unlike sibling comments, I completely agree.

$300k is (around here) over 7x the mode of income [1]. That's a significant amount (basically the yearly income of 7 "regular joes") and raises (to me) the ethical question of whether I'd deserve it. For a full 40-hour workload, perhaps a case could be made.

But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasite on society. And that's not something I would want.

Note: this, by itself, does not imply no one would deserve that sort of compensation. It simply raises the bar - perhaps to a level that is beyond human reach, perhaps not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics)

> But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasite on society.

That isn't the case with the power of scaling. If the product you happen to be working on 4 hrs a week happens to have X billion users, your tiny contribution gets multiplied by 9 orders of magnitude.

There's still something arbitrary and random about it, but it's not accurate to say you aren't producing net value for your employer/users/society/whatever.

This is the age-old ethical question "do people deserve more reward for their time when they do higher-leverage work?"

It's not as obvious a "yes" as I first thought. I do high-leverage work, but that just means my work builds on the work of many others. I couldn't do anything near what I do now we're it not for thousands or even millions of other people doing low-leverage work that provides the fulcrum for my work. It's society that allows me to do my high-leverage work -- why should I personally collect the pay check for it?

Also I won the genetical lottery to have the interest and intellectual capacity for this work. Is that something I should be rewarded for? Or is it an unfair advantage that other people should be compensated for not having? There's nothing about my personal effort that has given me that advantage.

Not to mention the education and relaxed upbringing that allowed me to reach this potential. That's also a gift from society to me. Should my response be to not repay? To hoard the rewards alone?

I don't know! That's the system we live in. But is it the system we ought to have?

> This is the age-old ethical question "do people deserve more reward for their time when they do higher-leverage work?"

Indeed. And I would argue that society answers this question already, in the form of teacher salaries. Teachers have the mightiest of levers: the not-yet-capable enter and the capable to highly capable leave. Any high-impact individual was molded by them.

Granted, there's not a trivial 1-on-1 relating between future excellence and a particular teacher. On the other hand, every person who had an outsized impact on the world had teachers that helped him/her along that path.

So I'd say society is pretty comfortable with a big "naah" here: teacher salaries are nothing special. (In the West - I remember reading about rock star salaries for good tutors in some Asian country.)

Few people understand how much of a golden ticket this would be…

Do you have any aspirations to build something of your own at all, whether profitable or not? Well you’ve now been given 300k/year of funding without giving up any equity, with the only condition that you put in 4hrs/week for your “job”

Or maybe you like fixing houses? Same thing, etc etc

> Few people understand how much of a golden ticket this would be…

Uh.. I think you got that backwards. Nearly anyone would recognize that as a major golden ticket!

I dunno, have you seen some of the other replies here? =)

Seems like lots of ppl still can’t fathom something better than an interesting, high paying, but still fulltime job as their “ideal”, or don’t have any passions they’d rather spend their time on.

IMO one reason why so many haven’t found any passions is precisely cause all their time has been spent working, which is sad, honestly.

Yeah, agreed. It would be ideal to perfectly align your life passion with what you can get paid for, and a some people do manage to do that. It's not the only way though, despite what adherents of "success culture" seem to preach.

There is definitely a lot of work out there that needs to be done that isn't going to be anyone's passion. Still needs to be done, and it can pay well, and then you can do all kinds of fun things that you'd never be able to get paid for on the side.

A lot of people aren't monogamous in their passions either, which is kind of what you need to be in order to turn it into a career. Personally, I can't imagine every being so focused on one thing that it's all I'd want to do. I like my work, and I also love a lot of things that aren't my work.

I've come to enjoy doing things other than coding more than I enjoy writing code, but they don't pay nearly as well when done professionally. I'd rather code for four hours and then do those things with the free time.

Maybe? But not until I’ve spent a while doing the whole 4-hours thing.

If I’m working 4-hours a week, that’s a 4-days a week I can be skiing. And reading, and hanging out with friends, and working on actually interesting code projects that aren’t beholden to the whims and timelines of a company. I’d absolutely do that for a while.

In addition to the good points made in other replies, there just aren’t many jobs like that available! “Something you actually care about”, I mean, rather than just “something that’s reasonably interesting to work on and not actively bad”.

And not many pay $300K.

I would take virtually any job that paid what I make now (nowhere close to $300k) and required 4 hours a week over the very best job that paid what I make now and required 40 hours a week. Don't even have to think about it.

I can fill 36 hours a week of my time better than anyone else can. If the money's equal and the time difference is that steep, I'll take the shorter time commitment.

Even over doing something awesome like trying to land people on Mars?

Not parent but absolutely. There isn't a single thing I could do 40 hours a week long term without at least getting kind of sick of... but 4 hours per week means I wouldn't get sick of it, plus I'd have all that flexibility and energy and time to devote to several things that do interest me

Yes, 100%. Honestly can’t think of many things that interest me less than 40 hours a week trying to land people on Mars.

I’ll take 4 hours a week at work, a livable salary, and 36 hours sitting in a coffee shop reading a book and shitposting on Reddit thanks.

To each their own.

Any fiction recommendations?

Jack Reacher series. John Grisham. Michael Crichton. The new Heat 2 novel. Pretty much any crime/medical/legal thriller does it for me.

Now add in that contractually, you cannot controbute to any open source project, and any intellectual property you develop hoes to the company.

Still worth it?

Depends on if the 4 hours a week was all time I had to be at the office or the time I could do something useful but still had to be there 40 hours. For the first option it might be ok. I could find other things to do, maybe start my own little company, spend more time with the family and so on.

I would be more than happy with that arrangement! Think of it, you could spend 36+ hours a week working on something you want to work on!

Why can't it be a job you care about 4 days per week?