I said "pay me 3/5ths of the salary you just offered me and I'll work 3 days a week". I also offered to keep this arrangement flexible so that I could work in stretches of varying lengths if needed.
This did not go over well. People were actually offended by this proposition and it went nowhere.
As a founder myself, I understand the desire to only hire people that will give you their full heart and soul. But, I'm also a practical person and if someone's skills are valuable to me, then they are very likely still valuable in part.
In fact, when it comes to a product/engineering position, I think the employer would come out on top in such a scenario. They still get access to the person's brain and all of their knowledge and ideas. For someone that's being offered high compensation, their knowledge and ideas are probably a big part of the reason why.
Not only that but I think this is the key to fix the economy! Think about it: if people could accept salary cuts for less work we would have more jobs and could transition to an eventual post-scarcity economy smoothly.
Creative workers don't output more than 25 quality hours a week anyway.
If I am willing to work 3/5 days a week for 3/5 of the pay, do I also only get 3/5 of the health care coverage and 3/5 of the vacation time of my 5/5 peers?
We obviously don't have the same healthcare situation as you, but surely it's just part of the negotiation? If 5 days a week is worth a $100k salary and $10k healthcare (don't ask me if that healthcare cost is 10x too high or 10x too low... but that doesn't matter) then 3 days a week is work $60k salary plus $6k healthcare. So offer that person $54k and healthcare. Or $66k and no healthcare. Simple enough, surely?
This is key. Most employers don't realise what a great deal this is. They are paying much less for probably the same amount of output. The person might even be more productive because they are more rested and can think better.
Arranging part-time conditions can be a slightly bumpy process: as stated above, management is often initially offended that you don't want to dedicate your life to their company, but framing your request correctly can smooth over most bumps.
When requesting a part-time arrangement I usually present it quite honestly: referring to a need for work/life balance, but also referring to the learning outcomes from pursuing challenging projects and the positive impacts they will have on my experience and capacity at work.
At the end of the day most managers realise that they are faced with either agreeing or facing the inevitable lose of an employee, but the decision can be made easier for them if you highlight the positive outcomes for your performance at work.
Incidentally, when I've described my part-time work schedule to friends and family, the universal response has been amazement and jealousy. The desire for a better work/life balance is such a common thing that I'm curious as to why so few people pursue better arrangements...?
But working with a few of these guys I found they are usually the best employees. They tend to bring energy and innovation to everything they do and generally better than a corporate drone who really does just want to cash paychecks for the rest of their life. At least in my area of marketing where one needs to look for innovation. Also they didn't exit after 6 months as building side businesses takes time and don't all succeed. For me know I'd take side projects as a plus on a CV but I suspect many people will hold to that first instinct I felt.
Unfortunately leadership didn’t like the idea; were afraid of others doing the same. So instead of biting the bullet they lost me.
My one day off is for my own projects, and it has also become special time I can spend with my wife (I was able to convince her to do the same thing at her job).
I can't imagine going back to a full work week. All I can imagine doing is taking another day for my own projects when I can support it financially.
If they're asking you "how much do you work," you can reply: "Considering my other commitments, I can give you 25 hours per week." They don't need to know what your other commitments are, and they'll probably be content to assume those commitments consist of other freelancing gigs.
My clients don't know any details about each other. They know I have multiple clients, but they don't know each other's identities, how many there are, or how much time I give to each.
"I aim for about 25 hours/week of client work so I have plenty of time for professional development and personal projects where I can focus on learning instead of delivering the best results for my clients."
If phrased right, you can make it sound like you're already an expert at what you're doing for them, which is why you don't necessarily learn as much from it, so it's important to spend time honing your skills in new areas so you can expand your offerings.
You could say something like this: "I'm generally not able to disclose details about other projects. But I can tell you that their effect on my availability will be..."
That's only the case if you have literally no other projects. If you have even one other project, it's not the slightest bit misleading. All I recommended saying is that you don't disclose details about your other work. That statement implies nothing about the volume of the other work, except that it's non-zero.
One of the best skills you can develop as a freelancer is to read between the lines when doing client development. Some clients say they want a freelancer, but what they really want is a full-time, remote employee. They won't necessarily know that about themselves, and if they don't, they won't articulate it directly. So you need to get good at sussing things out.
Taking a pseudo-freelance, client-demands-full-time gig and trying to compress it into ~10 hours a week is a recipe for disaster. You won't please the client, you'll drive yourself insane, and you'll end up resenting the work.
The biggest favor you can do for yourself is to discriminate ahead of time. Determine which sorts of jobs, and which sorts of clients, fit with your model. Accept the ones that do; turn down the ones that don't. (Don't be afraid to refer someone who doesn't fit your model to a freelancer you know who is a better fit. It's just a good-karma thing.)
If I were to hire a contractor to do work for me, I would require exclusivity for the duration of the contract and not because I want a certain number of hours necessarily. Being a developer I know that the delivered value is not directly related to the number of hours, I really do and in fact I'm skeptical of the value delivered by people claiming to work long hours.
No, I would want exclusivity because focus is important and people (especially developers) cannot focus on multiple things at the same time, unless we're talking about things that the contractor is very specialized in, has done those things repeatedly and has a track record to show for it. For CRUD stuff for example, I wouldn't care. But for new, more difficult, more challenging problems that require focus and inspiration, then I would require exclusivity. On the types of problems that I currently work on, for example, I cannot focus on multiple things on the same day, or even the same week. Sometimes if I get distracted by conversations that are unrelated to what I'm working on, my whole day is fucked because then I have to remember the context I was in and I'm already tired and out of my zone and I can't get back anymore, ending up staring at the laptop with a stupid look on my face. I have days in which I notify everybody that I need to get work done and don't want to be interrupted, unless there's an emergency.
Sometimes I envy devops, or CRUD developers, or other types of freelancers that can rely on experience to place themselves on autopilot or that can deliver value in a short amount of time. For example devops get paid mostly for being on-call, which means they can get calls at 12 o'clock at night, but can also mean that they don't have much to do all day and thus can serve multiple clients at the same time.
And note that I'm not comparing the difficulty of the job here, but about the types of gigs on which you can rely on experience or on short amounts of focus to deliver value. Or who knows, maybe I don't have enough experience and some day I'll be able to place myself on autopilot.
That's the big distinction. You're imagining yourself as the client, but I'm imagining the thought process of clients such as I've actually had. In my personal experience, clients are almost always never developers. And they do conflate hours worked with value delivered. I'm sure there are exceptions to that rule, but for what it's worth, I've never encountered one.
He found it hard to grasp that my plan was to do absolutely nothing. In fact, I told him my plan was to go watch TV for a while.
I was by no means rich but I had enough money to keep me going for a few months and this was during the Boom. It wouldn't take more than a couple of days to find a job when I was ready for one.
If you're living paycheck to paycheck and have big responsibilities (kids, a mortgage, etc) it can be inconceivable that you're willing/able to not play the game of trying to always acquire as much money as possible.
Literally, I am billing < 20 hours a week, and unless I become disabled and/or get dementia/Alzheimers, I feel that I will like doing what I am doing in some form or other forever.
I've done a lot of different things in my life, and this _is_ having it nice. It's far nicer than the "retirements" of many of my friends in their 70s, though I will grant it is not as plush or completely free of pressure as my parents' retirements as school teachers/administrators.
I'm also travelling in SE Asia so my outgoings are very low. I didn't realise how cheap it was here. I'm bringing in nearly 5x (before tax) of what I'm spending.
One problem I encountered was people just not "getting it." And I don't mean random strangers, I mean potential clients. It's oddly difficult to tell people "I make enough money to support my lifestyle working 25 hours a week and I like to save the rest of my time for other projects that interest me." They expect you to be "doing more" or see you as lazy, after all why not make the most money you can possibly make at all times? When in fact I think I'm far less lazy than most people, I put a ton of effort into coding, educating myself, going the extra mile, working on projects for fun, reading technical books, going to talks. I'm also very serious about my pursuits beyond my programming "day job." And yet I've found it difficult to convey that, and that clients consider me unserious because I was intentionally working less than 40 hours a week even if they are looking for someone for a part time role.