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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

...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!

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.

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?

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

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.

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'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

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'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).

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

For an alternative take:

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

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...)).

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-...

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

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.

At least it's a start...

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.

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

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

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.

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 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...

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).

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.

interesting

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.

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".

> 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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'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.

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.

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?

(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)

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I agree with all of your points, though.

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 :)

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!

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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 :/

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.

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).

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

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.

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?

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.

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.]

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

me too.

They’re called “part-time jobs.”

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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