Going for the 5 hour workday
code.krister.ee
code.krister.ee
The fundamental problem is that he doesn't actually want to be doing what he is doing, despite the rhetoric of "great team and awesome project". Come on, is that really how you feel about it deep in your heart, or is it empty SV rhetoric?
Two things will help this author:
(1) Strike out on your own, following your own motivation only. Yes you have to figure out how to make ends meet financially, but that is your lot in life. Fortunately it is easier to do this with computers than in most other fields.
(2) Meditate, learn to observe your mind and why it does what it does, so that you don't feel powerless or subservient to things like burnout. It's hard to explain the transformation that takes place, but being able to stand next to or outside these mental processes is very powerful.
Back in the day, I used to love working 16-20 hour shifts (unlimited overtime) in a tech-support call center. I was in my early twenties, and while most people hated tech support, I felt like every call I took got people connected to the internet, where who knew what they could accomplish, look-up, research, etc. I was genuinely helping hundreds of people a day get online, it felt great.
Versus, if you hate hate hate what you're doing, you'll feel burned out after a few hours a week. And you could fall anywhere in between too. I've felt both extremes working in the same position at different times, depending on the circumstances.
I still have a day job, but I get a lot of satisfaction out of running a blog + small product business on the side. I think you're on to something with your Thing #1. Meditation has helped me too, but I don't think it has really stopped the burnout/boredom problem -- but I also haven't been very consistent with it.
1. There is a fixed cost to having an in-house employee no matter how many hours he/she works. Healthcare, Office Space, Parking, lunch, any subscriptions to systems per-head etc. So inherently it's a bad deal to lower % productivity because these cost stay same. Note that not only these costs don' decline, company now has to hire more people to replace lost time, and incur these costs for those people as if they're full-time. So instead of fixed cost going from 1x->.8, it actually goes to 1.25x to get same amount of work done!! (assuming 80% productivity at 5h)
2. Even if (1) wasn't an issue, splitting a project to a larger team is inherently less efficient. The communication overhead of a 2 person team (1 comm. channel to manage) is 1/3 of a 3 person team (3 relationships/channels). Communication complexity increases exponentially with team size.
3. Time & context are very important to competitiveness in technology. Doing the same project in the same #hours and same $ is irrelevant in the real world if Team1 did it in one 4 weeks real-world time and Team2 did in 6 weeks of real world time, even if total hours worked is same. Likewise, employees build company and project context faster, can iterate faster, acquire relevant domain knowledge faster, and thus become more productive in Team1.
4. Should your stock vest over 5-6 years now instead of 4?
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I am not claiming that the standard 8-hour day is the maximum; but I think if a shorter day is better, I would guess the situation would peak around 7 or 7.5 hours. But again this depends on what kind of people you are talking about. I personally work 60+ hours a week, most weeks, and I prefer it that way.
I work a normal north european 37.5 hour week and I'm productive about 75% of the time. If I'm having an off day, I'll just go home and do something else and come look at the problem from a new angle the next day.
Programming is a creative profession, just piling on the hours doesn't affect productivity in a linear fashion.
For coding and hard sustained mental work, I believe 8 hours is way too much. That doesn't mean they don't have to think about the work after leaving work - there was an article recently on HN about thinkers having breakthroughs when going on long walks. Maybe a flexible schedule would work best (short burst of intense 80+ hours of coding are also common but not sustainable).
OTOH there are many other kinds of work where working 60+ hours is sustainable long term (though I would advise against much more than that, there's a life to enjoy too!).
Was in my last position for 18 months, and the one before for 3 1/2 years, but now after only a couple of months am back to where I was feeling toward the end of both of those places. It is a great company, and a fantastic opportunity, but do mentally seem to be struggling.
Meditation? Yeah Vipassana is my friend. Can't say I follow Goenka's daily schedule, but it's here.
Thanks for the thoughts, I shall keep them in mind.
That was my thought as well. It may sound like trite management-ese, but autonomy, mastery and purpose can be important considerations for employees too. Every time I've burnt out, I looked at the situation through that lens and realized all the things I liked about my job were outside of those intrinsic motivation categories. You can be well paid, on a team you love and actually enjoy the work you do, but if you don't feel you're improving in your craft, don't feel like you have enough control over what you're working on and can't connect deeply with the reason you're doing the work, you may still burn out.
- People who started early (~7am), left really early, and people who like to start much later (~10am). This led to only ~3 hour overlap time period when the majority of the dev team was in. There was a small effort to normalize the start times, but we could never find a common time that worked for everyone.
- I felt this put an obscene amount of pressure on some people (including myself) more so than others.
- People hate meetings, people beg and cry that meetings are a waste, but the bitter reality is ether you get everyone on the same page at once, or you need to do it separately, which becomes even more pressure for certain people. Combine this with the limited time when you can guarantee the majority of dev will be in, makes it difficult.
- The coop/intern students i felt got shafted hard by this, since time is so much more valuable during that two months they often got very little direction.
- I also personally found that about 6 of us (team leads/seniors) ended up with much more pressure, and stress due to trying to force 8 hours of work into 6 hours of a day.
In the end we ended up giving up on the idea, due in combination to other departments complaining, some HR payroll issues, and problems with coverage.
It's not like there's any dead time, for me at least, although it probably varies by industry. Back when I was in finance, we needed to be around whenever markets were open, if only to be able to run one-offs and answer questions for the traders.
In tech, there's always more to do. The bulk of the hard stuff isn't raw programming, it's doing the data analysis to figure out where problems are, trying to come up with experiments to run, documenting them so you don't repeat yourself six months later, and so on. On top of that, there's whiteboarding out ideas with people, teaching interns and more junior folks, meetings with aligned teams to share knowledge, manager-stuff (1:1s, planning), writing up docs (also to share knowledge), trying to learn how something works, etc.
I don't think I can manage more than a few hours of raw code time myself, but that's a pretty small slice of the things that need doing.
It strikes me that #1, #3 and a large part of #4 are not problems caused by the reduced hours but purely by the flexible hours. Do you think this system could've been more successful with more coordinated working schedules?
#2 on the other hand sounds like a systemic problem exacerbated by reduced hours, rather than caused by. It seems to hint at an imbalance in resource allocation in general, which is a problem worth addressing even with the increased hours.
Obviously I don't think software developers should be fired for rolling in at 8:02, but on my current team our start time is 100% personal preference, and the window is about 4 hours wide. If you added shorter schedules on top of the insanely flexible schedules, we'd basically have separate teams at that point.
Most places I think can only operate on one: shorter work days or more flexible work days. If you're going for the shorter work days, you need to be more strict about what time people arrive or it's a lot harder. Subsequently if you're super flexible about arrival and departure time, it's hard to maintain any team coherence unless everyone is putting in 8-9 hours a day.
None of this matters if the team is set up to handle remote work well and the majority of communication is written.
On your point on remote work, I don't really think this is true. One day response turnarounds can be a real pain in writing.
Force the sync mechanisms and processes to be "remote only" oriented.
* Instead of meetings, have discussion threads and deadlines for achieving a decision goal.
* Instead of face time, document requests and responses in a more formal way (and have an informal channel as well for sounding out ideas).
* Use a corporate owned chatting mechanism. IRC, Slack, some xmpp nightmare, just find something that works. Preferably run your own server.
* Maybe some jobs where already over capacity, divide the workload further.
A remote-only company hosting its own IRC instance is in no better position to succeed than a remote-only company reliant on Slack for communication. Yes, services shut down. Yes, DDoS attacks happen. But buildings also lose internet access, people trip over cables, etc. The weaknesses are different but one is not inherently better than the other.
Ex: 9am to 1pm are core hours. You can adjust your hours around that time frame.
Or even, why not reduce the core hours? 10:00 to 12:00 ?
Isn't the point to do less work per day?
In my view, a true professional shows up and gets the job done, no matter what. Asking employees to show up at 9 am on a reasonably consistent basis so that the team can work effectively seems like a pretty low bar to me (except in the case of special personal circumstances, of course).
She never complained. Yet we find problems sitting for 8 hours in an Aeron chair drinking micro-brew coffee with the freedom to check out Facebook or Amazon whenever we want.
Was my mom unhappy? Nope, she loved her job. Was she tired and burned-out at times? Absolutely. I think a lot of this has to do with perspective.
The value in your job isn't your output, it's the organisational outcomes that occur as a result of you doing what ya do.
Some companies are fine and built around the outcomes of 5 hours a day of your code. Some organisations though really want 8 hours a day of access to those sweet, sweet neurons. Even if the constant interruptions, meetings and feelings of unproductivity are side effects, perhaps they value the outcomes of 2 hours a day of your code and the value sharing that comes from an inane question at 17:59, more than absolute output.
Not saying the latter is more efficient or should be right, but just showing there's different value companies derive from their employees over and above project deliverables.
I know that I've learnt things from meetings where it's evidently a burden/"waste of time" for the party I'm gaining from, and likewise, am fairly certain I've delivered value to others when it's been a waste for me.
It might not be the best way of handling it, but some organisations are designed to work that way, and as much as we can try and mould where we work around us, sometimes it's just a different dynamic.
When you do your big prototype solutions is it usually something you toss over the fence to the team that now takes on the rest of the dev/qe responsibility or do you try to work closely with one or two people on that team as you build it? I mostly ask because another sort of altruistic (or selfish if you're just killing time until the next round of meetings) thing you can do with your role is go around dropping mana on heads-down coding grunts by working with them directly on something; they'll probably have a nice feeling of appreciation like this person, who they aren't quite sure does what but must be very valuable, is taking time to work with them, and hopefully you teach them a few useful things from your deep knowledge to boot.
As to approach, it depends. Occasionally I've written and hosted a solution, and given endpoints for people to test with, before then walking people through the specifics and bringing devops on board to move it to production, and then will still actively take a hand in making changes/fixes/etc. Other times I've basically just POC'ed it, and then suggested to a team "Hey, this looks like it will solve a problem you're facing, here's some POC code, maybe play with and evaluate this approach, see if it'll fit your needs?" and they have, and in the process have learned more about the particulars than I knew, so that they're in a good place to do the real evaluation and decide what direction to head in. And still other times, especially common with juniors, when someone hits a roadblock, I'll sit with them, seek to understand the problem, and either explain the nature of the problem, and some possible solutions, and leave it up to them to pick one (since they have the most domain knowledge), or work/talk with them to work to and understand an ideal solution (if it doesn't require domain knowledge I don't have).
...you are being paid to be in a chair.
I understand what you are trying to say, but if this would be true, I should be paid for a lot, a lot of overtime. When I left the office, my brain still process some job-related topics. I catch myself thinking about some work issues on weekends, evenings and holidays.
Some of the best ideas for work problems I hadn't had in the office.
Of course there is still have hourly pay based work but, in principle, those would be for specific tasks or specialties not routinely needed.
Yes, I realize these are idealized, but the occurrence of misuse doesn't negate the point. That said, idealizing may be an unfortunately common affliction I suffer from...
Why on earth would you choose to work and get paid less than you can, while you are young and capable?? I look back and wish I had worked multiple jobs when I was younger, not that I had fewer hours.
Downtime isn't a loss of productivity. It's when you let your subconscious do its job—making gut decisions, allowing ideas to overlap one another, omitting the non-essential. It's key for creativity, and creativity is what helps you spot opportunities.
It sounds like you're stuck in an uncomfortable loop.
What's working amazingly well in your life right now? What's not?
Double down on what is going well for you and free yourself from the obligation of maintaining the rest. You zero out your inbox, why not your stressbox?
What obligations can you walk away from to give yourself time to do what matters?
(and my kids will have to earn their own college money because thats the only option, I'm not certain college will be the same thing in 15 years anyway. I will train them to be robot repairmen/women as a backup plan)
Depends on your level of comfort and future ambitions, of course, but if you live in a country with low(er) cost of living, strong social safety nets, tuition/healthcare costs minor issues, etc. then spending more of your (young) life outside of an office may be very attractive. Which is probably why part-time work is relatively popular in the Netherlands, that and strong desire for a healthy work/life balance.
Paradoxically, I just read an Internet comment how your 20s should be a wild ride of backpacking, meeting people, having sex, and living a carefree life.
I don't think your effort should go into maximising work hours; that's a mistake I have made a few times in the past. You maximise the ROI on your effort by climbing the right hill [1]; and it takes some failures before you find the right one.
At any given day, five hours of focused work is much better than eight hours filled with distractions, but I haven't found the magical solution to make that (super-focused work) happen.
Personally, I don't have much of an issue with working hours. The main issue is I can't enjoy long stretches of vacation. Yes, it's possible to sacrifice some of your salary to go wild, but you can't do it without getting a frown from your superiors.
I have to work until 67 in my country. So when I'll be off, I'll be way to tired to start new stuff. Moreover, after 50 years old, I'll get a good chance of getting cancer or some other life-changing disease. So I think it's better if I take my time right now...
Final note : this holds because my job is not a dream job, so my return-on-time-investment is weak (I don't consider the ability to buy a big car or around-the-world vacations, or top-notch-phone to be a good return on the time I spend at work)
Additionally, many people who like to buy 'things' are getting them for the experiences they provide. For example, it's hard to argue that someone who buys a VR system or a hot tub isn't getting 'experiences' when they use them with family and friends.
Just something to consider if you ever use this to berate people too 'materialistic' for your tastes.
I value Internet (a lot). But I don't need a phone to reach it. I value being able to move around, but I don't need a Ferrari to do it. I value meeting other cultures, but I don't need these to be 10000km's from my home.
Now as how I value myself, well, I dunno. I'm more interested in how the others value me :-)
I presume you mean you have to work until 67 if you rely on the state to fund your retirement?
- low wages meaning lower contributions
- low investment returns
- changes to the tax system
- they started contributing signifiant amounts later in life due to other pressures
I had the option of working 36 hours each week, but they wouldn't allow more than an 8 hour day. Having one half-day seemed to me like a total waste; not only do I still have to commute every day of the week, I'd only have a short amount of productive time.
So now I do 40/32 and have every other Friday off. It's great. While I work 10% less, and nominally get paid 10% less, the way taxes work out I ultimately only make 7.xx% less.
I am not even convinced I am getting more work done at work. Oh well.
It is, and I'm working 4*9 now which is great for my spare time and great for maintaining proper income/benefits. That said, I very much agree with the sentiment in the article: it feels like cheating the company. The extra hour a day is even less productive.
That said, I don't really feel guilty as the option described in the post is not available here. Work is important to me, but my spare time more so. I'm willing to work on a compromise to optimise the two, but then both sides have to bring something to the table (e.g. pay cut from me, more time off from my employer).
I don't know why you feel like you're cheating them. Management are human too. They know you aren't productive for the entire day or choose to believe you are.
Recently, I joined a coworking space.
I used to think that I'm "unproductive", but after seeing how others actually work, I'm surprised that businesses get any work done at all.
I'll be amazed if most employees work at more than 60% productivity.
But then there are meetings. Factoring in meetings takes a lot of time. Endless talk about improving process...
The flip-side of focusing on productivity and less so on actively participating in meetings or scheduling them is getting stuck in a coding job, being remote and not active in pursuing promotions the companies I work for usually fall back to relying on me for good code and meeting/exceeding planned output and that's it.
In my experience, if you have the goal of moving up a company hierarchy, you have to put on a show that you are a busy which has little to do with output (code) and lots to do with appearences (lot's of talking).
I've only recently come to accept this. I've recently hit a period of too many clients showing up at one time and I now feel stupid when I work on the weekend because I know that kind of "heroic" effort will be balanced out by me goofing off on Monday.
I'd be curious to know if your total time is closer to 8 hours/day once you factor in estimates, leads, customer travel, accounting and all the stuff that comes with your own structure.
On a related note, it's useful to know the ratio of billable vs. overhead. All too often, people new to the self-employed world plan for unrealistic billing hours and forget about this overhead.
Also the overhead is exactly the reason I don't hire people: time and energy to spend on management are tremendous and up to this moment I wasn't been able both to hire someone and make profit from it. So, my model doesn't work well for teams. Or maybe I suck at management.
Another problem is time spent idling: my time in the office varies from 5 to 8 hours, when I switch from tasks I'm often distracted by non-work things such as reading news, lunch, occasional gaming.
The main non-obvious downside with pay-by-hour model is that when I try to be more effective, I spend more energy, but get less money.
P.S. Can't provide exact numbers now because not in the office.
Even the last three weeks: I was stuck on a design problem and couldn't really move forward/get productive for two weeks. Then when the solution finally clicked you can have a few days of just coding it all, that feels so much more productive.
Also got similar experience with being able to easily work 16 hour days on tasks that always have a clear and small next step, like CSS/design fixes.
What I've learned is to take advantage of those days that everything just works out and make the extra hours and not feel guilty when they don't. Works much better for me than trying to stick to a fixed number of hours per day.
This is a broader subject than "work hours": my firm thinks that staying more hour to procrastinate is not not useful, and it believes that employees are more efficient when they are happy! In order to have an efficient workforce and less turnover, I think any business should try to answer: "for each employee: what conditions does he/she need to be happy at work?".
TFA presents the shorter week [the alternative to a shorter day] as 3 consecutive days; I prefer interleaving work and non-work days, so as to neither be absent from work for 2 days in a row, nor work for 2 days in a row.
Currently I'm achieving this through contracting but I would much rather have a more typical employment situation to reduce the administrative burden and the need for sales.
Pardon my ignorance but in your view how is having a child supposed to push this in the other direction? Do you see having a child as an opportunity/reason to raise the 20 hours/week to 40 hours/week and stay away from home longer? Because I thought the point of raising children was so you could spend some of your time raising a family, and my impression was most older people would rather be with their families than at work. Do you see yourself wishing that you could work 40 hours when you have children or something? Wouldn't it make more sense to work more now and save for that future instead so you don't have to work as hard then?
On top of that, you have to remember that you can't have kids by yourself (at least not easily, if you're male): you need a willing partner. If you're working your ass off to save money for kids, that means you're either letting your relationship suffer because you're at work all the time, or you're missing out on opportunities to find a partner. And the older you get, the harder it is to find a good partner (really, you need to find her in college; if you haven't found her by age 25, you probably won't).
All in all, our society simply isn't set up to have an enjoyable middle-class lifestyle and have kids. You need to pick one or the other: either be poor and have kids and struggle financially, or enjoy a more financially comfortable lifestyle and forgo having kids. Also, having a happy relationship and having kids are at odds with each other, so again you have to pick one. Either have kids and look forward to divorce and child support or at least a miserable marriage where you dread coming home from work, or find a partner who doesn't want kids and enjoy spending time with her.
It's little wonder that the birth rates in developed nations have fallen so low.
That's a very dark line of thinking, and I'm sorry your life has led you to believe that is the case.
It's absolutely possible to have kids and a happy relationship, just as it's absolutely possible to not have kids and have a happy relationship, or have kids and a miserable relationship, or not have kids and have a miserable relationship.
Also, it's possible to have a middle-class lifestyle with kids; difficult, but possible. Living in the middle states of the US, with an in-demand skillset relative to the area you live in, and a semi-frugal mindset- it's absolutely possible. In San Francisco or DC? Not so much.
Oh, I completely agree it's possible. Plenty of people do. But what are the odds that you'll achieve this? IMO, not very good. Considering the divorce rate, and how many kids grow up with divorced parents these days, I think the odds are actually against you. I think it makes perfect sense to avoid a situation that has a greater-than-50% chance of horrible failure (and given the struggles I see my single-parent friends going through, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I use the word 'horrible').
>Living in the middle states of the US, with an in-demand skillset relative to the area you live in, and a semi-frugal mindset- it's absolutely possible. In San Francisco or DC? Not so much.
Yeah, as with anything, YMMV. But if you're a software engineer or similar (as is probably rather common here), you're not going to do well in the middle states of the US; there just aren't many jobs there, and they don't pay that well, and you have the problem that if that job doesn't work out, you now have to pack up and move because that was the only such job within commutable distance. So we're mainly stuck in high cost-of-living locales (and to be honest, I've lived in both, and the lost CoL places have their own problems, such as lots of very conservative people and policies, making them not a lot of fun to live in).
If i chose to do it like you sugested. Work 100% and save 50%, there is no way in hell that i would save that 50%. Nobody would. When you only have 10$ in bank to buy a lunch you buy it for max 10$ but if you have 100$ you have to force yourself to spend only 10$. you probably would not. I know that i would not do it 100% of time. So in the end you end up saving alot less then 50%.
when you get your child, the extra time that you have if you work less will be spend between you, your child/family, your alone time ( if you value it, will be not even close to 50% ) and because having a family is way more expensive, all the money you saved when working 100% and supposed to save 50% would be spend 3 times faster then when you where alone, and then you would have to go back to work.
I would agree with you but this is not the situation we're talking about there. The OP is totally comfortable living with 50% of the income; clearly he's not counting pennies when he goes out to get lunch, and I assumed that's not a situation he's looking to get himself into either (but if he is for some reason, then OK, you're right).
It very much seemed like he'd be still living pretty darn comfortably and getting everything he wants at 50% pay. Unless you like to spend money just for the hell of it, I don't see why you'd spend more on your lunch just because you're making more money, when you're already eating whatever you want anyway.
> when you get your child, the extra time that you have if you work less will be spend between you, your child/family, your alone time ( if you value it, will be not even close to 50% ) and because having a family is way more expensive, all the money you saved when working 100% and supposed to save 50% would be spend 3 times faster then when you where alone, and then you would have to go back to work.
I was thinking more like, invest the money in something instead of directly spending (say) 10 years' worth of 2x salary in like 3 years of daily life expenses. Maybe even use it to start your own business and dictate your own hours... so many possibilities I can't even think of when you have the money.
But... Ctrl-F "commute"? Nope, don't see anything. Are you either remote or living very close to the office? Having more than a few minutes of commute does potentially change the trade-offs.
I think is a win-win
I experimented with different hours off on certain days and found that the thing that would turn me into a productivity monster would be a 4-5h work day with remote option. But now try to find something like this (especially in Asia). Despite loving my current job, I think if I would get a counter offer from a company with these benefits, I would probably quit right away.
I am personally not a office bee and dislike leaving when it's dark. I'm drained of all my motivation and the darkness makes me just want to go home, watch a YouTube video and sleep, just to repeat the same cycle again. I managed to counter this fairly successfully by working outside of cafes that have terraces and picking a new location every day. My motivation and productivity level stays up longer and the drain is reduced, but now if I just had more time...
Here's his 5 year plan:
Year 1: work 4 days a week
Year 2: work 3 days a week
Year 3: work 2 days a week
Year 4: work 1 day a week
Year 5: cash cheques, spend time with his family, and do adventure sports full time
The author states that he's able to work with fewer distractions and better concentration when it's a 5 hour day, so everyone's a winner - he gets more time, he gets the same amount of work done, and the company saves money. I can imagine it works very well in the author's circumstances. But how many workers are in the same situation?
For a start, very few people can afford a 20% cut to their pay. Anyone in that situation is out.
For businesses that pay people enough that they could afford a 20% pay cut, such as the big high profile IT companies, the business is usually awash with cash; they need people to do more work and are willing to pay overtime for them to do it. Saving 20% of the wage bill is no incentive.
Lastly, as dasmoth points out, if you have a commute then you'd just be increasing the relative amount of time you're travelling compared to working, which I imagine would make it feel much worse. I have a 30 minute commute each way and when I do a half day it feels like a huge waste of time.
As a solution when it's appropriate I think it's great, but I doubt it's applicable to many people.
Most software developers, I'd guess
> very few people can afford a 20% cut to their pay. Anyone in that situation is out.
True, but among software devs it's proably a lot more common than in the rest of the population
> Saving 20% of the wage bill is no incentive.
It's the same argument as why businesses want workers to do 50h weeks and not 40. It's hard to find two talented persons so they find one and hope he'll work more. What they aren't seeing is that they'll have to find a replacement for him within just a couple of years. The incentive for the business must come from the fact that once this is widespread enough, talented people aren't going to want to work for the old "we expect you to be here 40-50h" businesses.
> if you have a commute then you'd just be increasing the relative amount of time you're travelling compared to working, which I imagine would make it feel much worse.
This is important. First, if you have a 1h commute it makes no sense to go to an office every day and do 5h as you point out. For some it would make more sense to work 2-6 days a week from home, thereby reducing the number of commute hours per work hour. For others, it would make most sense to do 4x6 instead of 5x5 hours etc. Also (and this is very important) if you do commute it's important to be able to work during the commute. A 1h train ride is easy to convert to work (even if it's not productive work but at least being available for chat questions, catching up with email etc) but a 1h car ride is not.
Even among that small subset of the population I doubt it's common. Your lifestyle expands to fit your income. That makes it increasing difficult to accept a lower wage. Further to that, it'll become even less common as developers get older and more commonly have mortgages and families.
There may be those that won't be able to take this offer because they already have the mortgage however,
I also didn't notice the drop in salary because I had time to repair things and didn't "buy" progress in hobbies. I also had time to design things for work while sitting in a convertible by a lake rather than a drab office. It was one of the best experiences of my life. Sometimes I wish I could do the same thing working for myself but the situation is different.
The only tough part was not having time to socialize with coworkers. They would take breaks and talk about things but I felt my time was so precious that I wanted to get my work done.
M/T/H does seem better than M/T/W or M/W/F though.
"What's wrong, don't you want to work 50 hours a week like the rest of us ? What's the matter ? Not motivated ?"
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/05/ec...
Uh, you should probably add to that "... by other people who work part time". There most certainly is a career bias against part time workers. Sure, in some sectors it might be worse than others, and not all of it is that explicit - but come promotion time, working part time gives you a severe handicap.
And sure...it may indeed be the case for some that promotions are slower to come by not working full-time. Hardly strange- if you work fewer hours, your experience will accrue more slowly. But this is separate from cultural acceptability or value judgments by your coworkers/employer: one can be productive and motivated for 36 hours a week, just as one can be lazy and unmotivated for 40.
I have a seasonal side-hustle that includes the occasional 12-hour workday and even multi-day 24 hour stretches. Funny side-effect is an increase in code quality and productivity during the season.
So, now I work Monday to Wednesday and have Thursday to Sunday free. This means I only have three days per week to make an impact on the company (as opposed to the ones who work full time), so I find myself really focused. My productivity vs before has skyrocketed.
What do I do on my extra days? Sometimes I go out, sometimes I just do nothing and relax, sometimes I do small side contracts or personal projects. I hope one of these takes off one day and allow me to recover the money I gave up when switching to part time. At least now I've got the energy to work on them.
Also I have tried figuring out what's wrong/different about me and I have no answer. I've actually have had situations where I'm grateful for having a job at all, but the positivity only lasts a few weeks.
W=F×s
As we see, the more you work your muscles, the better they start working - that's the basic premise of exercise and getting in shape. However, your brain doesn't quite work like that. You can over-exert your mind much more easily than you can your muscles and it just doesn't recover as well as them. For your muscle, the cycle is work->muscle hurts->muscle recovers->work hurts you less now. For your mind, the cycle is the other way around work->you get burned out->you recover->you now burn out more easily. This fundamental difference in the nature of work in the knowledge economy is what we should focus on, to overcome the work ethic, traditions and employer-employee regulations, that were formed in the time when 1 bread = lots and lots of calories expended by muscle.
Maybe relieving employers of the need to provide all full time employees with fringe benefits (ie. medical insurance)?
I don't know if this means we need a publicly funded, single-payer, healthcare system, or if there is a more attractive solution. But the way a person's healthcare is tied to their employer in this country is rather bizarre, and I'm sure it is widely regarded by businesses as an incentive to avoid brining on more full-time people.
Even before it was legally mandated, market forces made it virtually impossible to not offer it for full-time skilled labor.
Why would I work for you when I can go to your competitor, work for them and get medical insurance? Even if I was in a position where I needed a job, as soon as I can leave, I'm going to go elsewhere.
Yes: it's not the working for 8 hours, but rather the limited time left after the 8 hours is over. There is so much more in my life than what others will pay me to do, and I'd have so much more energy for work if I was given more of my time back to pursue it...
People differ of course, but a 3-day weekend is worth a whole lot more to me than somewhat shorter days.
Work when you want to; earn market rent for your time; and balance your need for leisure time (which may differ from others') with your need for compensation (and, maybe some other gratification if you love your job).
We are all free agents, even if it doesn't always feel that way in a traditional job.
However 30-35h where perfect. You get stuff done, you are not too far out of the loop, especially if others do the same, you are still able to rest enough.
From 6:15am to 9:00am, work alone at home.
Get ready and 15 minutes walk/cycle to an office.
From 9:30am to 12:45pm, team work.
6h/day (3h on Friday), 27h/week. Wednesday and Friday work from home only.
At the very least you replace the 1 to 2 hours of commuting with the above.
Honestly, living across the street from the office, I'm pretty fine going into work every day. The 5minute commute is bearable.
My only problem is not being allowed to work from home when I have tight deadlines. I'm much more productive at home.
But yes, it's still nice to not have to keep up appearances when you for whatever reason can't concentrate.
Work from home 2 days a week has really changed my life for the better.
I use local meetups on the rare occasion when I crave in-person tech socialization.
The one thing I do miss and haven't solved 100% is the ability to whiteboard with fellow engineers. We just Skype and share our screens. It's good, but not as good as whiteboarding.
Yet, the privilege of spending 2 non-productive hours somewhere else is costing the employee 20% of the salary.
It's almost like a tax on not partaking in optics.
That being said, there is a benefit to having 'non-productive' communication with colleagues during working hours, because it builds trust and rapport. These become infinitely value at seemingly unexpected times, and it's difficult to calculate an ROI on asking your colleague how their weekend was.
I wouldn't mind a 5-6 hour work day. That's plenty of time to get everything done and not feel like I have time bearing down on me.
* Tests are running.
* long-running scripts are running.
* Code is compiling.
* Database is importing.
* Files are copying.
* etc
Thank goodness for this site and a few others.
* docker build -t whatever -f some/Dockerfile .
* aws cloudformation update-stack ...
Come back in a year.
Also, it would be better to ask the manager's observations regarding productivity. Biases and all, you see.
Spent rest of day trying out mattresses, getting a massage, cooking fish and watching star trek. Hoping I'm successful so that every day can be like this!
Here, the author claims there is a change in productivity, all the way down to a %.
There is nothing scientific behind this; you might as well let your cat pick the numbers. They will be just as valid.