You Can Negotiate a 3-Day Weekend: a book for devs who want a shorter workweek
codewithoutrules.com
codewithoutrules.com
But yes, everything is negotiable, provided you do it on front. I tried to negotiate working from home after working at a company for years and got denied, but we have a few remote workers who negotiated it up-front. Likewise, my coworker negotiated more vacation days (he paid for it with lower salary), but that wouldn't have happened if he didn't make the deal up front.
IMO, the only advice needed for this is to decide what you want before taking a job and make it a condition of employment before you start; it's better to know up front whether the company will grant it, and it's better for them to know you want it as well. In fact, if you want a change in your benefits/work hours, you're more likely to get it (IMO) by looking for a new job than by negotiating with your current employer because for some reason new hires are valued more highly than retention.
2) For salaries it seems like new job is better way to get big bump.
For shorter hours, however, negotiating current job is much easier based on my own experience and research.
3) Deciding what you want is a big part of it, but you can make it a lot easier in many ways, as I discuss in the book. For example:
* Only ask for shorter workweek after you get the job offer.
* Present your skills in the right way (a lot of resumes are just a list of technologies instead of expressing real value of skills).
* Get multiple job offers.
* Make sure you don't give a vibe of not being committed.
etc.
It's about 27,000 words, so about a 100 pages at industry "standard" of 250-300 words a page. So, taken in a literal sense, yes.
Does it need a book's worth of content? It depends.
If you have a lot of experience negotiating quite possibly not, you can figure it out on your own probably (you can learn some techniques from interview I did https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer... and https://stackingthebricks.com/guest-post-how-30x500-alum-chr...).
Some people need more information though, and that's what I've tried to provide.
2. A lot of time spent reading books, and even more importantly online comments from people who have done it (for more techniques) and people who wanted to do it (for questions and worries people have).
That plus personal experience gave me outline of gap between where people are and what they need to be able to do, and skills and information needed to fill the gap.
(There's idea of backward design in education: here are outcomes, which require these skills, which require these even earlier skills, which require these attitudes...)