Ask HN: Experiences going part time?
Hi HN,
Has any one gone part time? How did it work out? What are you doing with the extra time? Anything you would have done differently? Anything else you want to tell us?
Cheers!
Has any one gone part time? How did it work out? What are you doing with the extra time? Anything you would have done differently? Anything else you want to tell us?
Cheers!
81 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadhttps://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_mas...
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14803468
Basically I work about three months a year, then take 9 months off. Spend a lot of time keeping fit, traveling, reading, spending time with family. Spend quite a bit of time in South East Asia - mostly diving. It's worked really well for me.
Feel free to email me if you have any more questions.
Plus, working part time in software still means that I make good money.
If I could work for a "regular" software company but only work 20 hours a week (and be paid 50%), I would definitely do it.
For what it's worth, I also know someone who for a while worked 6 weeks on 6 weeks off - he was kind of one of those fabled 10x developers and so had negotiated something special with his employer. Another commenter mentioned something similar; working 40 hours a week but for only a few months a year.
i've often wondered why this is not available more often. my guess is that hiring a person is so expensive (benefits, unemployment ins, hardware, office space, HR time, etc) that the company feels that it must squeeze as much productivity out of the employee as possible.
workers require a bunch of time/effort to find and maintain a relationship with (so milk 'em like a cow before they dry up).
I've since employed many folks part-time and a lot more full time. From what I've seen, it's almost always an option, but you have to ask for it, it's not just going to be offered.
It's also trickier to manage, if you have a handful of people that work 15-20 hours/week, and are paid hourly, vs full time folks who are salaried, and managing support/on-call schedules, etc, and it can create a strange dynamic on teams sometimes.
If you can afford to do it, working part time provides a much better work-life balance and frees you to work on side projects. The only downside was that I had a difficult time returning to full time work.
I think what I did is very doable for other devs - my business proposal was: give me 10 regular hours a week, and I'll continue adding to your internal company app. Phone call with the client once a week. I automated a whole bunch of their processes using Django and it was a great win-win. They weren't large enough to need or be able to afford a full time dev and I could work part part time.
The extra time allowed me to try a bunch of things. I tried livestreaming on Twitch.tv, being a digital nomad, blogging, making products. I enjoyed not having an alarm clock and going on walks in the park whenever to think. I was able to really put time into working on myself, and my health and mental state are pretty good these days. I've read a lot of books.
I'll admit that I've wasted a lot of time surfing the internet - I think the danger of being fully self-directed is that you have to work hard to use the time well. Nobody is sitting on you to "do what you are supposed to." It has also been kind of isolating, but I'm also an introvert and have social anxiety, and working on relationship building is one of my soon future projects.
I'm also not saying that I wasted all of my time or that I did nothing of value - just that it has taken real effort to figure out what I value. I think the existential crises I've come through have been really important for my growth, and I wouldn't have had to think about it had I not had to direct my time myself.
No if it's twitter or the government
Yes if you plan to start a company but don't have enough runway, so you can accumulate runway at your job
No if you have greater than $50,000 USD in cash and want to start a company
What if your job is working for the government on space tech? That seems to break your classifier.
Or if you work at a company ineffectively run.
Or if you have 50k in cash but not enough runway to accomplish what you want to do.
(Maybe start-ups that are short on money? But do those pay OK than? Or is there just consulting as an option?)
First off, my boss at the time made a very wise suggestion to start with a month completely off. Not even checking email. My first thought was that it was to affect my own behavior, but the most important part was to change other people's habits. They couldn't count on me to drive anything, resolve anything, fix anything, for that month. They were forced to learn how to fill all those gaps themselves, so when I came back part time I wasn't immediately deluged with a full-time level of demands/requests (or worse because of the backlog). Great idea.
For the first year, it went pretty well. I don't feel like I benefited so much from the reduced hours as the increased flexibility. I could work when I wanted, fitting work around my domestic responsibilities or the ebb and flow of my own energy levels, instead of having to fit everything else around work. It's amazing what a difference that makes. Also, I could take a three- or four-day weekend whenever I wanted, without having to take any PTO. I'd just front-load the week before and back-load the week after to make it fit. Very nice.
Over time, I did start to work more than my nominal part-time hours - as I'd already expected. Mostly that's because I was feeling recovered from the burnout that had triggered the whole process. So eventually I talked to my (by then different) boss and went back to full time. Then the cycle kind of began again and now I'm not there, but that's kind of another story. It really did help, and I highly recommend that anyone who has been running flat out for 15+ years (for me it was over 20) try part time to see if it suits them.
Maybe any move to part time isn't a plan to be part time forever, just that it is the right thing right now. There's a lot of people who think the only way to achieve anything (ie starting/growing a business) is to put yourself 100% into it, which then costs time spent with family, hobbies and yourself etc. Maybe going a bit slower for a while on some parts of your life is the right thing to do, then to switch the balance later if/when it is appropriate.
It's been great, I have one day per week when I'm the only parent and usually it means a combination of housework (meh, but has to be done) and fun quality time with the kids.
I was actually a contractor at the time, and I think I was relatively lucky the client was understanding about it. After I stopped contracting I took a perm position and I was their first employee not working 40 hours/week. Again they were great, and it worked out fine.
I'm now Scrum Master there which occasionally can be an issue when I'm not there on Mondays, as one of my responsibilities is removing impediments for the team. But overall it works pretty well. I do feel like there's not enough hours in the week, but the most important things get done.
I wouldn't have done it differently. I'm wondering how things will change and what I'll do once our youngest kids are all at school.
It's lovely to have extra time to spend with them while they are small. I always look forward to our Friday adventures. I appreciate the feeling of space it gives my week.
While I was on mat leave I started working on my little side project while they napped just to keep my skills fresh and to exercise the part of my brain. I've kept doing that and really enjoy having the time to inch my little website along. There's not a massive amount of time in my life that's not being a parent or at work, so it's been really nice to have something where I can call the shots and just do something for myself.
My boss was very accommodating when I wanted to switch to a four day week. We had another older guy in the team who was working half time and spending the other half spin charity work. There were also some other parents in the department who did non-standard hours. I don't know if it would have occurred to me if there weren't already other people doing it.
I gave our lead designer a lot more responsibility and empowered her to assign me the tasks she needed done instead of the other way around.
I kind of expected revenue to trail off over a few years. Oddly enough, with me working 1 day per week vs 5 I got back from Asia 7 months later and the business was going stronger than when I left.
I think being part time helped me focus on the things that actually mattered instead of just filling my time with trivialities for the hell of it. 80/20 rule in action.
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Some takeaways, and you'll see this in other stories here:
1. It's much easier to negotiate part time at existing job.
2. It is possible to negotiate part time at new jobs, but it's much harder. Easier if you already did it at previous position, and if you're very experienced, have in-demand skills, and have negotiation skills.
My experience (again, echoed by others) is that I am now a much more productive programmer, since I've been forced to focus, to prioritize, and to make sure limited time is used effectively.
(I'm actually writing a book, The Programmer's Guide to a Sane Workweek, to be released real soon now, which talks among other things about how to get to a shorter workweek if that's your thing. https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/ if you want to be notified when it's released.)
It's probably kept me from leaving tech entirely. I was in a weird middle-ground spot in my career where I had pretty much topped out on what I was going to be able to accomplish as a purely technical developer at companies of the size I enjoy working at, but at the same time I was basically too young (and still look very young) to be in a managerial role over senior developers. So consulting has been a great outlet where I've kept technically very sharp but been able to generate the social credibility to work with management on a peer level rather than as an employee-employer level.
I'm idly thinking about going back to FT (but not aggressively, I don't need to) for the consistency, but at the same time, I'm always looking for more gigs either in application development, as I'm pretty comfortable across many languages and frameworks, or in devops/infrastructure consulting, because I build cloud systems that are fault-tolerant and secure. (Looking to boost your team? Email's in my profile.)
If you go this route, it can be very rewarding. Work no longer becomes something you "have" to do, or something you escape during the weekends, but instead something you're doing because you want to, and doing it as much or as little as you want (within reason, you still probably have bills).
The most important lesson I can share is to be forgiving to yourself.
You will definitely spend whole days watching youtube or doing something 'unproductive', sometimes for long stretches.
Then you'll get dizzy thinking of all the lost opportunity and feel even worse that all you're doing is being 'unproductive'.
Remember this is normal, and human. If you're able to tell yourself it's OK, and try to just aim for being a little better about it, you'll be fine. If you beat yourself up about it, it'll just take you that much longer to get out of it and get to things you want to do.
Nowadays I recognize my unproductive cycles as a need to do something different for a while (eg. drawing, cooking, music) but it took some time to get used to harnessing my own motivation and accepting that it waxes and wanes as it does.
* a bit of burnout (not acute, but the preliminary symptoms were there)
* wanting more time for myself (my side projects and fitness had been languishing under work and family responsibilities)
* wanting to get back into coaching (rowing--does not pay well, but is extremely gratifying)
All told it's been wonderful. I really enjoy my 2/hrs day for myself. I would work less, but I want to meet my saving obligations. The current situation is a nice compromise.
Tips:
* Make sure you plan each day what you're going to do (I do this as part of my work prep so I never skip this)
* Give yourself permission to f!ck off every now and again; just don't make it a habit
* Devote some time to learning new skills (2 hours immersion in new software > 5' reading about it)
* Be clear with your employer and co-workers about when you are available and when you're not and stick to it.
* For coding side-projects, always leave 15' to create a note to yourself about where you are and update your @todo so when you jump back in you can be productive quickly.
If you can do it, I highly recommend it.
With my extra time I mostly read, visited museums, worked on a game prototype and travelled between cities along the Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal corridor (since I worked remotely it didn’t matter where I was).
I think the only thing I would have done differently was get out of Canada more often. I had insane flexibility but didn’t take advantage of it as much as I could have.
This year I’ve gone back to working closer to full-time and with predominantly Canadian clients. However I’ll probably try to resurrect the routine I had just mentioned.
Of course, as I make this decision, the requests for my services has stopped. :) Anyone need Elasticsearch services?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337618
Basically, I work for four hours per day doing mostly Django and back-end stuff and a bit of dev/ops and Angular for some great folk at a growing startup.
I spend two unpaid hours per day focusing on learning something (currently Rust).
I spend another two hours per day working on my own project. Currently, that's a React Native app designed to make it easy to write books by speaking into your phone. I'm using it to dictate my own book as I develop the app.
After that I try to spend time with my wife and kids. It's pretty nice so far.
One interesting thing I've learned is that I enjoy the contracting as much or more than the stuff I do on my own. There's something about human interaction that adds a bit more fun. At the same time, it matters a lot to me to have freedom to learn and build without taking too much time from the family.
For that reason, and because money is good to earn, I think that when my Rust has matured a little bit I'll probably try to find a gig that lets me use it in for pay alongside the Django work.
1. Screening process (testing for good English)
2. Codility test (algorithms, 3-4 tasks in 90mins or such)
3. Same as codility but easier, coding while you share the screen with Toptal dev. And he will ask you some questions regarding your experience, and why did you do something. Tasks were easier than codility tasks.
4. You get the project to do. The project will be relevant to your experience. So if you are mobile dev you will probably get a task to make some basic mobile app with maybe firebase as a backend DB. I got some basic app to make as restful API and angular as a client. Its purpose is to demonstrate that you know the basic stuff like what REST is, testing, project structure, roles, security, etc..
5. The last step is to share the screen with Toptal dev and to go through your project explaining to him what you did and why (trying to explain like you would to a client)
From my experience, I would say if you pass algorithm tasks, you will make the project for sure (you get 2 weeks for it). If you fail they will give you a second chance to reapply very soon (at 2-3 month tops, depends on where and how miserably you failed). If you failed for the second time, you must wait 2-3 years. Good luck!
I was a full time Manufacturing Engineer in an Aerospace Manufacturing company until I decided to dive into the A.I space and focus on Machine Learning. Fortunately around that time I implemented an ERP system at my company. I taught myself SQL, SSRS and some advanced customizations of the ERP system and began building Business Intelligence tools and reports. With remote friendly and company valued skills in hand, I asked to go part time remote so I can spend more hours programming and tackling ML projects.
One year into it now, I work 20 hours remotely for the Aerospace company, and spend about 20 hours to a ML project with another two researchers, then the rest is on personal projects / development work (website building, reading, non-ML projects).
My take on it is that the hours with my Aerospace company are easy to tackle. Specific objectives, set amount of time to complete, and your success as an employee is measured by deliverables. The other hours are loosely defined, open ended and possibly more mentally exhausting if you are trying to learn new skills.
I would recommend picking one tangible objective / project to spend your extra time working on, otherwise I think the hours will be under utilized.
My experience is that the first few months I spent learning a lot of different things in CS / ML. After a while it started to not feel very satisfying, because I wasn't gaining a mastery in any one thing and I didn't feel like I had much to show for it (aside from proclaiming 'I learned about a bunch of different things!').
With the internets infinite resources, it's easy to pass the days just wandering through the vast stores of knowledge out there (or get lost in hacker news or Wikipedia). If you don't have a fiery passion for something specific, it may be even harder to work effectively during these hours. The other option is to not work on anything and just do as you please, but I don't find that particularly satisfying myself. So my recommendation here is to go into part-time with the intention of building a very specific skillset / work on a specific project.
Once you have a very specific objective for your personal-work hours, the flexibility is glorious. I have the freedom to exercise, meditate, even power nap at whatever time I see fit. I can work through lunch or take a long one with someone, work from the library, co-working space, office or home if I please. These activities do take up time, but because they make the work life more enjoyable, work and life hours are blurred a bit more. I work on Saturday and Sunday, but that's okay because I'm never really burnt out.
The one draw back is lack of social connection while you work. I do video meetings every day and we cover the necessary items as far as the business goes, but there's definitely some fundamental human need to interact with other people and maybe form social groups or something. I used to work out of a different coffee shop a day, but working for long periods of time in semi-isolation and uncomfortable chairs isn't the heaven I imagined it to be. Whether you're working in office or out of office, finding people you enjoy working around I think is important. Then again I'm more an extrovert so maybe reclusive individuals won't feel the same way.
Lastly, free time:
I did travel around the world for about 8 months. I personally wasn't any less productive on my work hours, because in my mind the A.I stuff and having income was #1 priority, travel #2. It's a bit stressful to find a place to work with great wifi when you change cities every week.
Maybe this is obvious, but working every day is a different experience than vacationing every day. After about 3 months you get very used to changing scenery and new places do not have the '...
I actually own my own business so focusing on things during work time isn't too hard (Always too much to do regardless of the hours I work). The need for some social contact is an interesting one as I we are also considering moving out of the town we live in with my family. I think we will use that as an excuse to join some local groups and get involved with things and hence meet people that way.
Thanks!