Ask HN: Working part-time in tech?
I would like to drastically reduce my amount of work hours per week.
My dream is to come down to about 15-25 working hours per week.
I don’t mean to work part-time for all of my career. But I would like to have such an arrangement for the coming five years or so.
Has anyone tried this? If so, how did you manage to achieve your goal?
118 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadThe company I was working for came out of a university research lab, and so had a culture of PhD students working part time for it, so this was not outside the norm there.
The downside was not getting equity, nor benefits, but I was on my parent's insurance and wasn't too keen on their equity anyway, so this was fine for me.
For example, many remote companies that operate asynchronously won't expect you to be in the office 40hrs a week, but will expect a certain level of work to be done each week. If you can get that done in 24 rather than 40, then it works out fine for you.
[0] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...
I’m curious if this is a silent agreement with your boss or if it’s explicit?
https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...
> However, this eight-hour movement didn't become standard until nearly a century later, when, in 1914, Ford Motor Company astonished everyone by cutting daily hours down to eight while simultaneously doubling wages. The result? Increased productivity.
What happened was the shift from craftsmen at a workbench to a deskilled assembly line had significant turnover. The cost of training and retention was high enough that Ford instituted the lower working hours and higher wages.
From one of Ford's biographers: “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.”
You see this in shipyards during the war war 2 years where once the initial pool of workers is burned out, you need to raise wages to bring in more workers.
What they found is in a ~nine hour day, the people did between ninety minutes to 4 and a half hours a day doing their 'focused work'. You can imagine that project managers are pushing 90 minutes, and the engineers are closer to 5 hours.
All of this is on top of two hours a day chatting with people across cubical walls.
In reading a bunch of these studies, you find small populations, and a focus on law firms and consulting because their work is significantly more legible.
Any suggestions on what kinds of assignments that would work better or worse in such a setting?
Many of the consultants I’ve seen in IT are more like regular employees except that they are employed buy the consultants. (I.e. they sit in the client’s office 40 h/week.) But I guess there are other ways to do it.
Companies hiring contractors want to pay somebody to "show up" (perhaps virtually) and do the one thing they're an expert at, not waste time getting up to speed or learning on the job.
Figure out what you're an expert in, and contact some recruiting firms that hire for contracting gigs in that area. Explain that your schedule is "half full already" but you'd like to fit something else in, if it's the right opportunity.
I’ve been working mostly in IT and I’m a bit of a generalist. I’ve thought about doing contracting and specialising ”on-the-go”. It could work... but it could also be a bit stressful. I think my current job will allow me to go quite deep in some areas so I might want to hang on to it for a while in order to allow for better opportunities further down the road.
Sometimes you have to ask: https://twitter.com/shl/status/1300848723182776322
For EU/UK market: Contracting. You can get small gigs (but on a low pay) on places like Upwork, or you can get a proper contract with a company that needs hands for 3-6-12 months on a larger project. Some of the Big4 also do contracting work on which you are the back-end (think Service Center) for large IT projects (and/or compliance etc.)
Out of the blue, however, a former employer reached out to me and offered to hire me for as many (or as few) hours as I could handle, which has worked out to 10-25 a week. It’s been a really nice arrangement that I’ve enjoyed. The catch is that this company is in a completely different industry, with a completely different pay scale than tech. So I’m happy with my job, but wouldn’t be able to support myself on it with part-time hours if I was the only household earner.
I'd typically work Monday & Tuesday, take Wednesday off for myself, then do parenting for Thursday & Friday. It was a great way to spend a few months.
PS. As someone else mentioned here, and in case you find yourself on the market again: You might want to try to discuss part-time only after receiving a written offer. Then you know for sure that they want to hire you. And then you have some leverage.
I agree! Flexible work would be a huge differentiator and I was ready to bend over backwards for it. I’ve heard that many companies won’t consider it because developers are just so darn expensive - it’s not worth it to pay a huge ransom and not get someone’s full attention.
There are no good metrics for programmer productivity, but spending < 20 hours a week actually switched-on as a full-time employee is obviously a problem, to me.
I have definitely met workers who I've given a task and they produce sub-average work and, when confronted, give me the spiel about they worked "so many hours on this" and how could I "invalidate the time they spent".
At the end of the day, as long as you are doing the job at the pace I need you to be doing the job, then I don't care if you did it in 1 hour or 8 hours. If you want more work, ask, and if you're spending too much time on a task, then there is a communication problem as a team member should have caught that you were on the wrong track.
In my experience, focusing on hours worked has never produced quality work.
That's different from intentionally deciding to aim for less than that, though.
I think what you're arguing is that employees should always have some work to do, which simply won't be the case in every industry
I've never seen a system that was even close to perfectly designed or optimized. You can always find more to improve.
Yes, there are diminishing returns for any specific corner, and there comes a point when the increase in risk from doing further deployments is not worth the shrinking business gains for optimizing a given corner, but I strongly believe there are always more improvements that can be made, both at a small, focused level and stu the big picture level of what systems should even exist in a given company.
You don't though. If you become 40% more productive, you should be paid more. Quietly taking that time as part time hours, instead of staying full time and getting a promotion+raise, is fine.
Mine means I do have that obligation.
I suspect many share this aspect of my code, which boils down to "keep your commitments, both explicit and implicit."
Nobody hires a full-time employee expecting that they'll start slacking off once they get the basics of their job going smoothly, and I know that going in (as do most people).
Thus, if I plan to do that, I have to warn them up front that our expectations are likely not aligned.
If I don't want to have that obligation, then I can negotiate up front, or take on the risk of being a consultant or startup founder.
Thought experiment: ask yourself whether you'd hire someone advertising my work ethic or yours, if all other aspects are equal between the candidates.
Then ask yourself why you answered as you did, and which response the market will reward better in hiring.
My reason for this stance is my personal code of ethics, not pragmatism, but I think the pragmatic consideration may clarify my point.
Those ideals of mine are what give rise to my standards here.
If timelines become tighter, at that point, and only at that point, would I crack down on efficiency.
>Thought experiment: ask yourself whether you'd hire someone advertising my work ethic or yours, if all other aspects are equal between the candidates.
That's like asking all else being equal, would I hire the person who wore Air Force 1s to the interview or the person who wore chelsea boots. That has nothing to do with your performance of your job and any distinction on that matter is personal preference. The only thing that is important is are you getting the job done on the pace it needs to get done.
At this point you seem like you'd discriminate your employees based on which IDE they were using. If they produced good work, would you care that the most productive person on your team was using Notepad++ to do their job?
It sounded to me like you were suggesting an hour or three a day of actually focusing your attention on your workplace is plenty for a full-time, salaried employee.
If that's not what you mean, then I've obviously misunderstood you.
What do you suggest regarding hours of "butt in seat" when WFH? It's a truly wretched metric for productivity, but I think ignoring it entirely is unwise.
I would (and do) encourage my teammates to use whatever editor or IDE they want, as long as it doesn't cause issues for the rest of the team (which I have seen crappy obscure tools do, in one memorable case by converting line endings to classic Mac OS style across many files, but only on edited lines).
> That's like asking all else being equal, would I hire the person who wore Air Force 1s to the interview or the person who wore chelsea boots. That has nothing to do with your performance of your job and any distinction on that matter is personal preference. The only thing that is important is are you getting the job done on the pace it needs to get done.
Whether a candidate thinks they should put in 8 hours a day vs. two or four, if that's all their current task takes, is directly relevant to how effective an employee they will be.
It is not at all like what kind of shoes they wore to the interview, which is indeed unrelated to their technical skills or workplace conduct.
As far as ethics or working hard mattering, I think of them as necessary but not sufficient. If I have a great work ethic and bust my butt but do not achieve anything, I'm a poor employee.
When I have a task estimated at four hours but it takes me two, I don't think "Sweet, HN until lunchtime," I grab the next thing off the stack.
Like I said, perhaps I'm not understanding what you're trying to describe.
In startups that become stressful, the main problem I have seen is an ungrounded management team that doesn't quite know what they want the business to look like in 5 years, so every other week - surprise! We've got a new client and they want X, Y and Z by tomorrow, so get working! - that never results in low-stress work.
Has been no issue at all. Never has been.
What I do see with my 3on/4off colleagues (usually students) is that they lack any sort of continuity in their work. Not enough time to tackle larger problems in one go and always missing out on how the smaller pieces fit together. On top of that a lot off friction when handing things off, etc.
Surely it can be done better, etc etc.
I ended up at a small company that had additional hours but not enough for a full time employee. I'm now part time across three DARPA contracts. It was really just luck, a friend reached out and asked if I was interested.
Everywhere else I was talking to was just pushing unlimited PTO policies. I wanted explicit acknowledgement about how much vacation I'd take and that was hard to get.
I know people at Google went to part time. You probably just need to ask. My route was definitely finding a place that needed a worker but didn't have enough work for full time.
I think there are multiple reasons why I was allowed to do this:
A) I'm working on a stable, long-term project. So there were no objections by colleagues that this might impede short-term progress (and, as a side note, I think I'm far more productive now than previously).
B) My manager is a reasonable and kind person. I know other managers at $BIGCO who, I'm sure, would have objected.
Are you a developer or some other role?
I set my own hours + fully remote. Typically about 2-3h of team meetings (sprint kickoff, retro, grooming etc) a week. Rest of time is off on your own dev work.
Bill by the hour. As long as you work predictable amount of hours, you can do 20h or 60h week.
Good luck!
Look for small companies. Startups, small businesses, anyone who needs a developer but can't afford a full time employee. This can especially work out if you are a senior developer whose 20 hours are often more valuable than 40 hours of a junior dev.
It's not unheard of just uncommon.
The biggest drawback is that you feel less belonging and you aren't always there for all the decisions. At certain times I am OK with that.
I work 16 hours / week and am on a support rotation (albeit 3rd tier). I only cover unplanned work on weekends. I took a 60% pay cut but keep all my pre-existing benefits.
So far it has been wonderful for my mental health, although with social distancing and the pandy it certainly has been difficult to keep busy some days. I am passively looking for supplemental work as I don't make enough to deposit into my savings. I imagine as winter rolls in this will be a necessity to stay busy/sane.
In the meantime, though, I have picked up lots of cooking, baking, and work on some personal coding projects. I have also been focusing much more of my time on art, which is really awesome! It's too early to tell but this might end up a more permanent situation for me (if not at the current company then maybe at the next one?).
I think this has also made me more productive at my job. I have 16 hours this week - what NEEDS to get done? What is a nice to have? Constraints are wonderful for productivity.
Was it hard to negotiate or was your employer positive to the idea from the beginning?
I believe it's harder to do for small companies due to legal/tax reasons (something about less than 32 hours complicates things a lot although I don't know the details why).
The "simple" solution is to be good enough that you have the bargaining leverage to propose it and make it an ultimatum. Other ideas:
* Grind in a project for some years and become indispensable and then propose it.
* Propose it as an experiment for 6 months.
* Create an "excuse" of why you need the extra time such as pursuing an M.S./PhD.
So far I have mostly worked for small companies. So I might want to consider working for larger ones.
Also, thank you for suggesting multiple strategies. All angles need to be considered (^_^)
Having kids. Serves also as a pressure upon you to actually seek part-time instead of just procrastinating about it.
I believe it's harder to do for small companies due to legal/tax reasons (something about less than 32 hours complicates things a lot although I don't know the details why).
Not a US resident, but FWIW many countries because of redistribution schemes need to categorize people by whether they are a) principally employed or b) self-employed.
Hours worked for a/b are a common denominator for this. It's likely that depending on the regulatory environment smaller companies when given the chance will always opt for the candidate with less HR department overhead.
If you go this route, make sure when you calculate your rate that you build-in the benefits such as paid leave, health insurance, lunch break, and company holidays. The number might seem high but you can justify it.
We arranged a deal where I work between 0 and 40 hours per week, with the option to work more hours with approval.
Also you might enjoy The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss
I’ve heard about Ferriss book but haven’t read it. Is it good?
In other countries I'm aware of it's probably not that common, except when you're really senior in your domain and have unique skills.
1. It's easier at existing job; you have all this knowledge that's hard to replace (https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/01/25/4-day-workweek-easy-...).
2. At new jobs, apply normally. Then _after_ you get an offer, ask for shorter hours.
3. I wrote a book about the process; it's no longer public linked on my site because pandemic has lowered negotiation leverage a lot and I'm not sure how to address that, but if you're interested: https://codewithoutrules.com/3dayweekend/
Ended up divorcing my wife after spending 4 days a week at home with her, so wouldn't recommend it, but no professional problems.