Ask HN: Why don't you work less?
Simple question.
Why don't you only work 6 or 9 months of the year? Or 4 days a week[1]?
In your newfound time you could work on personal/charity projects or add some more to the "life" part of work-life balance, or do anything else you wish.
I think it would be harder to find a 4-day-week job, but taking 3 or 6 months off per year should be doable in this profession due to the nature of the work and very high earnings.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3883268
64 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadSo far, it's working out great - I do the research work from home, occasionally commuting to uni, and it's great to have the balance of academia and real life work.
Of course, my earnings took a serious hit, and that's probably the biggest reason only few people do work less. But I consider it was worth it!
Software Engineer salaries in the UK are generally pretty good, but not really equivalent to their US counterparts, so a lot of folks can't really afford to do this.
As a contractor/freelancer I make more money but have a lot less security and have to look for new contracts once in a while. I anticipate being able to take a couple of months off each year though. The problem is that work translates directly to income, so I could take those two months off, or I could get that new car or pay down my mortgage by a chunk.
Also, I enjoy large chunks of it.
I could certainly take the time off, if I was willing to share a flat with other people rather than owning my own home - but dividing my wages in half would make my mortgage completely unaffordable - and the kind of mortgage I could afford would then have me living miles away from work and commuting long distances. Or living in horribly deprived areas.
Your statement assumes that the median wage produces a reasonable standard of living for everyone, no matter where in the country they live, and that's simply not true.
My current earn to frugal living ratio is: 5 working days buys me a month of living expenses.
Currently though i'm working very hard because i'm in the process of buying a non-tech real world "lifestyle" business that will run with minimal hours after a initial time investment peroid, which should allow me to give up contracting completely, should i choose to.
I notice some Americans will call freelancing contracting even though they mean two very different things over here.
As a contractor, you generally have several years of experience in a technology (let's say Oracle ATG ecommerce platform). Companies that want to implement ATG may not want to hire a full time and permanent group of Software Engineers as building software is not there business, instead, they will hire a contracting firm, someone like IBM, Oracle or Accenture. These firms send people to the client to work in the new implementation on contracts that could last from 1 month to 12 months (for example).
Sometimes companies and consultancies will hire independent consultants (like the parent poster) who will join a company for a just a few months / until the project is done then they will go and join a new company so on and so forth.
Contractors generally charge per day (a good friend of mine charges £500 per day) and they have no employee benefits.
It's a tough market but if you have the right skills (tech and otherwise) you can earn yourself some very good money.
Some Americans think that there freelancing efforts are the same as contracting. This may be the case in some instances but a lot of the time I see people claiming that you don't need much experience go contracting and it's easy work to get if you try hard etc etc. These are usually Americans that are getting confused between the professional service offering that is contracting and the low value informal work they do which I would call freelancing.
EDIT: the parent just told us he was talking about a cleaning business. What I have described is IT contracting.
The existing owner is the hardest working guy i've met, used to be in the Army so has a proper work ethic. Thing is, hes not very good with people, hes got an abrasive personality, which doesnt bother me at all but i can see how its not good for managing people, and hes fully aware of this and doesnt want to manage people either. He currently does all the rounds himself for a total of a 60 hour work week in addition to his other things. I've already made hires to take over this and i'll manage them. Its going to be hard work to begin with but its an automatable system.
After expenses, it should generate £20k-£25k a year which is enough for me to live on frugally. I'll ideally expand it to generate more over the next year though. I'm paying less than the yearly profit to buy it as well, so its a damn good deal.
Not interested.
I'm much happier working 40 hours a week, never having to work over the weekends, hardly ever having to do any over time or face ridiculous deadlines, and having a reasonable number of vacation days I can spread out through the year. I consider this a much better work-life balance and I'm equally happy taking a pay cut to get this.
This isn't true for everyone, it just depends on your lifestyle. In Silicon Valley you can earn 100k a year being a programmer that asks for standard 9-5 hours (or 10-6), so the real question is whether you can live on ~50k a year.
Because I enjoy working.
Because, with 3 kids at home, work is a lot less work than being home. The most exhausting week this entire year was the vacation we took to the beach.
Instead I usually ride my bike. Which is productive in it's own way, and more the lifestyle I want anyway.
b - Because it's not an easily available option. It's not impossible but having this kind of a "requirement" would be pretty limiting.
It would be doable money-wise but I would think it would be hard to find a company willing to go along with this arrangement- although if people know otherwise I'd love to hear which companies offer this level of flexibility. In the past, others have suggested using the time between jobs for this - but (in the US at least) you'd still need to pay into COBRA if you wanted your health insurance to continue during that time. Also, having worked through the dot-com period at the beginning of the last decade, I'm always a little cautious about assuming that it will be easy to land the next gig.
If work is just a thing you do for money, then minimizing the amount of time you spend doing it makes sense. If you actually find work satisfying and care about the results, then I think it often makes sense to devote as much time as possible without causing yourself to stop enjoying it or become unproductive.
Having said that, I do try to reserve some time for side projects because that's a good way to develop new skills that I can apply to my main project.
"If I worked less, I'd want to spend the extra free time doing something important." Why do you focus on doing important things and not what-you-like-things?
I find out about my YC application tomorrow, so I may not need to take client work for awhile, If I don't get an in person interview for YC, I will probably need to pick up a contract before January.
tldr; I do only work between 6-9 months a year or less.
Now however, I do not feel the same need for this. I love my job, I get to do some (not meeting intense) travelling with it and I love the people I work with and what I do. Basically I don't my job is what I do for fun.
That's why I work more now.
Now however, I do not feel the same need for this. I love my job, I get to do some (not meeting intense) travelling with it and I love the people I work with and what I do. Basically I don't my job is what I do for fun.
That's why I work more now.
The real reason for the high salaries is because there aren't very many developers. However, from what I can see, there are machinations underway which will correct a lot of the supply problems over the next couple of decades. Many governments are pushing for primary school computer science education, and we have hacker schools and startups like codeacademy springing up everywhere. The money and success is going to attract the general public[0][1] many of which are finding it very difficult to get jobs, and they will come despite the perceived geekyness of the profession ultimately causing a cultural shift[2] before everything stabilises. Sort of like a mini gold rush.
That's my two pence anyway... :)
[0] http://www.thesocialnetwork-movie.com/
[1] http://www.bravotv.com/start-ups-silicon-valley/season-1/abo...
[2] I suspect we will eventually lose high average salaries but gain higher status as development becomes a more socially acceptable job.
I have other flexibilitties associated with my job, like flexible work hours, telecommuting and open vacation policy, but it doesn't change the expectation of me being in the office 5 days a week as a general rule of thumb.
I have other flexibilitties associated with my job, like flexible work hours, telecommuting and open vacation policy, but it doesn't change the expectation of me being in the office 5 days a week as a general rule of thumb.