Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?

No, I've been working 20h weeks for years. Companies are very desperate to find decent people and it's better to have one for 20 hours compared to 0 hours.

(I'm in Germany where students are not allowed to work more than 20 hours / week if they want to keep cheap student rates with the mandatory health insurance)

I've found that schedule flexibility on that level is rare unless doing freelance work, which has tons of accompanying challenges like actually getting people to pay and maintaining enough work to fill the hours you want without selling more than you want.

I agree with all of your points, though.

In the startup industry you'll find lots of greenfield projects, but very few where working only 4 hours a day is acceptable. Startups tend to need to get a lot of work done, relatively quickly, with a very small team. This is just the most effective way to build a business during the startup phase.

However, you will also find lots of startups have very flexible work hours as long as you get a reasonable amount of work done every week. Additionally, depending on your skill level and role within the startup it is likely that you'll be working on lots of different types of projects from day to day, which for me personally has always been enough to keep me enjoying what I do for a living, even though I'm usually working 40+ hours per week.

And some startups are very open to you contributing code back to the open source community. (Especially Node.js startups, where publishing NPM modules is just part of being a member of the ecosystem.) For me personally this also gives me that feeling of pleasure that ordinary work related coding might not always.

I coordinate 14 summer camp locations for kids every summer, it allows me to take the rest of the year off for travel or really whatever. Being a developer helps because you can build and sell web products to keep yourself working on something constructive, but nowadays most of my projects are random tasks that I've always wanted to do (construct a Wing Chun dummy, bike all the way to SF, build a go-kart, Lego rubiks cube solver, etc)

I don't think it's too difficult to find such opportunities if you're willing to be a freelancer/consultant.

I've gone for periods at as little as 5 hours a week. In that case I was mentoring more junior programmers, rather than owning a software project myself. It worked out great and the client was happy.

As you saw, at 16 hours you can easily own a software project and get great results. There's no reason you can't bid for freelance work at that level of commitment.

I negotiated a 4/5 work week with an ex-employer of mine at 80% of that previous salary.

I'd say work somewhere, prove your worth, then negotiate a better arrangement.

I think it's a very interesting concept and it should be experimented with more, especially with so many things now being facilitated by being automated.

I think a big factor for this idea not catching on is the grey area of what qualifies as 40h workweek labor. Some jobs like customer service positions make sense, but what about jobs that require a 24h standby? What about positions with fluctuating periods of downtime through the year? what about jobs that could be 8h workdays, but they haven't yet been confirmed that they could in fact be more effective as a 6h or 4h workday?

It's a by-product of modern times not quite catching up with modern technology. We certainly have the ability to think up algorithms that would better suit certain positions based on these factors, but the idea of it right now is too drastic and 'unfair' sounding. Ideally, in time, with the right evidence proving it's effectiveness, workdays would be shortened, quality of lives would bump up and robots would gradually take over.

I do this kind of week as a consultant. I think its the perfect work week.

Many of my small business buddies [+] start with their first few programmers on this sort of schedule. It generally fits within their/our budgets, gets them continuity versus project-based freelancers, and doesn't cause them to have to compromise on their quality of life through managing you constantly.

It isn't my place to mention the salaries I've heard but, anecdotally, they're a) more than anything I earned prior to going into business for myself and b) a substantial discount to market rates for FTE programmers.

So that's one option for you. Another is to be very good at making companies money and then, in negotiations, trade access to you for flexibility. Still another option is to own the company you're negotiating with.

[+] Context: solo founders or married couples running software small businesses with revenue in six to seven figures and no investor mandate to radically change the character of the business.

Well I have a lot of experience with 16 hour/day work weeks (have worked at banks most of my life). Yeah, you're right, it's not fun.

It really comes down to the time-sensitivity of your work. For someone in their 20s, I think the perfect balance is less than 80 hours/week but more than 40-50. If you're being paid two standard deviations over US median household income ($120k+), you're going to be expected to put some work-life balance on hold.

"Knowledge worker" makes you sound like you think programming is rocket surgery. VC is actually much closer to knowledge work than programming, and could more realistically have 16-hour work weeks.

I do 20-24 hours a week as a freelancer/consultant. And it is definitely productive experience. I have at times hopped to 40+ hours and never enjoyed it. I tried 30 per week but that was not better either. These 20-24 hours are highly productive and I spend the rest of the time with family/friends - or reading/experimenting.

The downside though - I sometimes feel I am wasting my time (because not many do so) and occasionally worry about opportunity costs.

I do hire on such terms. I believe it will become more and more widespread in the course of years. James Altucher is right — in the future, there will be only business owners and temp staffers/freelancers instead of our usual "permanent" office jobs, with lots of legal obligations.

If you're good, this is what good contract work is like.

Many times I got hired for a 3 month stint and got it all done in a couple of weeks with one eye shut. I tended to chip in and help with any other bits lying around that needed doing rather than sitting there playing solitaire. Builds a good reputation.

This is how I started my current permanent job. They decided they wanted to keep me so I'm getting paid a contractor's salary for a permanent job now and have a 25h week flexible time as a technical advisor and general devops guy.

Thanks for posting this! I've been looking for the same thing, but my most recent attempt failed.

I was asked to come back to a company that I used to work for, and I insisted that I would only come back if I could do a 3 day work week. I'm convinced my productivity would have been similar to when I used to work a 40 hour week with them, because rarely put in more than 3 hours of actual work per day. Unfortunately, they didn't hire me, because they said that absolutely needed someone full time to be able to complete the project on schedule.

I think they rejected the idea because everyone else there is on a 40-hour week, and they simply can't contemplate the idea of someone doing less work. They've been slogging away at the same never-ending project for 2 years now, and they aren't looking for someone to get work done efficiently. They want someone who will join in their suffering.

Going forward, I'm going to keep looking for a part time opportunity, but not waste time trying to convince people that it's good idea. I think I need to find people who already just get it.

For those that would enjoy such a situation: what would you consider to be a fair renumeration arrangement? Not I. Raw numbers but in comparison to traditional 40 hour/week gigs.

People are probably willing to pay you to do this, but not advertising it so much. Most tech companies (at least in the US) are desperate for work. Less than 40 hours is a week is a tough sell because many people feel the onboarding process eats up a lot of time. Primarily, since it's the norm to work 40+ hours (and believe me, it's not difficult to do this and be actually writing code more than 50% of the time) employers expect it.

> I sincerely think it is quite unrealistic to ask a knowledge worker consistently deliver at full throttle for 40 hours every week (never mind the enslaving 60+ hours on many companies)

I really disagree with this. Have you tried before?

I've worked 25 hours a week for the past ~6 years as a web developer, and I can't imagine a better work schedule. I've noticed that I'm just as productive on average, if not more so, than my 40-hour-per-week coworkers.

I do find it difficult to progress in my career, however. I've been trying desperately to transition into a full-stack, part-time position, but I feel pretty stuck as a senior level front-end dev. In my experience, this is because I need some weight to throw around when I request working only part-time.

I have been working as a high tier network engineer for the past few years for 40 hours per week (but always looks to go out on my own with a startup idea). I'm starting to really find that 40 hours per week make no sense and i'm actively going to try to find alternatives. Life slips by and there is little point in spending 1/3 of your working day dealing with monotonous bullshit.

To me this makes total sense, and I can't figure out why it isn't the norm for hired freelance developers.

For most people I know, myself included, you're at your best productivity before lunchtime. Afterwards you might get a few bits and pieces done, but generally it's a waste of time.

We offer flexible work schedules (half time, full time, anywhere in-between) with benefits.

1. A. In my experience it's hard to find unless you're contracting or have extremely rare knowledge.

1. B. We're a rails shop, (mostly) b2b edtech.

2. Not at all just greenfield. Having flexible schedules means that you have to be realistic with scheduling and expectations. You have to work out what will work best with the team and when they need to synchronize with you.

In some cases your work is orthogonal to main development critical paths, so the need for synchronization is less (still important though for staying synced with the culture).

yes

yes

No reason only greenfield projects should be suited to this. Contracting is the only viable route I've found. Otherwise you just won't get paid enough.

The downside of that is you need to be (loosely provably) good and experienced enough to (i) pick up contracts and (ii) that they'll flex to your schedule.

I've worked 16 hour days before with a manager literally sat behind me telling me to keep coding. They didn't care that half the next day would be correcting the mistakes of the previous. I don't miss those days.

Thank you very much for this, I think it strikes a major chord with many in the "knowledge worker" community at large, and I hope it stays in the top spot for a while, and spawn a healthy discussion.

For my part I've been doing a mix of freelance and salaried work in the last few years (as a data scientist), and I have reached the conclusion that a strict 40-hour week is not an easy thing to handle. I think it stems from the fact that the "knowledge worker"/hacker ethos is often deeply rooted in a self-driven and motivated agenda of learning and experimenting with new things on a constant basis, very often just for the sake of it. This can easily conflict with a regular work schedule in terms of number of hours and commitment. But the point is that it really shouldn't, because very often, those two "modes" nourish each other, which can result in a stronger, more robust and ultimately more meaningful and happier work like.

I've been trying to convince my current boss that a 3-day week would be a more efficient and compressed use of my time, while giving me more time to pursue other contracts and projects. But it seems that there are some cultural barriers that makes it a difficult message to pass. I actually intend to use that thread to show that I'm not the only one in that situation, that such a culture really exists, and thus that it must be taken into account somehow.

It might be somewhat cliché, but I really believe that this mentality is a glimpse of the future in terms of work ethics.

I sometimes wonder if, for mind-intensive, non-repetitive jobs such as programming (the good ones, anyway), lowering the number of work hours per week may actually increase overall output. It's well known that people tend to become more efficient the less time they're given to complete a task. So if people were to work fewer hours and use the rest of the time to get more sleep, relax with their family, etc. - hence keeping their mind refreshed and maintaining motivation - perhaps they'd get much more done over the course of the year than otherwise.

It's the reason I deliberately choose not to work late nights or during weekends, even if I feel the urge to. I'm afraid that it may actually end up hurting my overall output in the long run.