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Comment by bertr4nd | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely curious -- do many people with salaried jobs really have a "side hustle"? I'd feel a bit guilty working on a side project for money when I'm being paid as a fulltimer.

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I wonder the same. I rarely side hustle for money doing tech stuff, mostly because I don't have enough mental energy left over after a full day of day-job work.

I suppose for side-hustles it may help doing something that's somewhat removed from your day job. Rental property comes to mind. It's fairly rote, it's social, you can put in as much/little elbow grease in it as you like (barring the rare emergency), but it does generate modest income, it's usually more than just a "hobby".

A friend, who doesn't work in finance, is really into the stock market, spends a lot of time on researching companies. That's a kind of side-hustle too I suppose.

Many people doing this are not doing it after a full day of work, they are doing it during their day job.

I've a few things going on. I'm being paid for 9-5. The rest of the time is mine, gloriously mine, to dispose of however I please.

Full time work is a misnomer in common use. If companies wanted to control how I disposed of all my hours, there'd be a much higher price involved.

It is difficult to do at the peon level, unless you have a lazy job where your bosses give you privacy and lax deadlines. I've had experience with both. I worked at a large insurance company / asset management company in Connecticut. Initially, management was tight, so while we generally worked 9-5, those hours were fully utilized plus some. Curiously, management was overseeing efforts, and not fully utilized, and most people in management had a side gig -- articles they were writing, speaking engagements, properties they were managing -- all during work hours.

Then HR changed the promotion policy. You could only get promoted if you had 6 people under you. My manager immediately hired three more people to "stay" a manager. Then, he encouraged each of us to hire people under us, the wordload was mostly the same, we just created a lot more processes, controls, documentation, PMO, etc. But not enough to consume all the time the now-gigantic team had. While incredibly wasteful for the company and our owner (the US government) we had so much free time we were doing contract gigs during office hours. Two guys had full-on startups in play.

I've always calculated a full time job as 2,080 hours a year. That leaves 18.3 hours per day, or 6,680 hours per year, to do with what I please. Darn sleep takes up a big chunk of that.

In the past I've done a lot of side work much to my full time jobs benefit. Not so much in the last couple of years I've changed around some priorities. It was a bunch of fun though you should give it a try!

I hate sleep. But it would probably not be a good situation if everyone didn't need to sleep, because then we'd all be expected to work that much more. Ideally, it would be awesome if I could avoid the need to sleep, but nobody else should know about it.

I would love to have one if I could muster up the time and/or energy to do it.

I don't think there's anything unethical about it at all as long as it's not competing with or using information from your employer.

Are you implying that you think of "full-time" as meaning that if you want to write code on the weekend and in the evenings, it has to be either for your employer, or a personal/open source project?

Yeah, that's basically how I feel about it. I'm sure not everyone agrees, and I certainly don't mean to pass judgment. I'm just saying that I, personally, would feel weird about doing so.

I understand what you mean, although I don't take the same stance. You have an employment contract to work a certain number of hours. You have not leased your life to your employer.

It must be very convenient for employers to have employees that feel that their whole lives are leased to them.

Modulo burnout and things like that, of course.

It's not about agreement or judgment. It's certainly fine for values to be different. What I am confused about is this: what are the underlying values that you hold that inform this feeling of weirdness?

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