Hacker News Reader

Comment by ncallaway | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree. We're running a team with engineers working 20 hours a week. That seems like about the amount of "productive engineering time" that most people have in them in a week, regardless of how many hours they actually spend working.

It's a bit of an experiment, but I have to say that I'm really happy with what it's doing for us. Our engineers are still quite productive. Their work life balance is good, so we can avoid burnout (though this will take a long time to actually prove). And, finally, it gives us a _huge_ competitive advantage when it comes to hiring top quality engineers.

View on HN

Neat. Checked out your web site and really like your philosophy! I'm a solo consultant going into my tenth consecutive year. I too have found that >20 hours definitely throws off the balance. It's still a work in progress, but that 20 hour mark is about what consider my level of useful (high impact) hours.

I understand what you do for employees of your firm, but how do you apply your philosophy to yourself (and the other principals)? Client work is one thing, but there's plenty of non-client work too. Particularly in a small firm!

I'm also a solo consultant (really just a contractor), and I've been working 20 hour weeks for the last month or so. I'm finding that I actually don't feel productive enough, mainly because I'm working for a small unlaunched startup, and they are really itching to launch. I mean, I'm still feeling productive for those 4 hours, but when I'm in "the zone", I can focus for much longer. When I'm work on a personal startup or side project, I often spend all day on it, maybe with a few breaks for food.

I'm holding fast to my 4 hour days, but I'm starting to feel like it's not ideal to be the sole part-time developer on a project that needs to launch soon.

But I suppose this could probably be mitigated if they hired another 1 or 2 developers.

I used to be a consultant and went through periods of Uber productivity for 30 to 40 hours a week. When I was in this phase I let my productivity and creativity drive my total weekly effort. Being in the flow feels good and leads to better solutions. But it is not sustainable week after week. Now 30 years later, at 62 years old, I just can't sustain more than 20 hours per week of coding, software design or pre project planning for complex projects. I now find productivity and pleasure doing some of the administrative work managing my team and reporting up. Actually have a new boss and he is asking for lots of data and more. Right now his questions seem valid so it is not a burden. If he learns and grows great. If his information needs don't die down in a few months this may be a burden.

Edit: typos. Need coffee.

You make me smile, nearly 10 years as solo consultant too. For the past 5 years my "week of work" is 25 billed hours and for extremely hard problems (reworking old complex Fortran thermodynamics code) this goes down to 15h/week. Above that, I cannot sustain the rhythm more than two weeks.

The non-client work is done on an "energy and motivation" basis, so I accept that some weeks are good but I can do nothing two weeks in a row.

Ha, "energy and motivation" basis sounds about right for non-client work. I'm finding that getting smarter about what work I can outsource (e.g. bookkeeping to bookkeepers, tax preparation to CPA/accountant) is helping me out tremendously. It's very tempting to keep doing things because "I know I can do that", but forcing myself to let go of non-core/non-strategic areas is hugely empowering and helps with the balance issues and optimizes energy / context switching.

To be honest myself and my co-founder work closer to 35-45 hours a week. We also do about 20 hours of technical work a week, and the rest covers the business overhead (accounting, client relations, business development, project management, etc).

Our goal in the long term is to bring us down to 20 hours a week overall, also, but that's probably several years away. Still, we both feel that as co-founders at a small business keeping it well under 50 hours feels like a win.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about all the items in the business overhead. I've been creating extensive lists of what actually falls into this area, so that I can make sure I'm outsourcing / delegating (e.g. to freelancers) things that really don't need to be on my plate and are non-strategic. Do you have any non-technical employees, contractors, or advisors involved in your business? And, if so, are they are assisting in some of those business overhead areas?

Would you mind letting us know where this is?

Sure. We're a small consulting company called Apsis Labs (http://apsis.io/). We started in Seattle, although our hiring has been entirely remote across the US and Canada.

Cue the sudden influx of resume submissions.

I'm not him but it seems his company (apsis.io) deals with Rails, React, Unity3d, and AWS. The company (Apsis) been around since 2014 so they're probably a successful small startup with some runway.

I'm very curious about this, especially in the long run. Do you need to hire extra staff to work the "other" 20 hours that isn't worked, or do you find your staff are producing about as much in their 20 hours as they would in a 40 hour working week?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com