The Advantage of Being a Little Underemployed
collaborativefund.com
collaborativefund.com
The work was interesting though and very well suited to my skillset so I asked to work a 30 hour week instead so I could do a little freelancing on the side and make up the difference.
6 months later I haven't started freelancing at all, and I simply enjoy the extra time I have to pursue other interests. The unexpected part though is that I am undeniably more productive than I've ever been while working less actual hours.
I definitely use some of the free time for thinking, but I think I also end up being vastly more efficient when I'm in work mode as well.
Company provides critical financial infrastructure in the US.
I play a lot of music to make up for it. The gigs don't pay as well as that other 10 hours a week would have paid, but breaking up my work into two separate fields is valuable to me.
European startups also tend to be more chill about working hours than American startups (I'm from SF so I've seen it all).
Like, I'm on 10-4MF, and they give me a check every two weeks. They have some good will from me so if I have to put out a fire at 9pm and I can, I do it.
But I'm not a "full time" employee. If the responsibilities don't get met in the time allotted, they aren't going to get met. It's not like I get to work less if I figure out how to get my work done in less time... I don't see why I'd work more just cause they give me assignments that take more than 30 hours a week.
That said, I think employees also have a responsibility to push back on insane hours. If you're good at what you do, then you have far more leverage as a developer than just about any other type of employee.
I'm definitely 'underemployed', but the nice thing is that the work I do is so far beyond what anyone else I work with understands that I report to the director of the company himself. As long as I get my work done, nobody really cares what I do.
I work until I feel like I'm not making progress anymore, and then I go for a walk. Generally the walk is about an hour long, but I've found that a 90 minute walk is pretty much perfect for resetting my mind and getting over any hurdles I've been stuck on.
The only reason I don't take a 90 minute walk every day is because my desk is near the staff who just punch numbers in to a computer all day, and they start to gossip if I'm not at my desk enough. I objectively finish more work and produce better work when I get up and move around when I get stuck on a problem.
The best way I've come to describe the effect of walking is to say it's a meditative act. I don't mean that in a spiritual way, I just mean it helps clear out the useless thoughts and gives you a way to center yourself.
One of the reasons I'm still working where I am is because I work in such a great area for walking. I worked in the suburbs for a while, and I'll never do it again. The car-centric design of suburban office complexes honestly feels like torture to me.
I set the strategy for all of our mailings, run the data, and then analyze the performance. We have 800,000 constituents, and send about 500,000 appeal letters each year, as well as countless emails and other pieces of mail. I've managed to decrease our cost to raise a dollar from about 22 cents to about 6 cents, while improving the overall quality of our appeals, which I'm pretty proud of.
We are a really small organization (<50 employees), so I end up doing a really wide variety of tasks. We have a lot of challenges that larger organizations wouldn't have because of our limited manpower.
Since nobody had really taken a holistic look at their data before me, I spent the first year cleaning up all of their existing data and automating almost every processes I could get my hands on. I used to spend 3 weeks of every month running recurring processes, and I cut that down to about 15 minutes a week.
After that first year my manager left. At this time the Director asked me to come work directly under him because he felt that none of the other managers understood my role well enough to manage me. This allowed me to focus more on the analysis and marketing side of my role.
As time has gone on I've been asked to create more processes for speeding up other people's work. I'm not an application designer, and I recognize that the processes I'm creating are pretty fragile. This wasn't a problem when I was automating my own processes, because if they broke I could fix them. Now there are a bunch of people using processes that only I can fix, which makes it very hard to take a vacation or a sick day. This causes me a lot of stress, which is a key reason why my walks have been trending longer.
I'm basically somewhere in the middle of the graph from the XKCD comic Automation[1]. I'm starting to look for a new job before fixing broken automation steals the time I need to make a resume (or do the part of my job I really enjoy).
So long story short, I basically do anything involving the data or programming for a small-to-mid-size non-profit organization.
The funny thing is that driving is maybe 10 minutes faster each way, but I'm way more productive when I ride by bike. I doubt I could convince anyone to let me work 20 minutes less a day when I ride though.
I'm in a similar situation.
PROS: A large amount of autonomy, my work is appreciated and valued, very low-stress, reasonable hours.
CONS: Working on an "enterprise-y" stack, work isn't always the most challenging, concern about job prospects in the future since I'm not working on the trendy stuff always popping up on HN.
I've never been happier at a job though. My previous job was as a consultant where the pros/cons from above were essentially switched, and by the time I left that job I was pretty miserable. I loved the actual consulting company I worked for, but the environments typical to consulting just took their toll on me. Whenever I'm feeling bad about the cons at my current job, I just remember that the grass is always greener and try to focus on learning something new that re-energizes my love for coding.
I know the likelihood is small, but if I knew I could have my current job until retirement, I think I'd gladly accept that fate.
I've never worked in consulting, but I have friends who work as consultants for the Big Four, and it certainly seems like being stressed and working long hours is prioritized over making a meaningful contribution. That's probably a little unfair, but I've read the emails they are responding to a 10 PM at night, and it seems like everyone just stays up all night sending emails so that everyone else knows they are 'working'.
I always have trouble justifying that I have spent two weeks in figuring out something without any visible progress.
Also, walking a few miles everyday is the best possible thing you can do for your dog.
No one looks at you askance when you say "I have to walk my dog"...
During those walks we may not have banged out code or written emails or what have you, but damn if it wasn't the most productive time of the day. Usually, we'd go back to either his or my desk and turn the conversations we just had into something concrete.
We did some great work back then, and I don't think it would've been nearly as good if we hadn't gone for those daily walks. It also had the bonus of both of us missing some boring meeting every once in a while, but because those walks almost always ended up in something good we tended to get away with it.
You don't mean it in a spiritual way, but meditation helps you with become more spirited?
Or did you mean to use "religious" instead of "spiritual"?
It's like small government in that respect.
I experienced the power of this when I was working for myself.
On some days I worked for 16 hours, other days only 3. Some of the best ideas I had was while lying down on the bed and staring point blank at the ceiling.
I'm no stranger to "getting in the zone" but this was some next level stuff.
I wish I could sustain myself that way. One day.
What I love about that is that you have long-term goals but it doesn't matter how you get there in the short term. So you can work like a horse for 4 days and rest for the remainder of the week. Or maybe another week you work a little bit 7 days a week.
You don't have to charge by the hour. You could charge by the day, week, month, or project.
With a consulting engagement there's usually a higher expectation of consistent proportional value delivered. It's more transactional (we pay $X we get Y).
As a salaried employee at least in many companies there's some element of the employee being a long-term asset to the company so the pressure is not as high or as consistent.
uhm, well i would put it at more like 33% sales and marketing, 33% R&D&O, and 33% other stuff like HR/finance/administration/etc.
and 1% glamour and glory like going out to drinks to celebrate after a release/sale/hire/investment/acquisition.
sales should not be 80% of the effort, unless you are literally a reseller.
The only concern I would have about being underemployed is that we only get a certain fixed number of years to save for retirement and if you're chronically under-saving during your years of maximum earning potential, the back end of your life may be pretty ugly. Then again, I am a pragmatist and I figure "life" can be as long or short as you desire it to be, right?
I don't take my desk-hours too seriously because I know that while I'm out running errands, exercising, taking a shower, sleeping, etc. I continue to chew on problems, and sometimes taking the slow path to a solution produces a much more mature one.
That's a perfectly reasonable point of view, but in office environments it can quickly run up against crab-mentality people who make awkward comments about anyone whose hours don't match or exceed their own.
And at least in the software industry, current trends (stand ups, pair programming, etc.) are pushing away from flexible hours and focus on results.
Our society fails badly at teaching people how to use their brain properly and how to prevent it from going on a bender.
The best advice I've heard on this subject so far is to think when there is a specific problem to be solved. Use your brain like a tool, then stop using it after you're done - meditate.
Very hard, since thinking (and overthinking) is addictive.
I feel like 30 hours is plenty and 20 hours is sufficient for many jobs. That would be a more direct challenging of the 40 hour belief.
I think this is why big companies have trouble innovating. They get filled up with hard workers who spend little time time thinking because they're too busy working.
I doubt that's actually true. The only reference to it is in the trivia section on imdb.com.
if the company manages to fuck up and generates too much work, you just get to do overtime.
no incentive to be efficient.
This reminded of how the USA PATRIOT Act came into existence.
Say I were to exit one day, is there anything I can do for say, 20 hours a week, that would still pay the bills? I wouldn't expect to make as much as I do working 60 hours, but I wouldn't ever want to do that again tbh.
I can see myself being extremely valuable as an advisor or a part-time C-level person, but I don't know how frequent or how well paid those positions are. Also it's completely not obvious if anybody would be willing to pay for an entrepreneur's time if that person is not.. entrepreneuring, the people who need our advice the most can't actually afford it. Any advice?
From my observation, some experienced people do stitch together a combination of advisory roles, maybe some teaching on the side, speaking, etc. that adds up to meaningful money without working too hard.
To give you some ballpark figures, an industry analyst will charge something like $10K for speaking at an event or a day-long advisory session. Of course, they have a lot of non-billable hours in order to get those types of rates. (Same applies to expert witnesses.)
For me, one of the issues would be that 20 hours per week isn't that big a win versus a more conventional workweek. The bigger win would be taking months off and that's more difficult because you get out of the loop and behind on tech.
Some fame in an area that allows you to collect on big dollar speaking gigs in spite of limited ongoing involvement. Eminence grise sort of thing.
Widely recognized world-class expertise in some relatively slow-moving technology area. You're an expert in really gnarly ball bearing problems. $10K/day for a couple weeks is a bargain.
Obviously these don't apply to a lot of people :-)
Without concerted pressure this is not going to change any time soon. IBM just recently announced it wanted all employees to be on-site. It is a tactic to cut back their workforce but the fact that they can do this unchallenged means something about worker rights is broken.
Working less than 5 days is entirely uncontroversial here. In fact, I believe Netherland is world champion part-time work. And personally, I think it makes total sense. If you've got a good job, the extra time is often worth more than the extra money. We need time to enjoy life. Life is more than work.
From what I've seen, you can only work on one thing so much before you grow to resent it. You need to take time off from it, even if that time is working on another software project. Companies like Google have tried to emulate this effect with their "20% time" initiative, but from what I've heard it doesn't really work, since people still consider it to be part of their main body of work.
Some of my best revelations for solving problems at work have come from entirely unrelated projects. As someone who does game development as a hobby on the side, I've actually discovered solutions to major enterprise software problems while working on a random indie game. It's important to let yourself do this.