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Comment by itamarst | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to wait for society to make this happen (and in fact waiting will fail you). This is something many programmers have negotiated on their own (e.g. https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/05/09/part-time-software-d...).

More broadly this is one of many good reasons for programmers to unionize; even if salaries are high, working hours are still far too long.

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I think too many people are willing to take a pay cut to do this. If you believe you will be as or more productive, or that your skills and knowledge are more valuable than just your raw time, you should consider negotiating a 4 day week with no pay cut.

Since I am willing to take a pay cut, and even a pay cut per hour, here's my reasoning.

For every hour spent at work, I am not spending it on something of my own choice. Hours of my own choice are worth much more than hours of work to me, because they usually fulfill me more.

So, if I am to work couple hours a day, that's going to cost you little. The more you take from my "own" hours, the costlier they get. So, if I consider a normal work week to be 24h, anything above that costs non-proportionally more. I.e. 40h is not 40/24 more, but it's actually 24 x base_hourly_cost + 16 x own_factor x base_hourly_work, where own_factor is usually around 2, depending on how much I might like the base work.

So, in a sense, I am not taking a pay cut, I am just taking a reasonable salary for doing the work, but if someone insists on taking more of my time for little benefit to them and a lot of burden to me, it's going to cost significantly more.

This is a similar line of reasoning that I take regarding 4-day work weeks. Not only would I be working for 20% less hours, I'm also gaining 50% more leisure time (2 day weekend => 3 days).

From this perspective, taking a flat per-hour pay cut is an easy choice.

You're essentially paying your employer so that you can have more free time. One could argue that if you feel the need to pay for your own life, you're in a sense the property of another person. If you do X amount of work, why shouldn't you be entitled to the fruits of that labor? Why does anybody have the right to take the value that you created away from you?

In European copyright law, they actually can't: non-exclusive (eg. can't be sold) moral right protects the obvious moral aspects, but there are also compensation related clauses (eg. I created a "work of authorship" and got compensated $1000, yet company earned $5 million off it, I'd be entitled to ask for a fairer share of the profits). I am sure this hasn't been tested in courts for software development so far, with it being such a collaborative endeavor, it'd be hard to lay a claim to how much your worm was really worth).

I also take a different view: a person is not owned, but it's normal for labour to be paid. A labourer can design their own pricing scale to encourage labour deals they prefer. Just like companies design their pricing schemes to eg. support only large customers (up to 20 users free with no support, paid-for afterwards).

To chime in here, I've only ever worked part-time as a programmer. I'm in the UK, so YMMV, but if you're looking for part-time programming roles (i.e. 4-day working week, what I work) just ask. A lot of places are pretty open about 4 day work weeks. Some places jeer and it's a firm no. But it's worth a stab. Generally, the atmosphere is improving and the stigma seems to be dying off.

UK is almost a standard 35 hour work week anywhere. Salesforce, Tesco, Skyscanner, Google UK, almost anywhere. Why you part time at 4 days?

Well, I work 30 hours a week, so it's five hours less than that! Plus I don't even need to travel on Fridays for a half day. :)

I was working 25 hours a week, 5 5-hour days, which was good fun too. But I kept bumping heads with people at work. I'd work 10-3, with no lunch, and people would schedule meetings for 3, or 4, forgetting I wouldn't be there. Jira also didn't make things easy for the accounting people, so I am told...

If I could afford to go down to 3 days a week, I would. I'm not quite there yet with my annual salary. I think 3 days a week is the sweet spot. Though I feel my firm would be a tad peeved at 3 days a week. I'm not sure if they'd go for it. But it's a conversation I'm keen to have.

Some things aren't geared for pro-rata either. Things like the NHS top up, share schemes, cycle to work, you might lose them when you drop below 25 hours, rather then them scaling down like salary and holiday allowances.

I've never seen anything else less than 40hrs in the UK, UK had the longest working time for a while and I think it still is the highest (in Europe at least) on average.

Yup, went contracting for this reason. Code is a passion of my and I love that it's also my trade but I have other personal ventures I need to focus my attention on and I have absolutely no juice left in a regular 5day/40hrs engineering week.

So you point is since programmers can negotiate preferable working conditions (which include both salaries and work schedule most of blue-collar workers can only dream of) they need unions to negotiate for them because otherwise they can't get working conditions they'd prefer, even though there's evidence they're already getting it. I think you broke my logic parser.

1. It's much harder to negotiate early in your job.

2. Some people are less willing or able to negotiate for various reasons.

Thus, while individuals can and should negotiate for themselves, negotiating for everyone is even better.

> 1. It's much harder to negotiate early in your job.

Of course, you have no experience and have not proven yourself. Essentially you're a huge pile of risk asking to take a chance on you. How would you expect to be easy to negotiate in this position? Why would you expect the employer to remain in a position where they get all the risk and no power for any significant amount of time?

> 2. Some people are less willing or able to negotiate for various reasons.

If somebody is content with what they are getting and is not willing to negotiate, then where's the problem?

> Thus, while individuals can and should negotiate for themselves, negotiating for everyone is even better.

That's a non-sequitur. Are you claiming since some people don't have good negotiating position and some just don't want to do it, their negotiating power should equal to those who both have good offer to negotiate and are willing to do it? How it's better? Of course it could be better for some people - namely, somebody who has no negotiating skills and very weak negotiating position - but that can come only at the expense of other people who are willing to negotiate and have a good position, since employer's resources are not infinite, and one-size-fits-all negotiation would surely have to take into account that part of the pool is very risky, and compensate for that risk somehow.

> If somebody is content with what they are getting and is not willing to negotiate, then where's the problem?

Segments of workers are less likely to negotiate, and often it might not be because they are content with what they're making, but are either intimidated by the prospect of negotiating, or ignorant that they could or should negotiate.

https://www.payscale.com/career-news/2015/05/millennials-and...

And this is a situation that often occurs in software development:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

https://www.twilio.com/blog/2016/02/patrick-mckenzie-on-sala...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=negotiation&sort=byPopularity&...

Is this the main reason for a software workers' union? Not necessarily. It seems like there's at least one service that exists for such a case. Or perhaps the IEEE, or some other industry guild could provide free training and education about how to better negotiate their salaries, to reduce the obfuscation that often accumulates in the hiring processes of the industry.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17276423

> since employer's resources are not infinite

Certainly not, but employers are often choosing to spend revenue elsewhere instead of raising wages:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2018/10/31/why-arent...

And this is not consummerate to, especially in tech, how much revenue each employee brings in:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the...

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