Hacker News Reader

Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

On average, how many hours do you work per week overall? And on which days (weekdays, weekends, etc.)?

It bounces all over the place. I spent some time at client sites and worked 9 ~ 5 or 10 ~ 6 at their preference. There was about a month in the summer where I probably did 10 hours a week in a good week. November, when I was pulling the hard yards on Appointment Reminder, was generally six hours a day. (Sometimes a very quirkily scheduled six hours: between a bad cold and longstanding bad habits, I often got up at noon and started working around two or three.)

I generally don't work on weekends, with the exception of customer support emails and an evening or two prior to the AR launch. I mean, crikey, until the very end they even gave me weekends off when I was a salaryman: working weekends would be moving in the wrong direction.

Hi Patrick! You mention several times your past as a salaryman, and from your posts I get the feeling you're very happy about not being one anymore :) Besides the "pull" factors (such as loving to develop your own product, manage your own time, etc), could you mention some of the "push" factors that made you want to leave the salaryman existence?

I guess most people on HN could elaborate a lot on why working for a salary is not among their first options, but now I'm particularly interested in your story, if you don't mind :)

(For reference, here are some quotes from your blog:)

My name is Patrick McKenzie. I’m an ex-Japanese salaryman

reacclimating myself to a human existence after years of salarymanhood

After several years working as a Japanese salaryman, I quit my day job and went full time on my business as of April 1st of this year. This was the best decision I have ever made.

The three hour commute to the seventy hour workweek was the lArgest factor. Having to ask for permission to see my family grated on me, too. There are also comparatively minor issues about salary (mine was half a US starting engineers') and having impact with my work, but I would have lasted those for a long time without the work/life balance issues.

How did you find time and energy to work on BCC while working 70 hour weeks?

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busin...

That is a revolutionary post on the time aspect. What about energy, or was it even an issue? I work about 45 hours a week, but it sometimes seems like that's all the work I've got in me. Working 70 hours a week would, I'm assuming, be almost twice as draining.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com