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Comment by arsome | Hacker News Reader

Screw taking 4 months off, I'd take every Monday and Friday off for the 40% pay cut any day.

No one will offer me that job though.

You may have a hard time getting a new job at 60% time, but I bet you’d have better luck starting full time at a company and working your way up to it. That’s what father did for the last 10ish years of his career as a programmer. He started working full time then transitioned to 80% time at 80% pay, then 60%, then 40%. He says it was a really good way to ease into retirement.

I'm working 70% part-time (5.6 hours per day). Overall, it's really nice for work-life balance. My biggest gripe is that the communication overhead does not scale proportionally. I'm expending the same time on communication (reading e-mail, reading chat, reading tickets, attending meetings) as if I were employed full-time, so the actual time I get to spend on the actual "work" part of work (designing systems, writing code, responding to incidents, etc.) is less than 70% of hypothetical full-time me.

I suspect that this is the reason why part-time is not more widely adopted. Theoretically, you can replace two full-time workers with three 66% part-time workers or ten 20% part-time workers. In practice, communication overhead destroys that equation.

My former project manager used to take every Friday off, probably because they couldn't pay him the right salary and he got things done fast anyway. Maybe try somewhere you're overqualified for. A lot of places would rather hire a cheap senior than a couple of juniors, and they'll be less suspicious of you offering to take a low salary.

I've freelanced at 3 days/week but it's too little for me IMO. I really liked taking Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays off. Many groceries restock on Friday, Saturday evenings, or Monday so those were good times to find fresh food. I could also extend that to a 4 day weekend if I wanted a quick vacation.

I worked a "9/80" schedule for a few years, in which we nominally worked 9 hours per day, but had every other Friday off. Even that was enough to significantly improve my quality of life.

I'm doing 4 10 hour days a week and can swap my day off for whatever day when I want. That's almost what you said, but without a pay cut lol.

I could barely muster a 4 hour day, lol. I don't know how you could get more done with a 10 hour day.

thats not at all the same thing.

granted it is cool that you get 3 days off every week, but the other poster (and me) would much rather work three 8 hours days than four 10 hour days.

10 hours/day would leave me K.O for the rest of the day. What's the point? It's probably not even healthy.

I know a Google dev that did this. In other words he asked if he could switch to 3 days a week at 60% pay. They said "yes".

I negotiated such arrangement once as a software dev (well, Thursday and Friday off). It's doable as long as the employer really does not want to lose you.

In many European countries this is doable and employers are required to accommodate a shorter schedule in some cases.

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