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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

There would definitely have to be coordination at the organizational level. Say, no meetings on Mondays and Friday and individuals can choose to work individually or not on those days. But that starts to get inefficient for the people who do want to work and it reduces the flexibility of those who want to work part-time.

And TBH, if I were to work fewer hours in a year, I'd probably prefer to have bigger chunks of time off, i.e. more vacation time, than having every weekend be 3 or 4 days--much less have shorter work days.

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For me, personally, part time work would be the dream. I used to contract and would do year long projects and then take large multi month breaks between. Neither "mode" was optimal. Work periods are obviously stressful and its hard to find free time. But the rest periods also got a bit old after a month or so, and even when we were traveling to cool places, I would find myself grabbing the laptop and coding just for fun and to keep my skills sharp. A part time scenario seems like the perfect in between.

However, I never saw a place where it could work. For one, if the rest of your team was full time and you were part time, you would automatically be less productive and useful than the rest of your peers.

With your Monday / Friday scenario with no meetings, it seems like the people that only worked Tue - Thur would have their schedule disproportionally filled with meetings, and have much less time to get stuff done. This could work for a manager type role, but it wouldn't work for an IC.

I feel like part time work, much like remote work, might require an all-in buy in from the whole team. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future companies go "all part time" and have their whole organization be tuned for part time productivity.

In tech, I think it would be hard to take large multi-month breaks on a regular basis. There's such rapid change that you either keep your hand in a bit when you're off or you're going to spend a month of time getting back up to speed after every break.

I would spend more time off if I had it but I really can't complain too much as I have pretty good vacation by US standards and I normally also travel a lot on business to interesting places which is almost like having extra vacation.

The one person I know who did work part time in this manner was a contract lawyer with a company and I think they could pretty much just take multi-month breaks with a bit of planning.

>I wouldn't be surprised if in the future companies go "all part time" and have their whole organization be tuned for part time productivity.

The challenge there is that the pay almost has to be less than it would be for full-time work. And a lot of (most) people aren't really in a position to take a low salary in exchange for part-time work. Overall, I assume you'd cut your hiring pool appreciably.

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