That company was minting money and wasn’t worried about deadlines. I wish more work was structured this way.
I was usually available for brainstorming/chats during my sometimes months of off cycle, including at non-regular hours. I'm hopelessly neural atypical with on/off cycles of productivity and haven't found a way to make myself more regular.
I was paid as a full time employee despite my schedule, with a mutually agreed upon below-market offer in exchange for that freedom. USD 130k/y with full benefits and a much smaller than normal equity grant.
That arrangement lasted 7 years before moving on to new opportunities.
I doubled my salary between last year and this one and I'm still not even halfway to 130k/y (and I'm happy because it's remote).. .and I live in the most expensive city in South America (more expensive than US midwest & Texas, cheaper than NY / SF of course).
I thought USD 130k/year was a good offer even in the US, I think it's roughly what the Texas-based developers I work with make.
But if you go FAANG and/or atypical role, the limit is much higher.
And since you said "worked", what made you decide to stop popping back to the issues queue at this particular org?
Use a kitchen timer, then every time you finish something input the time precisely.
I HAVE been in situations where logging 19 minutes to project X and 37 minutes to project Y was 'crucial' because 'accuracy was vital' but... damnit - I don't stop thinking about your project just because I'm not sitting in front of some time tracking app. I avoid those situations wherever possible now (and it's quite possible).
It becomes a lot easier when you need to do it to get paid.
I loathe time tracking for internal metrics, but if I need to do it to get paid the motivations change and it just becomes part of the workflow.
I used to be super granular about it until I realized I was billing the equivalent of 8 hours of work as a full time engineer, as 2.5 hrs or whatever, due to the nature of granular billing. Turns out I'm hella unproductive when I spend all day at the office. So I switched to more like dedicating some chunk of my day to work, then billing that chunk, even if some of the time I was making coffee or like, going on a quick walk break.
In all honesty with how much more productive I am as a contractor I could probably justify billing flat 8 hours a day but I'm just too honest or something.
Besides being generally nice, it's also a total godsend when you have other things going on - I'm currently working towards a CS degree and there's no way I could've balanced the two if I had a "regular" job.
We're one of the few industries where we are not only able to work like this, but also have the tools to do it efficiently (because we built them!). Yet, inexplicably, the majority of companies still insist on cubicles, strict working times and constant synchronous communication.
To be clear, there are definitely disadvantages to this and we need to be very careful to not let this idea turn into a gig economy type situation where if the company doesn't have work for us, we don't get paid (stable pay is often far more important than how high it is), where an individual's slice is too small to live off of and where people turn into expendable "work processors", but if done correctly, this really does seem like the way forward.
I’m at the half way mark of a MS in CS and trying to get a feel for the commonality of flexible positions in the industry, particularly for non-senior roles.