Ask HN: Do you work less than 40 hours? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you work less than 40 hours?

12 pointsxupybd27 comments

Have you found a way to reduce your work hours?

If so, how did you do it?

Has it been worth it?

Can you tell us what you do with your extra non work time?

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No, abject failure on that front. I work at a BigCo, and it's ridiculous how hostile it is to optimizing hours worked.

A few examples:

There are some weekly meetings to review changes and incidents for a 100+ person department, where they work through changes and incidents one by one, in random order - basically you have to listen in for the whole hour+ so you can respond if they get to an incident/change you are involved with, you can maybe address questions/concerns for 30 or 45 seconds, but have to listen and wait to be called for over an hour. If you aren't responsive when called upon, you look bad, so 100+ people all spend an hour waiting for their 30 second slot.

Lots of neverending support / escalations for supposedly "urgent" stuff, where they say we are experiencing X problem, how do we fix it? We suggest... check A to diagnose... check B, etc... nothing. 10 minutes later... we are still experiencing X... ok, did you check A or B? nope. somehow, it's urgent enough to pester me, but never urgent enough for anyone else to do anything at all.

> so 100+ people all spend an hour waiting for their 30 second slot.

This is a real issue at big companies. I wonder if there needs to be a standard format where the host starts each issue by quickly saying issue number and relevant people at the beginning. If your working while half listening you can give your full attention from the start of that point.

Something like that gives many people a bunch of productivity back, especially when it's easy to get pulled into a bunch of these type of meetings each day.

if you're not paying attention to the other changes in a change board meeting, it defeats the purpose of having the meeting (the interaction could be done asynchronously) and seems like it defeats the purpose of reviewing changes at all (besides audit compliance)

I've had to sit in on these things almost weekly at a previous job. I represented one small department and I wasn't a manager, just someone who knew the tech and needed to do the explaining (or was asked to at least) for the incidents.

Nothing the other departments discussed (which 95% of the call was dedicated to) was relevant for my job at all, and was at best, mildly interesting, so I tried to get other work done during it as best as I could, but it was super distracting, and I always had to half listen for my department to be mentioned.

> There are some weekly meetings to review changes and incidents for a 100+ person department, where they work through changes and incidents one by one, in random order - basically you have to listen in for the whole hour+ so you can respond if they get to an incident/change you are involved with, you can maybe address questions/concerns for 30 or 45 seconds, but have to listen and wait to be called for over an hour. If you aren't responsive when called upon, you look bad, so 100+ people all spend an hour waiting for their 30 second slot.

Perhaps I wouldn't do it weekly with 100+ people, but since you're already there, isn't there some value in understanding more about the incidents that are impacting other teams on live systems so that you can bring those learnings back to your team and make them more robust? Or are talking about incidents on completely different stacks and systems?

Yes,

Moved to Eastern Europe to reduce cost of life, Freelance on Upwork, work about 6-8 hours a week.

Absolutely, should have done it years ago.

I rediscovered the joys of programming by learning Rust, I rediscovered they joys of hobbies (photography, car wrenching, modeling, 3d printing, bicycling, weight lifting). Wife gets at least 2 full days a week to do whatever she wants together. We often visit old European cities for a 5 day weekend. What else. Rehabbed my childhood home, rehabbed my Wife's log cabin in the mountains. Looking for a historical flat in the old town part of nearby large city. Life is not bad.

You do all that on 6-8 hours of work a week?

$1k a week goes a long way here.

What is life like on Upwork?

Is there a lot of wasted time and low paying contracts?

Not really, I set my rate at $150/h. Most of my work comes from clients I've had for years.

What type of software do you produce with Rust for your clients? If I may ask.

So far, parsing common crawl database at line speed, rewriting a lot of AWS Lambda functions, embedded systems upgrade scripts, few ESP32 deep embedded devices, REST API backends, custom key-value stores, custom TLS terminator, etc, etc. A lot of my other work is ancient PHP, SysAdmin stuff and performance troubleshooting.

When I lived in Canada I worked 35 hours per week as a full time employee. It wasn't kept track of though, and as long as you're getting your work done you're good.

Now I live in Japan and work 40 hours per week, and all employees need to keep track of work hours.

It makes such a huge difference. 8 work hours + 1 lunch hour + commute means it's always dark when I get out of work. Most people have 30+ minute commutes so that leaves < 6 hours of free time, and most people don't have the time and energy to go out after work. Even if I wanted to go out after work everyone is exhausted.

Compared to Canada where post work activities are extremely common. I used to attend a language meetup, have dinner with friends, and go to a club every week.

So in my experience even 1 extra hour makes a huge difference. I'd love to work 30 hours per week of I could.

Yes, I found a part-time contract as Solution Architect. I worked 20 hours a week over the summer, then it was 35 over the winter and now it seems like we will be back to around 20 hours over the summer again. For me it is ideal.

I am contemplating leaving the IT field completely, but haven't found the right way out yet. Until then I can better live with a 20-30 hour workweek than 40. And beeing extremly priviledged with high hourly rate, the trade off is not really there. Of course I could make a lot more money working 40 hours, but I would feel a lot worse.

I use the extra time to work on old motorcycles, photography and take mini trips.

The contract I took was the first part-time I had been presented with. But I have actually seen a few others since then. So perhaps there are more to be had in the future.

Yes, I reduced from full time 40 hours to 32 hours. Which results in a 4 day workweek. I did this when becoming a freelancer. I'm in Europe and salaries here are not that crazy high as in the US, so getting a 20% pay cut might even hurt. However currently I make around ~110k per year with less work than before, thanks to freelancing.

On my off day I do the bare minimum of work, like writing invoices and do taxes. This takes max 30 mins, depending on what I have to do. The rest of the day I do whatever I want, without feeling guilty. I do sports, nap in the afternoon, pursue my hobbies or go shopping.

This really increased my mental health. And it was absolutely worth it. My "day off" helps me regenerate and just takes all the stress away. My plan is to do this until I retire, or even reduce my hours more.

I generally work between 5-7 hours a day. A lot of it depends on having a good manager and good team members that you can rely on.

For reducing work hours, I do a lot reading internal technical documents or technical blogs with my free time. This helps me with getting the job done faster.

I also spend a lot of time helping out coworkers so when it's time for me to ask help, the job gets easier.

Another way is not to overcommit on work.

With my free time, it's mostly family and hobbies.

I work part time, around 20 hours a week more or less. I would like to work full time but I burn out very easily. I spend the spare time studying, looking for other work, exercising, making food etc. A lot of the time work is at the back of my mind, so I feel like I'm working a lot more than I actually am.

10 hours a week tops. The trick is passive income. Set it and forget it. But I have always lived debt free. Bought my home with cash.

I spend time online torturing my political enemies, I make electronic music (which contributes to my passive income, but only a bit) and gardening, hunting, fishing, and practicing marksmanship.

Honestly, sounds kind of sad!

I would love to spend more time in the garden. Hunting and fishing are hobbies I'd also love to pursue. I find that after the work week I have just enough time to spend time with my family and not much else.

I'm not sure what is sad about the parent reply can you elaborate?

Political enemy, is that you?

> I spend time online torturing my political enemies

What does this entail exactly?

Can you be more specific? You mean portfolio income, like stocks? Did you work in tech and put all the money into stocks, and then retire?

Most weeks I work since I wake up 'til launch time (12 am), so 5ish hours a day.

In the afternoon I try to do something not work related, but to be honest is when I solve/decide most of my task for the next day.

Yes. I work 20 hours a week, as a software consultant. I make low six figures.

Very well done. That would be ideal.

Most days, yes.

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