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Comment by RussianCow | Hacker News Reader

It actually makes me uneasy that 40-50 hours is considered "normal". I know 40+ hours a week is very typical for any fulltime job, but that's SO much time. Between that and driving, cooking, sleeping, doing housework, etc, we have practically no free time (or at least I don't). I also don't feel that I'm any more productive after about 30-35 hours a week; anything over that and I may get burned out, which negates any benefit from the extra time.

Maybe I'm alone, but I doubt it.

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I agree, I'd actually much prefer 30 or 35 to 40-50, but our society isn't set up well for that. There are tons of employers who will pay you market rate for normal effort --- normal being defined as 40-50 hours/week of diligent work.

What you can do tho is put up with the 40-50 hours a week for a decade and then have the rest of your life to decide what you want to do with each hour of your day and not worry about how much society thinks you should dedicate to working.

There are many employers who will pay you market rate for 40-50 hours of presence, half of it spent frittering away time on the Internet. But essentially none who will pay you nearly as much for a true solid 20-25 hours of real effort without all the "looking busy" time wasting.

Yeah... I really wish it were the other way around, because I hate wasting all those hours, knowing that nothing good came out of that time.

This too. Another reason I am for financial independence

I've mentioned this a couple times before but we hire Rails engineers for 24-40 hours a week + health insurance (in fact we're majority part-time at this point).

It's not for everyone, but it works well for us. We're all fresh and relaxed at work, and the free time is great for learning, side projects, exercising, travel.

Anyway, we're actually hiring right now: if you're in the Bay Area and looking shoot me an email.

Someone I know works where a new regime is enforcing hours: 9 to 6. Effectively they have reinvented detention. (NB: don't tell me about Google and Cisco, because this isn't. A fair part of their staff is very effective at 35 hours per week, and another fair part is ineffective at any.)

Or you could go into contract work. :) That's what I ended up doing, and I'm considerably happier now than when I was employed fulltime (and I happen to make more as well).

To be honest, I'm not sure if a decade is enough to secure financial independence, unless you get paid a ton.

Retire after 10 years of salary work? I don't think so.

I've found it's really only possible for me to do highly focused, productive coding for about 5 hours per day. I can spend other hours doing more routine things but for any kind of serious problem solving or implementation the quality of my output drops pretty precipitously after that.

So much so that it can actually be counter-productive to squeeze in a few extra hours because I'm likely to just make mistakes I have to undo the next day.

The SV jobs comes with perks that eliminate cooking, doing housework and so on. All 3 meals at work, having a laundry machine and a maid every 2 or 4 weeks plus some really basic clean up is plenty enough to keep your house cleaner than the average american. Also avoid commuting by living close to work. You also integrate fitness into your workday during lunch and so on.

But I don't want to build my entire lifestyle around my job; it should be the other way around. What if I like cooking and eating homemade food? What if relocating to an apartment close to work isn't an option? I get that you have to make compromises, but I would much rather compromise on my job and enjoy the rest of my life than have a great job but compromise on everything else. This is exactly the kind of attitude that pushed me towards contract work instead of fulltime employment.

"But I don't want to build my entire lifestyle around my job; it should be the other way around. What if I like cooking and eating homemade food? What if relocating to an apartment close to work isn't an option? I get that you have to make compromises, but I would much rather compromise on my job and enjoy the rest of my life than have a great job but compromise on everything else."

Amen. I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks it's crazy that we as a society think it's normal to spend almost all our time chasing money.

I think there are a lot of programming jobs that don't provide every meal free and any sort of housecleaning service. In fact, country-wide, I'd say the majority provide neither of those. I feel like outside of the brand-new-startup-with-no-revenue scene, 40-45 hour work weeks are also the norm by far.

Those perks tend to be concentrated in the Bay Area, where they are worth more than elsewhere since people there tend to spend a vast portion of their income on housing.

True, but even elsewhere (I live in Portland, OR), I'm starting to feel the "hussle" attitude infecting startups. I think it has a lot to do with investments: startups with a lot of cash are more likely to overhire and overwork their developers (in exchange for great pay), whereas bootstrapped startups that have less cash can't afford to pay huge salaries, so they instead need to make their company appealing by providing a better work schedule, etc. I don't know that there's a causal relationship there, but it's just an observation I've noticed.

Might work if you don't have a family. All three meals at work? What better way to set up a freeway to divorce for any potential employees who are married?

The life insurance policy protects against divorce.

Hah. That's a good one. It's good when someone else has a dark sense of humor too.

You don't have to have the meals, many people leave by 5pm and some people bring the dinners with them when they leave at 5pm!

But for people who don't want to spend the 2hrs/day total in decent food prep & cooking, it's there for them. Maid service and such is something you usually pay out of pocket, most of the times it's just meals & a gym.

Makes you wonder WHY Facebook is building their own city, or employers provide these types of perks.

This is nothing new, it's probably THE innovation of American industrial capitalism. Mirrors precisely what happened during the steel and then auto manufacturing booms: deliberate company towns.

And the following comes to mind:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get

Another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store

I generally work approximtely from 11am to 6pm (from home, so I have no commute), which adds up to 35h/week, and is more than enough for me.

I can work more if I have to but I'd be pretty miserable in the long term.

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