Some companies have flexible work policies that give employees the option of switching to part time. My current employer (megacorp, not tech) has such a policy documented internally, not really widely advertised. I read about it, discussed it with manager, I framed it as "it doesn't make sense for me to work full time any more. I'm still open to doing part time. Can we switch to part time, per company policy?". Manager agreed, I negotiated with managers of project I was allocated to, to let them lock in the 3 days a week they wanted me at work, provided it left me with a contiguous 4 day weekend.

I've been part time for over a year now, 4 day weekends every week. It is pretty great. I don't do anything much productive with my days off, but that's okay. I worked full time for about a decade prior to this point.

Perhaps part of this is having negotiating power to frame the switch to part time not as a request, but instead implicitly framing it as "we need to figure out a part time arrangement or I'll need to find another employer that does", rather than requesting a switch to part time. Part of the negotiating power is being good enough at what you do for your skills to be in demand, and having resources or alternatives to fall back on if company is not willing to agree to a part time arrangement.

I appreciate that you acknowledge the negotiating power required to make that kind of a move.

That sounds like a great move for you, and I'm really curious about your experience. Do you find that you're more "out of the loop"? Naively, I would expect you to become a lot more of a satellite employee, less involved in any decisionmaking. How has that gone?

> Do you find that you're more "out of the loop"? Naively, I would expect you to become a lot more of a satellite employee, less involved in any decisionmaking

yes. more decisions will be made without your ability to influence them. if everyone else is full time then projects won't wait for you!

there are some ways to mitigate this, that perhaps also overlap with ways to organise decision making more effectively. if your company or team has a culture of drafting and circulating written docs (e.g. engineering design docs) before making a decision, then you can somewhat influence decisions by submitting written feedback and recommendations in advance, even if you cannot attend the meeting on the day when the decision will be made. also, if there is some written record of the decision -- written up in the company wiki, or emailed, or broadcast into the project slack channel -- then you can catch up over morning coffee and review how the entire strategy has changed since last week.

similarly, avoid becoming a bottleneck for your full-time colleagues. if i leave a code review on a colleague's pull request that we're not able to close off before my week ends, i tell them they don't need to wait for me to "approve" the pull request & ask them to merge it when they feel they've sufficiently addressed review feedback, or get a colleague to review it instead.

>Part of the negotiating power is being good enough at what you do for your skills to be in demand, and having resources or alternatives to fall back on if company is not willing to agree to a part time arrangement.

but that's the thing: there aren't many jobs past entry level that even give such an option for part time. Consulting is the closest factor but even than can have some strict time requirements (too strict at times).

So for (I wager) 90+% of people, the only fallback is "I can quit and never work a day in my life again" sorts of situations. That or you are playing some high stakes career haggling should the employer decide to try and train a replacement that will work full tim.

> Working less than 40 is nice but once you get down to 20 you have whole DAYS where you can do whatever you want

I spent around 10 years working about 20 hours a week doing freelance work.

It's good until it's not. Basically, yes you do have a lot of time and often times you can decide to be done at noon if you'd like. Taking entire days off is also possible unless it's expected to do something in a timely fashion such as meet with someone or produce results by XYZ day. I found in practice it wasn't possible to really drop off the grid for continuous 4 day weekends.

I came to the conclusion this lifestyle is only really worth it when you have more money than you would likely ever have if you worked this schedule for a long time. For example, if you only worked 3 days a week but had millions of dollars then this would be super interesting because you could go and do fun things all the time. Having $5,000 a month to spend guilt free to do whatever would be amazing if it didn't cut into any type of retirement fund because you're already set.

But if you're working for half a salary chances are you don't have millions of dollars tucked away unless remarkable things have happened to you. So what you really end up doing is finishing at noon some days and then procrastinating on everything while you do nothing productive or fun because you've done everything you could with your budget 100 times over after years of this lifestyle. At least that's what happened to me. Your mileage may vary.

I realized I'm happier when I feel like I'm maximizing my time. That doesn't mean always working but it means feeling like I'm making enough to where when I want to take off 2 weeks a few times a year to do something really fun it's fully enjoyed. Then I fill in the gaps between trips doing assorted fun but not crazy things. With 40 hours of payments this becomes less of a financial burden. Only problem now is having less time to do them.

> So what you really end up doing is finishing at noon some days and then procrastinating on everything while you do nothing productive or fun because you've done everything you could with your budget 100 times over after years of this lifestyle.

This indicates that you are tying "free time" closely with "spending money" by doing some costly activity. Perhaps that's the issue right there.

Just sitting in the sunshine at a lake with a book, or with a cappuccino in a cozy coffee place downtown chatting with friends, neither costs significant money. Or go running or biking or swimming or rock climbing. Or hack a cool side project in Haskell, whatever floats your boat.

I'm not sure what you are aiming for to do with your free time, but if anything that doesn't cost significant money you book as "just procrastinating" instead of enjoying the free time, then that's the issue here.

> This indicates that you are tying "free time" closely with "spending money" by doing some costly activity. Perhaps that's the issue right there.

I'm kind of the total opposite really. I can have fun and enjoy myself without spending "real" money but guilt free money IMO make things more enjoyable when you're talking about keeping yourself occupied for spans of years.

For example I do walk a few miles every day, totally disconnected. I really like this. I've been doing this for a bunch of years on both a 20 and 40 work week schedule. I usually walk around my neighborhood but there's a couple of spots within a 10 mile radius that are nice to mix it up by going through trails, etc.

But when you finish work every day at noon those walks are going to fill up an hour or 2 of time. The same goes for reading for an hour or so. There's still a ton of time left.

Everyone is different but even as someone who can keep themselves fairly self entertained walking + reading + coding gets tedious if you're doing this every single day for 4-5 hours for ~10 years straight. It's not that they become boring but it leaves you wanting to do more things. I still do find legit joy in walking and occasional reading but when that's done my idea of procrastinating is basically looping HN, Reddit and YouTube while thinking "why are you doing this, wouldn't it be better to just work 40 hours and save more money so you have better options later?" or "yeah, go do something else but wait that's $75 bucks -- are you sure it's worth it?".

One thing I would like to try is moving somewhere new every 3-4 months. I think that could fill a gap of boredom because I find exploring new areas by foot really fun.

> Taking entire days off is also possible unless it's expected to do something in a timely fashion such as meet with someone or produce results by XYZ day. I found in practice it wasn't possible to really drop off the grid for continuous 4 day weekends.

I've tried to hire part-time employees or 4-day workweek employees in the past. You described essentially the #1 roadblock.

It actually works okay as long as you have a steady stream of non-urgent, totally isolated, async-okay work for them to do. Most companies run out of that type of work fairly quickly and prefer full-time employees who can work together with their teammates. It actually becomes a constant annoyance for the rest of the team if the 1 person working part-time is only sporadically available, so they now have to shape their workweeks around that person's availability.

> For example, if you only worked 3 days a week but had millions of dollars then this would be super interesting because you could go and do fun things all the time. Having $5,000 a month to spend guilt free to do whatever would be amazing if it didn't cut into any type of retirement fund because you're already set.

Without going into too many details, I can actually speak to this. It's another scenario that's amazing at first, but (I really hate to say this) gets old over time.

The problem for me was that few other people were available to do things during the week. I grew close to some friends with similarly erratic schedules (professional nurses often work 3x12 schedules, for example), but it's a small population. I enjoy doing a lot of things alone, but being able to do them with friends would be more fun.

I also started feeling like I was missing out on interesting engineering problems that my friends were working on. Once you have the means to be selective about the jobs you take and money can be a secondary concern (to a degree) you have the option of joining a lot of very interesting companies and working with very interesting people.

>The problem for me was that few other people were available to do things during the week.

This describes what I felt after a few months of "not working". Most people I knew, and probably most people in US, are in a 5/2 schedule. Work 5 days then you get Friday night and whole weekend off. If you add 5 more days to that schedule it all mixes and after a while it got old, too. your millage may vary :)

maybe the problem is the 4day workweek. I worked 30h for some months and 32h for half a year in between always fulltime. People want to shovel one day free and then add a weekend but that creates all those sync issues and makes them just less productive. But instead work 6h every day in intelligence jobs like programming. When I did that I had zero sync issues because in core time I was always there, I had no downtime during work. Effectively I got just as much if not more done than fulltime but still everyday felt like I had half the day to myself (going swimming ...). It is a worlds difference in quality of life (unless you have to fill the free time with other family work or waste your life on Netflix).

If I was an employer in IT, I would only hire 6h day workers (full pay). No breaks but no more than 6h 5 days a week. I can do 6h concentrated work almost any day with an afternoon/evening of other things. 8 or 12h only works occasionally on average when I work 8h I add more than the 2 extra hours of time wasting, because less satisfied/concentrated/happy.

Totally understood that someone not being available is an inconvenience, especially if that someone is the only one.

I'm curious though how that's really so different from other situations than "4 day work week guy". I'd say that it could shape up as much of the same, depending on how you define "4 day work week". If that means someone is always unavailable for an entire Friday or Monday or Wednesday for example and everyone else works nine-to-five in the same office, that can seriously change some things, sure. Not a fun situation. Heck, being the "remote only guy" during the exact same 5 day work week when everyone else is in the exact same team room in the office together is not great.

How about having teams made up only of people on 4 day work weeks? Suddenly it's not an issue any longer I would say and that is something I think the pandemic has taught us can be done. Not without some rules and not without some adjustments. I do think that those adjustments made permanent are well worth it for both sides. You gotta align when people work their 4 days at least a bit so that there is a chance to have some synchronous communication.

I can think of a few examples of this actually. One would be a team that is not co-located but instead spread over multiple timezones. Say some people in London (GMT), some in New York (EST) and some in Los Angeles (PDT). There's a short period of overlap in a "normal workday". If we limit the 4 day work week such that everyone has to work during each weekday's overlap period but is free to choose when to work (during Mon-Fri "normal workdays", I would argue this is totally workable. Another example would be (mostly freelancers) that travel from their home town to work on Monday morning and leave for home on Friday afternoon. They will arrive at work around mid-day Monday and leave for home when everyone else goes for lunch on Friday and work a little longer than everyone else in the evenings Mon-Thu. Works perfectly well from my experience tbh.

So what about "4 day" guy being that last example? He starts work Monday after lunch and is gone at lunch on Friday. Just no commute? Instead of working late the rest of the week he just doesn't. Should work just fine if you ask me without most of the effects that being off for an entire whole day (whichever it is) would have. Add in a few timezones across the team and you won't really notice the difference with a bit of planning of when someone will be available.

Now one thing that is left are "urgent matters". I think that is not really an issue either. You gotta plan properly anyway. The fact that many C-levels (and some lower levels) can't plan and just "need to get this done by EOD" is completely irrelevant to me. They just gotta learn to plan instead of just making people bend to their will because they're utterly bad at even the tiniest bit of planning ahead. For everything else there's "on-call" or "tomorrow", because it's either really important and you pay for it or it's not that important.

> made me really want to find a job that was less pay but also that low in hours

This was a very large factor in why I quit - old job wouldn't let me cut back hours, even at reduced pay, even framing it as "leave without pay", so I had no choice but to quit to get my time back, and I had enough money.

As it is, I'm content staying in that "learning and broadening" mode, even though I'm 20-ish years in on my career.

I don't think I'll go back, unless I absolutely have to, or a project catches my interest, but even then, no amount of money is going to convince me to work so many hours or ever in an office again (another reason I quit was they wanted us back in the office, despite my being much more effective working from home).

> old job wouldn't let me cut back hours, even at reduced pay, even framing it as "leave without pay",

I was curious what your role was, at what the incentives might have been for your old job to refuse this.

In your about page I see:

> Previously a programmer in the DoD world

speculation: were you working for a contractor that needed to bill your time out by the hour to the government? So if you weren't working maximum billable hours, they weren't making maximum profit margin on your hours, compared to someone else who would?

No, I was in civil service. Something I've had explained to me since is that even if my boss wanted to (he didn't; very old-school thinking), they couldn't because my position wasn't "coded" for part time.

This was a problem I also bumped up against quite often as someone who has been doing "DevOps" things since before that term was coined, but the government very much wants to pigeonhole people and couldn't wrap it's head around someone with IT experience who was also a software engineer. Even with certs that I basically earned blindfolded, they wouldn't grant me a sysadmin letter, and I didn't want to re-code to IT/IM because I saw how burned out sysadmins got. The turnover in government IT was insane.

If I really wanted, I could go be a government contractor, but I've seen they still want even contractors on-site, and it's completely unnecessary. For now, I'm just "re-tooling" to tech stacks that have piqued my interest, exploring my options (eg, my brother the designer wants to build games with me).

Honestly, I'm not the first, and from people I've kept in touch with, I'm far from the last. Government agencies need a serious kick in the pants if they want to keep good talent. It's not so much about the money, that's always going to be below market rate due to the tradeoff in stability and benefits (and even benefits are dwindling), it's more about recognizing that WFH is a right, not a privilege, and being flexible in hours and horizontal job duty changes. I've watched many a better engineer than myself leave for greener pastures (Micron, Blue Origin, etc), and middle management is still in denial because they've been in the same role for 30+ years and think "nothing has changed", or if they do adopt business practices, it's always the worst ones (open floor plans, etc). FFS, I couldn't get the last project I worked on to enable CI on their GitLab instance.

This sounds great. Ideally for me is that I am able to choose stretches of the year where I work 50% and stretches where I work 100%, and small number of weeks where I work 150%.