Why don't you only work 6 or 9 months of the year? Or 4 days a week[1]?
In your newfound time you could work on personal/charity projects or add some more to the "life" part of work-life balance, or do anything else you wish.
I think it would be harder to find a 4-day-week job, but taking 3 or 6 months off per year should be doable in this profession due to the nature of the work and very high earnings.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3883268
So far, it's working out great - I do the research work from home, occasionally commuting to uni, and it's great to have the balance of academia and real life work.
My current earn to frugal living ratio is: 5 working days buys me a month of living expenses.
Currently though i'm working very hard because i'm in the process of buying a non-tech real world "lifestyle" business that will run with minimal hours after a initial time investment peroid, which should allow me to give up contracting completely, should i choose to.
The existing owner is the hardest working guy i've met, used to be in the Army so has a proper work ethic. Thing is, hes not very good with people, hes got an abrasive personality, which doesnt bother me at all but i can see how its not good for managing people, and hes fully aware of this and doesnt want to manage people either. He currently does all the rounds himself for a total of a 60 hour work week in addition to his other things. I've already made hires to take over this and i'll manage them. Its going to be hard work to begin with but its an automatable system.
After expenses, it should generate £20k-£25k a year which is enough for me to live on frugally. I'll ideally expand it to generate more over the next year though. I'm paying less than the yearly profit to buy it as well, so its a damn good deal.
Also, I enjoy large chunks of it.
I could certainly take the time off, if I was willing to share a flat with other people rather than owning my own home - but dividing my wages in half would make my mortgage completely unaffordable - and the kind of mortgage I could afford would then have me living miles away from work and commuting long distances. Or living in horribly deprived areas.
Your statement assumes that the median wage produces a reasonable standard of living for everyone, no matter where in the country they live, and that's simply not true.
After being in the Valley since the dot-com boom, and going through the bust, and other personal issues, I was pretty burnt out, suffering from stress-related health issues, and after a couple of health scares, decided enough was enough.
I quit my job amicably, and spent 2012 just "doing my own thing". This entailed spending time on small, frivolous projects that I normally wouldn't have had time to pursue, and learning things that might help me in my career later on. I also spent a lot of time cooking dinner for my wife.
I don't spend a lot of money in general, but even so, I didn't curtail my spending at all, so I ate through a big chunk of my savings. I didn't care, and my wife and I even went on several trips. Obviously, having a working spouse helps, but one thing you learn after suffering through a few health scares is that money will come and go, but you're only young once, and your health (physical and mental) is pretty much the most important thing you have.
I didn't have any vast goals like creating a startup, or even creating my own iPhone app. I ended up not doing a lot except learn, but I really did feel refreshed and more important, I felt a lot better about myself and about programming in general. I spent 6-7 days a week, 6-10 hrs a day programming and learning, so I didn't waste any time at all, but didn't feel stressed out once. I even started working out again, although I didn't hit any of my weight targets.
After about 9 months, I figured it was time to get back to the world of the gainfully employed. Thankfully, no one cared that I took the time off, and I was able to get a new job at a company that I really am excited about within a few weeks.
Not interested.
I'm much happier working 40 hours a week, never having to work over the weekends, hardly ever having to do any over time or face ridiculous deadlines, and having a reasonable number of vacation days I can spread out through the year. I consider this a much better work-life balance and I'm equally happy taking a pay cut to get this.
This isn't true for everyone, it just depends on your lifestyle. In Silicon Valley you can earn 100k a year being a programmer that asks for standard 9-5 hours (or 10-6), so the real question is whether you can live on ~50k a year.
The real reason for the high salaries is because there aren't very many developers. However, from what I can see, there are machinations underway which will correct a lot of the supply problems over the next couple of decades. Many governments are pushing for primary school computer science education, and we have hacker schools and startups like codeacademy springing up everywhere. The money and success is going to attract the general public[0][1] many of which are finding it very difficult to get jobs, and they will come despite the perceived geekyness of the profession ultimately causing a cultural shift[2] before everything stabilises. Sort of like a mini gold rush.
That's my two pence anyway... :)
[0] http://www.thesocialnetwork-movie.com/
[1] http://www.bravotv.com/start-ups-silicon-valley/season-1/abo...
[2] I suspect we will eventually lose high average salaries but gain higher status as development becomes a more socially acceptable job.
If work is just a thing you do for money, then minimizing the amount of time you spend doing it makes sense. If you actually find work satisfying and care about the results, then I think it often makes sense to devote as much time as possible without causing yourself to stop enjoying it or become unproductive.
Having said that, I do try to reserve some time for side projects because that's a good way to develop new skills that I can apply to my main project.
"If I worked less, I'd want to spend the extra free time doing something important." Why do you focus on doing important things and not what-you-like-things?
Because I enjoy working.
Because, with 3 kids at home, work is a lot less work than being home. The most exhausting week this entire year was the vacation we took to the beach.
It would be doable money-wise but I would think it would be hard to find a company willing to go along with this arrangement- although if people know otherwise I'd love to hear which companies offer this level of flexibility. In the past, others have suggested using the time between jobs for this - but (in the US at least) you'd still need to pay into COBRA if you wanted your health insurance to continue during that time. Also, having worked through the dot-com period at the beginning of the last decade, I'm always a little cautious about assuming that it will be easy to land the next gig.
After I sold my first company I was sure I would take 5 years off and not work, I couldn't even sit still for a month before I was itching to build something else and soon started something new.
It's more of a lifestyle choice and my family and those around me probably suffer a bit, but the truth is my work is my addiction. I often wake up in the middle of the night and walk to my computer because I have just realized a solution to the problem I was trying to work through earlier in the night.
Some people don't understand those who keep going even when they don't have to, and I cannot speak for those who do, but in the case of myself I don't understand those who stop.
I am constantly thinking of a better way to do something or a more efficient method for something I have already done and I truly believe its just my personality. If I were a high school football coach I would want to coach college and if I were a college coach I would want to coach in the NFL.
Likewise if I were and NFL coach I would want to win superbowls. I feel the same way about business. No matter if I have success or not I can always find ways to improve and I constantly strive for better. My girlfriend will tell you its a sickness and my parents will tell you they don't understand but all I can tell you is I know no other way.
Everyone is wired differently but I truly believe entrepreneurs share some similarities about their ways of thinking. Not all are motivated by money (see Steve Jobs) although some are (Larry Ellison, Richard Branson) but most are motivated by changing the status quo, making an impact on society or at least their market and at least with most of the good ones who I have met they don't see stopping as an option.
1. I currently rely on contract work, and I find that I don't have contacts that want to employ a contractor for 20-30 hours a week, or even a set of contractors who want to employ for a combined 20-30 hours a week. Usually when people hire contractors, they want something done as soon as possible, without distractions.
To obtain my desired work hours per week, I will have to greatly extend my contacts list. Which I should do anyway, but it won't happen overnight.
2. Health insurance. I have mild schizophrenia which, untreated, makes it hard for me to reason logically. With the proper medication and care I remain gainfully employed as a dev/sysadmin/devops role. On top of that I have Tourette syndrome.
Insurance for anyone with these kinds of pre-existing conditions is expensive; laws changed such that very soon they won't be able to _deny_ it to me, but they can price it as high as they like. Despite having substantial savings, long periods of not having any income is out of the question for me. Therefore, either traditional corporate employment, or full-time contract work at a high enough wage to pay for high-quality insurance, are the way to go.
I don't mention these things in a "waaaa, waaaaa, I'm so helpless" way--far from it. I've attained more than the average person in my career, in terms of skills and pay.
Rather, I think people on this site forget sometimes that not everyone is suited to risk it all on a startup, and not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur, and not everyone has to be an A+++++ level developer to get by, and it's not a sin to seek some stability.
I have other flexibilitties associated with my job, like flexible work hours, telecommuting and open vacation policy, but it doesn't change the expectation of me being in the office 5 days a week as a general rule of thumb.
Instead I usually ride my bike. Which is productive in it's own way, and more the lifestyle I want anyway.
2) Money is addictive. My wife hates getting called for work at 3AM. But those calls pay so well for very little work that it's hard for her to take her name off the call list.
3) The fear that if you always say "no" to requests, you'll stop getting requests.
Your perspective is just that: a perspective. When his body changes (for the worse) so does his perspective.
Luckily, I don't have children or a mortgage, but I do have a health problem that requires me to maintain health insurance, which I pay for myself.
I find out about my YC application tomorrow, so I may not need to take client work for awhile, If I don't get an in person interview for YC, I will probably need to pick up a contract before January.
tldr; I do only work between 6-9 months a year or less.
We're working really hard on saving now, so that when we have kids we can both afford to go part-time, so as to not miss out on them growing up, and hopefully retire a bit early.
We're now at the point where our returns on our savings boost our annual income by about 10%, so slowly building up enough capital to give us that future flexibility.
Software Engineer salaries in the UK are generally pretty good, but not really equivalent to their US counterparts, so a lot of folks can't really afford to do this.
As a contractor/freelancer I make more money but have a lot less security and have to look for new contracts once in a while. I anticipate being able to take a couple of months off each year though. The problem is that work translates directly to income, so I could take those two months off, or I could get that new car or pay down my mortgage by a chunk.
So, I suppose it's only up to finding an employer who would accept you working like this or working for yourself. Either way is good.
Now however, I do not feel the same need for this. I love my job, I get to do some (not meeting intense) travelling with it and I love the people I work with and what I do. Basically I don't my job is what I do for fun.
That's why I work more now.
Easiest way to do this was reduce expenses. When I was with my ex, I lived on about 90% of earnings. Being single (for most of the last 5 years) I've been living off a lot less, but with a lot more travelling. (normally around 35-40%, but last financial year was 50% as I had six months off)
If you have enough money, you can do such a thing. If you don't, you're a bit more restricted.
Throwing in some kids, house, family, health issues, whatever compounds it, but at the end of the day, the more money the better.
Of course, my earnings took a serious hit, and that's probably the biggest reason only few people do work less. But I consider it was worth it!
I believe it's the same thing in software.
Eternal vacation/hobby projects with no gain sound awesome until you actually do it. It get's boring fast. I lasted 4 weeks in to my early retirement before I just had to do something.
b - Because it's not an easily available option. It's not impossible but having this kind of a "requirement" would be pretty limiting.
+ some more 18hrs a week of trying to grow out of the 40hrs+debt... can't work less otherwise it means dropping the tombstone on the dream of a satisfying life(moving to another country or bigger economic centers here could do too but health issues in family impede me). Sucks.
