Clojurians Log v2

What's your work schedule like? Do you work the standard 5-day workweek 9-5?

Some people work like that, some people have zero constraints and can work whenever and for any amount of time. But how useful is that answer?

it also depends the area you work in, sometimes people need to stay on watch even when they are not technically at work because they are on call and might be needed to fix something.

Oh yeah, that's fun. Or shifts, from a few days to a few months.

I've heard of some people trying different regimes. For example working mornings and evenings, having free afternoons. Or part-timers, having wednesdays off. Just interested in what people have experinced, tried, and what they stick with. Tips & tricks on organizing the work on daily / weekly basis.

I worked 4 day weeks (Fridays off) for a few years. I did that as a contractor, so I just charged for the days worked (meaning I took the financial hit in order to work less). I've been working 5-day weeks for the past year and going back to 4-days as soon as I can, I'm not happy with only 2 days off for every 5 worked.

@mamapitufo I'm in similar situation. Last year I've been working full time, but I'm finding out I'd rather work less and make less money, but have more time for myself. I'm considering two options - taking one day a week off, or working less hours every day. I'm probably gonna go for the second option.

A long time ago I worked mornings only for a year and a half, and it was glorious :D

Sounds awesome!

We pair most of the time, so we have core-ish hours. Some people work 8:30-5, others 9:30-6, so you might have an hour of solo time on either end of the day. We pair all the time, except Friday afternoons is open source time to work on os or watch conference talks or other things to grow your knowledge/career. We switch pairs weekly, but have an odd number of engineers right now so every couple of months we get a week of solo work, usually stuff outside of the regular work- maybe investigating what it would take to bring in a new technology or plan a big refactor project or something. What is nice about pairing is that in order to work, you have to share hours with other people, so there’s no way that work invades your evenings or weekends (except when on call). It’s nice to know that once 6pm comes around, you are absolutely off duty and there’s no expectation you work outside of the regular hours.

@hmoorefarley did you find pairing that much to be exhausting when you first started? I’ve read quite a few bits of advice that suggest folks should only pair for a few hours at a time.

I remember my manager asking me that the first couple of weeks when I started that pairing job since it seems to be common, but I didn’t find it exhausting. I had moved from being a full time at-home parent with small kids to pairing and I found the demands on my attention weren’t hugely different. 🙂 In fact, my pair didn’t need to follow me into the restroom, so that’s a plus. @seancorfield

@janpotociar At work, we’re 100% remote (and have been for a decade or so) but we have “core hours” that cover, basically, Pacific TZ mornings, so we can have meetings as a team and/or as a company. Beyond that, folks can pretty much work whatever hours they want, and we’re very flexible about folks taking time off as needed. I typically work 10-6, 5 days a week, but it really depends on what else I’ve got going on and how I’m feeling. And there’s an unofficial allowance for half a day a week to be spent learning, doing open source, whatever work-adjacent stuff you want.

@hmoorefarley that’s interesting to hear. I haven’t worked anywhere that does extensive pairing. Our front end JS devs tend to pair quite a bit, maybe a few hours a day, but we don’t do that on the backend because it’s a large codebase and we mostly work on non-overlapping parts of it. Also, we’re a very, very small team 🙂