Making $1 million from affiliate links on "Ad-Free" blog - <AUTHOR> http://on-advertising.tumblr.com/post/42994773187/maria-popova-have-you-made-1m-on-affiliate-ads-while <comment><USER2> This discussion is quite long, but for me it's really simple:

You don't say your site is ad-free if you get paid for links. Especially inside the donations pitch.

I don't care if you take donations, have a paywall, or sell advertisements (the ballet does all three, and that's awesome). Just be honest.

A maxim I use when trying to establish honesty: If you write a sentence that a substantial number of readers are misinterpreting, it's usually fair to call it an inaccurate sentence. If it's knowingly left there, it's usually fair to call it dishonest. Exceptions would include technically difficult material.

Edit: In this case, both the group paying her (Amazon) and Wikipedia refer to affiliate links as ads. I haven't polled her general readership, but that's a reasonable proxy for how the terms "ad-free" and "affiliate links" are interpreted.

<https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing>

<comment><USER3> The difference is between solicited and unsolicited paid promotions. Popova thinks there's an obvious difference which goes without saying. Bleymaier thinks there's no difference and therefore attacked Popova for being morally bankrupt.

Sound about right?

<comment><USER4> The deception seems not about how to classify affiliate links, but rather deliberately leading the reader to infer that the blog's only income source is donations

<comment><USER3> Maybe so. It all boils down to recommendation versus promotion. I hate ads yet I'm totally comfortable with affiliate links on blog, so I consider her site to be ad-free.

Oddly, I don't like affiliate links in forums like HN.

<comment><USER5> Why do you think one is okay but not the other?

<comment><USER6> I feel the same as grandparent, but it's a blurry line. Ideally, promoted ads _should be_ recommendations. Buy more than just reach to a demo, instead ensure a qualified voice authentically highlights your benefits - more akin to social recommendations from friends than banner ads.

This is rarely attempted in a world of publications that depend on ad volume and outsourced ad buyer supply, but examples exist. The webcomic Penny Arcade recently ran a Kickstarter to achieve freedom from ads, but found itself answering questions like "What if I love ads?" (<http://www.penny- arcade.com/2012/07/20/what-if-i-love-ads>) because they'd built a reputation of only advertising products they would feel comfortable endorsing even without an adbuy (can't find a direct link to when they talk about this, but it's out there somewhere).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am surprised that the FTC's position on this issue is a footnote of the original article and the HN discussion.

From FTC Assistant Deputy Rich Cleland: "a disclosure must be made when a blogger is recommending something and using an affiliate link. He went on to say that "the recommendation triggers the disclosure requirement."(1)

There is no wiggle room here.

Maria Popova needs to disclose the relationship with her advertisers (Amazon).

The FTC has a gargantuan job ahead of them w/regard to enforcement, but that's no excuse especially given the content that Popova writes about.

(1) [http://lovell.com/corporate-blogs/ftc-guidelines-include- aff...](http://lovell.com/corporate-blogs/ftc-guidelines-include-affiliate- links/)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, a lot of prominent bloggers are violating that rule then. Marco Arment (<http://www.marco.org/2013/01/06/baby-stuff-review>), Jeff Atwood ([http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone- st...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-still-needs- a-router.html)), not to mention The Wirecutter blog. (<http://thewirecutter.com>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Affiliate links are absolutely a form of advertising. It's called CPA (cost per action), and its one of the two major categories of performance advertising. The other category of performance advertising is CPC (cost per click), which is most common in search advertising but is also used by Google for their Adwords on-page ads. Banner ads are often sold as CPM (cost per thousand), which is often called brand advertising as opposed to performance.

Setting aside semantics, ad-free publications are expected to be influence- free. The minute a publication starts to optimize their affiliate links, they are allowing their advertising revenue to influence their publication.

Finally, as another poster has pointed out: using affiliate links is not her mistake. Her mistake is claiming to be ad-free when she is not. And claiming to be supported solely by donations, when she is not.

Both of these mistakes are fraud according to the FTC and also under California law (which applies to her readers in California). She is most exposed to a class-action lawsuit from a lawsuit mill. Literally, there are law firms whose main line menu says "press 4 if you have received a class- action lawsuit from us".

Changing the wording in response to a complaint, then changing it back after creating an LLC will be the crucial step that the law firm uses to pursue the case against her personally and against the LLC.

<comment><USER10> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get this at all.

So she has a site full of affiliate links because (holy crap) she wants to make some cash. Is OP mad about this? If so, meh, get a life.

So she says her site is 100% ad free. It is. Affiliate links aren't "ads" in any definition a reader would have unless it is somehow immoral to make a living.

So she asks for donations in order to keep ads off her site while at the same time employing affiliate links. I missed the part where there is a law about having multiple sources of income, and so did the company you most likely work for. Would you be happier if she put this entire thing behind a paywall?

I really don't understand the logic behind the critique. She provides a service, if you like the service, you get to consume it _completely without payment_. Now you're bitching because you've found out that she has found a way to continue to offer this service to you _for free_?

The beauty about "reviews" is that if you don't like them - for whatever reason - you stop listening. It's irrelevant whether the person is paid or not for a favourable review if you actually like the end product and agree with the review!

The entire idea of "immorality of paid reviews" screams of teenage "your band sold out because lots of people like you".

<comment><USER12> Affiliate links are advertisements, the best kind, they have a call to action "buy this" and a built in tracking mechanism. When you watch CSI on television and they drink pepsi (not coke, not generic cola) that creates a link in your brain that the 'cool kids' on CSI drink pepsi, and a billion studies have shown that this influences peoples choice when they are sitting in the soda aisle at the store buying soft drinks.

She writes a blog, it has loyal readers, she recommends things. People who click on her recommendations and buy them sends her money. Similar studies have shown that when the amount of 'reward' you get from your actions is easily tied to those actions, you modify your actions to maximize your reward, even without thinking consciously about it.

That is why journalists try to put an impermeable wall between the money they are paid, and what they write. They are no more incented to write good things than they are bad things, they are _more likely_ to write the truth as they see it.

She is on record as preaching independence for financial gain, and yet has set up her blog such that she can shade her words to increase or decrease the financial return. So she lies. Probably to herself as much as anyone else, I mean most folks don't start out trying to lose their integrity, it happens slowly over time.

One day she will wake up, reading a column she wrote with a glowing take on a complete piece of crap book with a high resale price because her declining readership is returning less and less money and her need to pump up the sales to cover her bills that just won't go away.

This has caused nervous breakdowns in people, when the fiction they have carefully woven inside their own head to cover their journey down the road into hell suddenly breaks down. Athletes who "don't do steroids" but that one time they needed a bit of HGH to heal up in time for the All Star break or get ready for spring training, a way to just be more of themselves during the post season, not cheating right? They would be this strong/healthy/whatever with regular workouts and physical therapy but the timing is just off, it's not cheating it's just dealing with the schedule that is imposed. The financial trader who just needs a bit more focus on this one day and decides to pop an Adderall or truck driver that does a bit of cocaine to get through just this month's deliveries.

If it were a new story, it might be interesting but it isn't. Its a sad story. It ends badly. And this article gives as good a narrative as any about how these stories start.

<comment><USER13> I was mostly agreeing with what you said.. until you somehow conflated steroids to ADHD medication.

Steroids are never prescribed by medical experts, ADHD medication is.

<comment><USER14> Allergies and asthma are two common reasons steroids are prescribed.

<comment><USER12> I had a nasty case of poison oak which required steroids to clear up, it was not fun at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Curious that I didn't see this quoted...

<http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/donate/>

> Keeping it a clean, ad-free reading experience — which is important to me > and, I hope, to you — means it's subsidized by the generous support of > readers like you: directly, through donations, and indirectly, whenever you > buy a book on Amazon from a link on Brain Pickings, which sends me a small > percentage of its price.

Update: it looks like that and the site's footer explanation of Amazon links were both added recently (they don't appear in the Wayback Machine: [http://web.archive.org/web/20130116024042/http://www.brainpi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130116024042/http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/donate/) )

<comment><USER16> Probably because she added that after the articles in question were written.

<comment><USER17> That's more than fishy. I wonder if they will vanish in 6 months

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If anyone is interested in turning on Amazon Affiliates for a technical blog, I collected some data over the past few months.

I put a single affiliate link on my technical book reviews (sample: [http://swanson.github.com/writeup/2012/10/29/complications.h...](http://swanson.github.com/writeup/2012/10/29/complications.html)).

The numbers: <https://gist.github.com/swanson/4711006>

Not exactly rolling in cash yet :)

<comment><USER19> Technology blogs with affiliate links and/or adsense are known to have much lower conversion rates than average because tech savvy people tend to be more blind to ads (and many even use adblockers), and these users are typically aware that these programs exist.

I know I for one always hover over links before I click on them to see if they're affiliate links, and I can't remember the last time I clicked on an ad on Google or elsewhere.

<comment><USER20> "I know I for one always hover over links before I click on them to see if they're affiliate links"

Do you do this because you are curious, or because you don't want to click the link if it is an affiliate link? If the latter is the case, it seems strange you would not want to support the tech blogs you read, at no extra cost to yourself, if you already intend to purchase the item linked.

<comment><USER13> I think issue here is if you see an affiliate link, you start to question whether the author is heartily suggesting something because he genuinely likes it and wants to recommend it to you or he's just a bored blogger posting a new link on a new day, because that is what he does. On a side note, it seems to me that the author-reader trust is arguably preserved if the author of the articles does not choose what ads appear on his site because it absolves him of the cloud of doubt that he might have ulterior motives.

Maybe a lot of the folks doing this are the ones that used to see ads before they started using Adblock, and they still have a memory of ads leaving a bad taste in their mouth. Of course all of this is questioning the model of an ad- supported Internet. This is something I'm still conflicted about -- I really don't want to see ads on Google et al., I mean I _really_ don't, I really wish I could give Google $50/month and tell them hey just focus on the experience, don't show me ads, and I'll be your customer. I'd do this for a whole array of sites on which I begrudgingly use Adblock and other extensions that prevent affiliate links from appearing.

<comment><USER18> I agree about the motivation aspect - should I write a glowing review of a book that I didn't like to generate more clicks? Even if I write honestly, will it be perceived as disingenuous because of affiliate links?

I turned on the affiliates links as an experiment and haven't changed my style - though I always try to find at least something positive about a book. I'll probably revisit it in the future and decide if the (thus far) meager income is worth dealing with the reader-trust issues.

<comment><USER21> I agree, I don't have a problem with affiliate ads but if the article in question is a gushingly positive review without any negatives mentioned and they are using an affiliate link then I tend to question the motivation behind writing it. I also will then look for a review that doesn't contain an affiliate id or one that covers the pros and cons giving a full review instead of an advertisement disguised as a review.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A, perhaps, more nuanced analysis:

1\. [http://blogs.reuters.com/felix- salmon/2013/02/13/blogonomics...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix- salmon/2013/02/13/blogonomics-maria-popova-edition/)

2\. [http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/16/maria- popov...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/16/maria-popovas- blogonomics-part-2/)

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the links, including a response at the end of the first link.

From the second link:

      > To a certain extent, this is a female thing:  positive happy
      > bloggers tend to be female, as do their readers.*
      > ...
      > *Update: This sentence has not gone down well in the Twittersphere.

Surprise!??

<comment><USER24> Yeah unfortunately that one sentence has overridden this whole article because of the nature of Twitter--people keep retweeting and piling on without ever reading the article. It was a really dumb statement though. I don't even understand how to begin with that. Wouldn't you assume audience is more related to content than how positive or how many vaginas someone has? This just seems to focus on the wrong thing...

<comment><USER25> I wonder if there would have been the same reaction had Salmon instead written his observation with leftish-academic word choice:

 _To a certain extent, this is a gendered phenomenon: positive happy bloggers are disproportionately female, as are their readers._

Same idea – which may or may not be true, but it seems plausible enough to entertain for the purposes of casual opinionated discussion. The rephrasing gives it more intellectual and euphemistic padding, as a defense against knee- jerk outrage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I agree with the main point of the article.

However, I can tell you that your $1M in affiliate revenue on 1.2M UV for a literary blog is way off. Your assumption of 10% conversion is off by at least an order of magnitude.

The more likely rate is probably less than 1%. This would bring the total amount to around $100K in your calculation.

<comment><USER27> I do (much lower scale) affiliate links and book reviews, mostly for the data, rather than the money. But my conversion rate is something like 23%. With a good niche and qualified traffic (eg most traffic coming from people genuinely linking to you because the content is awesome and relevant) 10% is not impossible.

<comment><USER15> Your conversion rate from unique visitors to sales is 23%? What type of traffic are you talking about? That's absurdly high and would still be high for a site that directly sells something, let alone a site that has a link to a book.

<comment><USER23> People that do the work to find these types of niches don't usually just announce them to the world on Hacker News.

<comment><USER15> The amount of traffic is not a giveaway of the vertical. 23% of a 100 visits is something entirely different than 23% of 1,000,000 visits.

<comment><USER23> When you said 'type' (of traffic) above I did not think that meant 'amount'.

I do agree that amount of traffic is not a giveaway.

<comment><USER15> Well I meant both how much and what type (as in direct, referral, organic search engine, paid search engine, etc).

23% would be unbelievable for direct traffic like the blog in question has, but less so for search engine traffic (if you have links to what people were searching about they are many many times more likely to both click and convert than if they are just on their daily read through).

He/she could also have meant 23% conversion as reported through Amazon which means 23% of the people who clicked ended up purchasing, also a much more believable number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been following this story, as my co-founder and I are in the midst of an advertising-policy debate.

I think the main issue was Popova not disclosing, even in some tiny font somewhere, that there were affiliate links. She may have avoided that in order to hold the "ad-free" moral high ground.

The FTC guidelines on this are an interesting read if you make endorsements, even affiliate links, on your site. I'll track it down.

EDIT - Here it is: [http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides...](http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf)

<comment><USER29> >I think the main issue was Popova not disclosing, even in some tiny font somewhere, that there were affiliate links.

A visit to her site reveals that she has corrected that defect. Down at the bottom, we now see:

        Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates
        Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means
        for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human
        terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link
        on here, I get a small percentage of its price. That helps support
        Brain Pickings by offsetting a fraction of what it takes to maintain
        the site, and is very much appreciated.

<comment><USER30> That's clever wording:

      That helps support Brain Pickings by offsetting a fraction
      of what it takes to maintain the site[...]

It implies that only a small amount of the costs to maintain the site are paid for by affiliate link earnings, but _technically_ something like 200/1 is also a "fraction".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've read the books she recommends on her website and they are usually thoughtful pieces of writing.

I don't think her statement, that she uses Amazon data to find other books her readers enjoy, is an admission of immoral conduct. She said a quarter of the books she recommends are from information she gained from Amazon. I believe she's referring to how she discovered them and not the reason she recommends them. Of course I am giving her the benefit of the doubt because the quality of the content on her site is generally high.

She serves her niche of intellectuals fairly well and I think spamming with lower quality content for the sake of making money would be noticed quickly by them. The donations on top of the affiliate links seems a bit much, but I think people might still donate and or purchase in order to show support for her work.

<comment><USER13> > I don't think her statement, that she uses Amazon data to find other books > her readers enjoy, is an admission of immoral conduct. She said a quarter of > the books she recommends are from information she gained from Amazon.

Visiting the website for myself now: <http://www.brainpickings.org/>

I think it's clear that she's deliberately and forcefully fishing for clicks on Amazon affiliate link hits. I mean, just take a look at the number of large images (every one of them being affiliate links), one after another, encompassing probably 6-page'fuls at times (and I'm on a 1080p res.). I'm a person who's usually very well aware of what is an affiliate link or not... and yet I found myself strongly wanting to click the images. I don't buy it for a single second that Popova is not exactly aware of what she is doing. Her repeated requests for donations (after _every_ post, in which she stresses that this is a site that doesn't have advertisements) leave no room for doubt -- I strongly believe she is disrespecting the user in a very fundamental way by misleading them like this and playing them on.

<comment><USER32> As I write this, there are over 40 Amazon affiliate links on her homepage alone. And as you correctly point out, they're prominently placed (esp. using images) to achieve maximum click-through.

She says the affiliate revenue she's downplaying is way, way less than what the article assumes. Well, if I were her I'd:

1) disclose all my Amazon revenue and

2) donate it every month to someplace awesome

That'd probably get her more monthly subscribers, earn her more money, and silence the haters. Unfortunately her dissembling on this issue so far sort of edges me into the latter category.

<comment><USER33> That is very noble of you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Here's Maria's response to these accusations: [http://www.scilogs.com/next_regeneration/internet-curator- ma...](http://www.scilogs.com/next_regeneration/internet-curator-maria-popova- responds-to-unfair-accusations-with-civility/)

In particular, she states, _"Regarding his Tumblr article – first of all, those numbers are ludicrous! If Amazon gave me even a tenth of that a year after Uncle Sam takes his fair share, I'd be delighted. Delighted!"_

<comment><USER35> That seems to imply that before taxes she is making at least $100k

<comment><USER36> Assuming literal honesty, "if 1/10 of that, i'd be thrilled!" does suggest that the actual figure is at least 1/20th of whatever "that" was (1.2m/yr?) (but could still be lower).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This post seems too dramatic - it looks like she is simply admitting to learning from what her readers read. If you build an audience writing a certain way, it's likely that your readers also have something of value to contribute and inspecting what they read and in turn offering it to other readers on your website is clever, if anything.

Also, it's just not nice to publish personal email communication. Just bring it up with her over a coffee or something.

<comment><USER38> I don't think it's particularly dramatic -- many of us find blogs in general to have more moral ambiguity/flexibility, and less of a understanding of the power of persuasion. This is an absolutely rampant issue (did Marco or Atwood recommend that hard drive or coffee carafe because it's the best...or because it's one that they could post an affiliate link to? What inspired that post?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> > the simplest summary question I can think to ask is: What do you think > Richard Feynman would do in your situation?

At the risk of getting downvoted for a silly comment, there's the Feynman Flowchart: [http://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/what- would...](http://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/what-would- feynman-do/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Funny thing is: she could make more money by telling people she gets support from the links. She just needs to spin it correctly.People want to buy these books, knowing it is helping her would only make them want to buy them more.

I worked at a non-profit tech company that did a campaign where we got people to use our affiliate code to make purchases on Amazon. People liked doing it, it made them feel good. It also gave them excuse to feel good about going on a buying spree on Amazon.

I bet she could significantly increase revenue buy having a button under each book she links to that said, "Help keep this site going, buy this book".

And it would also sidestep this whole controversy.

<comment><USER41> I think this is the best idea/solution in this thread...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > There are typically 3 articles published per day, and most pages have more > than one article, but for the most conservative number of ad impressions > let's assume one article per page, yielding 6 ads per page. At 3M page views > per month, this is about 18M affiliate ads served per month, or 216M > impressions per year.

It's cute that the author thinks number of links = "impressions" and that it has some sort of effect on the number of sales. In reality it's mostly the same people viewing the site every day and very few will end up buying a book, even fewer from the affiliate link (there appears to also always be a link for finding it in your local public library). You could put 100 links in a post and have no more sales than with 1, what matters is if your readers find the book interesting enough to want to pay to read it.

<comment><USER42> I believe they are using "impressions" in the technical sense.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_(online_media)>

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Couple of issues with this:

1) The screenshot mentioned in the story shows no clear indications of the advertising he refers to. [http://on- advertising.tumblr.com/post/42994492644/donation-p...](http://on- advertising.tumblr.com/post/42994492644/donation-pitch-included-at-the-end-of- each-brain)

2) Author has included a massive wall of text with little structure. No headings or sections. Makes it harder to get through it.

3) Most important of all, the author does not provide a clear link to the site of the person he is criticizing. This makes it harder for third parties (us) to evaluate his claims.

</comment><comment><USER19> It looks she now has a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that says they participate in the Amazon Affiliate program which allows website owners the ability to earn a commission for products that are linked to.

<comment><USER44> Sure, but it's located below the donation section, which still claims to be ad free. And the site itself is JAMMED with affiliate links disguised as pretty pictures. She can justify it however she wants, but at the end of the day, she's misleading readers (IMO).

<comment><USER45> _> And the site itself is JAMMED with affiliate links disguised as pretty pictures._

Those "pretty pictures" are often illustrations from the work shown to assist in the review. That's quite the undertone you're wringing out of her rather mundane actions.

<comment><USER46> Attaching affiliate links to those images is not "mundane". It effectively them into banner ads. She's covering her site in click targets that make her money _and then_ claiming to be ad-free on the same page.

<comment><USER45> It really is, considering the number of people who use Amazon's affiliate service. She's not sneaking in links or using a URL shortener or something. She's taking a part of her review that might entice people to buy the book— the illustrations— and adding an affiliate link to them. Pretty mundane. Personally, it just hasn't crossed that line into "shady behavior used by spammers."

<comment><USER46> _She's taking a part of her review that might entice people to buy the book— the illustrations— and adding an affiliate link to them._

Yes. That's called advertising. Something every page of her site denies it has.

<comment><USER45> Er, no. I'm not saying those images exist solely to entice someone into clicking them. _That_ would be advertising.

Those images fulfill a purpose to the reader: They deepen the review.

<comment><USER46> In what way does an affiliate link deepen the review?

<comment><USER45> They don't. The images do. She is merely utilizing the images to also be affiliate links.

<comment><USER46> What "merely"? That's exactly what I said she was doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> "from Amazon after her readers click the ads in her articles and go on to make purchases (she sees, and makes commissions off of, the other items they place in their shopping cart, including books that she didn't link to)."

How does this work exactly? Is there a cookie with the affiliate's id set when you click on an affiliate's link?

<comment><USER48> Any purchases made within 24 hours are credited to your account. You can send them to Amazon in buy a $9 book, and if they buy a $2500 TV four hours later, you get your 6%.

<comment><USER49> Yeah, I've even seen pop-unders on shady sites whose entire purpose seems to be to set Amazon affiliate cookies in the hope of making money off unrelated Amazon purchases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'm not sure what her support page used to say, but it seems perfectly clear at present. In the same sentence she both says she wants to keep the site ad- free AND confirms that one of the way she does this is through affiliate links:

"Keeping it a clean, ad-free reading experience — which is important to me and, I hope, to you — means it's subsidized by the generous support of readers like you: directly, through donations, and indirectly, whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on Brain Pickings, which sends me a small percentage of its price."

Seems like she's being fully transparent.

<comment><USER51> The Web Archive tells all: [http://web.archive.org/web/20130116151028/http://www.brainpi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130116151028/http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/donate/)

The last snapshot was a month ago but it clearly didn't say it then. What do you want to bet the page changed in the last five hours?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Does the math in the post seem plausible to anyone who uses affiliate links? A .001 click-through rate to Amazon seems plausible, but unless I'm mistaken the author of the post is using that a conversion percentage (i.e. a click-through + purchase), which seems way too high to me, by an order of magnitude or more.

Does anyone have solid numbers for click-through to purchase rates of affiliate links?

<comment><USER53> From my own numbers for Q4 2012 from my personal blog:

~6900 "impressions", 577 "product link clicks", 36 "other clicks" (NFI), 8 "total items ordered", 1.31% "total conversion" (as reported by Amazon).

$12.15 in earnings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Capitalism rewards skilful deception. Yes, she does unethically, but she is rewarded by the system! And read her, she is doing a good job for her readers. Ask yourself - are Google and Yahoo and Yandex doing all right by placing everyone into their individual search bubbles to extract more ad money from AdSense? Probably not.

</comment><comment><USER55> Looks like someone got some free A/B-testing on add-free vs banner-free out of the exchange :P

</comment><comment><USER56> Competitor of hers maybe? Don't totally disagree but the implication at the end this woman may be engaging in tax irregularities? - that's unfounded and a bit slanderous.

Agree though - aff links are ads. You shouldn't say 'ad-free'.

</comment><comment><USER57> Could a lack of disclosure about affiliate links be a violation of the Amazon terms of service and get her affiliate account canceled?

</comment><comment><USER58> Usually, when referring to someone in print, we use their last name. Out of courtesy. So it's "Popova" not "Maria."

Also, _Bleymaier_ 's estimates on donation and affiliate income are just ludicrous. 50k-100k/year in donations from 1.2 million visitors/month? Yeah, right. :) They take away from the original point he was trying to make, which he could have made without making numbers up out of thin air.

</comment><comment><USER59> Nothing wrong with trying to make money. It's not like she is scamming her readers

<comment><USER60> I don't think anyone is saying that trying to make money is wrong. It is very disturbing (to me at least) to say that you're funded _only_ by donations while you're embedding affiliate links. People should have the utmost respect for their audience and the person in question has failed there.

<comment><USER61> I think that this consistent misunderstanding that she is "only trying to make money" is itself significantly more worrisome than her specific case.

I think it speaks very poorly of our profession that so many HN readers have a really hard time grasping the concepts involved with this story. It makes me question if this is simply an area of ethics that most tech-heads aren't very experienced with or if it is something more insidious, more along the lines of the Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Affiliate links are ads, hers'

</comment><comment><USER63> The author of this article came across as a major creep to me. They guy checks emails from 6 months ago and keeps going back to her blog to verify stuff....WTF? I'd be more concerned about this guy than her silly affiliate links.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm not an accountant, but what The Brain Pickings is doing sounds like tax fraud to me, especially the non-profit bit.

</comment><comment><USER65> scammer.

</comment><comment><USER66> Oh dear god. One more hypocrite makes illegitimate gains and has whistle blown by jealous, over-zealous loser who believes themselves to be the moral judge/jury/executioner of us all. Next</comment>


My conference is giving away $26k to 1 startup - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/events/2012/01/31/7-startups-will-compete-for-26k-at-superconf-it-could-be-you-but-act-now/

<comment><USER2> We were at SuperConf last year (as one of the presenting companies) and got tremendous exposure. If you're a pre-series A start up, this is a perfect conference to practice your pitch at and to meet cool people. The speakers were also fantastic. This year's line up looks even better.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just to nitpick: if you were really giving away $26K in cash, that would be something. It's $10K in cash, and $16K in services, and we all know how those services were priced. Still, $10K is pretty good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is the breakdown: <http://superconf.co/blastoff.php>

The service credits are priced at face value (Except for GitHub which is a package) - maybe I'm misunderstanding your statement?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, I put in some time to create an infographic with some stats I compiled on other conferences.

TL;DR - In 2011, TechCrunch Disrupt was the best conference to launch at. You should still apply to present at my conference (SuperConf) anyway ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> Seriously, if you're considering, stop considering and do this. It's my first time seeing what the Miami area has to offer and I want to be blown away.</comment>


WHY THE FUTURE OF INNOVATION IS IN IDEAS, Not PRODUCTS - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3008013/why-future-innovation-ideas-not-products

<comment><USER2> Pro tip since you are new here. Editorializing is usually not done for titles but feel free to not use all caps even though that's what the source does... Also, I could not bring myself to finish the article... and this kind of meta comment I'm posting is also frowned upon... somebody please flag it. :(</comment>


Amazon.com's proposed downtown Seattle office buildings - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/AppDocs/GroupMeetings/DRProposal3015022AgendaID4369.pdf <comment><USER2> The buildings remind me of puffball mushrooms.</comment>


16 Government Agencies Now Have Access to Unminimized Domestic NSA Collections - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170112/09144736472/official-sixteen-government-agencies-now-have-access-to-unminimized-domestic-nsa-collections.shtml <comment><USER2> It would be nice if the article mentioned exactly which agencies would have access.

<comment><USER3> There was a link in the article. [https://www.dni.gov/index.php/intelligence- community/members...](https://www.dni.gov/index.php/intelligence- community/members-of-the-ic)

<comment><USER2> Thanks, was trying to parse the actual document and not getting very far. Interesting to try and read that stuff, but it's pretty dense with acronyms, and I wasn't getting too far trying to google them.</comment></comment></comment>


San Francisco now has the highest salaries in the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-highest-salaries-in-the-world-zurich-13863696.php <comment><USER2> It seems like the data isn't that accurate, if you look at Software Developers salaries on: [https://swissdevjobs.ch/jobs/All/Zurich](https://swissdevjobs.ch/jobs/All/Zurich) (and account for 25% taxes) you would end up with ~6800 USD.

And Software Developers in Zurich earn around the average salary: [https://www.payscale.com/research/CH/Job=Software_Engineer/S...](https://www.payscale.com/research/CH/Job=Software_Engineer/Salary/8d55ae7f/Zurich)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm suprised it's not Menlo Park or some of the more valley cities.</comment>


16 days since last ruby drama - <AUTHOR> http://rubydramas.com/ <comment><USER3> I'm a manager of a user group (not Ruby or Rails, but ColdFusion) but when we have celebs in audience, I always default to them. Members have purchased their books, and read their blogs; they respect them more than they respect me or the speaker (usually me, managers commonly speak at smaller communities). Should they be pricks? No. But that's a question for the universe to deal with; as for our group, we like the celebs. (Ruby world's Katz's are CF's Camdens, Nadels, and Fortas - same difference...)

Having listened to Yahuda on various podcasts and whatnot, I get that he doesn't keep his mouth shut. Sometime's he's a douche, othertime's he's the smartest dude in the room and should be listened to. If you are a UGM and didn't expect this, maybe you should decline Yahuda's chance to speak.. his personality isn't exactly a secret, just saying.

tl;dr pricks will be pricks; experts ditto. Take the good with the bad, and research celebs.

<comment><USER4> The ColdFusion scene has stars?

There's... there's a ColdFusion _scene?_ Do you guys have dance-offs with the ASP Classic guys or what?

<comment><USER3> Several active conferences. A thriving open source community. ASP classic is a dead product; All three CF engines released new versions in the last year, with support for REST, WebSockets, updated ORM support, etc. While you'll probably never see it used in YC because it's not "cool", there's tons of it in Fortune 500 and the private sector.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the latest drama, this is a brilliant simile: [https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/0dd24728a088fcb4ae616b...](https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/0dd24728a088fcb4ae616bb5d62734aca5276b1b#commitcomment-1747128)

> _I can't get behind a change like this. This isn't even syntactic sugar. > It's more like syntactic aspartame. It might slim down your code, but it's > also a carcinogen._

<comment><USER6> Hang on, I thought they debunked the whole "aspartame is a carcinogen" thing...

<comment><USER7> They did, yes

[http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/artificial...](http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/artificial- sweeteners)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heh.

As an outsider to the ruby community (though a fan of the language), I'm not sure I have the right to an opinion on these dramas, but as a frequent unwitting observer of these events (since these dramas end up on sites I frequent and so on), I'd like to offer this thought:

The whole "coders-as-rockstars" meme, and the attendant treatment/fascination with these people -- I would be a slightly happier person if the world let that idea go. To me, it seems like this idea is where a lot of these dramas come from. People whose "celebrity" is overvalued, and people who pay way too much attention to these people. Coders are not rock stars. They're just not. They might be really good at what they do, they might even be 10x better than average, but its just not the same thing as being a "rockstar" and all the preening that comes with that, culturally or otherwise.

I can't think of anything less rockstarish than arguing with people over the internet or being a jerk at a usergroup.

The fact that these "dramas" are even news to anyone is just a side effect of the fact that people give certain drama queens way more attention than they deserve. I mean I'll admit it's entertaining -- but at the end of the day I feel like the fact that some guy was a jerk at a local conference, I mean, I just don't care. It's like intellectual junk food. I get a rise out of it, but it leaves me feeling like I haven't consumed something that makes me a better person.

<comment><USER9> You somewhat focus on being a jerk at user groups, but you're perpetuating a story from a blog post of a third person account that simply speculated about how someone might have felt without giving almost any context to the situation or first hand information from the speaker or Yehuda. I've been part of a Java usergroup where interrupting the speaker/presentation was not only acceptable but often the norm. Without any context you can't really say how that behavior was received.

Sometimes I think that Ruby's "drama" is equivalent to Rails' "magic", i.e. weak criticism perpetuated more by detractors and not really considered a problem internally.

<comment><USER10> I agree entirely. I started programming with ruby and rails about a year and a half ago and have made a habit of going to meetups and conferences in the area. I have seen nothing that wasn't intended to be constructive and helpful and I would argue that the ruby/rails community is one of the most welcoming I've run into. I have witnessed some misunderstandings that spun out of control, but I don't think you can say this is something specific to the ruby community and I'd argue that it has very little to do with celebrity-seeking. Any community is going to have some friction between elements at times, and I think this site just contributes to the overblown perception that all rubyists are primadonnas and drama-queens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Note the last "drama" was not to do with yehuda. the page isnt very clear but it is [https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/0dd24728a088fcb4ae616b...](https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/0dd24728a088fcb4ae616bb5d62734aca5276b1b)

(the "Last Drama" link, not the RSS links below)

</comment><comment><USER12> I was a little disappointed when they didn't include the ruckus about Zed not starting out teaching Array#each. That should probably have earned a spot.

<comment><USER13> Zed is a clever marketer and that was purely a marketing strategy on his part. It probably would have cost $20K to get that amount of traffic via AdWords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In communities where the majority are incredibly passionate about the topic there's inevitably drama. It's part and parcel of the process.

Although it is amusing that the whole 'MINSWAN' has departed the community slightly, given that was a big motto for a lot of Rubyists a while back and part of the reason why learning Ruby was so fun, everyone helped everyone (mostly).

<comment><USER15> If you replace "are incredibly passionate" with "have incredibly huge egos" then I'd agree with you. I don't see much of this happening in the Python or Clojure community - they're all too busy programming.

<comment><USER16> I don't really think it has anything to do with egos. Maybe this goes back to steve yegge's conservative vs liberal languages. clojure & python have communities that are much more conservative than ruby's. Yegge's argument that python is conservative, is due to google's style guide which forbids metaprogramming.

Yegge is fairly accurate with his conservative vs liberal rating in regard to each language community. Compare the type of mailing list posts in golang-nuts to nodejs; there's definitely more arguments in nodejs than in golang.

<comment><USER15> In terms what they can do, Ruby and Python are very similar, yet Python generates about 1/100th the drama of the Ruby community. I'd say that points very strongly at ego, or at least the culture of the community. If that doesn't convince you, have a look at the update at the bottom of this post from Giles: [http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/rails-went-off- ra...](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/rails-went-off-rails-why-im- rebuilding.html)

Python programmers appear to be more welcoming and don't seem to have the same need to wave enormous meta-programming wangs at each other. Not to say that metaprogramming isn't useful, but that it's just another tool in the toolbox. Take mailsnake for example: [https://github.com/Leftium/mailsnake/blob/master/mailsnake/m...](https://github.com/Leftium/mailsnake/blob/master/mailsnake/mailsnake.py) Completely classy :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> MINSWAN is now DHHIAJSWAJ.

Being a jerk isn't always the wrong thing to do. But people who are not dhh propagate the tone without always propagating the situational awareness.

</comment><comment><USER18> IMO this site is a nice reminder that no development community is immune from drama. Every line of code risks controversy. Every interaction has the potential to turn into a debate. A single action can lead to completely new ways of thinking.

And really, that's one of the things that makes software development great.

<comment><USER5> The thing that made smile most on the site was the "Powered by PHP"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My favorite recent ruby drama was rails including Coffeescript by default: <https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/9333ca7...23aa7da> (You have to scroll down for the images)

<comment><USER20> Thanks for mentioning this, very good stuff I never scrolled down to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd like to see the Python version.

<comment><USER21> Honestly I don't see this kind of thing happening in the Python community. Python devs constantly complain about Py3 and unicode all the time but I don't think it ever gets to the level of "drama" or vitriol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> [http://thewebivore.com/why-you-shouldnt-invite-yehuda- katz-t...](http://thewebivore.com/why-you-shouldnt-invite-yehuda-katz-to- your-u)

How ironic is it for this person to call out Yehuda and say don't correct people, when that is exactly what she is doing, she is correcting Yehuda.

If she followed her own advice she would have wrote the blog post about a "un named" person and maybe waited a few weeks. Instead she is doing exactly what she is advocating against: Publicly telling some one they are wrong...

<comment><USER23> Read the article. The author is quite explicit that the issue is in the timing - you don't interrupt DURING a presentation. You're being extremely uncharitable.

<comment><USER24> from the comments: bokmann on twitter

I was not the speaker whose demo he redid, but was there with the speaker and had a similar point in my metaprogramming talk.

Here is the code from my talk, and a new file named 'yehuda_inspiration.rb' that discusses Yehuda's change to the demo. <https://gist.github.com/1893359>

In short, the other presenter was not wrong... he had a piece of code that was stylistically different than what Yehuda would have written (see the 'include vs. extend' comments in that gist. Feel free to read that code example in that gist and make up your own mind.

I know first hand the other presenter did not take offense to this - <USER2> Yehuda claiming something is wrong when it is solely a style issue is a bit hubris.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> See also: <http://jsdrama.com/>

</comment><comment><USER26> Is any of this stuff actually ruby drama, or all just rails drama? I know the old ruby community has had a really hard time recovering from being infected with the rails trash, do they still exist or were they pushed out by the "rockstars"?</comment>


Ask HN: Working part-time in tech? - <AUTHOR> I would like to drastically reduce my amount of work hours per week.
My dream is to come down to about 15-25 working hours per week.
I don't mean to work part-time for all of my career. But I would like to have such an arrangement for the coming five years or so.
Has anyone tried this? If so, how did you manage to achieve your goal? <comment><USER2> I've been working 4d/week for the last 5 years as a Data Scientist. I first proposed it during salary negotiations with a small startup, who were surprised by it but were willing to give it a go. It worked out really well, and once I had that under my belt, I was able to ask for the same arrangement at subsequent job interviews - I would make a point to raise this up front, and it proved a good way to filter out companies that likely wouldn't have been a good work/life fit. (I look after three young kids outside of work; wife is a corporate lawyer who has to work 24/7, so my 4d/wk schedule is important in maintaining some semblance of balance for the kids).

Now I'm at a multinational (a publicly listed health data company) and the arrangement continues to work well, even though I now manage a team of 8 data scientists. I've had colleagues who've dropped from 5 to 3d/wk, the company seems very flexible around this type of arrangement. At the startups I felt that I had to squeeze in 5d of work in 4d at times, whereas here the workload has felt more commensurate with the hours I have available (and my manager often checks in to make sure this is the case).

Overall I love having an extra day to the weekend (I take the kids out to places in London on Fridays when it's considerably less busy). My colleagues with similar arrangements used this to split their working weeks in half, and that worked well for them.

Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER3> Are you hiring junior/intern data scientists from Canada? I know someone who is almost finished their masters and have worked on real data from telecomm quality of service as part of their thesis, and have had a term of internship.

<comment><USER2> I don't think we've worked with anyone in Canada in our team, however it's a huge company With multiple DS teams, and some may be open to this. Feel free to send a CV and I can forward to the appropriate hiring partner.

<comment><USER3> thanks very much. Where/how can I forward it?

<comment><USER2> Just added my LinkedIn link to my profile, hope that helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As other people have said, you can negotiate for this. I've done it at multiple jobs. Here's an interview with someone who has been doing it for 15 years: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time- programmer...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer/)

1\. It's easier at existing job; you have all this knowledge that's hard to replace ([https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/01/25/4-day-workweek- easy-...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/01/25/4-day-workweek-easy-way/)).

2\. At new jobs, apply normally. Then _after_ you get an offer, ask for shorter hours.

3\. I wrote a book about the process; it's no longer public linked on my site because pandemic has lowered negotiation leverage a lot and I'm not sure how to address that, but if you're interested: [https://codewithoutrules.com/3dayweekend/](https://codewithoutrules.com/3dayweekend/)

<comment><USER5> Having been a engineering manager before, it would put an extremely bad taste in my mouth if someone waited until the offer stage to ask for a part time role.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can understand why you feel that way. But many companies simply doesn't want to talk to people who wants to work part-time. (As in "don't call us, we'll call you".) So even if it might seem pushy to negotiate like that, at least to me it's understandable.

<comment><USER6> It also has the potential to waste your time and theirs. I wouldn't call it pushy as much as borderline deceptive.

<comment><USER7> Unless the employer posts the salary up front, they are bring deceptive too.

<comment><USER8> While that is valid, two wrongs don't make a right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been doing 20 hours per week (Mon-Wed) remote for nearly 3 years and I absolutely love it. I'm at a $bigco and worked there for 10 years before changing to this part time arrangement.

I believe it's harder to do for small companies due to legal/tax reasons (something about less than 32 hours complicates things a lot although I don't know the details why).

The "simple" solution is to be good enough that you have the bargaining leverage to propose it and make it an ultimatum. Other ideas:

* Grind in a project for some years and become indispensable and then propose it.

* Propose it as an experiment for 6 months.

* Create an "excuse" of why you need the extra time such as pursuing an M.S./PhD.

<comment><USER10> _Create an "excuse" of why you need the extra time such as pursuing an M.S./PhD._

Having kids. Serves also as a pressure upon _you_ to actually seek part-time instead of just procrastinating about it.

 _I believe it 's harder to do for small companies due to legal/tax reasons (something about less than 32 hours complicates things a lot although I don't know the details why)._

Not a US resident, but FWIW many countries because of redistribution schemes need to categorize people by whether they are a) principally employed or b) self-employed.

Hours worked for a/b are a common denominator for this. It's likely that depending on the regulatory environment smaller companies when given the chance will always opt for the candidate with less HR department overhead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just asked my manager for a 24 hr work week (3 days on, 4 days off), and they said sure, and the company prorated my salary down.

The company I was working for came out of a university research lab, and so had a culture of PhD students working part time for it, so this was not outside the norm there.

The downside was not getting equity, nor benefits, but I was on my parent's insurance and wasn't too keen on their equity anyway, so this was fine for me.

<comment><USER11> The other path here might be working somewhere with a culture of fixed goals rather than a time expectation.

For example, many remote companies that operate asynchronously won't expect you to be in the office 40hrs a week, but will expect a certain level of work to be done each week. If you can get that done in 24 rather than 40, then it works out fine for you.

<comment><USER12> This is why I love remote work. Studies [0] show that most office workers work only 2.5 hours a day on average, with the rest being socializing, procrastinating, surfing the web, and so on. If I can get my work done in 4 hours a day, I'll have done more work _and_ have more free time, since managers in an office expect you to be there for 8 hours a day, but not so for remote.

[0] [https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the- aver...](https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average- worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html)

<comment><USER13> I don't believe 2.5 hours is representative, so please cite these studies. Personally,senior engineers (individual contributors) that I have worked with spend 4-6 hours per day making significant contributions on their own and the other 4-2 hours working/coordinating with their team and sister teams. The only plausible scenario where one can do an acceptable job in 2.5 hours per day is where a senior person is doing the job of an entry level person. For people managers, having effective 2-4 hour days on an ongoing basis are very unlikely in my experience. I am open to be surprised with examples that prove otherwise.

<comment><USER12> Here is the study I read it from, there might be others. In my experience, yes, it doesn't work for managers, only those who are individual contributors doing programming full time. I doubt however that even the senior managers are coding the entire time for 4 to 6 hours, it is difficult to do so every single day. More likely, you perceive them to be doing that much work since they are present during that time, which is the same reaction I get as well; colleagues and bosses speak of how much work I get done compared to others, yet they don't realize I work a lot fewer hours. It's all about efficiency.

[https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the- aver...](https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average- worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html)

<comment><USER14> A specific note about this quote:

> However, this eight-hour movement didn't become standard until nearly a > century later, when, in 1914, Ford Motor Company astonished everyone by > cutting daily hours down to eight while simultaneously doubling wages. The > result? Increased productivity.

What happened was the shift from craftsmen at a workbench to a deskilled assembly line had significant turnover. The cost of training and retention was high enough that Ford instituted the lower working hours and higher wages.

From one of Ford's biographers: "So great was labor's distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963."

You see this in shipyards during the war war 2 years where once the initial pool of workers is burned out, you need to raise wages to bring in more workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I do this currently. I was working at Google and left. I wanted more time off since I have enough money to not grind, but still need to pay rent. Basically personal project time.

I ended up at a small company that had additional hours but not enough for a full time employee. I'm now part time across three DARPA contracts. It was really just luck, a friend reached out and asked if I was interested.

Everywhere else I was talking to was just pushing unlimited PTO policies. I wanted explicit acknowledgement about how much vacation I'd take and that was hard to get.

I know people at Google went to part time. You probably just need to ask. My route was definitely finding a place that needed a worker but didn't have enough work for full time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I've been thinking about joining a small company like that. But they can be quite hard to find since they generally don't put up any job postings. Congratulations to finding one! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm someone who values tinkering time greatly and low-hour work weeks (at least WRT "work" work) are a priority.

I've gotten to this stage from two different directions:

1\. Developing a relationship with a 'principal' consultant who handles client relationships themselves (shielding me from weird hours and stress) but outsources the tech to me (+ other technical freelancers). When this principal consultant has no clients, they still have hours available for their own in- house, entrepreneurial products.

2\. Bootstrapping a passive-income web business. I coded a Ruby on Rails application to sell law notes following my law degree. By following the advice here, I figured out how to market it with SEO and AdWords. Much to my amazement, it ended up providing for all my financial needs for over 7 years, sometimes with as little as 4 hours work a month. (Obviously there was a huge upfront investment in getting to that stage.) I've got a YouTube video where I talk more about how I came up with the MVP and what the first few months were like, in case this is a path you're considering too

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKXlZz- wbmg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKXlZz-wbmg)

</comment><comment><USER17> In some countries you actually have a _right_ to switch from full-time to part-time work.

Your employer can block you but only if they have a really solid reason, and "we have to hire another person to make up the difference" won't fly. If you want to go the other way (back to full-time) your employer can say no.

So -- if this is your long-term plan and you want to be _employed_ you might consider going to such a country, and doing a year or so of full-time first.

Anecdotally, I was seriously considering switching to half time pre-plague so I could do a PhD. Would have been trivial to get it approved, but I have a lot of seniority; you might have to fight for it if you're new. But at least in Germany, it's your right as a worker, not a privilege from your employer. I would expect it's like that in much of the EU.

</comment><comment><USER18> I tried this and struggled. After taking a break from full-time developer work, I reached out to multiple tech companies via personal referrals. Everyone said that they'd love me full time, but couldn't have a part-time hire. I got a lot of soft brush-offs to "reach out when you have more availability."

Out of the blue, however, a former employer reached out to me and offered to hire me for as many (or as few) hours as I could handle, which has worked out to 10-25 a week. It's been a really nice arrangement that I've enjoyed. The catch is that this company is in a completely different industry, with a completely different pay scale than tech. So I'm happy with my job, but wouldn't be able to support myself on it with part-time hours if I was the only household earner.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear ya. Many recruiters/bosses simply don't want to hear anything about part-time work at all. I think that's a mistake on their end – it could be a major benefit that would make that employer stand out from the crowd. But many companies sadly doesn't think about it that way.

PS. As someone else mentioned here, and in case you find yourself on the market again: You might want to try to discuss part-time only after receiving a written offer. Then you know for sure that they want to hire you. And then you have some leverage.

<comment><USER19> In my experience, you have to negotiate part-time after the verbal "great job, we want to hire you" but _before_ the formal written offer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I did this. I wrote tech tutorials. I got paid by hours so it was up to me how long I want to work per week. It's by pure luck I got this job. My friend who worked in a company asked me to help with tech writing.

Sometimes you have to ask: [https://twitter.com/shl/status/1300848723182776322](https://twitter.com/shl/status/1300848723182776322)

</comment><comment><USER21> My wife arranged this and ended up getting just as much work thrown at her, working just as much, but getting paid less and next to zero promotability. She obviously went back to full time after about six months.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ouch. There are definitely pitfalls along this path. And if the manager doesn't understand what the deal implies I'm sure it can be very hard and stressful. Too bad it didn't work out for your wife.

<comment><USER22> That's why it's good to have two things. One is to be able to easily pick up a job somewhere else for same pay and benefits if required. Second is to say no, ideally in a respectful way. Pretend you have another boss vying for those other 8 hours (this boss is you of course!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I just (4th week tomorrow) started a similar thing with my company.

I work 16 hours / week and am on a support rotation (albeit 3rd tier). I only cover unplanned work on weekends. I took a 60% pay cut but keep all my pre- existing benefits.

So far it has been wonderful for my mental health, although with social distancing and the pandy it certainly has been difficult to keep busy some days. I am passively looking for supplemental work as I don't make enough to deposit into my savings. I imagine as winter rolls in this will be a necessity to stay busy/sane.

In the meantime, though, I have picked up lots of cooking, baking, and work on some personal coding projects. I have also been focusing much more of my time on art, which is really awesome! It's too early to tell but this might end up a more permanent situation for me (if not at the current company then maybe at the next one?).

I think this has also made me more productive at my job. I have 16 hours this week - what NEEDS to get done? What is a nice to have? Constraints are wonderful for productivity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds great and kudos to you for trying an alternative to the rat race!

Was it hard to negotiate or was your employer positive to the idea from the beginning?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> You can probably do consultant work. Come up with solutions, don't necessarily implement everything or anything yourself. If you try doing everything yourself on a per-hour basis, you put yourself at a massive disadvantage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Do you mean solution architect kind of assignments?

<comment><USER24> Yes, that is certainly one option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yes. I just explained that wish when I was hired. I was not the most important engineer on the team, doing frontend (not in JS/HTML sense, just in UI sense) work for a project where most of the work was in the backend, and it was an easy sell.

Ended up divorcing my wife after spending 4 days a week at home with her, so wouldn't recommend it, but no professional problems.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't work part-time at the moment but have before and have part-time positions currently hiring for in my team and I manage part time employees and have before.

It's not unheard of just uncommon.

The biggest drawback is that you feel less belonging and you aren't always there for all the decisions. At certain times I am OK with that.

</comment><comment><USER27> I work at $BIGCO, 3 days on, 4 days off, 2 of which I usually spend learning tech and non-tech related things and/or working on side-projects I'm interested in.

I think there are multiple reasons why I was allowed to do this:

A) I'm working on a stable, long-term project. So there were no objections by colleagues that this might impede short-term progress (and, as a side note, I think I'm far more productive now than previously).

B) My manager is a reasonable and kind person. I know other managers at $BIGCO who, I'm sure, would have objected.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like a good deal.

Are you a developer or some other role?

<comment><USER27> Yes, I'm a dev.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I work 24h/w (TWT) for my employer. I did this by... saying that's what I could do when they offered me the job. (There are some specific personal circumstances that prevent me from taking full time work.) And sure, it does limit you; a lot of places demur, but not everyone. For sure my small company are happy to have me. Of course they are: they get a massive bargain. I am prorata so they get a developer for janitor wages and still everything gets done. Who wouldn't be happy with that deal?

</comment><comment><USER29> Contracting is your best bet.

I set my own hours + fully remote. Typically about 2-3h of team meetings (sprint kickoff, retro, grooming etc) a week. Rest of time is off on your own dev work.

Bill by the hour. As long as you work predictable amount of hours, you can do 20h or 60h week.

<comment><USER30> How much time do you spend with nonbillable work like lining up clients? I've always been interested in contracting but not really felt like I knew how to get started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I transitioned from FTE to ~25 hours per week as a contractor and it definitely works for my situation.

If you go this route, make sure when you calculate your rate that you build-in the benefits such as paid leave, health insurance, lunch break, and company holidays. The number might seem high but you can justify it.

We arranged a deal where I work between 0 and 40 hours per week, with the option to work more hours with approval.

Also you might enjoy The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool!

I've heard about Ferriss book but haven't read it. Is it good?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I work 4 days on, 3 off. Not quite what you're looking for, but along the same lines.

Has been no issue at all. Never has been.

What I do see with my 3on/4off colleagues (usually students) is that they lack any sort of continuity in their work. Not enough time to tackle larger problems in one go and always missing out on how the smaller pieces fit together. On top of that a lot off friction when handing things off, etc.

Surely it can be done better, etc etc.

</comment><comment><USER33> Have never tried it. But have been on the other side of the situation looking to hire developers half time.

Look for small companies. Startups, small businesses, anyone who needs a developer but can't afford a full time employee. This can especially work out if you are a senior developer whose 20 hours are often more valuable than 40 hours of a junior dev.

</comment><comment><USER34> Been doing this for 6 months (50% time), and loving it. In my case, a former employer reached out and asked if I'd like to work part time. I've got a friend who's working 2 full time gigs; 15hours each. He's more productive than his peers in each company, and only puts in a fraction of the hours. If you deliver high value, you can negotiate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it would probably help if I get better at identifying work that is actually high-value. It's kinda easy to fall in to the trap of doing busywork that demands lots of hours but doesn't really produce so much value.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b I'm at 22.5 hrs/week fully remote. I had been a full time employee for 6 years and wanted to resign. They wanted to keep me. I asked for this and they said ok.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've been working as a software engineer at a non-profit for a little over four years. I started at 40 hours per week, went down to 32 after a couple of years, and now am at 24 because they were looking to cut costs and I was happy to oblige.

When I brought it up to my manager, I told her very specifically _why_ I wanted to reduce my hours - I wanted to spend more time on other projects (specifically musical projects) - and she was totally open to it. If you really feel like you need more time for other pursuits, and you are lucky enough to work at a good company where your manager has your best interests at heart, it shouldn't be an issue.

Plus, hiring and training new employees is an expensive pain in the ass.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's possible. If not an option for the company you're working for at the moment look for other companies with openings for 80% or 60% of effort. I am currently working 80% (4 days per week) after almost 1 year at 60% (3 days per week).

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I work remote at a startup. I don't think that's a repeatable strategy but it does allow me to work very little hours throughout the week and spend most of my time relaxing with my family. It also helps being decent enough at my job that I can finish a week's worth of work in a couple hours at home. I imagine as the company becomes more mature I'll be working even less than I am now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Sounds pretty great. I've generally thought of startups as quite stressful work places – might not be the case for all of them though?

<comment><USER38> I think that if you only do a few hours of actual time working each week, you are deceiving not only your employer but yourself about what is productive and whether you're a good employee.

There are no good metrics for programmer productivity, but spending < 20 hours a week actually switched-on as a full-time employee is obviously a problem, to me.

<comment><USER37> I honestly doubt any one who says that they are productive for 40 full hours a week, or even 6 hours per day. There's a lot of downtime that employees usually do not notice from a first person perspective. Even still, the goal of IT is first and foremost to empower business goals through technology, one of the main aspects of that is increasing workflow efficiency and throughput of the rest of the business processes - in other words, make good software so the rest of the business doesn't have to work so hard.

I have definitely met workers who I've given a task and they produce sub- average work and, when confronted, give me the spiel about they worked "so many hours on this" and how could I "invalidate the time they spent".

At the end of the day, as long as you are doing the job at the pace I need you to be doing the job, then I don't care if you did it in 1 hour or 8 hours. If you want more work, ask, and if you're spending too much time on a task, then there is a communication problem as a team member should have caught that you were on the wrong track.

In my experience, focusing on hours worked has never produced quality work.

<comment><USER38> I know I don't hit a full 40 hours of "productive work" each week.

That's different from intentionally deciding to aim for less than that, though.

<comment><USER37> The goal of work is to intentionally decrease the amount of work you have to do to achieve the same tasks. Why pay you when I can find a person who will do the same work you do in less time?

I think what you're arguing is that employees should always have some work to do, which simply won't be the case in every industry

<comment><USER38> What I'm saying is that if I manage to build enough tooling to streamline my work so it takes me twenty hours of "at work" time instead of the forty it used to, then under the standard full-time employee arrangements, I have an obligation to use the remaining time for other tasks, like finding a new corner of the company's workflows I can help optimize and streamline.

I've never seen a system that was even close to perfectly designed or optimized. You can always find more to improve.

Yes, there are diminishing returns for any specific corner, and there comes a point when the increase in risk from doing further deployments is not worth the shrinking business gains for optimizing a given corner, but I strongly believe there are always more improvements that can be made, both at a small, focused level and stu the big picture level of what systems should even exist in a given company.

<comment><USER7> > I have an obligation

You don't though. If you become 40% more productive, you should be paid more. Quietly taking that time as part time hours, instead of staying full time and getting a promotion+raise, is fine.

<comment><USER38> You are welcome to your opinion, and to your own moral code.

Mine means I _do_ have that obligation.

I suspect many share this aspect of my code, which boils down to "keep your commitments, both explicit and implicit."

Nobody hires a full-time employee expecting that they'll start slacking off once they get the basics of their job going smoothly, and I know that going in (as do most people).

Thus, if I plan to do that, I have to warn them up front that our expectations are likely not aligned.

If I don't want to have that obligation, then I can negotiate up front, or take on the risk of being a consultant or startup founder.

Thought experiment: ask yourself whether you'd hire someone advertising my work ethic or yours, if all other aspects are equal between the candidates.

Then ask yourself why you answered as you did, and which response the market will reward better in hiring.

My reason for this stance is my personal code of ethics, not pragmatism, but I think the pragmatic consideration may clarify my point.

<comment><USER37> You put a lot of weight on your morals and work ethic but my point is that those mean nothing to me. I don't care how hard you work to get the job done. Once you're salaried, how efficiently you perform your job is up to you, and what action I take when you don't meet the pace I expect is up to me. When I manage a team, I encourage those on my team to bring up any obstructions or changes they'd want to see to improve the efficiency of their work - past that I don't care as long as they understand the timelines we are working under and if everything is on time, why would I add undue stress to my team?

If timelines become tighter, at that point, and only at that point, would I crack down on efficiency.

>Thought experiment: ask yourself whether you'd hire someone advertising my work ethic or yours, if all other aspects are equal between the candidates.

That's like asking all else being equal, would I hire the person who wore Air Force 1s to the interview or the person who wore chelsea boots. That has nothing to do with your performance of your job and any distinction on that matter is personal preference. The only thing that is important is are you getting the job done on the pace it needs to get done.

At this point you seem like you'd discriminate your employees based on which IDE they were using. If they produced good work, would you care that the most productive person on your team was using Notepad++ to do their job?

<comment><USER38> Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying.

It sounded to me like you were suggesting an hour or three a day of actually focusing your attention on your workplace is plenty for a full-time, salaried employee.

If that's not what you mean, then I've obviously misunderstood you.

What do you suggest regarding hours of "butt in seat" when WFH? It's a truly wretched metric for productivity, but I think ignoring it entirely is unwise.

I would (and do) encourage my teammates to use whatever editor or IDE they want, as long as it doesn't cause issues for the rest of the team (which I have seen crappy obscure tools do, in one memorable case by converting line endings to classic Mac OS style across many files, but only on edited lines).

> That's like asking all else being equal, would I hire the person who wore > Air Force 1s to the interview or the person who wore chelsea boots. That has > nothing to do with your performance of your job and any distinction on that > matter is personal preference. The only thing that is important is are you > getting the job done on the pace it needs to get done.

Whether a candidate thinks they should put in 8 hours a day vs. two or four, if that's all their current task takes, is directly relevant to how effective an employee they will be.

It is not at all like what kind of shoes they wore to the interview, which is indeed unrelated to their technical skills or workplace conduct.

As far as ethics or working hard mattering, I think of them as necessary but not sufficient. If I have a great work ethic and bust my butt but do not achieve anything, I'm a poor employee.

When I have a task estimated at four hours but it takes me two, I don't think "Sweet, HN until lunchtime," I grab the next thing off the stack.

Like I said, perhaps I'm not understanding what you're trying to describe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A bit more than you're aiming for, but from anecdata I heard, it's relatively popular and accepted in Switzerland to work 4 days a week in IT.

In other countries I'm aware of it's probably not that common, except when you're really senior in your domain and have unique skills.

</comment><comment><USER40> I haven't tried this personally but my company has a relevant policy and I've considered it from time to time.

The employee handbook lays out opportunity to take x% of your current hours for x% of your current pay. If you'd be happy working 4x8s and 80% salary + 80% bonus works for you? As long as your manager doesn't object, go for it.

I think this is a great benefit to offer. Abstractly, I imagine that the system means that once you hit an income threshold you're happy with, a 10% raise immediately gets converted into 10% less hours per week. You never retire, just get asymptotically close to doing so.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's certainly possible. Some people do it in my company. Either working part- time, or contracting. A lot of things are possible, but it depends on how hard you're willing to try, and how valuable you are for your employer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it could perhaps be easier if I manage to transition to a niche (or two) that is in high and stable demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> i have worked a full-time job one year in my entire life. after that always part-time. part time sounds bad but it's just you leaving the office at 1pm(or however that works out for you). it is the best setup and i have been working like this for over a decade. i prefer to work from office but it is not easy to find local companies for this setup and either way you have to be a self- employed entity. so i rented a desk at my previous job and worked from there for other companies, part-time, for many years. now i work from home since i have not found suitable alternative for my office since the company have moved to new space. but now i work on pre-paid hours, credit-like system, if you will. and have no schedule whatsoever. client pays me for certain amount of hours, upfront, and then as i work i just work up to the amount of hours i got paid. nobody is looking over my shoulder, nobody is giving me deadlines. when it's done, it's done. best setup, bar none. but ymmv. i charge enough so i can work hour or two a day if i want. i could make a bank if i would go do a full- time gig again and i have been thinking about it, for a year, to save money but i have not found interesting jobs so yeah... it is a individualistic lifestyle, not suitable for everyone. but as i have said, you can rent a desk at a company you know people from or something like that, so you are with people and not alone all doy long. i would not recommend corowking spaces at all though. that's the worst setup i can imagine.

</comment><comment><USER43> The easiest way to do this is by becoming a contractor. Your client(s) don't have to know that the other 20 hours a week you're kicking back rather than slaving away on a different client's project.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very interesting idea.

Any suggestions on what kinds of assignments that would work better or worse in such a setting?

Many of the consultants I've seen in IT are more like regular employees except that they are employed buy the consultants. (I.e. they sit in the client's office 40 h/week.) But I guess there are other ways to do it.

<comment><USER43> Is there anything you're an expert at? Postgres, Django, React, etc.?

Companies hiring contractors want to pay somebody to "show up" (perhaps virtually) and do the one thing they're an expert at, not waste time getting up to speed or learning on the job.

Figure out what you're an expert in, and contact some recruiting firms that hire for contracting gigs in that area. Explain that your schedule is "half full already" but you'd like to fit something else in, if it's the right opportunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really good phrasing.

I've been working mostly in IT and I'm a bit of a generalist. I've thought about doing contracting and specialising "on-the-go". It could work... but it could also be a bit stressful. I think my current job will allow me to go quite deep in some areas so I might want to hang on to it for a while in order to allow for better opportunities further down the road.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> How would this work when substantial equity is involved? It makes sense that if you drop your hours, your salary would drop in proportion. But if a substantial amount of your total comp is from unvested equity, it doesn't makes as much sense. Your employer can't take away unvested equity, right? If so it seems like your employer would have much less incentive to want to do something like this - you may be working half as much, but your total comp only drops by like 25% or something.

<comment><USER45> In some places I've worked, HR has a hidden target total compensation for each employee. When they make compensation adjustments, they try to bring you slightly closer to that goal. In this case, they might drop just your salary proportionally since that appears fair, but future adjustments will be lower or zero until your target compensation is above your actual compensation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> It is easy to make companies cut your salary but difficult to make them respect the reduced work hours!

Wife has been working nominally 4 days a week at the G of FAANG for several years. Prorated to 80% of the salary. Management has repeatedly stated that they expect far more than 40hrs/week from a full-timer, so an 80%-timer better turn in at least 40+ hours. Which largely defeats the intended benefit of doing a 4 days week.

</comment><comment><USER12> Work a remote job, and finish your work quickly every day.

<comment><USER47> not that simple when you have people pinging you and asking questions or meetings, etc etc. i mean you can just slack off maybe after doing several hours of deep work, but theres no way you can just log off and go do your own thing without anybody noticing

<comment><USER48> Logging off and not being reachable is entirely a function of expectation management though. It's difficult to go from responding in a minute every time to responding the next day, that's true. But try stretching your response times by 15 minutes per week and give reasonable and unassailable excuses like "I was on the phone with my mother". Pretty soon you will find that expectations about your reachability will change.

<comment><USER7> Or your coworkers might notice your chronic unavailability and deception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Give us a bit more background (location, work domain, etc.)

For EU/UK market: Contracting. You can get small gigs (but on a low pay) on places like Upwork, or you can get a proper contract with a company that needs hands for 3-6-12 months on a larger project. Some of the Big4 also do contracting work on which you are the back-end (think Service Center) for large IT projects (and/or compliance etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Location is Stockholm, Sweden and I've done lots of IT support kind of work, but very recently transitioned to doing more of sysadmin kind of work for a small MSP (Managed Service Provider).

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I work about 25 hours a week at home right now. I started with a startup tech company and at first we were doing 35 hours a week but we decided those 10 hours allowed us to work slowly. By cutting down our hours we were able to get more stuff done in a short amount of time with deadlines and the pressure of time limits

</comment><comment><USER51> I've sent you an email re:part time work :)</comment>


Smooth Gestures: When good extensions turn evil - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/smoothgestures-chromium/issues/detail?id=498

<comment><USER2> from the comments

> Sad to say we only noticed this because his hosting (a Linode) went down.</comment>