Hey #tribe Is there anyone who is only working part-time or have considered that? How was that like?

I work 3 days a week. It feels good. Gives me more time to focus on life and hobbies.

working part time, love it. Same experience as piyush

Work 3 days a week 🙂

I worked 20h/wk for ~5 months; got enough time to go to the gym, play some video games I'd been wanting to, learn new tech, correct my sleeping schedule and rebalance my finances.

From DMs. I figured the response might help others looking at part time early career as well.

Based on your experience, would you be against or pro going part-time early in career?

My "experience": ~ 5 years as a freelancer, mostly 20 hours a week. Then own company -> acquisition -> pivot to own company again for ~5 years full time. Back to freelancing, 3 days a week. I think this is very subjective so I will list my pros, cons and gotchas. They might help you decide for yourself based on which ones apply. Pros: (Almost all are around what you can do with the time) ✅ Lots of free time to learn! I would see something interesting in work and spend a whole day just digging into it's internals and reading blog posts from different people (this was before videos were the primary tute medium). ✅ Learning independent of my work As work days started getting separate from free days, this came somewhat naturally. Switching to different work within the org or switching to a different work altogether was easier because I'd have learnt the tech myself beforehand. ✅ Self-validate your interests Whenever I felt like I might enjoy working on X. I would do a little bit in my free time. Didn't like it? Ditch it. This was very useful early on when everything looks shiny and interesting. If I liked it, I could show my client that I have done a little bit myself and I am competent enough to at least try it. Conversely, if I didn't like something, I could tell them with confidence that we should probably hire someone else for that work and why exactly I didn't enjoy it. You can probably pull it off in a fulltime environment as well, but there won't be a lot of time. And if your client/manager gives you something new to try at work because they need it, there's the associated deadline etc pressure associated. It's easy to feel stuck there. ✅ I am a business This comes more from being a consultant than a part time employee. I learnt to manage it and see myself as a complete business and not just one role. In a way, I had to sell myself to clients on the things I was good at. Measure new skills with a soft lens of ROI. Not that I paid too much attention to it, but at least on some level, everything I tried work-wise had to feel like it would add value. This somewhat helped later in life with my company to some extent. ✅ Money I am not sure how relevant this is today, but back then I was one of few freelancers from this county. Other Asian and African countries hadn't picked up a lot in freelancing. As a result, I used to get paid more than typical Indian co fulltime money for my 20 hours. I think it's still the case but not sure how much. Cons: ❌ Blurry lines between work and learning When I had 4 hours a day kind of setup for the 20 hours, I would sometimes just end up working for the entire day. Conversely, I would sometimes spend entire work day just learning because "I can easily do 8 hours tomorrow to balance". But I used to take it in stride both ways as part of the journey. I was working entire day because I was enjoying it so much, so I'd chalk it up to fun time. ❌ Self parenting can be hard There would be periods when I'd get distracted by something in life. Some tv series or mental fallout from an argument with parents or SO could suck entire days into a blackhole. Not a single soul would care what I did outside my 20 hours and that can be too much sometimes. ❌ Dealing with being out of work This is more relevant for consulting. I have a rule to work with only 1 client at a time because 2 clients with self-learning felt like too much context switching. As a consequence, I would sometimes not have work lined up after end of a project or I left early because a client wasn't the right fit for me. On most occasions I'd have new work in a week but still the period between one client and the next can be tough, especially if I was mentally in a bad place. ❌ Difficulty cap on work given to consultants This won't happen early on. It is true especially for consultants and bigger companies. They'll try not to hire a consultant that can leave on a week's notice for their "core" work. While I got a lot of time to self-learn and grow quickly early on, it reached a point where either I was working on interesting problems with small clients that had no scale or on some random small project for a bigger company that had nothing to do with their core business. This is mostly why I switched out of freelancing to making a company -> working at the company that acquired us. You'll probably not face this much if you're on an employee contract. Gotchas: ❓ I was already freelancing in college. So I had some idea that it would work for me. ❓ Do not decide if you like or dislike it in first 3 months. It takes 6-10 months to get in the groove of self-managing. So it depends if you have that kind of free mental bandwidth/time. ❓ I was doing GSOC when college ended, so I had something (OSS code and experience) to go sell as well. YMMV ❓ I had this rule of not taking more than 1 client at a time, you need not follow it. But I will strongly recommend using all free time to learn as much as you can and switch to more challenging work.

Thank you so much Piyush.