2022 points by lmueongoqx 1790 days ago | 1091 comments on HN
| Moderate positive
Contested
Editorial · v3.7· 2026-02-28 11:10:10· from archive
Summary Work-Life Balance & Rest Advocates
This HN self-post asks the tech community for advice on minimizing work hours while meeting basic needs, directly engaging Articles 23, 24, and 19 of the UDHR. The author explicitly advocates for personal autonomy, leisure time, and freedom from career obligations while questioning industry norms around productivity and mandatory advancement. The content demonstrates strong positive directional lean toward worker autonomy and human-centered work conditions.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I've actually tried to hire dispassionate people before.
One was an assembly line style UI job with no future - the API was solid, the UI was designed by someone else. It just needed someone who could glue the parts, and repeat the same job forever, with minor API updates every now and then.
Another was a teaching job. Beginner HTML/CSS/Node.js. Come in 35 hours a week, actual necessary work is 12 hours/week. It's probably a dead end job, but it's a cash cow. Some graduates managed to go from becoming Uber drivers to junior developers who made the same salary with little manual labor, so the job brought benefit to society.
There's too many passionate people in the industry who just won't take these kinds of jobs.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to focus on hobbies/life and not caring much about working time job - I would guess most people fall on this side, actually (and they don't even have too much of hobbies either). However, the way you wrote this post, it strucks me that maybe you have burnout, or you're depressed - as if you reach out to your passions not mainly because you like them, but because those never failed you, and you want to get away from everything else, in which you were disappointed.
If this is not the case, just ignore this, but please think about it first. The world can be a great place with the right view, and there is a lot that can bring you back on track - including an inspiring daytime job.
This is an awesome question. I hope someone has good strategies for you. Life should be spent doing the things you find worthwhile, and the fact is, not all of those things are monetizable.
Given how esteem- and success driven HN as a platform is... you might not get too many ideas since I suppose people want to maintain their "hireable" status.
Success and "loving your job" are more or less empty phrases unless you are actually a professional moving your field forward or learning a highly complex subject matter - or you own a stake in a company.
Beyond that you are toiling, and if you like your job, it's glorious toiling like gardening (pleasing, but not important, but you love it, so it's great) or terrible toiling for living that eats your soul.
I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work since the tech stack is complex and fugly. I probably _appear_ motivated but I'm just a neurotic who hates failing. If I didn't need to feed and house my family I would have moved to a lower paying position long ago that is intrinsically more motivating.
Success and "loving your job" have nothing in common in my experience.
I think it's probably fairly random. I.e. you're just as likely to have a "do nothing" job in a FAANG as in some other random corps. But I don't think you can start doing nothing right after being hired - usually people are hired because there's more work in a team that the existing headcount can handle. So, you have to work for some time and then count on "falling into the cracks" - landing in a place where there's less work than people capable of doing it.
BTW I recommend against startups (pre big funding). In startups, the owners watch costs like hawks and there's zero chance of slacking off.
BTW2: if you're good with people, I recommend a Scrum master role. From my observations over the years, these folks have almost zero workload and absolutely zero responsibility for anything. It's slacker's paradise - you just have to be comfortable with babbling on meetings/calls for the majority of the day.
I can think of two possible routes that would fulfil this criteria in different ways.
The first is to get an IT job at a government organisation that isn't heavily IT focussed, but needs someone on staff "just in case". I once interviewed for a job at a National Library for a 35,000 GBP/year role (with 20% pension). They had a system where someone could book a room to read old manuscripts, and there was a C# program that let people swipe in and out with a smart card. For some reason they needed a dev on staff full time just in case anything went wrong. That was the whole scope of the job. Apparently most of the IT people there had other personal gigs they worked on most of the day, and it was super flexible. I didn't take it because I wanted a job that would push me and force me to learn things, but I reckon there would be a few jobs like that in government that would give you what you want.
The other way isn't exactly what you asked for, but might appeal to you anyway. Recently I've been working as a software contractor, mostly doing 3-to-6 month contracts, mostly for companies that need extra resource to hit some looming deadline. It's intensive work for the duration of the contract, but the money is a lot better than being a permanent employee, and I've been finding that over the course of each contract you can save up so much money that you could happily take a few months off in-between roles if you wanted to do what you like. I'm using the time off (just starting what I envisage to be a 4 month break minimum) to try to build side projects, but you could spend 4-5 months playing sport or whatever just as easily. You might even find the contract route gives you the time to do your hobbies, and professional fulfilment too, because each is timeboxed into several month long stints. Personally I love it.
I don't know about putting in the least amount of effort for 5 days a week. But what I do know is that in my country, the Netherlands, part-time work is more and more becoming the standard. Already, 75% of women and 30% of men work 32 hours a week or less. In many sectors the fulltime standard has been lowered to 36 hours, which means every other Friday off.
I myself started on 40 and will move to 32 hours somewhere next year. It's your right by law to reduce your hours for the same pay/hour.
So my advice would be to look for remote only dev jobs in the Netherlands, and just ask to work 24h or 32h a week. It's very common here and won't be a roadblock.
Although this is going to entirely depend on how much money you actually need to get by.
Honestly, I think this is somewhat of a crapshoot/hard to tell from the job description and the reason I say this is the job I'm currently in functions exactly how you describe but the job description/everything else from the outside gave me no clue before I actually started the job.
"Ideally being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect" -- in fact, for me, often it's 2 hours on a Monday morning the first day of the sprint, then just being present on Slack for the rest of the two week sprint. I wait and submit PRs etc at the end of the sprint.
My previous jobs in tech absolutely did not function like this, so I was somewhat surprised when I fell into my current position/groove. My coworkers/managers seem to think the amount of work I get done every sprint is actually above average, even though it rarely takes me more time than six hours max every two weeks. I mostly work on backend stuff (85%/15%) and am in a senior position at a relatively large (non Silicon-Valley though still very tech savvy) company with tens of thousands of employees and billions in revenue, though based on the East Coast. My salary isn't bonkers but I'm comfortably in the 150-200k range before bonus.
There was no way for me to know, going into the job, based on the job description, interviews with team members, etc, that the expectations of my managers and co-workers would be so low. And honestly, I'm still confused. I'm not a genius software engineer, I'm maybe above average but still not anything special. My coworkers aren't lazy or bad either - they're all sharp, proactive people. All of this is to say, what you're looking for does exist, it's my job, but I haven't the slightest idea how I would've been able to tell this is that type of job before actually doing it, so alas I can't help you very much, though I am willing to answer questions if you may have any.
If you have a good pre-existing network of contacts (or have a modicum of networking skills/are willing to do a bit of legwork) I’ve found there’s a constant demand for “low-end” sysadmin/devops work for small businesses - usually they just need someone to be on call in case their AWS/virtual hosting/or Shopify what have you go down. You could probably gather about a half dozen or so of those contracts, set up some alerts, and spend no more than a few hours a week on average of work and pull in enough to cover all your bills.
Like others, I’d recommend looking into FIRE principles at least, particularly the idea of Safe Withdrawal Rate - basically every $25-30 you have invested = $1/yr you can spend for the rest of your life.
I love this question for its honesty. Frankly if I had a job I just needed technical competence on without much thought, I'd probably hire you. Our 1-on-1's would be brief and probably just be you demoing whatever hobby it is you alluded to. As long as you can crank out some decent code, I don't see a reason why a person who needs some quality work done shouldn't at least give your desired arrangement a chance.
Unfortunately right now I do need product focused engineers, but in this case you wouldn't want to work for me anyways :-)
This is also a great thought exercise, what jobs would be good for you? Thinking on it a bit, I think the following could work:
1. Scrum team member at an all remote company on one of their lesser products. If you work fast then you can probably do it in a few hours each day.
2. Maybe a small consultancy where you work on a contractual basis just completing tickets?
3. Government. A small city council style place where you specify you need remote work and then probably the workload is minimal? I don't like the idea of being a burden on a government when there are perfectly dysfunctional companies you can find this with, it feels somewhat undemocratic, but in a pinch this might do?
4. A niche field? Maybe take up COBOL? Then you can specify the hours you work and if the patches are minimal you can fly through them?
Ultimately the thing that might get you to this arrangement fastest is being really good at your job, so you can fly though the work. So perhaps doubling down on one field and becoming a domain expert is the path to this arrangement?
These are all speculations, and hopefully they help you on your path to your desired role. Good luck!
You just described my job to a T. I'm a systems analyst at a university.
This was a big, demanding job when I first started. But after being here for 2 years, I've automated a lot of the complicated stuff. So now most routine tasks that took the other guy a week takes me about 15 minutes. To be fair though, the other guy was *really bad*. Like, couldn't even open IIS manager and restart a single website, bad.
The pay is not fantastic / FAANG, but it does offer a decent salary in a mid/low cost of living area. Combined with my wife's salary we make more than enough.
Also I get a free master's degree out of it. So that's awesome.
I suggest being the one-man IT department in a non-IT org. E.g. a university department, a smaller school, a small-time manufacturer or retailer, etc.
Automating your job on one hand and managing expectations on the other should set you up for a while.
Your tech skills will degrade if you tend to them, but accumulating good will and maintaining occasional contact with people should ensure they help find you new jobs as they move about.
This is the best Ask HN I've seen in a while. Fantastic.
As for OP, I recommend you consider data analytics. That may seem counterintuitive, but the analytical work is a great place to escape into, mentally. I really, REALLY enjoy it, and I can generally use whatever tools I want for the hard stuff, and then just spew out some Python/R for a notebook deliverable, or whatever format they want. It's really liberating to have so much control over the workflow, it's entirely unlike any other tech work I've performed.
Downside, there is a little "work" involved, but I think that you might not actually mind it. It seems you are frustrated with some part of your industry.
We can talk further if you'd like, I'd love to hear more about your story, however much of that you'd be willing/comfortable to share.
I had a data science position with a large non-tech company. It did B2B sales, and had a giant office for us, done up in brushed nickel and Edison light bulbs. The rest of the company was designed in standard cheap-cubicle format, but they took visitors (i.e. sales targets) through to see the data science team, so we got the fancy layout. After working there a few months, I realized that I was also there as part of the decoration. My work didn't matter (it took them 4 months to stand up a server for a project I was working on) and my boss didn't understand what I did. Very cush. Could have gotten away with a few hours a week of real work, though I still had to physically be there most of the time. I left for more money, plus ultimately having to surreptitiously waste 35 hours a week turns out to be quite draining.
I'm a musician and developer/architecture consultant. My goal since day one of tech work 15 years ago was "fund music life better", so I hear what you are saying. I currently average half-time and make a comfortable middle class salary.
The big thing to realize is that there is a huge difference between "I want a job where I can do minimal work and mostly do my own thing while still getting paid" and "I want a job where I can earn my living in 2-3 hours a day". I have done both, the first when young in non-tech fields, the second for the last 15 years in tech. I work very hard on those 3 hours a day, in a role where deadlines can never be missed and we are part of $100M+ transactions. I take that work very, very seriously. But I get paid enough to do my 18-20h a week and spend the rest of my time pursuing the arts, with no pressure to have to figure out how to monetize my music (a very nice thing).
If you're after the second, (hard, short work, for high money), you want to find specialized expert work where you are (as you astutely pointed out) out of the production loop. Consulting is the best thing I've found. When I'm on a gig with a client, they get me 100%, totally focused. When I'm off the gig, no one expects me to get back to them sooner than a day, allowing me to do grad school in music. The key to finding this work is to become an expert in some subfield of tech, and get really good at the human side. Writing, pubic speaking, negotiation, client relationship management, project and timeline management, etc. Not many techies want to get really good at those "soft skills", but if you do, and you are an expert in something, consulting firms will value you highly.
Another good option is contract tools development or freelance contracting for folks who need code only occasionally. Lots of companies will hire part time contractors to improve internal systems, and you're still out of the product deadline loop. I've done that too and still do it sometimes for scientists. Python and SQL are good for that area.
As someone that spent years working 2 - 8 hours a week on their real job while getting top performance reviews, here's my slightly unethical tips.
- Choose a megacorp where you're far away from the value being created. Analytics at a e-commerce site? No. IT at an oil giant? Yes.
- Cherry pick what you work on, image is everything. Focus only on project that make you look good and (ideally) others don't understand. Work on them a couple hours a week and make it seem like you spent all week on them.
- When interviewing make sure your manager doesn't have a technical background in what you're going to be doing.
- Build relationships. This one is critical. Just genuinely try to be helpful when others are in a rut. Get to know your boss on a personal level.
You'd be shocked how achievable this is at a megacorp. Personally I used the time to launch a variety of businesses, but be warned choosing this path can be a double edged sword. Sometime's it's the amazing but other times you can slide into a funk when you feel like your life isn't going anywhere.
A start would be to ignore a lot of things said about tech on HN. It is a solid source of pain, suffering and time wasting (I like it, but that's another story).
Forget about all this modern tech stuff no-one is asking for. You can work for companies / clients who need stuff automated; they don't care about k8s, jamstack, react, docker, service mesh, etc etc. You can hack shit together with php + mysql, put in on a vps and you'll be treated like a sorcerer.
Find small companies (I know a bunch in the EU, which is a good region anyway as you have a safety net if you lose your job and many places have 36 hour or less weeks) that are not IT companies but factories or something non-software with a small team that are working on internal software for the last 10 years. You will get tasks to fix/add on stuff, no-one will be in a hurry (factory runs fine without it, it just makes things better or gears up for a tax rule change or whatever).
I would be careful to not get depressed by this kind of work (I nearly did), but it's not hard to find (not here anyway) if you are at least a bit social and can write code so you can get through the interview. These companies don't give you whiteboard interviews or actually any more than just a friendly chat.
If you want my advice, it is simply this: look for dysfunctional companies. They're easy to recognize, because they look like pretty much the opposite of those companies everybody really want to work at.
Take everything you see from a website like Elastic[1] for example and invert it:
- It should NOT be clear what the value proposition is.
- The website should NOT adhere to modern design standards, or at least do so very poorly.
- Bonus points for lots of unnecessary, buzz-heavy text that does not give any further indication of what the product/service offers.
Just look for any remote developer job via linkedin or any other place recruiters frequent and just invert what seems to be a "good" job and look for that instead. Approach it with your current attitude (maybe not in the actual interview) and assume that you probably won't even want to add it to your resume.
I think you won't have any problem finding a role where you can get away with this: how it will affect your mental health is another question, but that's for you to find out. If you ever want to bail out, you can just drop it and fill this gap period with something else in your resume, like whatever hobbies you were busy with.
For the record, I think the incredulity in some of these responses is pretty hilarious. 99,9 % of companies do not care about your well being as a person, by choosing this attitude you're really just treating them the way they are already treating you: a disposable business partner that will be removed from the equation as soon as they are no longer beneficial for you.
Consider: you may become depressed, unfulfilled, and unhappy in this life. I had a position that was around halfway to what you want, government database coding, and I was miserable. I think becoming fully "chilled out" is ideal, because being "half chilled" and half "in-the-hotseat" gave me whiplash a few times. I developed lazy habits over time, my work output suffered, and all that free-time on my hobby wasn't as great as I envisioned.
You know the story, it's Christmas, you're the only one in the office this week because you're new and your PTO is garbage, you're young and have no family to go back to anyway. You stroll in an hour late through the side door, check emails briefly, okay no one is here, then you fire up the YT clips or the novel reading or whatever it is. By 3pm, after 5 hours of pure faffing around, you surely deserve the christmas cookies left in the break room. By 315, you're pooped, time to head home, sneak back through the side door, and you're off to use the screen at the apartment.
Is there some nagging feeling in your stomach? That you could've explored the database, you could've dived into that long-term project you've thought of. You could've been writing up a research proposal, searching for new grants, or helping someone at a volunteer organization. Instead, you're "half on" so you're half-assing your life, not fully relaxing, not working at all.
Honestly, it wasn't for me. I want to feel fully into what I'm doing, and having to half-ass my way through a boring job was causing serious depression. I'd only recommend this if you can use less of your ass, preferably remotely, and if you're sure you won't have a crisis of meaning in life.
Try being a product manager of a web service at a big corporation. I stopped and went back to programming because of how little there was to do. You said you don't want to manage people, but in my experience all I had to do was:
- E-mail calendar invites for a meeting
- Show up to said meeting
- State the topic, point to an engineer at random and say, "What do you think?"
- Zone out for the rest of the meeting, zoning back in only if it sounds like the conversation is starting to get off track
- 5 minutes before time is up, say, "OK, it sounds like we're agreed that we're going to do X?"
- Go back to coding side-projects
It's a funny job, because even though it's very easy to coast, it's also fairly high-visibility and in my opinion very necessary. Without a dedicated person to spend 30 minutes a day watching over meetings, things seem to very quickly go off the rails.
The US Federal Government is where you want to be, if goofing off all day is your goal. I know, I worked there. I supervised a guy who explicitly refused to do his job. He said so in emails that he sent to me. I, and my supervisors, started giving him bad annual reviews. He sued, claiming racial discrimination. From that point on, every time he refused to do his job and we tried to pressure him into doing it, he amended his EEO lawsuit to claim that we were retaliating. My supervisor said to me "This guy can spend 100% of his time trying not to get fired. You can spend maybe 2% of your time trying to get rid of him. Who's gonna win?". I was told by our HR department that we could get rid of him, or at least demote him, if he failed two annual reviews in a row. Eventually he did, but we were then told by HR that he had to fail two annual reviews in a row in the same way; if he failed twice, but differently in the second year, that didn't count. At that point I stopped trying to get rid of him, and he's still sitting in his office pulling down 6 figures. Everyone is in a protected class. If you're not a racial minority or a woman, or in a minority religion or older than 50, claim you're depressed - bingo EEO protection!
I'm surprised once again by the nice and helpful community on HN. I anticipated most comments would be people telling me to get my head out of my ass and get to work.
Thanks for the kind words, I'm absolutely not depressed ! I'm very happy with my life outside of work. Some days I even feel euphoric being lucky as I am, being able to play my favorite sport and having a loving family.
I'm only trying to optimize by reducing the time spent working and thinking about work, which I never see bringing me anything else than money.
I agree with the Scrum Master suggestion, my Scrum Master pretty much just creates meeting invites for 40 hours a week. We have a lot of contracts where we have Scrum Masters just because we do Agile, usually the non-technical types do it.
The irony is that Scrum Masters are supposed to not make the team reliant on them but by having a dedicated role for it of course the dev team will make the Scrum Master do menial tasks, if you don't might dealing with the Agile bullshit full time it's a doss.
This is not an adequate advice for somebody who has a family to support.
I'd argue that for the most of us, once we go beyond 18-19 years old we can no longer afford to "think about it first" all the way to retirement age.
So I am really not sure what actionable point you're making here. "Find a better job", maybe? Yeah, a lot of us are trying that. I guess it's filter bubbles thing because I keep being contacted by HR agencies and companies that I want nothing to do with.
As someone who sympathizes with your comment ("tech stack complex and fugly") and has made moves both ways in terms of salary (high to low for QoL -25%, then low to high again +50%), start with your requirements.
OP did a great job of saying "Here's what I need." Until that's staked out, you don't know what's too little, enough, and too much.
But generally, minimizing and controlling costs (critically, through city choice) affords you flexibility. High costs = must work high paying job. Low costs = choice between working less, taking a job you enjoy more that pays less, or working more & saving.
I'll probably switch back to a lower paying job in the next 6 months or year, because I'd rather work on something I love, and because I'll have the financial flexibility to do so.
I'm extremely curious about this from a practical perspective. (Disclaimer: American, so probably not the best work-life perspective)
As far as company / coworker expectations, how does this work? Are responsibilities / work adjusted to fit the hours provided? What about being on-call?
It seems like something a lot of companies should be taking advantage of, but the desire to own souls fights against it.
This sounds like a job a friend has in city government (in the midwest US). They have to look busy but in the end it sounds like they really don’t do a whole lot (he’s the manager and knows they don’t have much to do but has to maintain head count).
Yes I have seen same productivity patterns. In one company I applied, the most senior developer's average skills were less than my junior skills.
I can say I have junior skills but better productivity. Most of the times I had under-performed to save my ass from undeserving workload.
My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons.
Colleagues have spent days in jungles building bridges to drive cars over them, have got to know people living in random villages from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and share in their culture, have met and quizzed world leaders, have been to Antarctic bases, and have exposed and brought down criminal networks making lives miserable for thousands of people.
I guess you'd define that as "glorious toiling", but I could have 10m in the bank and never have to work again, but get to do very little of that.
+1 for scrum master. Their mere existence is a strong signal that you are in an environment with a high tolerance for bureaucracy and low expectations for delivery.
I came here to respond to your #1 and tell you I worked in that position, and you are 100% spot-on. I chose to do more and grow/learn, and obviously there were times when you had full weeks and overtime, but by and large, I’d say 50% of people on my team were phoning it in and only putting in 2-3 hours per day. The rest was team meetings, corporate meetings, lunch hour, miscellaneous slack chatter, etc
Anything *agile related bullshit job will do, really.
Scrum master, agile coach, what have you. SM certs are easy to get with minimal investment. A meeting here, some buzzwords there and compile the results regularly in lengthy confluence pages nobody will ever read. Automate much of it and maybe generate a graph or two to present during reviews.
OP will have to organise retros, groomings, etc. Invent ever changing formats. Remind everybody to stick to the rulez, but don't do much else. Keeps people on their toes. At minimal effort.
Have regular catch-ups with various people. They're essentially coffee breaks, but you pretend to be productive and maybe generate a protocol. Plus you get to suck up to all the important people.
Bonus points for regularly posting obnoxious agile methodology articles on your companies intranet or Linkedin.
I identified myself way too much in OP's post. I'm in my mid-20s, have a job as a consultant DevOps engineer in a boring fintech company, in a project that I think will fail. I'm full-remote atm, and I'm already doing the least amount of work that I can do without it being noticed.
I'm really good at programming (based on feedback of my co-workers), and I like doing side-projects (usually video-game related). I can't stop thinking everyday that I'm wasting my skills on, as OP stated, useless software. I'm not sure that I'm not being a diva, though.
I'm currently taking the steps to go to a 4/5th schedule, but I'm not sure it will make it any better. I'll have more time to do what my want (side-projects + hobbies), but I'm not sure it will solve what I feel deep down.
> It's your right by law to reduce your hours for the same pay/hour.
Is this actually a thing? There are laws regarding this? How do these laws work if there's a job requirement itself which needs certain number of hours?
OP does state "I do not want to manage people" which might go against the "you just have to be comfortable with babbling on meetings/calls for the majority of the day".
And being in meetings/calls can be a very taxing job. Talking is exhausting from my experience at a call centre.
Random may not be the right word for it, but I think you're right. Do nothing jobs tend to be snowflake jobs, each one different.
A lot also depends of what you consider "work" or "slack." Is low attention meetings work?
One good strategy might be the 1/10X programmer. Find a team that sucks, be 10X better than average. Work 1/10 as hard. Spend 2 days on 2 hr tasks, etc.
Some University positions can be notoriously cushy. I know a few networking folks who have been in their position at the University for a solid 25 years. Kind of unheard of in the enterprise-sector for the same position.
I ran a small infosec shop for ~15 years and worked in many industries along the way. An IT job at a university was the first thing that came to mind. Not necessarily because the job is easy, because that's not always the case, but because the environments that I've been involved with at least are really chill and you stay in touch with young folks.
> My work didn't matter (it took them 4 months to stand up a server for a project I was working on) and my boss didn't understand what I did. Very cush. Could have gotten away with a few hours a week of real work, though I still had to physically be there most of the time. I left for more money, plus ultimately having to surreptitiously waste 35 hours a week turns out to be quite draining.
Yup. I've occasionally landed on projects like this and had the same reaction. Sure, you can coast for NOW... but it always makes me feel like I'm rusting, and that the slow pace is undermining my competitiveness for the next position.
My view is that job security is your ability to get your next position. Any given job can blow up on you for reasons beyond your control. You have to continuously push yourself so you can easily pick up the pieces if/when that happens.
But 2008-11 was a formative experience for me, so maybe I'm just bitter.
> having to surreptitiously waste 35 hours a week turns out to be quite draining.
This is the real nightmare for me. If I go in and code for 7 or 8 hours a day, time flies and my mind is active and focused. Really doesn't matter what it is, just needs to be clear and well defined.
CENTRAL ENGAGEMENT: Post is fundamentally about the right to rest and leisure. Author explicitly prioritizes non-work time and personal pursuits over productivity and career advancement.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Author states ideal scenario: 'Ideally being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect'
Author describes motivation: 'The pandemic made me realize that I do not care about working anymore'
Author identifies priority: 'I have to focus on my passions'
Inferences
The post directly affirms the human right to rest and leisure time
The author recognizes and validates non-work activities as central to human flourishing
DIRECTLY ENGAGED: Post advocates for free choice of employment and rejects unwanted career obligations. Challenges assumption that workers must accept all offered career paths.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Author seeks: 'No career advancement possibilities required. Only tech, I do not want to manage people'
Author specifies: 'Fully remote (You can't do much when stuck in the office)'
Author questions industry norm: 'it seems like you always end up having to think about the product itself'
Inferences
The post asserts the right to choose employment conditions
The author challenges systems that limit meaningful choice
DIRECTLY ENGAGED: Post advocates for free choice of employment and rejects unwanted career obligations. Challenges assumption that workers must accept all offered career paths.
CENTRAL ENGAGEMENT: Post is fundamentally about the right to rest and leisure. Author explicitly prioritizes non-work time and personal pursuits over productivity and career advancement.
Evaluated by llama-4-scout-wai: 0.00 (Neutral) 0.00
reasoning
Editorial discussing work-life balance, no human rights stance
2026-02-28 12:51
rater_validation_fail
Parse failure for model deepseek-v3.2: Error: Failed to parse OpenRouter JSON: SyntaxError: Expected ',' or ']' after array element in JSON at position 16319 (line 335 column 6). Extracted text starts with: {
"schema_version": "3.7",
"
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 10:41:39 UTC
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