In this telling he tried to effect change from within, but was overwhelmed, both spiritually and physically, by what he found there.
If there is a positive to draw from it it lies in his ability to talk about the experience afterwards through drama and indirectly through this piece. I don't think that level of success often accrues to people trying to effect positive change from within.
I'm not seeing anything described in the article as "buying time" that couldn't also be described as "buying the right to order someone else around" aka "delegating". Surely the most direct way of buying time is by taking a pay cut in exchange for more time off, or even taking unpaid time off. It occurs to me there may be a good proxy for this in comparing similar tech jobs in the US vs the EU / UK. The latter pay less, but receive substantially more time off.
> Surely the most direct way of buying time is by taking a pay cut in exchange for more time off, or even taking unpaid time off.
We don't get those choices. I tried for YEARS to engineer a long-term part-time career in the software industry, and I couldn't get it to happen. I'm perfectly happy to trade more free time for less money, but there are just no takers out there. The industry isn't interested.
As far as taking unpaid time off -- usually, that happens after you've quit your previous job and before you've started the next one.
I can think of two ways you can trade money for time as a SWE:
1) Amazon has started to offer part-time jobs for SWE's (https://www.flexjobs.com/jobs/telecommuting-jobs-at-amazon)
2) relocating from the US to UK / EU gives you 25-100% more PTO and shorter hours in exchange for lower salaries
