I do it, though I do 30 hours so it's three 10-hour days, and I get 75% of my "normal" salary. I started out full time, and after about a year or so I went to my manager and said "how about I work 30 hours?" and he said "sure".

It's a big company which HN would probably scoff at, and we work with super uncool things like Oracle. But it's just a job, and I get to spend Mondays and Fridays with my young kids.

A lot of people just dont ask.

When I was a young graduate, I didn't feel like working 5 days a week. I had many activities that I didn't want to sacrifice.

At job interviews, I asked about part-time and surprisingly, some companies were fine with that. At least, until I got hired, then I was quickly pressured to switch to full time (eventually, I moved to academics which suits me better).

My day job is a school teacher in China. You sometimes have to find a country that suits your lifestyle to do the low hours thing.

I'd guess 90% of HNers could very easily walk into a job just like mine too.

IBM certainly do (I work part time for them in a dev role).

Large institutions can be surprisingly good about this. Government jobs in the UK, for instance, tend to be pretty open to job-shares. Look for companies supportive of working mothers -- if they have systems in place for parents to work part-time, they may well be prepared to accommodate you on similar terms.

They exist, we have people working from 50-90%, depending on position and what people want.