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Cutting your salary by 40%

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Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#61
In Spain this is quite normal ( they don't say it in the job offer, but is expected that you work more than 40 hours/week ). When you ask to get paid for those extra hours they usually laugh at you.

People outside Spain usually make jokes about Spanish "siesta", but in fact we are exploited in the same way this article describes.

( making jokes of course is ok, what is not ok is the exploitation )

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#62
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have Terraform chops? I'm looking for part-time remote SysAdmin type right now.

I have no idea what Terraform chops is..., but I would be more than happy to entertain your offer! Is there a way to PM on here?

Terraform is a tool to automate provisioning of infrastructure: https://www.terraform.io/

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#63
post #2

The original job postings[1][2] were even more egregious. They originally said, "many of us routinely work 70-90 hours/week". After a lot of criticism on a Facebook post by Andrew Ng[3] (where you can still find residual evidence of the "work 70-90 hours/week" claim), they modified it to, "many of us routinely work and study 70+ hours a week". So to be precise, they were initially offering you a 43% to 56% pay cut. G…

> Getting paid for 40 hours Do salaried jobs always specify a number of hours in their contracts? Otherwise you aren't being paid for 40 hours - you're just being paid to get the job done aren't you?

In India, most employment agreements in the software industry mention an average of 40 work hours per week.

They usually also have a disclaimer that mention that one may have to work more than 40 hours per week without any additional compensation. That's just a legal disclaimer. In reality though, in every software company (except Oracle) I have worked for overtime was rewarded with free pizzas for the extra hours we spent after sunset and also additional paid time off (known as "compensation time off").

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#64
post #5

Tangential: I loved the "When programming is your hobby" part of this blog post. Finally someone accepting, and not dissing, people who actually like to code . The advice is spot-on, too: coding > 40h / week is fine, but why give up your freedom of choosing what to work on, when to work on it, and when to take time off, without any compensation?

Yeah, except what this actually means is, "You don't have any interests outside of work and you do not have kids that may take you away from work and you don't have a SO/spouse to tell you that you're being taken advantage of." It's not really about your interests, it's about you being naive.

This is pretty amazing. OP made a comment about people not hating on those who enjoy coding and you came and called them naive. Plenty of people code outside of work, on personal projects, and are not being taken advantage of.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#65
post #10

To add to this, I recently got let go from my job 2 weeks ago . With that said, my boss routinely tried to guilt trip me because I didn't want to work more than 40hrs a week. I have 2 very small children and my wife is pregnant, I can't spend all my time working, nor do I have any desire to. There were a few times I put in a couple of 60hr weeks, but that was only to appease him, not because I felt it was necessary.…

>"When CAN YOU work after hours?" "You're a 40hr work week kind of guy" "Time to put on your big-boy pants"

Sue them like its going out of style.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#66
post #21

As much as I'd love to believe the "work more than 40 hours a week, because SCIENCE!" party line, I have a hard time accepting it, and I think so do most people who hear it (outside of HN, at least). For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of peopl…

[deleted]

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#67
post #21

As much as I'd love to believe the "work more than 40 hours a week, because SCIENCE!" party line, I have a hard time accepting it, and I think so do most people who hear it (outside of HN, at least). For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of peopl…

In my experience, the amount of workload you can handle is highly dependant on the person though everyone will see some diminishing returns after working a few hours straight. The people who pull 70+ hour weeks successfully tend to have an abnormally high tolerance to stress as well as an abnormally high 'drive'. I'd be willing to bet there's a genetic component.

> The people who pull 70+ hour weeks successfully tend to have an abnormally high tolerance to stress as well as an abnormally high 'drive'. I'd be willing to bet there's a genetic component.

Or else they're just killing themselves. I'd be interested to see how they do in the long-term.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#68
post #55
post #21

As much as I'd love to believe the "work more than 40 hours a week, because SCIENCE!" party line, I have a hard time accepting it, and I think so do most people who hear it (outside of HN, at least). For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of peopl…

> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. It's not in the slightest bit down to convenience. It's because 40 hours was quite simply discovered to be a more productive length of day, well over a century ago, back in the later stages of the industrial revolution. In the US, if memory serves, the move to a 40…

It's because 40 hours was quite simply discovered to be a more productive length of day

That was true when most of the workforce was doing manual and factory style labour. To the best of my knowledge it hasn't been rigorously reproduced for works that spend their days staring at a screen thinking.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#69
post #21

As much as I'd love to believe the "work more than 40 hours a week, because SCIENCE!" party line, I have a hard time accepting it, and I think so do most people who hear it (outside of HN, at least). For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of peopl…

> For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong?

You have it reversed. Get a sample of people working 70 hours a week and see how many are successful by some chosen measure compared to those who work 40 hours.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#70
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have Terraform chops? I'm looking for part-time remote SysAdmin type right now.

Confusingly, the email field in your HN profile is not public. You need to add it to the "About" bit if you want people to be able to contact you :)

You can add me on steam if you have it. Ascetik or thelegacyslayer
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