Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cutting your salary by 40%

codewithoutrules.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 451 posts

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#121

Post by tablet »

megaduck wrote: post #50

I enforce a militant "40 hours only" policy for my employees, and it's incredible for productivity. When you work longer hours defect rates increase, code quality drops, and things are on fire all the time. You also lose really good people due to burnout. Sustainable pace is super important for creating and maintaining high performance teams. Crassly, it's just a more profitable way of doing business. I wish more man…

I partially agree with you, but personal productivity varies. So in our company we have a rule "work as much as you like, usually we expect no less than 30 hours, but it is OK to do 50. Anything beyond these ranges is odd".

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#122

Post by stefantheard »

Joe-Z wrote: post #79
etiene wrote: post #38

This is insane. I've actually been looking to reduce my work hours to about 30, because even 40 seems too much. Having had a couple of burnouts before, I want my life to be more than my job, and I truly believe this would make me better at my job in the long term. After a day of full time work I almost never have the energy to do some of the other things I want to do. I want to be able do more open source, learn a fo…

Go for it! I'm working a 30-hour week right now. Like you, I feel even 40 hours/week of pure coding ist just not sustainable. Out of the 3 software dev jobs I had up to this point all the people that 'worked' over-time were just wasting more time drinking coffee and chit-chatting with colleagues. Most of the time I just want to put in a productive day, solve 1 or 2 problems and then go home at a reasonable time, so I…

How were you able to swing a 30-hour a week job? Was it negotiated or are you consulting / setting your own hours?

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#123

Post by jackschultz »

I always see posts like this, talking about the negativity of long working hours, but I do get curious the percentage of jobs in each of the categories. Categories like:

- Forcing only 40 hour work weeks - Not forcing, but expecting 40 hour work weeks - Not forcing, but expecting overtime work weeks - Forcing (or talking positively about) over 40 hour work weeks

All the blog posts and comments talk about how necessary those standard weeks are (I absolutely agree), but knowing the commonality of both would be great to see.

In my case, I'd guess forcing of 40 hour work weeks is more common than we think.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#124

Post by jnordwick »

Joe-Z wrote: post #79
etiene wrote: post #38

This is insane. I've actually been looking to reduce my work hours to about 30, because even 40 seems too much. Having had a couple of burnouts before, I want my life to be more than my job, and I truly believe this would make me better at my job in the long term. After a day of full time work I almost never have the energy to do some of the other things I want to do. I want to be able do more open source, learn a fo…

Go for it! I'm working a 30-hour week right now. Like you, I feel even 40 hours/week of pure coding ist just not sustainable. Out of the 3 software dev jobs I had up to this point all the people that 'worked' over-time were just wasting more time drinking coffee and chit-chatting with colleagues. Most of the time I just want to put in a productive day, solve 1 or 2 problems and then go home at a reasonable time, so I…

> I'd actually be willing to work a 40-hour week again, but only if my job then gives me responsibilies beyond just being a coder.

Why would they do that? You don't seem to have shown any initiative or demonstrated how well you would take on extra responsibility.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#125

Post by moron4hire »

AquinasCoder wrote: post #56

The article doesn't claim this is endemic to only startups, and in my experience work life balance among small, medium, and large companies is equally threatened. Even the term "work-life" balance seems to assume an artificial divide between the two. When work is a facet of a rich life, those extra long hours, the grueling commute, the vacillations of the newest management fad are just not worth it. Not to mention th…

I wonder about this a lot.

I can be highly productive in certain scenarios, and in others I can really drag on where others would be much faster than me. It's stuff like, I'm really good at code that involves math, I'm not so good at operations. Completely different, unrelated subject areas, but one is viewed as "harder" than the other, so if I can do one, I'm expected to be able to do the other. I often end up get a reputation for being a high-performer, because the stuff I'm good at often gets done during the initial proof-of-concept, and then start getting the screws tightened down on me from management in a really angry way as it appears I start slacking off when we hit the later-stages of a project that involve deployment management and other things that I'm just not very good at.

And it's other stupid shit, like, "if he's a whiz at JavaScript, he must be great at CSS and terrible at embedded systems." No, in this example, I'm the opposite.

Of course, it never occurs to them that maybe expecting everyone to do everything is not the right way to do things. I think, in sum total, I'm probably more skilled in a broader area of subjects than most people, but I'm not anywhere near skilled enough across every necessary subject for a full project to be able to pull one off on my own.

I don't want to focus on just one thing. I do think I provide a unique value by being very versatile. It should be used as a way to smooth over bumps in the project schedule while management rebalances staff or highers more people. I don't mind jumping from 3D graphics into web and database development, or whatever. I've always believed that all work is worth doing and none "beneath" me.

But too often, once I reveal I'm more capable than the original position to which I was hired, I'm expected to do everything, all at the same time. And that's when things get out of hand. It has at least always appeared like the people who keep their heads down and their mouths shut during meetings and don't volunteer anything beyond their job description have a much better time of their jobs.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#126

Post by jnordwick »

edanm wrote: 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…

> Why does everyoªne on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited?

Isn't this standard fare for socialists and technocrats that HN is flooded with?

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#127

Post by dogruck »

grasshopperpurp wrote: post #114
dogruck wrote: post #109

The most successful people I know work much more than 40 hours each week.

Professionally successful, or successful as people?

As people.

Granted, none of those people are grinding away working for The Man. Instead, they are running their own organizations.

Is that not your experience?

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#128

Post by Joe-Z »

stefantheard wrote: post #122
Joe-Z wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go for it! I'm working a 30-hour week right now. Like you, I feel even 40 hours/week of pure coding ist just not sustainable. Out of the 3 software dev jobs I had up to this point all the people that 'worked' over-time were just wasting more time drinking coffee and chit-chatting with colleagues. Most of the time I just want to put in a productive day, solve 1 or 2 problems and then go home at a reasonable time, so I…

How were you able to swing a 30-hour a week job? Was it negotiated or are you consulting / setting your own hours?

It actually started as a side-job while studying. I actually increased to 30 hours/week over time from starting with 20 hours/week.

That said, I think most companies would be willing to find some agreement on reduced working hours if you've proven valuable too them. A friend of mine just recently switched to 32 hours/week over 4 days, after having started out at the company with a 40 hours job. It's really the best option for the company and yourself if one of the two parties isn't satisfied with the agreement anymore.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#129

Post by soVeryTired »

mcv wrote: post #98
etiene wrote: post #38

This is insane. I've actually been looking to reduce my work hours to about 30, because even 40 seems too much. Having had a couple of burnouts before, I want my life to be more than my job, and I truly believe this would make me better at my job in the long term. After a day of full time work I almost never have the energy to do some of the other things I want to do. I want to be able do more open source, learn a fo…

I'm working 32 hours: 4 days a week. That leaves me a day with the kids outside the weekend. Oldest kid is at school most of the day, so I take the youngest to the zoo or something. I heartily recommend it. It's crazy that we're all still working 40 hours a week. Didn't Keynes promise we'd have 15 hour work weeks by now? (He did. He didn't anticipate our bosses taking all the profits from our productivity gains, thou…

>He didn't anticipate our bosses taking all the profits from our productivity gains, though.

He also didn't anticipate zero-sum competition for inflexible goods like housing. If I want a nice house in a decent city, I have to out-compete and out-borrow everyone else who might want that house. If everyone around me is making bank and I want the nice house, then I'd better make bank too. Lots of us end up working more than we'd like, in a delicate balance between our desire for stuff and our tolerance of overwork.

Life would be a whole lot easier if we could control our desires but it's easier said than done.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#130

Post by logfromblammo »

ikeyany wrote: post #99
doikor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because nobody on the better paid fields would take such a contract. You could try it but you would most likely lose in the market place of jobs by all the best employees going somewhere else. As to why having a contract that pays you for the standard work week always I think people just like the security of getting roughly the same amount of money each month (or biweekly or however often you get paid). Especially on…

So the point of salaries is to not have to pay overtime? No wonder everyone is becoming a contractor.

The point of salaries was to pay employees by the week instead of by the hour. My first job had a weekly timecard that consisted of a checkbox: "Did you work this week?"

Now, every job I have requires me to account for all my hours, so it seems like the only reason I am not a wage employee is to avoid paying me 150% base rate for hours worked beyond the first 40 in a calendar week.

Post reply on HN