Cutting your salary by 40% • Hacker News Board

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#141

Post by richardknop » Mon, Sep 18, 2017, 2:41 PM UTC

jnordwick wrote: post #112

What many here dont seem to understand is that you work commensurate with where you want to be. I work longish hours become I'm in finance and want to move up the organization or find a higher spot inn another. I want to know more about all facets of the firm and one day be a principal in a prop trading firm. I don't put in 80+ hour weeks because I want to stay where I'm at in my career. I become involved in more and…

You can progress in your career very rapidly by doing 40h of high quality work per week. I know many young people (my generation) who are in their late 20s or early 30s and have made a very fast career progression already and didn't need to work 80 hours per day at all.

Also for software engineers you have to take into account continuously upskilling yourself to know the latest tech is something which takes a lot of time and is mostly done outside of work as there's never time at work for that.

So most great software engineers I know might work 40h for the company per week but in order to keep on top of their game they spend portion of their free time for that.

Just as you said "I want to know more about all facets of the firm", most good engineers want to have a deeper understanding of specific tech and finer details.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#142

Post by shados » Mon, Sep 18, 2017, 2:41 PM UTC

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…

Yup. It's one of those case we want something to be true, but really, it isn't (always, anyway). Sure, some people are absurdly productive on 25 hours a week. Good for them! Keep at it!

Others though, not so much. In programming, you also get better by doing it more. So even if it's not "for work", if you have side projects, you will (generally) be better than those who don't, from pure practice. The super high salaries don't just reflect a higher demand: they also reflect an expectation of higher expected output than in other professions. It's implied that you'll spend the time to stay on top of things, stay up to date with technology and other things that may require more time than your weekly allocation of jira tickets.

There's a guy in my team who probably works 60+ hours a week. I warned him about burning out, told him he didn't have to (as his manager), etc. He does it for fun. Because he enjoys it. And he's amazingly productive. He's not doing it for a promotion either, he's already pretty much at the highest level the role can be.

And while a lot of people SAY they are "more productive" working less, often it's not true. One of my buddies keep spouting that, and honestly doesn't get much done. Another also repeats it AND is the most productive person I know.

Essentially, your millage will vary, but only rarely are people at the very tip top manage to do more with less time. Some do, but they're essentially gods among mortals (or lying to themselves about it).

Personally, I generally work about 40 hours a week, but I don't pretend I'm doing more than others. I just do what I feel I'm paid for while also pursuing my career goals to go up the ladder by doing what's best for my employer.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#143

Post by le-mark » Mon, Sep 18, 2017, 2:42 PM UTC

jnordwick wrote: post #112

What many here dont seem to understand is that you work commensurate with where you want to be. I work longish hours become I'm in finance and want to move up the organization or find a higher spot inn another. I want to know more about all facets of the firm and one day be a principal in a prop trading firm. I don't put in 80+ hour weeks because I want to stay where I'm at in my career. I become involved in more and…

> I become involved in more and take on more reliability because I want more responsibility I the future. I work twice or more what I'm paid to work because I want to earn at least twice as much in the future.

Noble sentiment, but in reality you are just marking yourself as a fool, especially to everyone above you. You seem to think that over achieving now will translate to future gains in either salary or position, it won't. You'll simply be exploited and marginalized by those who play the political game better than you. If you're goal is to move into management, then you have to play the politics where day to day competency is just a formality. Actually you don't even have to be competent, you just have to have perceived competency.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#144

Post by auserperson » Mon, Sep 18, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

Let's all be real here. Trying to impress your boss by working long hours (or whatever pointless shit) is worthless. Promotions don't exist and when they do they pay you less than actually just quitting the job.WTF do you get from trying to be the best employee of your silly company? Fucking nothing. You need to impress your co-workers who can give you recommendations on jobs in the future not your fucking ass shit boss. It's naive to try to impress your boss try to be the perfect employee. It's smart to try to be the best professional who happens to get paid for your work hours. Fuck employers.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#145

Post by megaduck » Mon, Sep 18, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

arjie wrote: post #80

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…

What is your methodology for determining the change in defect rates and code quality?

We use Pivotal Tracker, and it's pretty easy to see how many bugs are popping up and how often.

Code quality shows up in your velocity over time. My favorite saying right now is "quality is future speed". We also do regular reviews to assess things like cyclomatic complexity and how well SOLID principles are being followed.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#146

Post by jnordwick » Mon, Sep 18, 2017, 2:45 PM UTC

slaunchwise wrote: post #120

jnordwick wrote: post #112

What many here dont seem to understand is that you work commensurate with where you want to be. I work longish hours become I'm in finance and want to move up the organization or find a higher spot inn another. I want to know more about all facets of the firm and one day be a principal in a prop trading firm. I don't put in 80+ hour weeks because I want to stay where I'm at in my career. I become involved in more and…

Pro tip for getting ahead: learn the difference between 'commiserate' and 'commensurate'. Otherwise you will be unintentionally funny.

Thanks. On phone. Swype "comm" and just accept what it gives you.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#147

Post by richardknop » Mon, Sep 18, 2017, 2:45 PM UTC

jnordwick wrote: post #124

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…

> 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.

How do you know how much responsibility he has? Plenty of senior people work less than 40h but have a lot of responsibility.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#148

Post by jcadam » Mon, Sep 18, 2017, 2:45 PM UTC

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…

Pfft. A man-hour of labor is a man-hour of labor. Which is why I fully understand why my employer is requiring me (and the others on my team) to make up the 48 hours of labor I lost when I evacuated due to Hurricane Irma (even though the office was of course closed for much of that time).

I'm spending the extra hours perusing/posting on HN and looking at job listings :|

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#149

Post by megaduck » Mon, Sep 18, 2017, 2:46 PM UTC

dogruck wrote: post #97

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…

How did you determine that 40 hours is optimal? Why not 30? Or 50?

I'm not convinced it's optimal! However, it's a "known good" number that's easy to convince people to follow along with. Running experiments is hard and expensive, so we just haven't tackled that yet.

My personal suspicion is that optimal is probably in the 35-45 range, but I'd love to have more data.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#150

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Sep 18, 2017, 2:49 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #6

foo101 wrote: 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?

It is usually specified in a law somewhere. No, salaried workers are not paid to get the job done, they are paid for the time. That is why companies can let the job loosely specified.

Contract workers are the ones hired for a job, not their time. Yet, actual pricing will vary and even then some contractors will insist on getting paid by time.