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Cutting your salary by 40%

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Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#181

Post by chrisseaton »

doikor wrote: post #53
chrisseaton wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's a standard number of hours what's the point in being salaried? Why don't they just pay you hourly?

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…

What do you think is the difference between a salary and a guaranteed number of hours?

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#182

Post by notyourday »

Joe-Z wrote: post #131
jnordwick wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm sorry, but do you know anything about my work as a coder besides that I work 30 hours a week? I bet you, if you were to ask my boss if I've proven a valuable asset to the company he would sing you a song of praise for my work. Working long hours isn't everything.

> I bet you, if you were to ask my boss if I've proven a valuable asset to the company he would sing you a song of praise for my work.

Because you work for him and he does not work for you. People rise to one level above their competency.

You are a worker-bee. He is a queen. Him singing praises for your work is irrelevant. The only metric that is relevant in this discussion is who is the boss.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#183

Post by michaelbuckbee »

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…

The most productive organizations I've seen have been those that decouple "butt in seat" time from output - it's a poor proxy for adding value.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#184

Post by jrs235 »

richardknop wrote: post #89
Godel_unicode wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GPs point was that people can clearly be productive more than 40 hours a week because so many are. How people should be compensated for their time is only loosely coupled with how many hours they can work. I agree with you that we should be fairly compensated, but I also agree that the dogma of "40 is the max a worker can be productive, possibly less" is wrong in a large number of cases.

You might be right that some people can be productive more than 40 hours per week because I am one of them. However my point was that when negotiating salary you can't really say "I can be productive 70 hours per week" and therefor ask for 40% higher salary. It doesn't work that way and what you negotiate is based on your skills mostly in comparison to other people who are assumed to put in cca 40 hours per week. So…

>Otherwise you will just be working for free the extra 40% of the time and never be compensated for it by most companies.

And making your colleagues look bad if you aren't letting EVERYONE know that you are working more hours!

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#185

Post by hedora »

panarky wrote: post #167
jcadam wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :|

> Pfft. A man-hour of labor is a man-hour of labor. Not all hours are created equally. I do my best work with hyperfocus. I don't just mean more work, but far higher quality work that's at the edge of my intellectual capabilities. This is the work that's most rewarding and gives results that I'm proud of. But I can't get significant time "in the zone" on a 40-hour week. All the normal but necessary distractions take…

I think you'll find that pushing back on the four hours of usual distractions per day will be more productive than working long hours.

Personally, I find the usual distractions more tiring than coding, based on years of experience.

I estimate at least 2 hours of work lost per hour of meeting, once you add in meeting prep, calendar wrangling, walking, after and before meeting back chatter, realizing you have 30 minutes till lunch/commute after/before the meeting, being tired from presenting/listening/arguing, etc.

One strategy is to have meeting-only or meeting-free days, so meetings primarily ruin your productivity for other meetings and not your actual work.

Meeting-only days scale with team size, but can backfire by enabling the total number of hours in meetings to increase.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#186

Post by thecardcheat »

panarky wrote: post #167
jcadam wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :|

> Pfft. A man-hour of labor is a man-hour of labor. Not all hours are created equally. I do my best work with hyperfocus. I don't just mean more work, but far higher quality work that's at the edge of my intellectual capabilities. This is the work that's most rewarding and gives results that I'm proud of. But I can't get significant time "in the zone" on a 40-hour week. All the normal but necessary distractions take…

I think @jcadam was being snarky, not serious.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#187

Post by jnordwick »

huebnerob wrote: post #140
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…

We're all quite familiar with the idea that working long hours gets you brownie points with your managers. The point that's being made here is that companies should not be so proud of this quid pro quo, because on paper it is quite literally a devaluation of your time. You feeling you need to work excessive hours to progress in your career does not make anything about it right, quite the opposite actually.

Your excessive is my right amount. There are things that need to be done and just hiring nor people doesn't work. Peopleb aren't commodities - some things only I can do at a certain level much because I might have put myself into that place by learning all the prices of the puzzle.

I don't like the judgmental attitude against those of us who decide to make different judgement calls in life.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#188

Post by thecardcheat »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #156
tablet wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

What would you say if I told you in a given work day, I only work maybe 3-5 hours (including meetings) and still meet all targets? This has been consistent for every job I've ever had.

The larger the org and the closer to government (unless you ask for more work), the more likely I find this to be the case.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#189

Post by srtjstjsj »

Vektorweg wrote: post #175
tablet wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Some thinking-intensive work can bring you at the edge in just 3 hours a day. After that, you generate more problems than solutions. Especially mathematicians are prone to this. Similar cases in software development need to be respected.

3 hours of thinking-intensive work is fine. Then take lunch/walk/shower, and sit down to write documentation, update bug reports, chat with a coworker about your ideas, review someone else's code.....

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#190

Post by arjie »

megaduck wrote: post #145
arjie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting. Thank you very much for sharing.
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