The headline and thesis is completely bogus, because the author has no idea how much Ng's company pays or how much an applicant is earning elsewhere.
Cutting your salary by 40%
201–210 of 451 posts
Re: Cutting your salary by 40%
#202This job seems to be located in Singapore (can be easily found by googling the quote). On a related note, I recently saw a question on The Workplace SE mentioning it's common for most devs in Sri Lanka to work 12+ hours[1]. In both cases, companies seem to intentionally exploit this by explicitly filtering out candidates not willing to go such lenghts. Pretty pathetic. [1]: https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questio…
I think it's in Palo Alto.
https://www.deeplearning.ai/machinelearningsoftwareengjobdes...
Re: Cutting your salary by 40%
#203As 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…
>it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity.
I mean, why do you think people arrived at the 40hour/week metric? How do you think we came to standardize on it?
Re: Cutting your salary by 40%
#204The 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…
It's not a pay cut if the pay is $500K-$1M/yr including expected value of stock options...
Re: Cutting your salary by 40%
#205I think this must be the posting:
http://startupjobs.asia/job/33056-backend-developer-fast-gro...
Re: Cutting your salary by 40%
#206As 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…
I'm afraid this is a case of when the winners rewrite history.
Unfortunately the 40-hour week seems to have been among the last big wins of the US labor movement. Hence the popular (on HN at least) idea that this win was the result of Ford's top-down pioneering.
Re: Cutting your salary by 40%
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if it's not been rigorously tested, then there doesn't seem to be any strong case to assume that the ideal number for office work is higher, rather than lower, than 40. I'm also wondering how commute time (and method of commute) factors into this. Does 30 minutes of physically strenuous cycling before/after work have a positive or negative impact on office workers? Does the same time spent in a car navigating sto…
I recall reading somewhere that one of the best predictors of employee turnover is commute length. But that was for call center employees, and I can't recall where I read that, so take it with a grain of salt. Anecdotally, I once moved from having an hour long commute to a 5 minutes walk from work. I did end up leaving, but I feel that I enjoyed life much more living close to the office. Getting an extra two hours ev…
I guess commute doesn't need to be minimized, it just shouldn't be too long. I cycle to work which takes me 20-25 minutes and I enjoy it. It gives me a break between work and home so that I can separate the two.
Re: Cutting your salary by 40%
#208I 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 :|
That's ridiculous
Re: Cutting your salary by 40%
#209Articles like this show why the economic growth of the 21st Century will be in East Asia. This generation's educated Westerners are too comfortable and complacent.
Re: Cutting your salary by 40%
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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.
Don't just sue for yourself. Sue to have all their employees reclassified as wage employees rather than salaried exempt, and try to get them to pay out overtime for all that after-hours work.
IANAL, but in the US overtime isn't applicable to software developers.