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Cutting your salary by 40%

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Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#261

Post by dahart »

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…

Working for 70+ hours a week is trading your entire life for whatever money you make, all of it. I've done it multiple times working crunches in games, and I finally realized it's not worth any amount of money. If it's really a true 70 hours, there is no social life outside of work. Once you exceed 80 hours, you are compromising your ability to exercise & sleep, and there is zero time for family. I worked 80 hour weeks after my 2nd son was born, and I didn't see much of him for six months. My wife was rightly sore about that for years, and even worse than that I regret it deeply and wish I hadn't done it.

That said, I think calculating the percent pay cut feels like an awkward way to frame the issue. Very few people working 70 hours at a salaried job could get paid for 70, even contractors will normally get scaled back to 40 if they ask for 70. If you worked only 40, very few people will get another 30 hours per week job to make that extra money. (And contracts for lots of salaried employees would prevent that scenario.)

The value of hours worked above 40 is your life, not a percent pay cut. It would take a jump from a 6 figure salary to a 7 figure salary, or more, to make extended 70 hours weeks worthwhile, so I think talking about a 50% pay cut is drastically undervaluing that extra effort & time.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#262

Post by aetherson »

walshemj wrote: post #82
aetherson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure. But if you have a typical programming job, it's not like there's a clean finish line. There's always more work to do, but at some point you need to pack up and go home for the night.

then your employer needs to plan better and descope where required

No, dude. Like, not, "There's always omigod super important crunch time work to do." There's always just ordinary "what's next on the queue" work to do. Descoping doesn't mean "We're done as software developers," it means "We aren't going to worry about getting this functionality into this release."

But there's no point where you don't have a backlog. When you finish the task you're current working on, you pick up the next task. Nobody's expecting anyone to work all night on the next task, but similarly there's no place where you're like, "Okay, we're done, everyone go home for the week." So... work 40 hours-ish.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#263

Post by didibus »

I like to call it the difference between efficiency and productivity.

When you're efficient, you get more things done. Normally that comes from working more, either by doing more hours or cutting out distractions. So you might get more done in a week.

Being efficient does not mean you are productive. Productivity I think of as getting more value out of less effort. It comes from good prioritization, working on what matters most, focusing on the important.

Depending on the work, you'll need to be more productive or more efficient. In programming, equal effort tasks have very different outputs. So much that no amount of efficiency can catch up to good productivity. Choosing priorities is critical. Being productive is harder, because its a skill, you have to develop an intuition, measure, reason about the opportunities, predict which tasks are worth a lot and which are useless.

Efficiency vs Productivity is one of the bigger difference between a junior and a senior developer. Its the difference between good management and bad.

One of the issues is management schools do teach a lot about techniques to make people more efficient. And certain jobs benefit, like maybe a call center, a truck driver, etc. Not programming though.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#264

Post by curun1r »

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'm mostly the same, but I'm less militant about it and, instead, try to empower my team to handle it themselves. That said, I explicitly promise that any time outside of the normal 40 hours should be taken as comp time. So if someone spends 3 hours one evening dealing with a production issue or we have an upper-management-imposed push to get a feature out, there should be an equivalent number of hours taken off when the employee would have otherwise worked. And it's not time that can be banked to use to increase a vacation, it should be taken immediately and if I notice that someone isn't taking it, I'll tell them to leave the office. I've found that employees who aren't overworked can pull a 70 hour week and actually be that much more productive, but they can't do it on a regular basis and they need to recover afterwards.

Also, to combat the "time in seat" fallacy, I encourage my team to take walks every couple of hours, even if it's just around the office, though they should get outside if it's not raining. They can do it in groups, pairs or alone, but I've found that developers are more creative and better able to think through consequences/permutations when they don't spend too much time being sedentary. And it has the dual benefit of breaking the notion that sitting at your desk is the modern day timecard. As you've correctly noted, getting stuff done and achieving quality are what we should measure, not ability to spend time typing and looking at a screen.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#265

Post by pc86 »

dx034 wrote: post #211
blub wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your 60+ hours per week guy probably doesn't have much of a life outside software engineering. He'd be working between 8,5-12h/day, depending on how many workdays he puts in. At that level of time investment, he doesn't have time for a romantic relationship. Almost no one would be crazy to accept so little attention, but even if they would it would be a weak & shallow relationship. They probably don't have time for f…

While I'm not a fan of 60h per week, I'd disagree here. If you work 12h per day you'll still have several hours in the evening and the whole weekend for your partner. From my observations, relationships don't depend on how much people work, they depend on how much of their free time both partners like to spend together.

If you're willing to sacrifice other aspects, sure. And if your partner is willing to be secondary to your job, or they have a similar schedule.

Figure 30-60 minutes getting ready in the morning, a 30 minute commute, a 12 hour work day (12.5 with lunch!), a 30 minute commute back, 30 minutes for dinner, and 8 hours of sleep. That's about 22-23 hours of the day. Assuming you spend a grand total of 1-2 hours with your partner, and you do all the things you need to do to be a functioning adult (laundry, dishes, home maintenance if you don't rent, etc) on the weekends.

Or you can work at a company that respects its employees and is close by. From the time I leave my house to the time I come back is less than 9 hours every day, and that includes my commute and 45-60 minutes for lunch (not at my desk).

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#266

Post by randomdata »

richardknop wrote: post #166
chii wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> zero-sum competition for inflexible goods if you consider good housing to be only within a certain distance of some CBD, then yes, housing is zero sum. But there's lots more space available than humans right now, and relaxing the distance/centrality requirement will greatly increase the pool of available housing (and hence, "cheaper"). The only winner when everyone tries to outbid for a small amount of housing is t…

All the best jobs are in the big expensive cities. Everywhere around the world, if you want the best job you will need to go to New York, SF, London, Tokyo, Paris, Munich etc. That's one reason why everybody wants to live there. Second reason would is to be close to a large number of people which greatly increases social activities you can do. In a large city even a niche hobby will probably attract enough people tha…

Is it really the best job when the out of control expenses in those cities leave you no further ahead than someone working in the 'not the best job' elsewhere? Unless by best job you mean some kind of non-monetary metric, but I'm not sure that holds either. The best jobs for non-monteary reasons in my opinion are also found outside of those cities, but are definitely low paying due to the fact that everyone wants to do that kind of work.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#268

Post by s73ver_ »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #86
megous wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't think so. Everyone isn't the same, some people have more or less capacity to handle long hours. I personally feel that mastery and enjoyment have a large role in how many hours you can work. If you're working on something you love and are good at, you're going to be productive longer. I think just measuring hours is missing the point.

I have no doubt that I could easily work more hours than I do now. But then I would have no time to do other things in my life.

I have zero interest in handing the rest of my free time over to my employer, especially for free.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#270

Post by randomdata »

megaduck wrote: post #233
dominotw wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I enforce a militant "40 hours only" policy for my employees, and it's incredible for productivity. why not 35, 39 or 42 hours?

Predictability. We pair program, so we need everybody to be there at the same time. People sometimes work less, due to doctor appointments, child care, home repairs, and such. However, they never work more.

How does a total of 40 hours per week affect the predicability of being there at the same time in a way that 35, 39, or 42 hours maximum per week could not?
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