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Cutting your salary by 40%

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Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#301

Post by kyberias »

adambmedia wrote: post #222

I often think about Arthur Rubenstein, the phenom mid-century pianist, for whom a lot has been written about his mission in early life to "practice as little as possible." There's a lot of hyped up romanticism in these quotes and anyone who plays at his level has spent a lifetime playing piano, period. Regardless, his guidance about spontaneity, creativity, and the relationship to practicing too much, which I equate…

How is this relevant to the topic? They don't practice the 70 hours, they work.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#302

Post by gbacon »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #199
mcv wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can have a 15hour work week if you are an independent contractor, or if you pair up with a buddy to share your job time, as long as you only demand the wealth of an average person in Keynes's time. Economically, Keynes was spot-on, but he failed to account for political and social changes

… and the irresistible temptation to run the printing presses.

Those are all severe misses.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#303

Post by zulln »

Waterluvian wrote: post #243
tome wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite bizarre to me that they would accept a reduction in working hours but not an increase in salary.

It probably helped that I convinced them (then proved it) that my productivity really wouldn't fall much. I could do the same work in less time. Unless you're making widgets on a production line, productivity doesn't linearly scale with time. I wasn't at work on Friday, but I was still subconsciously processing what I had researched, how to solve problems, etc. It's the ultimate "sleep on it" or "get up and walk arou…

Did you experiment with other days, or was it just Friday? Was this choice made by you, or what fitted the job the best?

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#304

Post by perpetualcrayon »

I had an interesting experience in this regard. I was hired by a company who had a small team of developers. When I first arrived it was obvious they had built a culture of "work until you drop". Not because anyone above them was pushing it (at least I don't think so), but they seemed to enjoy "being heroes".

Granted, from my perspective it appeared they needed to be heroes in the first place because they had accumulated so much technical debt they were drowning in it.

I tried silently to change their culture by coming in for 8 hours, doing my job, and leaving on time. I don't know if I was ultimately able to change their mentality, but I certainly turned some heads when they realized that when I was on a project it never sounded like my fingers stopped typing until I would leave for the day. That's the kind of efficiency you can attain when you have work life balance.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#305

Post by astura »

gwbas1c wrote: post #25
Ascetik wrote: post #10

To add to this, I recently got let go from my job 2 weeks ago . With that said, my boss routinely tried to guilt trip me because I didn't want to work more than 40hrs a week. I have 2 very small children and my wife is pregnant, I can't spend all my time working, nor do I have any desire to. There were a few times I put in a couple of 60hr weeks, but that was only to appease him, not because I felt it was necessary.…

Call up an employment lawyer. Firing someone for not working on their vacation is wrongful termination. Companies that do this need to be sued out of existence.

No it's not.

And even if it was, reporting it to the DOL and let them handle it would be a thousand times less stressful and cheaper.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#306

Post by Waterluvian »

zulln wrote: post #303
Waterluvian wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably helped that I convinced them (then proved it) that my productivity really wouldn't fall much. I could do the same work in less time. Unless you're making widgets on a production line, productivity doesn't linearly scale with time. I wasn't at work on Friday, but I was still subconsciously processing what I had researched, how to solve problems, etc. It's the ultimate "sleep on it" or "get up and walk arou…

Did you experiment with other days, or was it just Friday? Was this choice made by you, or what fitted the job the best?

I didn't experiment because I felt it was unfair for my availability to wander through the week. People learned I was not present on Friday.

I wanted it to abut the weekend so that I could get into my own projects (coding, building, being with family, etc.) for a longer amount of time.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#307

Post by Waterluvian »

RankingMember wrote: post #257
tome wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite bizarre to me that they would accept a reduction in working hours but not an increase in salary.

What tends to kill these kinds of arrangements is other employees complaining and wanting the same deal in my experience. aka the "NO FAIR BILLY GETS TO!" factor

I think mature managers and mature employees makes this go away.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#308

Post by TeMPOraL »

jonas21 wrote: post #237
TeMPOraL wrote: post #5

Tangential: I loved the "When programming is your hobby" part of this blog post. Finally someone accepting, and not dissing, people who actually like to code . The advice is spot-on, too: coding > 40h / week is fine, but why give up your freedom of choosing what to work on, when to work on it, and when to take time off, without any compensation?

True, but what if your work is the thing you'd choose to spend your time on, given the freedom to pick anything. Other comments suggest that this is referring to a job posting from Andrew Ng's deep learning startup. If that's the case, you might have access to expertise and compute resources that you could only dream about if you were working on a side project.

That's a fair argument, but it doesn't change that the job ad is pretty bad. SpaceX has lots of people working serious overtime because of their belief in company's mission, but it doesn't routinely advertise overtime as a job perk...

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#309

Post by richardknop »

randomdata wrote: post #266
richardknop wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It depends. You are right that you can probably be monetarily better off living in some smaller cheaper city and working as a developer for a non exciting company. Real estate prices in that city are probably something like 3-5 times lower than SF/London.

The downside is that selection of jobs is very lacking in places like that. If you are not happy with your job, or want to try something else (maybe go to a different field within IT), it might be very difficult to find anything new. Also in economic downturn like 2008 there will still be enough new jobs in big tech hubs but anything outside might dry up for couple of years.

Another factor is that even though everything is super expensive and you might be relatively poorer compared to somebody with 60% of your salary but living in a place with 40% cost of living, once you manage to get on a property ladder in a city like SF, given the constantly rising real estate prices, your house will be worth a lot once you repay your mortgage and can be a great way to retire later.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#310

Post by dv_dt »

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…

Though Ford is noted as moving to 40 hours per week and gaining productivity in the factory, the 40 hours mostly came from political action from the labor movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

Personally, I think that our economy is technologically productive enough, and the nature of work has changed enough in many work places, that we should be considering a shorter standard workweek.

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