No deadlines? For how long does someone have to not "produce something that's better than what's on production" for you to decide he's not fit to keep getting a paycheck?
People can get fired from 40h/week, meeting and deadline heavy jobs too.
No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
81–90 of 543 posts
Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
#82I must say that's impressive. I've been thinking about this for some time. I'm wondering if this new wave of companies would be a problem for the economy. Running a company is getting easier every year. That's good, more companies means more job opportunities. On the other hand, as we can see from the article, you can run a very lean remote company and still grow and be successful. Such companies would hire less and…
It’s only a positive trend if society captures the wealth and spreads it back. I don’t think wealth inequality is a positive trend at all.
I was going to say, it's like looking at the "gig" economy as a positive trend. This type of hiring process leads to less job stability and no health insurance, both of which are sorely under represented in the US for as developed a nation as we are. I think this is one more disconnect in business and success that we have been seeing in recent history.
Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
#83In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution. It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model? I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week... So much so, I'm about to launch a website lis…
Some of it is a quirk of the American health care system. Your health care costs the same regardless of your work hours, and it's a significant fraction of compensation. If you were working 80% as much, they would probably only be able to pay 70% of your salary.
(Assuming you were linearly productive, which it's not, but it's the same assumption you were making and is good enough for this illustration.)
There are other fixed overheads, like your manager, human resources, the office itself, and even the cost of hiring you in the first place. It's possible that to make all things equal, they might have to change your salary to as much at 60%.
Of course all things are never equal, so these numbers have really wide error bars. And after all that, you might well decide that 60% salary for a 32 hour week would still be a good deal. I know I'd consider it. But it's important to note that it's going to be rare to find a job that will pay you 80% as much for 80% of the work.
Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
#84In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution. It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model? I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week... So much so, I'm about to launch a website lis…
In my experience, in Europe (at least in Switzerland and Germany) it's much more common for people to work 80% than it is in the US.
Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, hard pass. If I'm gonna be a 1099 contractor my rate will need to be very high (roughly $500/hr). Otherwise I'm sticking with my FTE job. And I'd need to be able to pick up more than the 20 hours per week than this guy will give me too, so I'd need multiple clients.
20 hrs a week @ 500 is 520k/y. you only need one client.
minus vacation, taxes, health insurance, overhead (time tracking, billing, book keeping, etc), time between gigs. 2050052 you are coming in way high. You can cut that in half and get a reasonable estimate for take home.
Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I won't discuss other people's rates but I personally earn ten thousand USD per month.
Thanks for the number. Are you willing to add how many hours you're putting in?
It really depends and I don't track my time all that well, though one of my 2021 things I'm doing is trying a bit of time tracking, just for my own sake / more visibility on how I spend my day.
Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
#87In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution. It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model? I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week... So much so, I'm about to launch a website lis…
A B2B business has two choices if they want to institute a 4-day week. They can be closed 20% of the week, when their competition is likely open, or they can be open 5 days and spread 4 days of work out among their staff. So now if your coworker takes off Tuesdays, and you take off Wednesdays, you better not have a question for him on Tuesday morning.
And isn't 28 hours 3.5 days?
Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
#88I must say that's impressive. I've been thinking about this for some time. I'm wondering if this new wave of companies would be a problem for the economy. Running a company is getting easier every year. That's good, more companies means more job opportunities. On the other hand, as we can see from the article, you can run a very lean remote company and still grow and be successful. Such companies would hire less and…
>On the other hand, as we can see from the article, you can run a very lean remote company and still grow and be successful.
Eh, this is a pretty unique situation. They spent a lot of money and effort building the initial product and growing users. Now that the product is (mostly) feature complete and they have sufficient users they can run lean and mean. But that doesn't mean they could have run lean and mean while building the company. IMHO, you still need the upfront investment to build out the core product and acquire a sufficient customer base.
The reality of today with interest rates so low is that growth is more valued than cash flow. So while lots of companies (Dropbox, Slack, AirBnB) could do something like this and start generating a bunch of cash they create more value in the eyes of investors by growing.
Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
#89This looks really great. I've been thinking for a while to start a tech co-op with the only goal of giving the best benefits possible to its members in terms of pay and freedom, while being completely independent from investors/shareholders and the delusion of perpetual growth.
This is both a confirmation that you can work on big projects without necessarily grinding away all of your time and energy, and that perpetual growth isn't a necessity.
Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I won't discuss other people's rates but I personally earn ten thousand USD per month.
Thanks for the number. Are you willing to add how many hours you're putting in?
their official deal is well known - it's a quarter time role so formally about 10 hours a week. of course, the time they end up actually putting in is up to them.