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No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

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Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#191

Post by alistairSH »

poorman wrote: post #121
_2d30 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you willing to provide any additional clarity on "very competitive rates as contractors"? I understand if not but would be useful to help some of us externally think about this model.

People don't realize that as a contractor, you can write off the room you're using for your office. As a remote employee you cannot. For people living in high rent areas, that's significant.

Not always. Highly dependent on country/state and actual usage of space (dedicated office space vs a desk/chair in the corner of the bedroom). Hire a CPA if you are unsure.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#192

Post by marcinzm »

Personally I actually like deadlines if project scope can be adjusted to meet them and there's no crunch time. It forces everyone to focus on getting a concrete deliverable out rather than getting side tracked for months on pointless features or additions or optimizations. And as an introvert having N mini-jobs where I have to keep track of N times as many people sounds like hell.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#193

Post by drchopchop »

DVassallo wrote: post #72
drchopchop wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on earth did you find standalone family coverage for $950/mo? What's your deductible / co-insurance?

It’s actually a bit cheaper this year: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1312177408879939584?s=2... It was one of the cheapest plan on the ACA marketplace in WA. It’s a very high deductible plan though: $13.6K.

Oof, that's a pretty brutal deductible, although I assume you have an HSA paired with that. FWIW, I'm on an Aetna corp plan that isn't much better, half the deductible for 2x the price.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#194

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

ftruzzi wrote: post #148

My team got laid off a few months ago and after experiencing remote working this is the only kind of work arrangement I'd be happy to apply for. 40hrs a week of remote working does not allow for a lot of freedom, ~20hrs sounds amazing. Really hope more companies start to adopt this.

Personally, unless there is some clear and dramatic advantage to a scheme like this, or it is enforced by law or collective bargaining pressure, I think it is unlikely to ever happen.

I hold this belief because I am now convinced that too many agents within companies care less about profit and success than they do about straight-up owning people. Forcing people to spend their time at work is as close to actual slavery as contemporary society allows, so that's what they do.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#195

Post by philmcp »

kaftoy wrote: post #127
jfengel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oth…

And more importantly above all, in my opinion, is the profit. A portion of the revenue generate by an employee becomes profit. Lower the revenue (since lower hours) means lower net profit. Giving up net profit is not somthing a business owner thinks about lightly.

But if you pay lower salaries, you can hire more people.

There is very little difference (imo) between 3 employees @ 40hrs per week vs 4 employees @ 30hrs per week. There will be more administration and onboarding admittedly, but this should be balanced by more productive employees (i.e. less burnout)

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#196

Post by musingsole »

juskrey wrote: post #185

On the wave of fashionable gig economy, many forget that full time employee is not exactly a workforce, but a company's insurance which guarantees that chosen workforce will be guaranteed at any given point of time and will do nothing else (taxing for working abilities) at any other point. Also, from the worker's standpoint, having two half jobs does not equal one full job. It is either much less (with less compensat…

Agreed. I will argue that a benefit of the gig economy is the average person has more masters (and so is beholden to any one master less). I'm open to other models, but that's a feature we need to keep in whatever comes next.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#197

Post by agumonkey »

systemvoltage wrote: post #11

I honestly think this is great. We can precisely write, but cannot precisely voice. Auditory communication through mouth and ears is low bandwidth, has high dependency over who has more testosterone, energy, enthusiasm, listening skills, attention, retention and record, etc. Writing has a permanent record, you can take time to form your opinions and respectfully argue. What are the downsides? I think immediate feedba…

Writing can be tweaked and even faked. Vocal communication has other valuable traits. Also human work is often emotional.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#198

Post by philmcp »

dcolkitt wrote: post #97
philmcp wrote: post #44

In 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…

The bigger issue to me is that there's no diversification of risk. If your company goes under, you lose 100% of your income all at once. From that perspective, it'd be a lot more rational to work say ten jobs at a single time. You're never at serious risk of losing more than 30% of your paycheck in any short period. You could even get smart and balance your portfolio of jobs between pro and counter-cyclical industrie…

Maybe it's just me, but I find it difficult working on more than 2 projects at one time. Lots of wasted time trying to remember what I was working on / how my code works.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#199

Post by dflock »

gricardo99 wrote: post #162

But we can compete–and win–on flexibility. And then the following part describes: In 2020, Sid left Gumroad to start his own creator economy company, Circle, together with former Gumroad coworker Rudy Santino I fail to see this as any competitive advantage since Gumroad's "employment" approach literally incubated a competitor.

They were talking about competitive advantage on hiring and retaining good people, I think.
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