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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

#261

Post by autarch »

xyzelement wrote: post #206
bitdotdash wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point out the Uber drivers making $10K/mo for quarter time work. Otherwise this argument falls flat.

Is it the guy who was making 400k at Amazon? Paying someone a quarter of what they are "worth" isn't that great a trick.

You missed the "for quarter time work". Earning $10k/month working 10 hours a week is pretty close to getting $400k/year for an FT job at Amazon (especially if FT ends up being more than 40 hours a week).

I say "pretty close" because if you're working on a 1099 basis there are a bunch of extra costs (extra SSDI payments, health care premiums, etc.) that you have to cover.

But still, nothing about the article suggests that the pay rates are poor, and the upper end ($250/hour) is quite good, especially when combined with the ability to work less than full time.

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

#262

Post by xyzelement »

autarch wrote: post #261
xyzelement wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it the guy who was making 400k at Amazon? Paying someone a quarter of what they are "worth" isn't that great a trick.

You missed the "for quarter time work". Earning $10k/month working 10 hours a week is pretty close to getting $400k/year for an FT job at Amazon (especially if FT ends up being more than 40 hours a week). I say "pretty close" because if you're working on a 1099 basis there are a bunch of extra costs (extra SSDI payments, health care premiums, etc.) that you have to cover. But still, nothing about the article suggests…

Autarch - thanks for breaking it down like that.

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

#263

Post by femto »

paxys wrote: post #39

I work for a large SaaS company with hundreds of engineers and a very healthy revenue. It's widely acknowledged that the company would continue to function exactly as it is now for a very long time if they fired 95% of the staff. Heck stability and uptime would probably improve due to fewer deployments/no new feature adds. So the graph with declining expenses and increasing revenue isn't at all surprising. The proble…

> you'd be powerless to compete with them.

A substantial potion of the part-timers could temporarily increase their working hours, possibly doubling or tripling the rate of progress overnight. The company of part-timers effectively has an additional prequalified workforce waiting in the wings for emergencies. The company would then have a period of time to put arrangements in place to bring each person's hours back to previous levels.

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

#264

Post by musingsole »

andrekandre wrote: post #260
musingsole wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> benefit of the gig economy is the average person has more masters how about no masters? > (and so is beholden to any one master less) that does not necessarily follow... if i still need say 3 jobs to make ends-meet, then im on the street if i get fired from one of them... now i need to juggle the demands of 3 masters, all with different demands on my time, energy and concentration...

Sure, no masters is better...though I'm not aware of anyone in that position. Manufacturers have customers, billionaires the IRS. Everyone's accountable to someone on something. Hermits?

Working 3 jobs and losing one is not the same thing as working one job and losing one. Losing revenue will always hurt. The point is to prevent it from being fatal.

And still, you don't really have an argument here. All of this is in comparison to the current system which is worse on both these points than a hypothetical 100% gig economy.

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

#266

Post by kgin »

gkoberger wrote: post #246
solatic wrote: post #242

> When someone new joins the company, they do what everyone else does: go into our Notion queue, pick a task, and get to work, asking for clarification when needed... Instead of setting quarterly goals or using OKRs, we move towards a single north star: maximizing how much money creators earn. It’s simple and measurable, allowing anyone in the company to do the math on how much a feature or bug-fix might be worth. Qu…

Does it have to be "sustainable"? It wouldn't work for Google, but it works for Gumroad (and, like they said, most open source projects). Gumroad is a pretty simple site (and I don't mean that as an insult). They don't deal with huge customers, sales processes, large data, complicated tech, etc. Most "hard" things can be outsourced to a SaaS tool. So why overcomplicate things?

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

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

#267

Post by oAlbe »

philipkiely wrote: post #86
tyrust wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you using to do time tracking, if I may ask?

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

#269

Post by adewinter »

ilovegumroad wrote: post #256

I wish I had $8M dollars and a bunch of really dedicated people to build a company to >$1M ARR and then get rid of all of them. At that price you are looking at a company at roughly $X0M value already. Most companies end up having to work tirelessly to grow because they have baggage of money that needs return. If you can get rid of that baggage it's relatively easy to just slow down and reap the rewards. FANG could a…

I'm curious why you think folks at gumroad don't "work much" and that most of the work had been done by those no longer at the company. Did you used to work there and have some insider knowledge?

Seems to me the post wasn't even claiming to have >$1M ARR either (there was a graph for the creators ARR which I think is different?) and that everyone does work... they just do it using a non-traditional process.

edit: There's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25675713 which might point to >$1M ARR?

edit 2: I also realized in a business like this ARR just doesn't matter (who cares? You're not trying to raise another round or IPO). https://twitter.com/shl/status/1215673023472140289 shows the net profit and it amounts to 1 senior engineer's salary. That's amazing for a small business with a small number of employees but it's not exactly living high off the hog.

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

#270

Post by oliyoung »

DVassallo wrote: post #28
draw_down wrote: post #3

This is maybe the only “how we work” I’ve ever read that is actually appealing. It really does sound wonderful. My only question is around health insurance for the US based folks (I’m guessing the answer is “take the money we pay you and go buy some” which is unfortunately not a good solution) but otherwise yes, sounds ideal.

I work quarter-time at Gumroad, and I pay for my own health insurance ($950/mo for a family of 4). If Gumroad offered it, I would almost certainly still keep my own (unless it was at >50% discount). I prefer not having my health insurance tied to one source of income.

It's hard to explain just how alien "I prefer not having my health insurance tied to one source of income" sounds to the rest of the world, the idea that those two things are co-dependent is wild and scary.

It's an insurance policy, it has nothing to do with my work.

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