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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

#371

Post by masonic »

philsnow wrote: post #366
DVassallo wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I lived in Ireland I paid 51% of my income in taxes. Imagine that!

I don't have to imagine it, I live in California. Top federal income tax: 37% Top California income tax: 13.3% Federal Medicare tax: 1.45% Additional federal medicare tax*: 0.9% The "additional" Medicare tax is only on whatever income is over $200k/$250k for single/joint filers. Call it "0.55% effective". Adds up to 52.3%. There's also a sizeable additional capital gains tax for three lucky ones who live in Californi…

  Top California income tax: 13.3%
That's the marginal rate applicable to each additional dollar over the threshold, not an overall rate.

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

#372

Post by poulsbohemian »

rablackburn wrote: post #283
callmeed wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I make more than enough to afford proper health insurance on the open market. Everyone at Gumroad is paid very well and should be able to afford the same. This might be true for everyone at Gumroad , but I wouldn't be so sure. You also seem dismissive (probably unintentionally) of one of the biggest problems we have in the US right now: health care and insurance is ridiculously expensive–especially for people with…

> Imaging paying 10%+ of your salary just for health insurance I decided to actually look at my budget from the last year and see how this compares to my costs. In Australia I pay about ~28% of my salary in tax. 2% is for medicare, and I have private health insurance on top of that for roughly the same cost again (for dental, which isn't covered in our system because of dentists lobbying an exception back in the 80s)…

Part of the issue here too is that not only is US health insurance very expensive, but for all practical purposes it doesn’t kick in until you’ve had a fairly significant issue. So you are paying a lot of money for insurance you hope to never use, and in the event you need some kind of basic care you are still paying out - and have no meaningful negotiating power. I’m under the impression in most countries with single-payer / government run health schemes, you might also pay a great deal for your coverage, but that it’s all inclusive.

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

#374

Post by john4532452 »

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…

Exactly. On this topic Bertrand Russell has an essay http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

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

#375

Post by xmprt »

_hyn3 wrote: post #163
Grimm1 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing IP acquisition which is the third well considered type of acquisition consideration. Not saying you're wrong here just wanted to add that.

As well as pre-built customer base, loyal community, etc.

As an example, I recall Instagram was acquired when they had a tiny team and now look at how large they've managed to grow.

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

#376

Post by chii »

tw04 wrote: post #130
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…

>If you were working 80% as much, they would probably only be able to pay 70% of your salary. ...why? Unless there's an implication that they'd need to hire more people, why would they need to pay you less? If you're generating the same amount of revenue, just working fewer hours, their fixed profit should be able to cover your fixed healthcare whether you work 80% of the time or 10% of the time. As long as they aren…

> If you're generating the same amount of revenue

if you worked only 80% but is able to generate the same revenue as working at 100%, then surely one of the following must be true: you either slack off the 20% of the time, or the company is overpaying you for the work you do!

Therefore, it must be assumed that if you worked only 80% of the time, you're only 80% effective. So the fixed cost of an employee doesn't decrease when they work only 80% of the time - so it becomes more expensive than just cutting the salary by 20%.

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

#377

Post by bartvk »

callmeed wrote: post #280
philipkiely wrote: post #15

I work at Gumroad, mentioned in this article. Sometimes, I read things by CEOs about how a company works on the inside and I wonder if it really looks like that, or if it is a view from the top that doesn't reflect what it's really like. This article, with its discussions of the upsides and downsides, is accurate to my experience and my understanding of other people's experiences. For many people, Gumroad wouldn't be…

> I make more than enough to afford proper health insurance on the open market. Everyone at Gumroad is paid very well and should be able to afford the same. This might be true for everyone at Gumroad , but I wouldn't be so sure. You also seem dismissive (probably unintentionally) of one of the biggest problems we have in the US right now: health care and insurance is ridiculously expensive–especially for people with…

I live in The Netherlands as a freelancer, and thus there's no employer in between that obscures taxes somehow. It's all visible to me, and I pay roughly 8% of my income on health insurance.

The Netherlands is just this tiny little kingdom in Europe that basically has all their ducks in a row. Nothing is super great, but nothing is bad either. It's my gut feeling that anything around 8% is really just the cost of health insurance that covers mostly everyone.

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

#378

Post by paulclinger »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #164
tw04 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you were working 80% as much, they would probably only be able to pay 70% of your salary. ...why? Unless there's an implication that they'd need to hire more people, why would they need to pay you less? If you're generating the same amount of revenue, just working fewer hours, their fixed profit should be able to cover your fixed healthcare whether you work 80% of the time or 10% of the time. As long as they aren…

>Unless there's an implication that they'd need to hire more people I think you hit the nail on the head. IF the company needs a someone M-F for 40 hours of Bug-fixed/widgets/ect, they will have to hire to fill the gap. If the last 20% of the worker's time is truly non-productive, then the company is already over paying and the worker is wasting their time.

> If the last 20% of the worker's time is truly non-productive, then the company is already over paying and the worker is wasting their time.

I think it's a misconception about worker productivity: you need to optimize the overall system, which will require having slack in some places that are not a bottleneck. "The Goal" by Goldratt is a good explanation on why that's the case. Any attempt to locally optimize to keep everyone busy sooner or later kills the overall productivity of the system.

How this slack is used by the workers is a different question, but if someone wants to use it to improve the system, to improve themselves, or simply to recharge, I think it's up to the worker. The goal is not to keep everyone busy; the goal is to provide optimal results using available resources.

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

#379

Post by solatic »

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?

> Does it have to be "sustainable"?

Well, yes. Sustainability doesn't only mean "in the face of expected large growth", it means (for example), here's a culture that the company likes, can that culture continue to thrive through the coming years?

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

#380

Post by ajitkrsingh123 »

brianwawok wrote: post #291
kgin wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

You say that, but the other side of this argument is having to rebuild every. Single. Part. Of a program because nothing was designed with forethought and scalability in mind. Great code is both simple and has the ability to scale if needed in the future.

jnl
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