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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

#411

Post by eloisant »

zmmmmm wrote: post #392
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'm curious how they hold their technical architecture together. Is the architecture mature enough that there are no decisions to be made? I know if I ran my team without syncing up directly on things we'd end up with horrific inconsistencies all over the place and it would become impossible to support. I would guess longer term quality would suffer as well.

They say that they write a lot, so maybe what other organizations do with direct sync up, they do with detailed documents and async discussions around those documents.

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

#412

Post by dannyw »

solatic wrote: post #379
gkoberger wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, you can be sustainable at 10% YoY growth at a lot less pressure than 20% YoY growth v

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

#413

Post by dannyw »

simpixelated wrote: post #138

I work at a similar company (less than 10 employees, no deadlines, (almost) no meetings), but unlike Gumroad we actually have health insurance, 401K with matching, donation matching, etc. So it is possible to to have "freedom" without laying everyone off and removing all benefits. You can read more about it here: https://simpixelated.com/two-year-work-retrospective

Are all of your employees there for true flexibility (ie spending more time on their own project than work?)

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

#414

Post by schwartzworld »

jfengel wrote: post #83
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…

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.

You mean they would only be WILLING to pay 70%. I'd wager the vast majority of people with salaried jobs don't spend 100% of their work time working. Many jobs can be done in a fraction of the time. I don't doubt that most people could lose a day and probably gain productivity on the other days.

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

#415

Post by throwaway2048 »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #372
rablackburn wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 singl…

Also not a single mention in this subthread of what happens if you aren't poor enough to qualify for medicaide (in most states you have to be near-homeless levels of poverty), but not anywhere near rich enough afford a $1500 a month plan for your family.

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

#418

Post by enonevets »

rgbrgb wrote: post #167

This is a really interesting conception of a company structure that leans towards maximum flexibility. The thing I don't see talked about here or in the post is equity ownership stakes. Distributing equity to give employees real money incentive to improve company performance has been a hallmark of tech companies at least since Fairchild Semiconductor and the traitorous eight. On the other hand, I've seen small compan…

They’re contractors, not employees. No equity or benefits.

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

#419

Post by langitbiru »

philmcp wrote: post #409
langitbiru wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to you, I'm building a part-time jobs website. https://parttime.careers I feel that the part-time jobs trend now is like the remote jobs trend in 2007. It's still in the early days.

Awesome! Completely agree its in the early days. Out of interest, how did you find these part time jobs, just by searching Google?

Twitter, Hackernews threads. Interestingly, I haven't used Google yet.

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

#420

Post by austhrow743 »

konjin wrote: post #331
cercatrova wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, your comment suggests that you were spending beyond your means, or keeping up with the Joneses. Millions go very far if invested properly and drawn down properly so that the principal is never touched. If you're spending the millions instead, then yeah, that's definitely not gonna go far.

There's a huge trough in what you can do with what you can buy when you earn between $80k a year and ~$8m. It's the same shit just better. Your shitty commuter house 3 hours out of town is now a mansion 20 min outside of town. Your shitty 1990 ford fiesta is a very nice 2020 BMW. Your shitty healthcare plan is a great healthcare plan, but the main difference is how nice the plants at the doctors office are. If you wa…

Sure if you try to go up in quality you hit diminishing returns. Not quantity though. $80k and you're working for the rest of your life. $8m and you retire at the end of the year.
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