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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

#451

Post by frockington1 »

ativzzz wrote: post #112
shafyy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Curious how being laid back in regards to work opens up opportunity from countries such as China that have some companies working 996 schedules (9-am - 9pm, 6 days a week) to overtake and make obsolete European global companies. I guess the only way EU can compete is protectionism, no?

They even fail at protectionism. They try to take on American tech but get swatted away in the courts when they realize they need American tech to be remotely competitive again. There's a reason America is launching Teslas into space while the EU bickers in court

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

#452

Post by literallycancer »

irateswami wrote: post #440
heavyset_go wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone at Gumroad is paid very well and should be able to afford the same. Have you looked at how much decent health insurance coverage costs on the individual market without income-based ACA subsidies? It's absolutely insane, and even more insane if you want family coverage. For a similar, but nowhere near equivalent, of an employer provided healthcare plan, I'm looking at spending more than $9,000 in premiums e…

Bingo. Saying that the employees are paid well enough to buy their own health insurance is a red herring because it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, companies get far better rates on insurance products. Gumroad could probably save a significant amount of money by providing health insurance to their employees and just not paying as high of a salary.

Company provided health insurance creates incentives for employees to delay leaving and stay in jobs they don't like anymore. This lowers the quality of life for everyone involved.

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

#453

Post by yowlingcat »

After 2020, I've talked with a number of friends about what the future of remote work looks like. I can't help but wonder if it looks like this. The anti-overwork provision (creating 20 hrs/wk over time and allowing but disincentivizing going over) and single metric (total creator revenue) seem like major wins for me. Do others think that more companies will begin to go in this direction? Something about it seems so much more simple, sustainable and elegant.

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

#454

Post by olah_1 »

valzam wrote: post #329
olah_1 wrote: post #157

> There is another downside to this system: people have to track their hours. Some people solve this by billing 20 hours a week, even though they may work a bit more or a bit less. Others track it diligently, in 15-minute increments, and send a detailed invoice every week. I cannot stand tracking hours. No thanks.

It's really only as bad as you make it though. Sure, don't grossly over/underestimate but I would imagine that a lot of their contractors work in half day increments at least, which makes it a lot easier to track. A friend of mine works at a law firm and they track by the minute, as in people record when they go pee and when they come back. that sounds like hell. So I see where you are coming from.

The biggest issue is actually recording the time, to be honest. An ex-coworker used to set aside 2-4 hours every Friday to just do timesheets. Some set aside a half hour every day to get them accurate.

It strikes me as cruel. But in any case, just not my cup of tea.

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

#455

Post by draw_down »

oliyoung wrote: post #270
DVassallo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No shit

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

#456

Post by Broken_Hippo »

DVassallo wrote: post #284
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…

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

I imagine that if you were paying that tax rate, you were in an upper bracket, and could probably afford it.

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

#457

Post by kgwgk »

rattray wrote: post #430
DoreenMichele wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the criticism is probably of the Canadian health care system a la "She had to go to another country to get her scan in a reasonable period of time (and that country has a terrible global reputation for being insanely expensive and broken itself in the health care department)."

She didn't have to go to the US for the MRI; implication was the clinic was in Canada. Private care isn't illegal or anything there. People from the US go abroad for care all the time.

Some forms of getting private care are indeed illegal:

https://www.capitaldaily.ca/news/private-two-tier-healthcare...

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

#458

Post by JTbane »

skissane wrote: post #393
bash-j wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food is more expensive in Australia and serving sizes are smaller.

A related factor: US sugar subsidies make sugar expensive, so a lot of manufactured foods in the US contain High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) instead. On a kilojoule-for-kilojoule basis, excessive intake of HFCS is a lot more harmful to health than excessive intake of sugar is. By contrast, Australia has a long history of being anti-agriculture subsidies, and fewer foods here include HFCS (most of those that do are imp…

>On a kilojoule-for-kilojoule basis, excessive intake of HFCS is a lot more harmful to health than excessive intake of sugar is.

Do you have a source for that? I don't see how sucrose from sugar cane is any healthier than HFCS, which is the same thing, just split by an enzyme.

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

#459

Post by geodel »

ElFitz wrote: post #438
chii wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 decr…

Depends on the type of work you do and what the company pays you for. It is the means (your time)? Or the outcome? Had quite a few clients and employers asking and haggling over trying to get it both ways. If you consider a creative job where you only care about the output, then the more creative it is, the less (above an undetermined threshold) time spent working and output are correlated. The means (again, time spe…

> It really depends...

And it really comes down to what most of the IT/Software people are. I have a feeling though most of them have are closer to fruit picker but a lot think of themselves penning great literature when writing 10 line comments on 2 line function summing a pair of integers.

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

#460

Post by programmertote »

wolco5 wrote: post #301
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)…

Australia spends 10.5% on health. US 17.5 Is the increased level of care worth 7% In Canada it's 11.5 so 6%,extra. In Canada the waiting lists for mri and other advanced testing can be long where the same tests/operations can be done as a walkin option that day in the US.

Not so easy in the US. My sister is in the first trimester of her pregnancy. She had to go to ER last week because she couldn't eat (keeps vomiting and lose sleep because of vomiting). She was in a bad state (very weak and was almost passing out) when they (her in-laws) brought her there. They had to wait for 2 hours to be attended by the nurse/doctor eventually. It's not because the hospital was crowded with COVID patients (Rochester, NY isn't overwhelmed with COVID at the moment). It's mostly because there are few doctors assigned for each shift at the hospital (the supply of doctors in the US is scarce--partly because of the artificial restrictions put in place by American Medical Association [https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/thanks-to-doctors-there-a...)

When I broke my nose, I went to ER and registered at around 12am. A doctor finally treated me at around 8:15am. That's at the Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY ~6 years ago.

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