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No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

sahillavingia.com

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

#481

Post by appletrotter »

chii wrote: post #376
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…

> 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…

> Therefore, it must be assumed that if you worked only 80% of the time, you're only 80% effective.

This is the exact logic that is causing the issue. I would posit that a statement like this could only be true in an environment such as a factory line, where the output of widgets is truly linear over time.

Study after study have shown that for information workers, there's a strong trend of diminishing returns as workers clock more time.

Modern offices are truly an exercise in Parkinson's Law.

Further, I would speculate that the way companies encourage employees to optimize for duration of time on task leads to an insidious effect of individuals adopting less efficient methods to complete work, as there is no incentive to finish tasks more quickly within a timeframe when any time saved isn't recovered to the individual.

This stifles innovation.

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

#482

Post by CydeWeys »

bing_dai wrote: post #103
jacobsenscott wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

minus vacation, taxes, health insurance, overhead (time tracking, billing, book keeping, etc), time between gigs. 20 500 52 you are coming in way high. You can cut that in half and get a reasonable estimate for take home.

There are people who are perfectly happy with about $250K of take-home pay a year if that means they have plenty of freedom to do other things. In fact, I bet many people in the US will be happy with $30K a year, not $250K.

Of course, but why would someone be happy with that if it's a significant downgrade from where they are now?

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

#483

Post by appletrotter »

geodel wrote: post #459
ElFitz wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I currently work in a pretty rote software job, and I personally feel that even the most basic things can be very taxing on the mind and requiring of excellent focus. There are very few systems one can engage with where small changes can't have large ramifications in these environments, and great care must be taken.

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

#484

Post by fwip »

grapehut wrote: post #474
fwip wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the odds were that it was something that would cause problems in fewer than seven months, or that if she experienced symptoms that they would move her up in line? Genuinely asking, since I don't know any details about her situation or much about lung ailments.

I don't know the specifics, but there's also the mental cost of the doctor seeing something concerning enough that warrants an MRI and waiting 7 months just for the test; praying nothing gets worse in the meantime.

That's a very good point.

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

#485

Post by newswasboring »

kgwgk wrote: post #457
rattray wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

From the article

>“In Canada, the absence of a private system is not due to the illegality of private health care per se,” reads a 2001 analysis in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. “Rather, the lack of a flourishing private sector in Canada is most likely attributable to prohibitions on subsidization of private practice from the public plan.”

Seems fair to me.

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

#486

Post by eloff »

samvher wrote: post #433
eloff wrote: post #229

I've been working like this, 16 hours a week for the past year. About 3 hours of that is meetings, and the rest is straight up coding. I don't make a lot of money, but I've never been happier with a job. I honestly don't feel less productive than when I worked full time. I spend the rest of my energy working on a project I intend to turn into a saas business. I think this kind of thing, where your job doesn't dominat…

Out of curiosity, where do you work? I'm in the process of negotiating a similar setup with my employer, at my previous organization I worked 60% and also felt very happy with that. It seems to be hard to arrange unless an employer already knows you, though. (At least for interesting/challenging jobs with growth.)

Yes, it's a small startup where I've worked with the founder before. I think it's get hard to find a gig like this, and it shouldn't be that way.

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

#487

Post by newswasboring »

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…

> I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week...

In the Netherlands it works exactly like this. Half my team is on either a 90% or 80% contract. Other half doesn't have children yet :P

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

#488

Post by cercatrova »

tasuki wrote: post #434
cercatrova wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites like HN, reddit, Twitter etc are de facto US based, assume if no country or jurisdiction is specified that it's the US. Now, which state it is in the US is a different matter.

Fyi I downvoted you because I'm based outside of the US.

That's fine, some people are of course. But when you look at what people mean when they provide no jurisdiction, it always seems to mean the US. That's all I meant by de facto US based, because if it weren't, wouldn't people state the jurisdiction as "US"? They don't, so it must mean that the US is what is assumed.

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

#489

Post by yeswecatan »

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…

How does one apply to Gumroad?

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

#490

Post by coffee »

cutemonster wrote: post #469
coffee wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all companies desire to be acquired, even when offered. Not all deals go through, even when desired. We often hear of those that do get acquired, more rarely those that don't - Facebook has notably failed making attempts. Those companies are still going strong. Facebook didn't kill them.

What are some of those? Snapchat is one? I wonder if they have in mind an IPO instead

A quick Goog search will turn up some notable mentions, but yes, Snapchat, Twitter...
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