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Maybe you should do less 'work'

johnwhiles.com

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Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#421

Post by npsimons »

shoo wrote: post #351
npsimons wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> made me really want to find a job that was less pay but also that low in hours This was a very large factor in why I quit - old job wouldn't let me cut back hours, even at reduced pay, even framing it as "leave without pay", so I had no choice but to quit to get my time back, and I had enough money. As it is, I'm content staying in that "learning and broadening" mode, even though I'm 20-ish years in on my career. I…

> old job wouldn't let me cut back hours, even at reduced pay, even framing it as "leave without pay", I was curious what your role was, at what the incentives might have been for your old job to refuse this. In your about page I see: > Previously a programmer in the DoD world speculation: were you working for a contractor that needed to bill your time out by the hour to the government? So if you weren't working maxi…

No, I was in civil service. Something I've had explained to me since is that even if my boss wanted to (he didn't; very old-school thinking), they couldn't because my position wasn't "coded" for part time.

This was a problem I also bumped up against quite often as someone who has been doing "DevOps" things since before that term was coined, but the government very much wants to pigeonhole people and couldn't wrap it's head around someone with IT experience who was also a software engineer. Even with certs that I basically earned blindfolded, they wouldn't grant me a sysadmin letter, and I didn't want to re-code to IT/IM because I saw how burned out sysadmins got. The turnover in government IT was insane.

If I really wanted, I could go be a government contractor, but I've seen they still want even contractors on-site, and it's completely unnecessary. For now, I'm just "re-tooling" to tech stacks that have piqued my interest, exploring my options (eg, my brother the designer wants to build games with me).

Honestly, I'm not the first, and from people I've kept in touch with, I'm far from the last. Government agencies need a serious kick in the pants if they want to keep good talent. It's not so much about the money, that's always going to be below market rate due to the tradeoff in stability and benefits (and even benefits are dwindling), it's more about recognizing that WFH is a right, not a privilege, and being flexible in hours and horizontal job duty changes. I've watched many a better engineer than myself leave for greener pastures (Micron, Blue Origin, etc), and middle management is still in denial because they've been in the same role for 30+ years and think "nothing has changed", or if they do adopt business practices, it's always the worst ones (open floor plans, etc). FFS, I couldn't get the last project I worked on to enable CI on their GitLab instance.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#422

Post by deltaonefour »

ironmagma wrote: post #419
deltaonefour wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More pedantism. Well if you sell parts of your company to other people, then it's a gang bang. Multiple people fucking the employees. Let's just stop here. It's pointless.

It’s strange you believe any financial transaction including selling shares of a company is inherently a ripoff. A really weird way to view the economy, since price is something that has to be agreed to by all parties. Why would some investor have to buy my company? If they are doing that it’s because they view it as a good deal.

It's strange that you put words into my mouth.

Also don't use the word strange. I see it all the time on HN. "OH it's so strange that you would think... I find it so strange that you seem to be ... " yada yada yada.

It's basically a technique to get around the HN rules to insult a person while being polite. It's a complete dick move only used by dicks. Hopefully you made an honest mistake and you're not a dick.

When you own a share, if that share increases in intrinsic value with you doing zero additional work to increase that share. Then you just ripped someone off. Someone was doing work to increase that value, but they're not the one benefiting. The person benefiting is the person who invested nothing into increasing the value of the share.

Let me illustrate. You buy a 5$ share. You now own something worth 5$. Suddenly the share price increases to 10$. You earned an extra 5$ by sitting on your ass. Who increased the price of that share? Whoever it is, he got fucked. By you.

Increasing intrinsic utility is unique only to things related to human capital. This is entirely separate from value increases due to supply and demand.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#423

Post by bnix »

aprdm wrote: post #209
commandlinefan wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had great bosses, all the way up the chain... but they were all held captive to the "efficiency" measures of the time-tracking system. Everywhere I've ever worked has implemented a methodology that, regardless of what they called it (XP, Scrum, Kanban, whatever) boiled down to: write down everything you're going to do, write down how long it's going to take, and I'm going to measure how accurately you predicted…

For what it's worth, I've been doing this for 10+ years, being a lead, a manager, and I never worked anywhere that tried to have "efficiency" measurements of devs.

Agreed. Agile needs to be for developers first and foremost, not the management.

At least, in Scrum, from my experience so far: pointing is about measuring the uncertainty to delivery, but should healthily include learning, tech debt refactors,testing, q/a, even unexpected stuff like dev churn (i.e shoot under always, over estimate slightly).

But if individual performance is measured by velocity and points, you will just get devs badly cutting corners and gaming it while project & product will never get accurate measurements they can tie time based business outcomes to (especially as you get further out and short term corner cutting starts to rear it's head as brutal Tech Debt and time sinks)

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#424

Post by ironmagma »

deltaonefour wrote: post #422
ironmagma wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s strange you believe any financial transaction including selling shares of a company is inherently a ripoff. A really weird way to view the economy, since price is something that has to be agreed to by all parties. Why would some investor have to buy my company? If they are doing that it’s because they view it as a good deal.

It's strange that you put words into my mouth. Also don't use the word strange. I see it all the time on HN. "OH it's so strange that you would think... I find it so strange that you seem to be ... " yada yada yada. It's basically a technique to get around the HN rules to insult a person while being polite. It's a complete dick move only used by dicks. Hopefully you made an honest mistake and you're not a dick. When…

Please. As if you have not already broken multiple HN rules such as “don’t be snarky,” “have curious conversation,” and “assume good faith.” Hiding behind the rules is a poor shield at this point. The fact you think “strange” is inappropriate language yet “fucked” is perfectly acceptable is… interesting.

Buying a share is not ripping someone off. They are selling the share because they want money up-front, and you are providing it to them. If they didn’t think selling the share was worth it at that price and time, they would hold on to it.

Buying the guy’s share at $5 is a price he set. He determined that getting $5 at this time is worth losing X% of control of the company that that share represents. No one is getting fucked, or at the very least, it’s unknowable who is getting fucked. Whether it was a fucking depends on whether the share goes up or down in value over time.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#425

Post by Msw242 »

wildmanx wrote: post #398
Msw242 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reach out to people who aren't interviewing you People in the interview are under scrutiny and don't want to be responsible for driving away candidates

Anybody you reach out to, no matter hiring responsibility or not, has the interest of getting good people into the company, irrespective of how happy they themselves are at the workplace. Really good people are hard to come by in this market (need to be not just smart but also easy to work with, communicate etc), so you better don't express dissatisfaction, otherwise they go to a competitor. It's really hard to get h…

This doesn't match my experience, but your mileage might vary

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#426

Post by ehnto »

cinntaile wrote: post #416
ehnto wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that earning more and working more are usually related. It can be related, but I don't think it's the norm. I think the norm is working more than you're getting paid for, and that pay not differing from those who are working less than you. Just look at people wringing themselves out in the hospitality and services industries, they're not getting paid more than everyone else.

The important part is earning more leads to paying more taxes. If you work the same job you'll earn more money while working 40hrs than working 20hrs. Where 40hrs is the standard, so in a general sense people working normal hours will pay more taxes than people working reduced hours.

Ah, I think we were just talking past eachother then. That makes sense to me. I was imagining the situations where the same two employees are paid 40hrs/week but one works 40 and one works 60. It sounds like you were thinking of people working part time versus people working full time, in which case definitely, the latter correlates to more income and more taxes.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#427

Post by therealdrag0 »

argc wrote: post #337

I haven’t figured out how to not work all the time, but I’d like to. More likely though I’m just going to quit without a job lined up long enough to recover from burnout and go back to things I love, until I need to work again.

I think having other commitments is the only real way to work less. Make evening plans and weekend plans with other people for example.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#428

Post by deltaonefour »

ironmagma wrote: post #424
deltaonefour wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strange that you put words into my mouth. Also don't use the word strange. I see it all the time on HN. "OH it's so strange that you would think... I find it so strange that you seem to be ... " yada yada yada. It's basically a technique to get around the HN rules to insult a person while being polite. It's a complete dick move only used by dicks. Hopefully you made an honest mistake and you're not a dick. When…

Please. As if you have not already broken multiple HN rules such as “don’t be snarky,” “have curious conversation,” and “assume good faith.” Hiding behind the rules is a poor shield at this point. The fact you think “strange” is inappropriate language yet “fucked” is perfectly acceptable is… interesting. Buying a share is not ripping someone off. They are selling the share because they want money up-front, and you ar…

Fucked is at the border, but there's no insulting going on here that is not my intention. The word is just used to illustrate a concept a little more violently. Strange is an insult, it was personally directed at me. While, technically it's not an insult... the intent is there and is detectable. I suggest you don't use it the next time you want a discussion to continue.

>Buying a share is not ripping someone off.

I never said buying a share is ripping someone off. I'm saying watching a share grow in value is ripping someone off.

Also I'm not talking about bidding. I'm talking about the intrinsic value of the share. There is value outside of bidding. The bidding correlates with the intrinsic value but is not a completely accurate reflection of it.

It's hard to describe what intrinsic value is. But the concept exists outside of this conversation. Look it up if you never heard of it.

So to bring it full circle. The worker contributes work that increases the value of the company which in turn increases intrinsic value of the share. The owner of the share benefits from this increase in value while contributing zero work on his end.

If you are rich enough, you don't even have to work anymore. Simply growing your money endlessly is enough. Nothing in the universe comes for free and such people don't have to work because that work is being done by others in their stead.

Over a long term horizon or even in the short term through dividends... massive intrinsic value can be extracted from these assets.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#429

Post by johnnyanmac »

shoo wrote: post #349
Melatonic wrote: post #341

There was a time during the first shut down when my company decided to reduce peoples hours and also reduce their salaries instead of laying off more employees. I end up working 20 hours a week (instead of my normal 35) with a reduced salary (and I was even able to collect partial California unemployment benefits for the remainder of the reduced hours under a special program called Workshare). Honestly it was amazing…

Some companies have flexible work policies that give employees the option of switching to part time. My current employer (megacorp, not tech) has such a policy documented internally, not really widely advertised. I read about it, discussed it with manager, I framed it as "it doesn't make sense for me to work full time any more. I'm still open to doing part time. Can we switch to part time, per company policy?". Manag…

>Part of the negotiating power is being good enough at what you do for your skills to be in demand, and having resources or alternatives to fall back on if company is not willing to agree to a part time arrangement.

but that's the thing: there aren't many jobs past entry level that even give such an option for part time. Consulting is the closest factor but even than can have some strict time requirements (too strict at times).

So for (I wager) 90+% of people, the only fallback is "I can quit and never work a day in my life again" sorts of situations. That or you are playing some high stakes career haggling should the employer decide to try and train a replacement that will work full tim.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#430

Post by agumonkey »

0des wrote: post #5

Getting my task completed at my own pace makes me feel good. Often that is fast and on time. In my heart, when I touch the keyboard, I feel like a greyhound dog with a little Bob Ross afro - it can be a race, a competition, but it is also an expression of my art. This article makes me feel bad because in the authors world, people like me are relegated to worker bee monkies trying to please the bossman due to patholog…

The artistic side of programming is very often put aside. To the point I felt like a narcissistic alien.

I wonder how prevalent this notion is in the industry. It often feels we're cogs in a pipeline.

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