Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

#141

Post by BookingPotions » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 5:30 AM UTC

whateveracct wrote: post #41

zzalpha wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. Amazon is a sweatshop. The expectation is salaried employees put in ungodly hours. All this is doing is giving people more freedom to burn themselves out at home, while further blurring the lines between work and life and throwing in a 25% pay cut as the cherry on top. It's like the opposite of Google campus life, but with the same goal.

I work 40 hour weeks at Amazon as an SDE and never feel pressured to put in more. I don't take my work with me. It varies by team ofc I'm sure there are bad ones.

How long have you worked there though?

Re: Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

#142

Post by jamie_ca » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 5:36 AM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #133

lettergram wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can usually just do the math. Let's assume last year I decreases the loading time of our website by 50%, taking it from 2 seconds to 1 second. This reduces the drop off rate of customers (people who switch websites before it loads) by about 15%. That means a 15% increase in overall sales. Now let's assume it was a $10 million a year business. That means it's now making $11.5 million dollars a year because a softw…

Well, my own experience is that the $1.49 million would more likely be reinvested in the company as a whole: hire more developers, more salespeople, expand the office, etc. That money would also take an entire year to materialize and would require your back of the envelope math to pan out perfectly. Requesting a $1.5 million dollar bonus for making the website faster seems a little ludicrous and potentially hostile t…

And yet, it seems pretty routine for the sales team members to take residuals on leads they bring in - it's just that it's a lot harder to quantify the effects that code changes have to the bottom line.

Re: Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

#143

Post by BookingPotions » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 5:37 AM UTC

citizenflynn wrote: post #3

krisdol wrote: post #2

The folks I know at Amazon may have been in the office for a normal amount of time, but they worked long night after long night from home. If they're approaching a 30 hour work week as a reduction from 40, it's bound to fail. They have to realize it would be q reduction from 60 or 80

And my team at Amazon almost every day has only 4/5 engineers at the office because one is taking it easy working from home. Sometimes people take hour lunches and leave after 7 hours. Sometimes they want to finish something and stay later.

That's true sometimes, and makes sense in the salaried way. But to take a reduced pay you would need to be guaranteed reduced work.

Also, you sound disgruntled, why don't you do the same if you feel your team allows it?

Re: Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

#144

Post by nilkn » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 5:38 AM UTC

jamie_ca wrote: post #142

nilkn wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my own experience is that the $1.49 million would more likely be reinvested in the company as a whole: hire more developers, more salespeople, expand the office, etc. That money would also take an entire year to materialize and would require your back of the envelope math to pan out perfectly. Requesting a $1.5 million dollar bonus for making the website faster seems a little ludicrous and potentially hostile t…

And yet, it seems pretty routine for the sales team members to take residuals on leads they bring in - it's just that it's a lot harder to quantify the effects that code changes have to the bottom line.

Yes, residuals -- they don't book the entire sale for themselves. And they often have much lower salaries as well compared to development staff. Of course I cannot speak for all companies, but this is how it's been in my personal experience.

Re: Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

#145

Post by BookingPotions » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 5:39 AM UTC

yeukhon wrote: post #8

krisdol wrote: post #2

The folks I know at Amazon may have been in the office for a normal amount of time, but they worked long night after long night from home. If they're approaching a 30 hour work week as a reduction from 40, it's bound to fail. They have to realize it would be q reduction from 60 or 80

I agree. First, this is a team made up of part-time workers, not full-time workers, which is not what I was expecting by reading the title. So working 30 hours a week is really really not that special, consider they are PART TIME. Regardless, there are weeks people will have to pull extra hours to complete work, such as during product launch week. If this were a program made up of full-time employees, I would be inte…

I agree about the hour spread. It should be something like a max hour per week, but that you can partition as you see fit.

Re: Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

#146

Post by crazy2be » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 5:40 AM UTC

Dwolb wrote: post #131

lettergram wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can usually just do the math. Let's assume last year I decreases the loading time of our website by 50%, taking it from 2 seconds to 1 second. This reduces the drop off rate of customers (people who switch websites before it loads) by about 15%. That means a 15% increase in overall sales. Now let's assume it was a $10 million a year business. That means it's now making $11.5 million dollars a year because a softw…

Why does everyone talk like the leverage of the business is the leverage of the developer when discussing compensation? That's not how it works. Compensation is set by the market: what is the next person who can do this same job willing to be paid? If we go out into the market to find all the people that can decrease page loading time by 50% and have them bid against each other, we will probably end up paying the low…

Well, you are both right. Compensation is set by the market, but the ceiling for compensation to perform a task is (roughly) the amount of value that a employee can generate, in a rational market.

Of course, our market is far from rational, etc, etc.

FWIW, I don't think that software developers are overpaid, at all. It's a difficult career, requiring years of intense study to do well. Sure, maybe not as much as Doctors, at least not formally, but a lot of that has to do with the structure of medical education in the United States (in particular, the requirement to complete an undergrad degree prior to admission to medical school). The job of a surgeon is certainly more difficult than the average software developer, but compared to a SRE at Google, say, who is working with real, "living" distributed systems that interact in complex ways, I would say they are comparable. If anything, I'd expect, in a rational market, for the SRE to be paid more, because their services are providing for millions or billions of customers, while the surgeon is only providing for one at a time (and maybe a few thousand over their carrer).

Re: Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

#147

Post by boxcardavin » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 5:42 AM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #127

nilkn wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of claims that developers are underpaid. Maybe I feel differently about this because I'm not in a major tech hub and am not faced with the prospect of buying a multimillion dollar cottage, but when I compare my life as a software developer to that of more or less anyone else I know, including doctors and lawyers, I struggle to find a single person who seems to have a more comfortable life than me. I'm n…

You can usually just do the math. Let's assume last year I decreases the loading time of our website by 50%, taking it from 2 seconds to 1 second. This reduces the drop off rate of customers (people who switch websites before it loads) by about 15%. That means a 15% increase in overall sales. Now let's assume it was a $10 million a year business. That means it's now making $11.5 million dollars a year because a softw…

The (17.6%) increase is unlikely to be something that only one programmer can do, so the market takes over and most devs are already making top 3% income in their countries.

Re: Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

#148

Post by chrisper » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 5:45 AM UTC

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #107

spectrum1234 wrote: post #42

This is fantastic news. It's absurd that it's basically impossible to have a successful career working a bit less than full time. This is way overdue in the modern world and hopefully becomes an option in more companies going forward.

There's a 25℅ reduction in pay. This policy is another one of Amazon's "screw the worker" policies.

Do you mean 25% or something else (since you did not use the % symbol)?

Actually, I did a bit research and it seems the symbol you used is not even a mathematical one. It stands for "care of" and "signifies an intermediary who is responsible for transferring a piece of mail between the postal system and the final addressee."

So you can, I guess, disregard my question.

Re: Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

#149

Post by whateveracct » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 5:47 AM UTC

BookingPotions wrote: post #141

whateveracct wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work 40 hour weeks at Amazon as an SDE and never feel pressured to put in more. I don't take my work with me. It varies by team ofc I'm sure there are bad ones.

How long have you worked there though?

2 years and I've gotten a promotion and gotten no comments about the hours I work in any performance review so I guess those hours aren't considered bad in my org at least.

Re: Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

#150

Post by Falkon1313 » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 5:48 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #97

toomuchtodo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your viewpoint, without experience, is toxic to rational discussions regarding remote work (and is ironic, considering your employer).

No, it's just a different viewpoint. If you don't have measurable inputs and outputs (i.e. Tickets, service requests, widgets, cases, etc), you typically lose productivity. Not necessarily because of the employee, but also because of managers who don't function well with out of sight people. Personally, I think in many cases you'd get better outcomes out of sending people home at noon on Fridays than having them tele…

> If you don't have measurable inputs and outputs

Of course if you're not giving employees anything to do, you'll get reduced productivity. That's also true if you force them to sit in a chair in the office and do nothing. If you can't come up with anything for them to do (slow season, sales pipeline stalled) maybe let them pitch ideas for things they'd like to work on and give the ok on some.

Either way, if they have something to do and you keep in touch with them on how things are going, things should keep moving even without specific granular measurements. But why not use tickets or tasks or something to make it visible?

> also because of managers who don't function well with out of sight people

Those people probably shouldn't be managers, at least not working with remote workers. Communication is critical. A remote team should feel like they're communicating at least as much as an in-office team, if not more.