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Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

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

#171

Post by serge2k »

Chronic9q wrote: post #119
jchendy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we could give them the benefit of doubt I've found that this is a much less stressful and more productive way to approach most things in life. > Some of the 60 hr/week employees are gunning for promotions and probably don't care about work life balance. Why should everyone have to compete with that? That seems totally reasonable. It's similar to the way tech companies have a concept of a "terminal level" wh…

> It's similar to the way tech companies have a concept of a "terminal level" where it's considered fine to spend your whole career with no pressure or expectations to earn further promotions. And who else besides Jeff Dean, enjoys such a distinguished role?

Senior dev is usually fine to stay at as long as you keep producing.

Amazon states that SDE-II is fine actually. I think that's just their way of keeping the bar for senior higher.

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

#172

Post by xapata »

ta_donk_gt wrote: post #136
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…

As an opposing anecdote, I've spent a significant percentage of my software development years in the medical arena. The overwhelming majority of doctors that I have worked with do not work as hard, anywhere near as many hours, or under as much stress and the overwhelming majority of software developers I have worked with. The stressful period for most doctors is getting into medical school, getting through medical sc…

Software will continue its bifurcation into two income distributions, similar to lawyers. No lawyer earns average salary. That industry is split into low wage work and high wage work. I expect software will be the same.

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

#173

Post by elihu »

I work for Intel, and just a couple weeks ago switched to a 32-hour-a-week schedule. I had to get approval from my boss, and presumably my boss had to get approval from his boss, but it was a pretty easy switch. So far, it's been great. Benefits are the same, salary amortized at 80%, and stock grants are reduced a bit more than that.

I think most people would rather have the extra money, for various reasons. If I owed a couple hundred grand on a mortgage or was saving to send my kids to college, I might think the same but as it is I have no house and no kids and relatively low living expenses, so I can afford to be a little bit self-indulgent and take a 3-day weekend every week.

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

#174

Post by nemesisj »

My company (Administrate - http://www.getadministrate.com) went to a 4 day, 32 hour week (but paid for 5) a little over a year ago. It's been a huge success, and we haven't seen any drop in productivity. We have had to be a little bit more efficient in some areas but overall the productivity gain was more or less "automatic". I'd recommend trying it to anyone, but understand it can be a scary thing to implement, mainly b/c it can be an easy thing to blame when things aren't going well. We have had some brief periods (usually when we're hiring) where teams have had to work 5 days, but overall we've been pretty consistent.

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

#175

Post by vectorjohn »

zeeveener wrote: post #52
gfody wrote: post #37

Something about this bothers me. Time-keeping is already not straightforward for an engineer. Because the work is done in our heads and doesn't necessarily stop just because the workday is over. You don't have to be sitting at a keyboard for your head to be grinding on a problem. More often some problem takes hold of you, occupying some mental bandwidth even while you're away, at home trying to enjoy time with your f…

Programmers can suffer from this problem as well as engineers. The project never fully leaves your mind and often I'll go home and mull over the reasons why things might not be working or how to start another task. No "actual" work gets done, but I'm still working; just as you described.

Nope, you're not working. You or the parent. That's a nonsensical definition of work. Nobody is making you mull things over, you're doing it because you want to, because you find your job interesting. Some may try to claim the contrary, but I'm sure if you're doing something other than a mundane task like driving or cleaning, your mind instantly gets sidetracked from "working". You can't possibly actually be thinking about work in any real sense while you converse with friends and family, read a book, watch a movie, etc.

Do you think carpenters never think about work after hours?

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

#176

Post by ekianjo »

gfody wrote: post #37

Something about this bothers me. Time-keeping is already not straightforward for an engineer. Because the work is done in our heads and doesn't necessarily stop just because the workday is over. You don't have to be sitting at a keyboard for your head to be grinding on a problem. More often some problem takes hold of you, occupying some mental bandwidth even while you're away, at home trying to enjoy time with your f…

Sorry but why do you think the mental load of work after work applies only to developers? I can tell you it applies to a bunch of jobs that have nothing to do with development.

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

#177

Post by [deleted] »

Gorbzel wrote: post #164
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…

What I don't buy is why it's okay to generalize your imposter syndrome to an industry as a whole. "Maybe I feel differently about this because I'm not in a major tech hub" Read: "I can afford to live in a comfortable place and not a closet, so let me generalize such that no dev can afford to live in historically relevant software hubs either." Next, lest this selfish hot take get too tonedeaf, time to write off our 6…

[deleted]

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

#179

Post by vectorjohn »

crack-the-code wrote: post #78
mabbo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm biased as I'm an Amazon SDE. That aside... Amazon experiments. It's not about bold PR moves to make waves and attract attention. It's about trying everything, even ideas that might sound bad, and seeing if they actually work. This? This is the same idea. Try it out on something less important (HR software, sure, why not) and see what happens. In the worst case, a bit of internal software is late. That's a low-cos…

It may be part of the same philosophy of "trying everything," but it would be naive to say that there are no motivations of improving the negative reputation Amazon has built upon itself through its intensive work ethic.

How DARE they try to improve their reputation by offering something people want. The scum!

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

#180

Post by Joof »

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…

Honestly, that engineer enabled that growth, but it wouldn't have been possible without the work of a full team providing content, security, reliability and so on. If the same work was done on an old Geocities site, there would be no value to add.

You're overvaluing the engineer in your argument; they were only one piece that enabled that extra value.

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