Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 299 posts

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

#211

Post by spangry »

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…

Very on point about the AMA functioning as a union. I'm not a software developer (and don't even live in the US) so apologies if this question is ridiculous: could software developers form a union, er I mean the 'American Software Developers Association'?

There are strong network effects in many digital markets. In these cases, given enough time, it leads to a monopolist employer in that market. Even in cases where there are a few firms competing (e.g. Google and Apple), they have incentive to form a cartel through 'agreements' on hiring practices (and there have been documented instances of this). The natural way for software developers to avoid being exploited, in either scenario, is to form a labour monopsony...

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

#212

Post by humanrebar »

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…

> 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 lowest bidder who is capable of the job about the median salary of the profession.

And what if the companies were to bid on the employee? That would likely drive wages higher and compensate for the natural information asymmetry in the tech labor market.

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

#213

Post by sokoloff »

dap wrote: post #138
Dwolb wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least in microeconomics 101, companies hire as long as the marginal revenue equals the marginal cost of the employee. If the marginal revenue per engineer is high, companies will try to keep hiring them. The demand for engineers goes up, and so does compensation.

In microeconomics, the firm would use marginal gross profit not marginal revenue [sales].

Think of Amazon, Walmart, or any firm with significant COGS [cost of goods sold]. It's clear that they can't hire employees inline with marginal revenue.

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

#214

Post by sokoloff »

rad88 wrote: post #190
jchendy wrote: post #156

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 A lot of it also goes to essential business expenses: HR, legal, the AWS bill, the new feature that's currently losing money but will pay off in the long term. And the person who made the $1.5mm code fix didn't do it on their own. They wouldn't h…

Yep, a great division of labor created that wealth for the company, and the developer is not entitled to 15% of it's revenue (or even profit) just for that work. This isn't a practical issue though. The everyday situation is not that a undeserving worker is granted a large ownership stake, it's that an undeserving financier/executive/founder is .

I read this line of argument fairly regularly and am continually amazed that more people making this argument aren't off starting their own companies to scoop themselves up a heaping helping of this easy and undeserved money.

(As text is a poor medium to communicate tone, I'm positing that it's not nearly as easy as it seems, therefore nor are the profits for the successful as undeserved as they seem.)

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

#215

Post by swiley »

DominikR wrote: post #130

Could it be that this has to do with Obamacare? I read that it is cheaper to have part time employees in the US right now, but I might be wrong on that.

That's true but I don't think it's cheap enough at these pay levels for that to matter a whole lot.

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

#216

Post by elbows »

crazy_ant wrote: post #168
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.

>The expectation is salaried employees put in ungodly hours. I am not US based and I've always wondered about this. In virtually every other western country, it doesn't matter if you're "salaried" or not - your employer is legally prohibited from not paying overtime. If your employment contract says you work 9-5, then anything outside those hours must be compensated, often at a higher rate (1.2x-1.5x is not uncommon…

The US has overtime laws as well, but certain types of job are exempt from them. I don't know all the details of the law but in practice, basically all white-collar jobs are exempt.

Here's a list of exemptions: https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/flsa/screen75.asp

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

#217

Post by Bahamut »

crucifiction wrote: post #108
enraged_camel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many tech companies do you know where the current and former employees have come together to create websites like this? https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home

It all started with the warehouse worker complaints, which were general complaints that any warehouse worker will have and not really egregious comparatively. This fed into a media narrative and causes sites like that to pop up. When startups ask a lot of their employees its showered in praise. When Elon Musk demands 100 work weeks, people are in awe of how great he is. When Nest does the same people squint because G…

A lot of the stories on that site are from corporate, not the warehouses.

Also I know a lot of Googlers as well (hard not to living in Mountain View), and they work roughly 40 hour weeks in general. It is night and day between Amazon and Google based on the stories that are coming out from current & former employees. I've heard issues about Apple as well, but nothing on the level of the stories coming out of Amazon.

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

#218

Post by GarrisonPrime »

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…

Good point. This is one reason why I advocate a fee-per-service model over an hourly one. Potential client wants XYZ done, and seeks someone who can fulfill that need. Engineers quote prices, client chooses someone based on price and their reputation and portfolio. Etc.

Or in a simpler sense: You need someone to perform weekly maid service? $X please. You want a foundation dug and poured for your new satellite office? $Y please. Hourly wages in many cases are just inviting abuse and drain employee productivity and motivation.

Of course a flat fee would be rather difficult to implement in direct customer service sectors. Hiring a cashier to process a certain number of customer check-outs or a certain amount of purchases for a flat fee would be problematic, because there's no way of knowing how long that would take (so the employee can't schedule the rest of their life) and the employer wouldn't want the employee to have much control over what time of day they work.

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

#219

Post by GarrisonPrime »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #162

> "Even names like that, 'part-time' or 'reduced,' make it seem like a deviation from the norm, like you're doing less." This is a telling statement. Why are we still stuck on a minimum of 40 hours being 'full-time'? After over a century of productivity increases, and with ever-increasing automation, we could soon be at the point where a 15-hour work week is the equivalent of an old 'full-time' work week. Now is a go…

>Now is a good time to start nudging down expectations.

Agreed. As technology advances, we have a much less need for labor. Yet we are not yet at the stage of "Star Trek abundance", so people still need to work for a living. A cultural shift to a shorter standard work week will be essential, I feel, to avoid having catastrophic waves of unemployment.

I'm not sure about the pay cut being wrong however. That may be necessary to some extent, society-wide. But if nearly everything is becoming automated and dirt cheap, one's standard of living need not necessarily decrease. It may dramatically increase, even if the dollar amount of your paycheck doesn't change (or even if it goes down).

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

#220

Post by sokoloff »

itaysk wrote: post #206

"These 30-hour employees will be salaried and receive the same benefits as traditional 40-hour workers, but they will receive only 75 percent of the pay full-time workers earn." How does this sentence make any sense?

It means that they get the same [non-cash] benefits as other workers and that their cash compensation is the only thing scaled down in proportion to nominal hours worked.

(I'm assuming you were confused by "same benefits" and "75% pay". Benefits, in this context, is the non-cash benefits: health insurance, PTO accrual, etc.)

Post reply on HN