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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

#231

Post by nommm-nommm »

andrewguenther wrote: post #39
pjmorris wrote: post #36

'Amazon is piloting 25% pay cuts'. I wonder if the group that does this will be viewed as lesser, e.g. work on less interesting projects, be less likely to be promoted, than the "40" hour employees.

The pilot is a team-wide thing. You won't have a 30-hour employee on a 40-hour team. 30-hour employees will work with 30-hour employees under a 30-hour manager. I think that will help offset some of this, but it does put a limit on what projects you could work on. For the pilot, anyway. I'm interested to see how this pans out.

We have our 30hour employees and 40 hour employees on the same team. No reason they can't mix. We even have a couple part timers too.

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

#232

Post by briHass »

Steeeve wrote: post #201
vectorjohn wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To your point everyone who has ever worked a reasonable length of time in restaurants has had the experience of their work environment permeating their nightmares and dealt with stress about work outside of it. It's perfectly normal in every industry to have a constant stream of thought going about work. However, in many engineering and scientific fields, that constant stream of thought is frequently productive due t…

To be fair, that small-town SE in Tennessee probably won't have much trouble saving for a house. On the contrary, making $100K, or just under, in Tennessee is going to make you comparably very well-off.

The median home price in Nashville (one of the more desirable areas in the South) is $205K, while in San Fran, it's over a million. Using the old-standard of 3-4X gross income for a property, the developer in TN can afford a really nice house.

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

#233

Post by Kenji »

notyourwork wrote: post #91
Kenji wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 family or whatever - technically you're still working, your mind is preoccupied, you might not be able to sleep or when you do you dream about the problem. Oh my gosh, exactly this! When I am working on a theoretical maths problem, there is just no end to the work! On the train hom…

You sound like you resent this which makes me question whether you genuinely like what you do?

You are asking a good question. I love programming/solving maths problems more than any other work activity but I wonder if I have made a mistake with turning this hobby into my job or if the environment is the problem. I'm going through some big changes in my life now, so time will tell.

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

#234

Post by Kenji »

jdavis703 wrote: post #117
notyourwork wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like you resent this which makes me question whether you genuinely like what you do?

Right, we are getting paid to solve puzzles essentially! Lots of people would love to do that kind of work, and many do it for free solving Sudoku or what not (not that it's mathematically comparable to what OP does, but in a similar vein).

I love Sudoku! The best way to pick up the essentials of a programming language is to write a Sudoku solver in it. So I've done that plenty :)

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

#235

Post by rayiner »

cema wrote: post #228
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…

I agree with the main message: we are not underpaid. Considering the risks we are taking (both in life and in career) we live comfortable lives indeed. A side note: when you said "I didn't have to pass a single licensing exam" I immediately thought of the way our profession tends to have that kind of exam every time we interview each other. A big part of interview for a software developer is based on the exam-type ma…

I'd rather take the bar exam (a uniform, objective, standardized test), than do as-hoc interview puzzles.

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

#236

Post by peatmoss »

BookingPotions wrote: post #126

As an amazon SDE myself, one who doesn't think working at Amazon is that bad, but do admit that it is challenging, and often do work much longer then 40h a week, I would need to have a guarantee that my pay cut comes with a no more then 30h a week clause. I'd like to see proper hour counting, like a check in and check out. Where any hour above 30h comes at an extra cost to Amazon, like double pay. So that they would…

I never thought I'd want a clock-in, clock-out system until this moment. Early in my working life (teen retail electronics job), I felt the pressure of the clock, even as a super reliable worker. I just knew it was there.

Now, the idea of a clock that tells me to go home seems super appealing.

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

#237

Post by nommm-nommm »

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…

There's two classes of employees in US labor law, exempt and non-exempt. It's called exempt/non-exempt because a class of employees is exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act which defines rules for overtime.

To be exempt you have to be paid on a salary basis, you have to make over a certain wage (which, until a few months ago, was a comically low $23,600/yr), and have certain job duties.

These job duties that are required are defined in the FLSA. There's executive employees, administrative employees, professional employees, computer employees, and outside sales employees. The text is here: http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?tpl=/ecfrbrowse/Title29...

In general, most salaried employees do not regularly work unpaid overtime in the US. For example, the one time I ever worked overtime in my software engineering career it was paid overtime (paid at my normal salary). I had a friend who was an (I think?) accountant and she had to work on her vacation otherwise she'd fall behind. Some workplaces are abusive and the law allows it for some classes of employees but it's not the norm outside of the bay area software industry.

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

#238

Post by biztos »

spangry wrote: post #211
ta_donk_gt wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The tricky part would be having some kind of license without which it would be illegal to perform certain engineering tasks.

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

#240

Post by skybrian »

spangry wrote: post #211
ta_donk_gt wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It's hard to see this happening since dissatisfied software developers can often fix the problem by finding another job. (Maybe not everyone can do it but that's the perception.)

You'd need a common sense of injustice. It's a lot easier to do this for, say, graduate students who really are underpaid.

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