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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

#271

Post by Roboprog »

abalashov wrote: post #260
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…

In addition to that, I'm frankly not sure that a 10 hour/week (2 hour/day) savings is going to be worth a 25% pay cut to most people. I'm not saying two hours per day (or an extra weekday or whatever) is entirely trivial, just that one has to be very fastidious and organised to take advantage of it. Even so, the economics of human task-switching and overhead, particularly in high cognitive load professions like softw…

If they are fair and honest about this (not handing out 40 or 50 hours work and calling it 30), I think that 4 days * 8 hours per week would be pretty nice.

I did a 4 * 10 job one summer when I was a teen. It was REALLY nice to have Friday as "recovery" day before the real weekend started.

I'm not sure how my family would tolerate me being gone 4 * 10, though.

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

#272

Post by rad88 »

sokoloff wrote: post #214
rad88 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I didn't say it's easy, or that there shouldn't be compensation! All those people add value and some of their work is very difficult. But difficulty of work is not the basis upon which they have large ownership stakes. Many jobs are not nearly as easy as they seem, but most merely pay a wage or fixed salary.

The founder controls the legal business entity and contributes capital assets and real or intellectual property. The financier purchases ownership directly. This is why they "deserve" to appropriate the value created by the company in perpetuity.

The founder may have done a lot of hard work in creating that intellectual property (including brand) in the first place, but it is the legal ownership of it that he trades for ownership in the company, not his hard work. In other instances it's possible to simply purchase IP or brand outright in the formation of a business. The commonality in these cases is legal ownership and the trade of capital assets, not hard work, whether their job is one I could not do personally, etc.

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

#273

Post by p1esk »

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…

No, usually you can't do this math.

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

#274

Post by posterboy »

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…

The unit of measure for work is not time. It's work. The measurement in units of time is related to a constant output of energy, ie. work. If you find that too rough an estimate to be applicable, that's fine, but how does that warrant more pay? Anyone could claim eating, staying healthy and taking the required time to relax after work are also work related, just e.g.

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

#275

Post by initram »

lordnacho wrote: post #255
barrkel wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people work much harder than dentists, lawyers etc and get paid an order of magnitude less. Supply and demand sets prices, not worthiness or fairness. Personally, I feel like I sold my teenage years as a price for my edge in tech. I'm not always sure it was worth it.

Sold them? What do you regret? As far as I can tell, spending my teen years learning stuff was the right move. Short of becoming a professional sportsman, which was never on the table for me, I don't see anything that I could have now if I had acted differently.

I agree. I learned a bunch of tech and then used it to socialize, make friends, meet women, etc. I don't feel I missed out on either the teenage part or the learning part.

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

#276

Post by jaredsohn »

dasmoth wrote: post #193
jaredsohn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be quieter, you don't have to deal with office distractions, and if you are an introvert it can be less draining.

Certainly agree on the "less draining" part -- but I'd like to think I'm being paid for making stuff, rather than for ending the day shattered. Some employers seem to have different views, though.

I don't disagree; Google says "take it easy" means "proceed calmly and in a relaxed manner" which I think fits what I described (and you'll probably get more work done this way, too if you already have a good idea of what you need to do.)

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

#277

Post by elihu »

dasmoth wrote: post #196
elihu wrote: post #173

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 owe…

Good for you. I can assure you that there are plenty of people with kids who like this idea, too! But what's the justification for a more-than-pro-rata loss of stock grants?

I still get full benefits even though I'm only working 4/5ths the hours, so it makes sense they'd take that out somewhere else. I don't get a lot of stock, so I think it works out numerically that the stock I don't get is probably about equal to a fifth of the cost of my health insurance. I think that's fair.

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

#278

Post by sokoloff »

rad88 wrote: post #272
sokoloff wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I didn't say it's easy, or that there shouldn't be compensation! All those people add value and some of their work is very difficult. But difficulty of work is not the basis upon which they have large ownership stakes. Many jobs are not nearly as easy as they seem, but most merely pay a wage or fixed salary. The founder controls the legal business entity and contributes capital assets and real or intellectual propert…

You threw me off then with the use of the word undeserving. What did you mean by that word?

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

#279

Post by JamesBarney »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #229

Makes sense to me. For most of my 40+ years of working, I worked a 32 hour work week and this was mostly for large corporations. I simply informed HR that I would not be working Monday's and to pay me 80% of my salary. It always amazed me that I was able to do this decade after decade, but the trick was that I worked really hard the 4 days I was in the office. I mostly used the extra time for friends and family, and…

BTW if you went around and asked a bunch of software engineers how they finangled there way into working a sub-40 week and collected that into a e-book. I would buy the shit out of that. And judging from other hacker news posts there are lots of other developers who would as well.

I would do it myself but I don't have the extra day to write books :) and I'm a terrible writer.

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

#280

Post by abalashov »

Roboprog wrote: post #271
abalashov wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to that, I'm frankly not sure that a 10 hour/week (2 hour/day) savings is going to be worth a 25% pay cut to most people. I'm not saying two hours per day (or an extra weekday or whatever) is entirely trivial, just that one has to be very fastidious and organised to take advantage of it. Even so, the economics of human task-switching and overhead, particularly in high cognitive load professions like softw…

If they are fair and honest about this (not handing out 40 or 50 hours work and calling it 30), I think that 4 days * 8 hours per week would be pretty nice. I did a 4 * 10 job one summer when I was a teen. It was REALLY nice to have Friday as "recovery" day before the real weekend started. I'm not sure how my family would tolerate me being gone 4 * 10, though.

Maybe I've just been self-employed for too long. In this mode of existence, one has immense schedule flexibility and yet is always working, all at the same time, in some weirdly paradoxical way. It's a lot like the life of professors; they don't have to be in the office except when teaching or having office hours, yet they're always busy.

From the vantage point of that mode of existence, an extra day doesn't do anything for me. Nothing I'd take a pay cut for, for sure. I can take a random Wednesday off anyway if I feel like it. On the other hand, I am working at least some time every day, and some days a lot.

I guess if I think back to when I was W-2 employed my butt had to be in some cube farm at 9 AM every day, a Friday off might seem more valuable.

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