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

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

#281

Post by rad88 » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #278

rad88 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you own a large amount of value or wealth that you did not create, I would say that is undeserved.

Founders and early employees contribute work and are hopefully rewarded for that work with ownership stakes in the company. Rightly so. But as the company grows, and to the degree that it necessarily hires additional employees, the proportion of ownership held by these early employees becomes undeserved (in the simple above sense of the word). Their large ownership positions remain, even as it becomes clearer and clearer that the value of the company is created by its hundreds/tens of thousands of employees.

So if you start a business and make a profit (a hard thing to do!), that is not undeserved. But if business grows and eventually the value is created by 15,000 people all together, you don't deserve 25% of it.

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

#282

Post by notyourwork » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 9:19 PM UTC

Kenji wrote: post #233

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?

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.

Sometimes its environmental. One way to figure this out might be to try changing some parameters and see if you still enjoy things. Its hard for me to say without any context but I hope you find your purpose!

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

#283

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 9:35 PM UTC

rad88 wrote: post #281

sokoloff wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you own a large amount of value or wealth that you did not create, I would say that is undeserved. Founders and early employees contribute work and are hopefully rewarded for that work with ownership stakes in the company. Rightly so. But as the company grows, and to the degree that it necessarily hires additional employees, the proportion of ownership held by these early employees becomes undeserved (in the simpl…

IMO, you do since you created the company and navigated it through the difficult early waters. If you were able to do so and maintain a 25% ownership share (astoundingly unlikely/uncommon IME), then you "deserve" it partly as a founder and partly as an ongoing investor (by virtue of not selling your shares).

There's a genuine argument that the investors and risk-takers "created" a portion of the wealth by virtue of bankrolling and hiring those 15K employees and paying them a risk-free salary.

I'm not especially interested in whether or not it's cosmically fair when deciding whether or not it's deserved. Warren Buffett "deserves" every bit of Berkshire Hathaway that he owns; Bill Gates every bit of Microsoft, Mark Z every bit of Facebook, etc. (Again, all in my opinion. I'm sure there are others who disagree, but even among them probably differ on how [or whether] to correct the "undeserved" ownership.)

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

#284

Post by throwaway_amzn » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 9:35 PM UTC

nol13 wrote: post #124

throwaway_amzn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in Alexa there are some teams that are being pushed too hard. I work for Alexa as well and there is plenty of burn out and "sweatshop" teams in our org. It really varies a lot from team to team and what that team's role is.

let me guess, abbasaamer is your boss?

Haha, no. I get the impression from his post history that he works for an ASR/NLU team. They tend to have a more reasonable workload than some of the other teams.

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

#285

Post by rad88 » Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 10:36 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #278

rad88 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> I'm not especially interested in whether or not it's cosmically fair when deciding whether or not it's deserved.

The argument about the "risk-tasking investors" rightfully owning the work of the "risk-free employees" is an appeal to fairness (the investors could lose their investment while the employees still gain their salaries), so by the way it does seem that you are interested in that.

Early efforts in organizing the company and navigating difficult waters are work and those employees should be compensated with ownership. I don't think that subsequent work by subsequent employees should not be compensated in this same way. Mark Zuckerberg and half a dozen friends created a company valued at $98M by Accel in 2005 and enjoyed ownership of that. Today he and 15,000 others create a company valued at $360 billion, of which he enjoys 25% ownership while the combined ownership of the rest is miniscule.

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

#286

Post by Steeeve » Sun, Aug 28, 2016, 2:21 AM UTC

briHass wrote: post #232

Steeeve wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

The small town Senior SE in Tenesee for Infosys is making ~$58K, and has to worry about paying back the loan he took out to come to the States.

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

#287

Post by jtfairbank » Sun, Aug 28, 2016, 2:58 AM UTC

xapata wrote: post #262

jtfairbank wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a trend among many highly paid fields: - Many doctors earn 100k or 3-400k depending on their field. - Many small business owners earn - 9 out of 10 startups outright fail or aren't successful enough to compensate founders & employees for the opportunity cost.

It's hard to tell what the distribution of income is without good data. I'm skeptical that normal, non-startup businesses fall into this pattern. I'd expect more of a log-normal for most industries. The log-normal also applies somewhat for lawyers. The partners of big firms make millions annually. As long as we're getting into nuance, I should add that the two-peak distribution is most clear for lawyer starting salar…

Great points all around! The reason I think small businesses are relevant is that the founders/owners own the entire business. They either lose money, break even, or make money. In the sucessful small business cases where they make money, since they own 100% their profit requirements for a good return are far lower than those of a startup. I'd guess it's still a power law scenario (just with less amplitude than startups).

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

#288

Post by mabbo » Sun, Aug 28, 2016, 12:05 PM UTC

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.

That's a fair point.

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

#289

Post by kwhitefoot » Sun, Aug 28, 2016, 12:29 PM UTC

abalashov wrote: post #261

spangry wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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'? Well, the real nuance is that the AMA is not so much a union as a guild. It's not _legal_ to perform medical services without an AMA-blessed licence to practice. If one could concoct a scheme by which it would be ill…

Please don't even suggest such a thing!

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

#290

Post by kwhitefoot » Sun, Aug 28, 2016, 12:33 PM UTC

anthony_barker wrote: post #254

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…

Doctors working well into their 60s or 70s? Yes Coders? Never. Interview for medical job: Normal Coders?: Often humiliating

There are plenty of coders in their 60s, I'm one of them. You don't think computer programming was invented in the dot com boom do you? I have colleagues still coding who are in their 70s.

And no we aren't all coding in Cobol or Fortran 4.

I do agree though that it would be difficult for most of us to get new jobs in another company as developers because of the age-ist behaviour of many of our younger colleagues.