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Cutting your salary by 40%

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Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#361

Post by y_u_no_rust »

mcv wrote: post #98
etiene wrote: post #38

This is insane. I've actually been looking to reduce my work hours to about 30, because even 40 seems too much. Having had a couple of burnouts before, I want my life to be more than my job, and I truly believe this would make me better at my job in the long term. After a day of full time work I almost never have the energy to do some of the other things I want to do. I want to be able do more open source, learn a fo…

I'm working 32 hours: 4 days a week. That leaves me a day with the kids outside the weekend. Oldest kid is at school most of the day, so I take the youngest to the zoo or something. I heartily recommend it. It's crazy that we're all still working 40 hours a week. Didn't Keynes promise we'd have 15 hour work weeks by now? (He did. He didn't anticipate our bosses taking all the profits from our productivity gains, thou…

yeah 40 hours is already to much especially at later ages.. aren't we supposed to be trying to make life more enjoyable?

if we're not what's the point?

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#362

Post by walshemj »

aetherson wrote: post #262
walshemj wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then your employer needs to plan better and descope where required

No, dude. Like, not, "There's always omigod super important crunch time work to do." There's always just ordinary "what's next on the queue" work to do. Descoping doesn't mean "We're done as software developers," it means "We aren't going to worry about getting this functionality into this release." But there's no point where you don't have a backlog. When you finish the task you're current working on, you pick up th…

Sounds like your employer sucks mate and probably a weak or ineffectual CTO who is not doing their job

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#363

Post by walshemj »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #118
walshemj wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your not salaried one of the key features of salaried jobs I sno fixed hours of work and no OT.

At least here in NZ, the core difference between salary and wages is that when you have a salaried job, you talk about yearly income, and when you have a wage job, you talk about hourly. The no fixed hours and no overtime thing seems to be an American thing.

Its probably deeper than that as NZ law is derived from UK law most people don't know the details of employment law.

Actually UK and it has an impact on your social status setting your own work hours is a class / status indicator

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#364

Post by ssalazar »

slaunchwise wrote: post #120
jnordwick wrote: post #112

What many here dont seem to understand is that you work commensurate with where you want to be. I work longish hours become I'm in finance and want to move up the organization or find a higher spot inn another. I want to know more about all facets of the firm and one day be a principal in a prop trading firm. I don't put in 80+ hour weeks because I want to stay where I'm at in my career. I become involved in more and…

Pro tip for getting ahead: learn the difference between 'commiserate' and 'commensurate'. Otherwise you will be unintentionally funny.

"Thanks to you, sales are up 20% and infrastructure costs are down 15%. But you made a minor spelling error in a Hacker News post, so we're gonna have to pass on that promotion this year."

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#365

Post by walshemj »

doikor wrote: post #93
walshemj wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your not salaried one of the key features of salaried jobs I sno fixed hours of work and no OT.

I dunno. The direct translation of "salaried" to Finnish is "kuukausipalkallinen" and/or "palkallinen" (which is what it says in my current contract). Which basically means monthly paid or just paid. This is the "default" way of getting paid for your work. We have separate system of hourly paid called "tuntipalkallinen" (again a direct translations tunti==hour and palkallinen==paid) I think this comes down to the emp…

true though as an English language site most would assume Anglo Saxon derived employment law - I know one member of a major UK union executive who would be deeply offended to be thought of as some one who got paid OT

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#366

Post by dogruck »

cardiffspaceman wrote: post #336
dogruck wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's linked to the question of "how many hours can we extract from these human widgets before they revolt?" It doesn't hold true in times of crisis, such as war. When the US ramped up for WWII, people were happily working around the clock. And I'm not sure that it applies to the knowledge workers. My own view is that knowledge workers are productive in bursts.

The US was only in that period from Dec 1941 to Aug 1945, just over 3 1/2 years. Assuming that the build-up years (when "everyone knew" we were going to have a war) were not as intense.

The work didn't stop when the war ended.

Regardless, my point is that when there is a motivating force, people work hard.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#367

Post by asah »

This was presumably written by someone who's never worked at a successful startup and had equity worth something, let alone seen the tax difference between salary and equity (capgains in the US). Don't take an offer that you can't afford to live on -- but salary ain't the point of startup compensation.

As for 40 hour workweeks, most startup jobs have 20+ hours of overhead: commuting, breaks, meals, random email, "status update" meetings, etc. If you're working 40 hours, you're getting 15 hours of real work done ( https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... ). Even "real work" includes repetitive tasks and not focused learning. At hour 40, the boring stuff is done and you're working towards Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours of focused learning.

tl;dr: if you're motivated by 9-to-5 and 10% raises -- then a startup isn't for you. No need to crap on the rest of us who love it.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#368

Post by quuquuquu »

otterpro wrote: post #229
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens when every company is doing this ritual? Just look at Japan to see what a 12+ hour / day work culture looks like. Their population and their economy are both slowly going down the shitter thanks to it, depression is widespread, etc.

Working long hours is common in Asia, especially in Japan and Korea. My wife had worked as salaried accountant at Nike, Gap, Guess fashion, and other companies that have presence in Asia, and it was common for her to have to stay at work until 11pm, sometimes past midnight, and yet expected to report by 9am the next morning. Leaving work at 9pm would be ordinary, and leaving at 6pm would be like committing a career s…

I'm almost certain I would rather starve. Wow.

Why live life like that? The only way to win is to not play!

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#369

Post by s73ver_ »

tw1010 wrote: post #179
Vektorweg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some thinking-intensive work can bring you at the edge in just 3 hours a day. After that, you generate more problems than solutions. Especially mathematicians are prone to this. Similar cases in software development need to be respected.

Grothendieck worked twelve hours per day every day of the week for a decade. Source: https://math.stackexchange.com/a/874290/161054

Good for him. I have no desire to sacrifice all of my free time to make someone else rich.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#370

Post by s73ver_ »

dogruck wrote: post #366
cardiffspaceman wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US was only in that period from Dec 1941 to Aug 1945, just over 3 1/2 years. Assuming that the build-up years (when "everyone knew" we were going to have a war) were not as intense.

The work didn't stop when the war ended. Regardless, my point is that when there is a motivating force, people work hard.

Europe isn't going to fall to Hitler if I don't put in extra hours at my job, though.
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