Cutting your salary by 40% • Hacker News Board

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#411

Post by Aeolun » Tue, Sep 19, 2017, 4:06 AM UTC

Godel_unicode wrote: post #83

richardknop wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are expecting me to work extra hours you will have to pay multiple of my normal rate for overtime. I'm sorry but anything else is some form of exploitation or at the very least unfair. And the argument with extra hours working on personal projects is ridiculous. As a matter of fact I am a heavy open source contributor and work on numerous projects in my personal time, some of them already have many hundreds of…

I think GPs point was that people can clearly be productive more than 40 hours a week because so many are. How people should be compensated for their time is only loosely coupled with how many hours they can work. I agree with you that we should be fairly compensated, but I also agree that the dogma of "40 is the max a worker can be productive, possibly less" is wrong in a large number of cases.

40 hours might be the maximum a worker can be productive on a single issue/project. After a little while you have to do something completely different.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#412

Post by kamaal » Tue, Sep 19, 2017, 4:21 AM UTC

shubhamjain wrote: post #29

So few companies realise that working 70-90 hours / week calls for introspection not celebration. Fortunately, I never had a job where I had to put unreasonable hours against my will but I have heard stories of people who went through the ordeal and they share a common element: the capacity to think better solutions dampens which effectively makes 70 hour work-week, a It's sad that only a fraction of people in manage…

Because that is not always possible. In India, in most IT firms, either budgets are fixed for a project, or there are upper slabs for hourly billing. What happens is you will eventually run into situations where you are pushing very aggressive deadlines with limited resources. The only option to do a project is to work crazy hours.

Its easy to say why don't they scale down for better work hours. If they did, they wouldn't even have those kind of projects, and by that definition you wouldn't have a job. Most companies can't do this.

Also in my early career this kind of a working environment was a boon. Sure if you are only in for a 9-5 job and money, you don't even have to sign up for something like this. But working crazy hours gives people far more disproportionately higher learning opportunities compared to peers. I have seen people volunteer and even fight with managers for these kind of projects only for the exposure. Do this enough number of years and you get very good at a lot of other things. Doing side projects, start ups and a range of other things necessary for a long haul career. Also your ability to contribute with merely participating in a project goes up way higher than your peers, and that eventually brings you more opportunities.

>>It's always people who work 'hard', who are more in the office, get admired and promoted.

Lastly, Is this really surprising to you. Look at how academic performance works, or how it is in sports, investing or for that matter in other walks of life.

Quantity of work, has a very deep effect on quality of work.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#413

Post by alexasmyths » Tue, Sep 19, 2017, 4:33 AM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #387

alexasmyths wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I would expect people to 'check in' on vacation as well. Not every day - but if you have real responsibilities - others may depend on you. I know it's not ideal ... but in a 'week off' I'll glance at my emails every few days, and maybe once or twice fire off a little note. That little note can make a huge difference to the machine. Unless I plan to be 'in Rome' or whatever, in which case I would plan ahea…

> To be fair, I would expect people to 'check in' on vacation as well. Your expectation is unwarranted. If your company can't let employees off for a week or two without checking in, I suggest the management style and staffing levels be checked. Your employees need these breaks to attend to mental stress, and adding to their stress by expecting availability during their time off should be re-evaluated.

Responsibility is not a magic switch you can turn on and off.

You can't 'exit a system' if you have responsibilities, in a situation wherein that machine could break down in your absence.

If 'reading a few e-mails' is 'stressful' - then the person has issues working in a professional environment. 'Checking in' should not be stressful. It's just that - popping your head in to see what's up.

In reality - there is absolutely no escaping this for those who have responsibility unless there is a lot of planning, especially the further 'up the chain' you get.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#414

Post by Setepenre » Tue, Sep 19, 2017, 4:42 AM UTC

Yhippa wrote: post #250

philipkd wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way about karaoke. Do a little bit of practice so you don't look like a fool. But, if you over-practice you'll take the fun out of having your best performance live.

> But, if you over-practice you'll take the fun out of having your best performance live. I wish this was true about the modern coding interview.

Humm, if you get everything right I would probably assume you already read about something similar which means that it is evaluating nothing or rather it is just evaluating your ability to remember things which is not that useful when you can just google it.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#415

Post by lightbulbjim » Tue, Sep 19, 2017, 5:21 AM UTC

danjayh wrote: post #374

megaduck wrote: post #50

I enforce a militant "40 hours only" policy for my employees, and it's incredible for productivity. When you work longer hours defect rates increase, code quality drops, and things are on fire all the time. You also lose really good people due to burnout. Sustainable pace is super important for creating and maintaining high performance teams. Crassly, it's just a more profitable way of doing business. I wish more man…

My employer has traditionally been very good about 40 hour weeks. However, recently everyone on the team has been doing 55-80 hours per week. On about week 4, I pointed out to my manager that the last time we were on an extended stretch of OT, the company put in place a policy to pay us at an hourly rate equal to our annual salary / 2080 for all OT hours worked. He responded "Yeah, but [project x] was on OT for over…

I would be outta there.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#416

Post by alexasmyths » Tue, Sep 19, 2017, 5:25 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #389

alexasmyths wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really agree. Practice is important for building skills, and for knowing the piece. The point is that you should be able to play the piece like you know how to walk. Imagine: if you had do 'think' about walking, about every step, you would walk unnaturally. You'd certainly not be able to swatter. When you can play as you walk - then - you can loosen up, and focus on having fun, making it creative i.e. have sw…

A programmer can usually average ~4 hours of focused highly productive work where they are not on Hacker News etc per day. Fewer people can do that kind of focused effort for ~8 hours a day regularly. I have never met someone that can do that kind of highly focused effort for ~12 hour days. That does not mean highly focused effort is the only valid type of work. But, it is very valuable for most programming jobs. Fur…

I fully hear you about the 'focus' ... but again, a lot of tech work is reading, trying things, meetings, etc. etc.

If we 'only wrote code' I might agree that 1/2 days would be max.

FYI - for the the same reason professional orchestras don't 'rehearse all day'.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#417

Post by Aeolun » Tue, Sep 19, 2017, 6:00 AM UTC

asah wrote: post #367

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, "sta…

Where did you find 10% raises? I'd love to know.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#418

Post by Aeolun » Tue, Sep 19, 2017, 6:03 AM UTC

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…

But this is an unhealthy sentiment. You should be able to move up and get where you want to be even if you work a normal 40 hour workweek.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#419

Post by blauditore » Tue, Sep 19, 2017, 6:51 AM UTC

rhcom2 wrote: post #202

blauditore wrote: post #31

This job seems to be located in Singapore (can be easily found by googling the quote). On a related note, I recently saw a question on The Workplace SE mentioning it's common for most devs in Sri Lanka to work 12+ hours[1]. In both cases, companies seem to intentionally exploit this by explicitly filtering out candidates not willing to go such lenghts. Pretty pathetic. [1]: https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questio…

I think it's in Palo Alto. https://www.deeplearning.ai/machinelearningsoftwareengjobdes...

This is funny - the same wording can be found here: http://startupjobs.asia/job/33056-backend-developer-fast-gro...

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#420

Post by mcv » Tue, Sep 19, 2017, 7:42 AM UTC

soVeryTired wrote: post #129

mcv wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>He didn't anticipate our bosses taking all the profits from our productivity gains, though. He also didn't anticipate zero-sum competition for inflexible goods like housing. If I want a nice house in a decent city, I have to out-compete and out-borrow everyone else who might want that house. If everyone around me is making bank and I want the nice house, then I'd better make bank too. Lots of us end up working more…

Absolutely true. I just bought a house in Amsterdam. The seller got over three times what he originally paid for it. I don't regret it, but we can only afford it because we both have excellent jobs. A single good income is just not enough anymore. And it's all the fault of people like me who are willing to pay whatever it takes to live in a really nice city.