Hacker News Reader

Comment by vadym909 | Hacker News Reader

While all previous evidence goes towards pointing this to be another way for AMZN to squeeze more out of their employees, I think we could give them the benefit of doubt. I think they may have seen a segment of talented developers saying I don't want to be in this ratrace. I'd rather work 30hrs/week and make $100K to maintain work-life balance. 6hrs/week or 4 days/week. I wish more companies were open to this. It would reduce internal competition. Some of the 60 hr/week employees are gunning for promotions and probably don't care about work life balance. Why should everyone have to compete with that?

View on HN

If Amazon had a good track record for people working only 40 hours a week, I might be less skeptical about this 30 hour week situation.

There are very few technical teams inside that seem to come even close to that, so I'm extremely doubtful that managers are going to be sufficiently disciplined to keep their staff down to 30 hours, nor employees sufficiently empowered either. It's so hard to see this as anything other than a way to pay people less for comparable work.

> I think we could give them the benefit of doubt

I've found that this is a much less stressful and more productive way to approach most things in life.

> Some of the 60 hr/week employees are gunning for promotions and probably don't care about work life balance. Why should everyone have to compete with that?

That seems totally reasonable. It's similar to the way tech companies have a concept of a "terminal level" where it's considered fine to spend your whole career with no pressure or expectations to earn further promotions.

> It's similar to the way tech companies have a concept of a "terminal level" where it's considered fine to spend your whole career with no pressure or expectations to earn further promotions.

And who else besides Jeff Dean, enjoys such a distinguished role?

Terminal level is usually "senior software engineer" or the equivalent. Something that every competent engineer can reasonably be expected to achieve.

Senior dev is usually fine to stay at as long as you keep producing.

Amazon states that SDE-II is fine actually. I think that's just their way of keeping the bar for senior higher.

> While all previous evidence goes towards pointing this to be another way for AMZN to squeeze more out of their employees...

Why would you go against a theory that all evidence pointed toward? I think what you meant is that despite what it looks like at first glance, there could be reasons why this is a good idea. You should present evidence for those arguments, maybe based on personal experience

I'd love to make $100k USD working a 40h week.

I'd love to make $200k USD working a 20h week.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com