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Comment by tomohawk | Hacker News Reader

If I work an hour, I should be paid for an hour. The whole salary thing creates a situation where employers are incentivized to get workers to work as many hours as possible because its free labor. If workers were paid for each hour of work regardless, it would force employers to properly account for the cost instead of shifting it to the employees.

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On the flip side.. it can be a nice arrangements for both sides.

This week super super busy? Work 45 hours to help out.

Next week slow? Take off Friday at 1 pm and work a shorter week.

Such agreements can be good for both employeer and employee.

The only real "problem" is if there starts to be abuse by either side. If 50 or 60h is the expectation for every week, then you should know that signing up. 60h week standard is "fair" from a salary POV, but make sure the salary is more than the 40h a week job down the road.

Think of the salary for an employee as the same as a retainer for a consultant. You are paid $x,xxx per month for your availability for xx hours per month. They can be all or none consumed. But more hours are not guaranteed (employees/consultants should be able to reject over time) and should be paid a different rate (higher).

There are very few companies, in my experience, that are OK with you charging less than 40 hours, regardless of circumstances. If you want to leave early, you burn your leave time.

They are all happy (and in some it is implicitly mandatory) for you to work greater than 40 hours.

My experience is that I just do something reasonable and I've never had any problems. If it's just an hour or so early I'm leaving on Friday I don't even bother to announce it. Sometimes I'll just state I had to deal with some issue in the middle of the night so I'm taking off early tomorrow to catch up on rest or whatever.

Oh, and unless I'm taking an entire day off I've never used any leave time for something like a doctor's appointment at any employer. If I miss a few hours of work one day I might make a special effort to make it up or might not, depending on what's going on in the department and my perceived need of whether or not it's valuable to the team/project. I'm sure soon enough I'll get hit with some overtime for a big project or a late night support call anyways.

FWIW I acknowledge that overtime is part of the deal on occasion working in IT, but I'm not the type to grind away 50 hours every week forever. I might be able to sustain that for a week or two in an emergency, but it's not worth it. I talk about that part of the work culture during the interview process. I would avoid grind shops.

I have not had that experience in reasonable environments. There ARE bosses that count butt in chair hours, but I choose to not work for them. They likely now have an entire team of people that clock exactly 40 hours, after all of the talent left.

Doesn't that same arrangement work out if you're paid hourly? 45 one week has 5 extra (actually 7.5) hours, so the next slow week you can elect to work only 32.5 hours and you're in exactly the same place income wise.

This means the employer gets less simple hours work from you for the same amount of money, but that's the price of overtime.

I don't want to be paid by the hour. I want to get paid by the return I generate.

The idea of renting your life to someone else for sustenance is at an anthropological level odd, don't you think?

Also from a capital point of view. Why work harder? In fact why not work easier if you are paid by clock hours.

> I want to get paid by the return I generate.

Return to who - your employer or 'the market'? If your employer fails to monetize the widget you've just made, are you happy to get $0?

That's just allocation of risk to return. It can be negotiated and modelled in several ways; you're familiar with this: Some sales people make commissions. Some HR managers get salaries. Some engineers get salaries plus equity plus profit sharing.

It's easier to move risk onto labour if they labour has more direct control over the return, which is why sales people are more comfortable with direct commissions than engineers.

Because my consulting practice is based on operational improvements and not ownership of the end result, I don't work on a commission basis but on value-based pricing.

It is funny that people say "we should be paid hourly" but any job I've ever had with hourly pay I did as little as I possibly could. Possibly because I was a stoned teenager in food service. But even as a salaried employee, I don't often feel like I'm here because they need me every hour from 9 to 5 - I feel like I'm here because I can do some things and if I weren't here at all they'd be in trouble.

Anyway, I was also a stoned teenager in food service when I got a job at a pizza shop delivering pies. No hourly pay, just $20 a day plus a $2/$5/$10 delivery fee depending on how far you were from the shop. I kept all the tips and payday was 11:30 or so every night. I've never worked harder or felt better about work than I did coming home with my pockets full of money at the end of the day - it was clear that my showing up and busting my ass made me my paycheck. Ironically, this is called "getting paid under the table" and it's illegal.

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