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Comment by ipnon | Hacker News Reader

>The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours. So if you work 45 hours one week and 36 hours the next, that’s supposed to be okay.

I am satisfied with my salary because I finish my responsibilities in 2 to 4 hours, then spend the rest of the "work day" maintaining a green dot on Slack and promptly responding to merge requests, looking as busy as possible. My coworkers who feel the need to work a certain number of hours (40), invariably work overtime every week because their work expands to fit their perceived availability. They all get paid twice as much as me, but if I'm working half the hours is that equal compensation? I say no, because I still have my hair and my doctor says my blood pressure has improved.

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> "I am satisfied with my salary because I finish my responsibilities in 2 to 4 hours, then spend the rest of the "work day" maintaining a green dot on Slack"

This is precisely why when I started my company I committed to only hiring contract devs for 10-20 hours per week. No meetings. No bullshit. I pay you a high hourly wage, you do as much (often more) work than if you were a salaried 40 hour FTE, and you likely make more money in the process.

The model of work and the 40 hour work week is so fundamentally broken I feel like I'm in a perpetual twilight zone state when I talk to people. They think it's normal and okay to have 3+ hours of meetings per day and barely get any work done. I will never understand it.

My first 7 years of work life outside of college consisted of THOUSANDS of pointless meetings and months of pretending to be busy. I've promised myself I will never do that shit again, and I will not let my business succumb to that style of work.

One problem with hiring only contractors is they’re in it only for the money. “Well duh!” You say, but they’re not incentivized to do anything beyond beyond what they’re asked to do and will need to be highly managed. They’re not going to improve performance, make long term tech investments, or (the big one) innovate. Because they have no incentive to, they have no skin in the game.

This is obviously a generalization and of course this may well work great for some companies, including yours.

One problem with hiring only contractors is they’re in it only for the money.

I don't think that's totally true, it certainly wasn't in my case. I started contracting because I had had enough of the corporate grind. Quite a lot of my peers seemed to have the same attitude.

Having a customer is so much more intuitive to me compared to having a boss.

I’m a salaried worker and this is my exit strategy. In a year or so, when living situation is secured (mortgage paid off), I’m going contracting.

Played the game to put myself in position to do this, but absolutely weary of it.

I did it and it's worked out pretty well. If you've ditched your major debts then you'd be in an even better position to manage the ups-and-downs of contracting, so I say go for it!

> I had had enough of the corporate grind

"Personal Business Commitments" "Performance Reviews" "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" "Be sure to share stuff about X new project on your social media!" "Submit your vacation request"

Yes, this. All of this.

I will deliver you technical solutions to the best of my ability, and I will do it as well as I can, making sure things are documented, complete and easy to understand for longer term maintainers, using common tech stacks where possible.

I will not corporate pole-climb or waste my life on company admin, nor pretend I believe in your mission.

This is also a feature since contractors can be told upfront what to do in deliverables and the medium for deliverables. I plan on using contractors in the future.

I look forward to not having to inspire or align people and just tell people "this is what I want".

Their skin in the game is their reputation for repeat work.

> "I look forward to not having to inspire or align people and just tell people "this is what I want"."

What I like about contractors is that good ones will give you suggestions and recommendations for improvement, but they won't make it their life's eternal mission to throw your entire project off track by campaigning for their solution.

I had a contractor do literally that.

> "but they’re not incentivized to do anything beyond beyond what they’re asked to do and will need to be highly managed"

What skin in the game does an FTE have? Aside from maintaining benefits, which personally I think is preposterous to tie to full-time employment anyway. What else is there? Stock? Contractors are eligible for stock.

Even so, I don't need anyone to do anything beyond what they've been hired to do. Why would I need someone to go above and beyond? I just need smart, competent workers.

I work a lot with contractors in a different industry (construction/real estate) and I can't say this is true. Even mercenaries want to take pride in a job well done, and if you build a long-term project with them, they'll want to see it succeed. Being in it for the money does not have to mean not caring about what you're working on.

Also, referrals are worth a lot of money in construction. I’ll pay extra if I’m not gambling in a random contractor.

> One problem with hiring only contractors is they’re in it only for the money.

What do you believe employees are in it for?

The context of this conversation is full-time salaried employees who give more than they financially get, so personal satisfaction, influencing others' behavior, or prestige at the company are some potential answers to your question.

A lot of (most?) tech industry workers change jobs every 2-3 years and develop no particular attachment to or long-term plans for remaining at a company.

Thanks for the answer. Having had experience with both employee and contractor colleagues (and having been both) I'd say the only one that might not apply (but also could, depending on circumstances) to contractors is prestige at the company.

"they’re not incentivized to do anything beyond beyond what they’re asked to do and will need to be highly managed."

I actually find that quite offensive. Myself and the other contractors I know are professionals, winning work through reputation and delivering results. That's why we get paid well.

We require less management and always try to deliver above expectations. We have a professional, business to business relationship with our clients, where many employees seem to consider their employer almost a surrogate parent.

Employees have no more skin in the game, in fact I'd say less - if I don't deliver I get no more work.

In my experience, being a salaried employee doesn't really give you skin in the game at all. It's often illusory, as owning a sliver of equity or profit sharing translates to practically no upside or downside. Salaried employees and contracts are equally likely (or unlikely) to be invested in the success of the company. Misusing contractors or mismanaging salaried employees is a failure of management, and ultimately a failure of ownership. Garbage at the top, garbage at the bottom.

That is fair and I apologize for the characterization, it’s a generalization not meant to apply to everybody. I have been on both ”teams” as engineer and manager as well and either way it’s something you have to take into account as you work on or manage the people.

I am w-2 and my salary is in the top <2% of salaries in America and I literally only do my job for money, and I only care about money.

The better I do, the more money I can make.

Having been a contractor for quite some time, I was in it for the work and I was happy. I usually worked in the middle of the bell curve part of the project and was exempted from all the silly meetings.

You may think that’s the way it’s supposed to work for contractors, but in every single job I’ve ever had as a contractor, I always tried very hard to work as if I was a salaried employee — like I had skin in the game. It’s just part of who I am, and I can’t really change that.

Either way, I am trying to take home a certain amount of money, sure. And make enough to cover my insurance needs, yes.

And as a contractor, I was always sensitive to those clients who wanted to make sure I never billed more than 40 hours a week, regardless of how many hours of work I actually did.

Maybe that’s not how contractors are supposed to do things, but that’s a core part of my personality, and not something I can change — or would want to.

Of course, I’ve never been an Amazon warehouse worker, or a driver for Uber or Lyft, so for them I might act differently. But as an IT consultant many times over the past 30+ years, this has been the way I have worked.

I'm a consultant / contractor. I never think about it as "in it only for the money". I try to provide value as much as possible.

My ownership over the projects I worked on has gone up enormously since I became a freelancer/contractor. I'm not here to merely put in the hours, I'm here to deliver the best product I can. And I tend to stay on a project until I'm sure I can leave without it collapsing.

My incentive is to make my client happy so they may hire me again, to get a successful project on my resume, and to be able to point future clients to this client if they want to know what I can do for them.

This is a very valid point. In my workplace we have contractors and FTE engineers all paid by monthly salary. The contractors are by far more efficient coders. But it makes sense, they attend only standups and they waste no time in HR and corporate rituals,

Lol, yeah. You get to skip so many meetings as a contractor.

How do you avoid meetings with a distributed part time team? Any hints or best practices?

Working, part time, with a remote team and seem to have 3 hours of meetings. How do you do it?

We're remote and have a one hour meeting every three weeks; because we believe it's important to have a high bandwidth conversation to make sure we're all on the same page.

Beyond that, we communicate mostly on GitHub issues, Slack (for realtime issues, goofing off, etc), and P2 for designing things that need more threading/nuance.

We're so distributed (literally around the world) that our one hour meeting is guaranteed to inconvenience someone. When it's my turn, our meeting is at 11pm local time. I usually join with a beer. This meeting is usually a retrospective and just going through what issues we're planning to prioritize for the next few weeks.

How long has the team been assembled for and how do you bring new people on? Is your team mostly tech people? Are there any business folks involved?

We've been a proper team for almost two years now, we recently brought on a new developer last year. Onboarding is a whole thing as there are many, many systems involved in our project. We do hop on 1:1 video calls as needed to discuss things or get help debugging, which also can end up being a social call just as much as working together.

We're a very technical team, so we don't have any business specialists on the teams.

This is also why I started freelancing and limit myself to ~20hr weeks. I actually feel just as productive as I did working 8hr days salaried, since I have much better mental health with the extra free time.

The only real downside is finding clients to agree to that limit, but so far it hasn't been too much of a problem.

And as someone who hires contractors, 20 hours can be positive for your client.

Why? Lowers weekly management / feedback / “business decisions” needed to enable your work.

Where do you work where employees who work twice as much, make twice as much?

The issue I have with salary structure is that you have no opportunity for going above and beyond. If I work a minimum hours to get my job done, I get payed the same amount than if I went overtime and finished my tasks sooner.

It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work, but struggle to see the reason to when it’s just another company that will do nothing about it.

To be clear - salary is much better than an hourly + overtime system. The former provides a ton of flexibility. It’s just that it provides little to no incentive for going above and beyond.

Maybe too many companies have been burned by the undocumented mess left by the "above and beyond" crowd who move on after two years?

> The issue I have with salary structure is that you have no opportunity for going above and beyond.

Yes you do. This should be recognized via bonuses, raises, and/or promotions as appropriate. It's not immediate, but it does manifest over time. If it doesn't, use the experience gained to move to a company that appreciates such work and rewards it appropriately.

> "...move to a company that appreciates such work and rewards it appropriately."

Which takes 1-2 years of very hard work to discover, by which time the employee has invested a huge amount of effort for 10-30% more salary and 1-20% more equity than a new hire who has contributed nothing.

And this employee has to wonder why they're contributing so much more when other people are doing almost nothing and getting nearly the same reward. Which leads to the best people quitting and the worst people staying.

Most startups treat "The Senior Leadership Team" like unique people who matter and have to be compensated like they're hard to replace. They get employment contracts, large bonuses of equity/cash, and special treatment. Everyone else gets lip service and the treatment of replaceable cogs in the chain.

For example, the 10x programmer typically gets 10-20% of what an incompetent VP will earn in total comp. Because they're treated like two different classes of employee.

And this fact hurts most companies deeply in ways they'll never understand. It shows up in project delays and huge problems, which ultimately cost far, far more than it would've cost to keep the best contributors.

Bonuses are a joke in most companies. The difference between a year of coasting and one of efforts is in 3 digits.

Not sure where you've worked, but where I've worked, the raises have never matched the effort.

At nearly every job, I've gotten a raise nearly every year. But the raises generally are very small, 5-10k a year. I'm not going to work nights and weekends for another taxed 5k.

No company I've ever worked at has a bonus system. I would gladly get a feature out in 2 weeks, instead of 4, if it meant a extra $5k check in my bank. Instead, repeatedly doing that for a whole year means a taxed $5k raise at the end.

Not. Worth. It.

Tech companies do have a bonus system, not just in literal bonuses but also in stock grants that depend on your performance. Coupled with an engineering promotion ladder that tops out at the equivalent of a VP (or even SVP?) role, it seems like there are financial incentives to go "above and beyond".

Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean working longer hours! Out of the people I've worked with, the overlap between working extra hours and having outsize positive impact is smaller than you might expect. Incentivizing extra hours for their own sake would be actively counterproductive.

I'd also say that people generally overestimate the effect of formal financial incentives and underestimate informal social incentives. Company and team culture can have a much larger effect than compensation, especially when everyone is being paid a lot in absolute terms.

I seriously doubt there are many places where principal eng makes as much as vp and 0 for svp. Even at google and aws I don’t really think it’s the case

> It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work, but struggle to see the reason to when it’s just another company that will do nothing about it.

This is essentially how the bonus system works at the big software companies. People with the same title might make roughly the same salary, but have very different stock compensation, which gets updated every year based on performance and can be much larger than the base salary. It's why you see such a wide range of numbers on sites like levels.fyi (for example $300K to $900K for a staff engineer at Google).

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

> It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work

No, no we don’t. I like working just as much as the next person, but I prefer my evaluation to be based on me and my peers working 40 hours, as opposed to me working 40 and them working 60.

This, so much this!

Employees, at least a lot of them, ask for bonus systems. They seem to love bonus systems and shun/dislike companies that have a proper bonus system: none.

Bonuses (and other shenanigans) only kills team work and team spirit and make it an everyone against everyone game. And don't tell me that you get too many slackers without a bonus system. Slackers are actually usually pretty good at playing the bonus game, i.e. doing exactly what is required to get the right numbers to get a bonus. Whether that's helping the company or the team in the long run is none of their concern.

Emphatically this. This is also why I choose to work in automation. My work-life balance is a direct result of the investment I've made into doing my work well. I've engineered the company's systems and processes in a way that results in less work for people as a whole. That lets us all work more efficiently.

For the handful of weeks I've worked every night until 2am, there's 20x as many where I've done a couple of hours work in the morning and then been a paid SME the rest of the day. And seemingly unlike most engineers, I think getting paid to talk to people is FANTASTIC.

You simply cannot do this if you are hourly.

Why can you not do this if you are hourly?

Because if your labor is being measured in windows of time, you are either putting yourself out of work or admitting that they don't need you for 40 hours.

You need to shift the conversation away from hours worked to value of your work.

If you are an hourly employee, you are being paid to be a cog, not to be a brain.

How do you determine how much value you're creating? And how do you convince clients of that value?

Not knowing this skill is probably why people remain hourly, as I did for many years.

I'm not sure that's really teachable, either. If you can't figure out what moves the needle for a business...

It’s cool, that your colleagues are paid twice. I tried working 3 hours a day and 9 hours a day. With 9 hours a day I made my manager angry showing how lazy my colleagues are. So I ended up with working 3 hours a day and staying green the other 5 while learning skills I need for my side project. That’s the perfect working setup for me, though I would love to have a manager who wants me to work 9 hours a day for the company.

Sounds perfect to me.

I wouldn't call your colleagues lazy, i would say they have other responsibilities and a life. Not everyone has a SO to clean and cook for them and maintaining relationships takes work

Also: you dont have 9 hours of productive work in you a day. Nobody does. You have 4 good hours and then a bunch of wasted time where you are performing being busy because you want everyone to know how smart you are.

> you dont have 9 hours of productive work in you a day.

> Nobody does.

You are making an overgeneralisation, or assuming a context. For lots of jobs productivity is fairly linear with time - some of those jobs work on piece rates or hourly wages.

Some people are productive for 9 hours in professional jobs, and they are billed accordingly, although maybe the marginal productivity per hour falls.

Not everyone is “wasting time, busy working, and showing off” to paraphrase you.

In the general scheme of things you're right that many jobs are near linear, but I think for the intended audience of TFA (people likely to be scammed by the salary system and made to work longer than 40-hour weeks without overtime pay) it's a valid generalization.

The jobs that actually are linear actually do tend to get paid by the hour and often even have 1.5x pay for overtime, and the fact that salaried workers don't get that is precisely where the scam is.

> Not everyone has a SO to clean and cook for them

I do have an SO and it's not her job to cook and clean for me.

In any case, yeah, 9 hours a day is pushing it for actual productivity.

> Also: you dont have 9 hours of productive work in you a day. Nobody does. You have 4 good hours and then a bunch of wasted time where you are performing being busy because you want everyone to know how smart you are.

This is true though it may confuse some who currently do but don’t realize it’s not sustainable and leads to burnout. I used to have 8-9 productive hours a day until I realized the cost. I also have a family now and putting those hours would spend me completely and I’d have nothing left for them. Why in the world would I do that? Even if it was for a lot more money I’d probably do it only for a short period of time with a long break in mind for recouping and tending to what I’d have neglected.

If you’re young and trying to prove yourself and are thirsty to learn and all that sure it works but don’t think this is in any way sustainable.

It can be sustainable. Just takes a lot of setup, and it’s not usually constant for long periods. But I regularly hit 9, even more and have been for many years now through 5 startups.

Only happens when you have equity, you like the work, and you have a lot of it in front of you with no managers or meetings in the way.

But I’ve designed my work so far to be just that. I’d never go back to working on a team or project that wasn’t structured that way. I’m at my happiest when I’m in this zone, it’s the most creative and rewarding work.

> od hours and then a bunch of wasted time where you are performing being busy because you want everyone to know how smart you are.

This. I'd be happy if I can get 3 solid hours of uninterrupted flow state.

You can have some 9hour productive days from time to time. Cmon..

Cant keep it up every day of the year for sure but Ive had days where Ive been productive for 6 - 10 hours.

> promptly responding to merge requests

This counts as work to me though?? Like there's something that feels like it's not real work because I'm not writing code, I'm reading it. But it's 100% real actual work; if you weren't doing it they'd have to hire someone else to do it.

Of course reviewing PRs is work. I bill the time I spend on PRs to _their_ ticket all the time and that's how it should be.

I think what the OP just means is that just like keeping slack green and responding to people there, responding quickly to merge requests shows that "you're there" (i.e. "working"). If that's what's required to not get any dumb questions about the rest of his day, that's very smart. As in, it seems that the hours he "works for real" + helping out others on the team/in the org are enough to satisfy his boss that he's doing the work that he's being paid for.

Awesome for him I'd say.

It boggles the mind why half-time and three-quarter time employment isn't more popular. I guess UBI would allow that to happen instead of employers having to worry about benefits.

The coordination and knowledge sharing costs go up at least linearly with number of people. Twice as many people each working half-time mean a lot more of that time is chewed up with communication/knowledge acquisition.

That's the employer's problem. What I find weird is that more people working in high tax-progression countries do not realize that doubling your annual holidays[1] is actually dirt cheap - and require that as a perk instead of the slightly more expensive car or whatever they are spending that marginal income.

[1] or 4 day work week or 6 hour work day or whatever suits your life at the moment

And the employer solves the problem by only hiring developers full time...

Employers’ problems and employees’ problems are probably closer than you might think when it comes to sustainable business and employment practices.

I had an employee who had a clear opinion that some stuff weren’t his duties and that arriving sleepy at work was ok.

So, as I said, I “had” an employee.

Let’s count in jobs. Basically a man fully dedicated to his job 37hrs/week creates about 1 new position a year, every year, because he makes the processes so efficient that we serve 2x more customers, so we can hire. That guy and another intern, they created -1 job in a year (his project brought literally no customer) and cost us 16k€ + his salary + the intern (I pay my interns, I give hefty bonuses to everyone).

I’m not complaining, it’s my job to root out the weed and prune it, and I did a mistake, but you need to understand, as a nation, how many jobs don’t exist because employees live off their colleagues (as for my share, I have created 6 jobs myself so I’ll just collect the huge margins, I’m just vexated he doesn’t collect his margins too). In sectors where everyone thinks it’s not their jobs, people end up harassing each other for the remaining positions. In growing companies, it’s the American dream with free food. The correct middle ground is to own your product for 37 hrs a week, and not delegate questions to be solved by the employer.

You fired your employee for being sleepy in the morning? I think he’s better off not working for you and I’d avoid such employers like you like the plague. Im productive after a coffee in the morning and do arive sleepy at work and thats not your damn business. Getting the job done is a better metric and if you want 100% consistency look to invest into robots. You can’t expect people to submit everything to you. What do you do for them beside paying for their work?

Let's say doubling your holidays means roughly 10% reduction in work time. If a fully dedicated 37.5 h person creates one job per year, could you estimate how many jobs creates a) fully dedicated 41 h person b) fully dedicated 34 h person?

Of course, people are different and this is just an anecdote, but from my personal experience (a couple of instances) I can push myself to "fully dedicate" more than 4 hours a day of mentally really hard work - for some months. After that I tell politely that sorry, it is time for me to do something else for a while. More often than not, I have been welcomed back later. Of course, those have been exceptional circumstances, typically there is no need to fully dedicate more than 4 hours of mentally really hard work, but there is some less demanding aspects of the job taking some time off.

>Basically a man fully dedicated to his job 37hrs/week creates about 1 new position a year, every year, because he makes the processes so efficient that we serve 2x more customers

For how long can an employee, ever year, double his efficiency and the amount of customers he serves? That just doesn't sound sustainable.

>as a nation

Which nation?

> That's the employer's problem.

This is a lazy, cop-out answer.

I've tried hiring half-time in the past.

It kind of works if the tasks can be neatly packaged and handed off for totally asynchronous work. It breaks down as soon as you need the part-time person to work with the rest of the team.

You end up forcing the rest of the team to work around one person's schedule. You also end up with someone on your team doubling up on the part-time person's knowledge if you need someone available during normal hours to answer questions or debug something.

It's not really about benefits. ACA doesn't require full benefits for someone working 20 hours a week.

Let's be honest: Many remote work jobs are essentially becoming half-time jobs, with the other half of the work week comprised of simply being available on Slack if someone asks a question.

My remote job has been a 25% job for a decade, 75% being available on chat. Back when I worked in an office it was 25% work, 75% being available in person.

Not even that. Even 10.5/12 to 11/12 time would be great.

Why is it that senior employees with a $500K package are expected to take zero vacation time or are subject to disrespect? Why do people pride themselves in taking no vacation, guilting their peer-level leaders in the process? I'd gladly take 11/12 of that pay in return for being able to take a full 4-6 weeks off to myself to do things I want to do in life.

Personal travel, personal project, and family time are important, and that has nothing to do with how much passion I have for the job.

I find it hard to find the right time to take vacation - I'm almost always doing something interesting at work, so it's always stimulating enough that I won't think too much about taking time off for extended personal projects.

I get it. It’s hard to eat well, to sleep enough, to exercise. Taking time off is one of those things in my opinion.

> The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours

That's the opposite of how it is supposed to work when you are on salary.

You are paid for units of work, which is hours worked.

The output is not what you produced, but what the working force globally produced.

Being salaried means being paid a flat rate (forfait) for being there: sometimes you produce more (you lose), sometimes less (you gain), but the pay stays the same.

> You are paid for units of work, which is hours worked.

Nope, "units of work" is features delivered, bugs fixed, new people trained and so on.

As the parent commenter said, if you can do it in 2-3 hours per day -- this is great and you are getting benefits of being exempt.

Of course sometimes people pay you like you are exempt, but expect you to be present for 40 hours anyway like you are hourly -- and in this case, being exempt is a scam as the article said. But while common, this is far from universal.

> Nope, "units of work" is features delivered, bugs fixed, new people trained and so on

Wrong: in a salaried job units of work is hours.

Unless your contract says otherwise.

> As the parent commenter said, if you can do it in 2-3 hours per day

You never do it in 2-3 hours per day, consistently.

If you are that good, don't tell anybody because they will start thinking they are paying you too much.

Interesting point I saw on this site a while ago - most people are well trained to work out hourly compensation by time spent working.

By that metric, ignoring hair loss, you and your coworkers earn the same per hour.

Let's flip it and measure something else of value. How much free time you have left over.

After all overheads (work, sleep, commute, chores) 1 extra hour worked per day can be a 25% reduction in your free time. What is that worth? How much are you selling that 25% for? Would the overtime or pay rise be worth this?

Sometimes you just need cash in the bank even at a poor exchange rate but I think it's useful to look from different perspectives.

Watch out, they're going to ML models that keep track of what apps and websites you have open. Best to sit there and add/remove blank lines to a python file for the remaining 6 hours.

They can bloody well try. It's illegal in many places and I would refuse to work anywhere with that level of micro management. I know it's a privileged position to be in, but I'll excercise that position as long as I have the option to do so.

> I still have my hair and my doctor says my blood pressure has improved.

Wise man.

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