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Comment by ZephyrBlu | Hacker News Reader

You can pay 3-4x more for an employee that is 10x more productive (This is what I think about Netflix). It's a great deal for everyone.

I don't think you can really convince most employers of this though.

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I don’t know - the wfh revolution is changing this equation. The more productive employees (10x etc) can just scale down their output commensurate to compensation and expectations based on the median employee and enjoy a better work life balance now.

I'm not sure you what you mean. If you're working somewhere like Netflix I'm assuming the median employee is quite good, so "scaling down" your output to match that doesn't really make sense to me.

The implication is a 10x employee could work half a day a week at a "normal" (not netflix) job and from the outside it's the same amount of output as a 1x.

I'm guessing he means if you work somewhere that isn't "we only hire the best, and we'll fire you if you're not" like Netflix, the better employees realize they can work half as much for the same pay and just enjoy life more.

These employees are optimizing for free time, not salary. As someone who thinks big tech pays ridiculously more than is necessary for a comfortable lifestyle, if I could work 1 day a week for 1/5 the pay I would (I understand why working so little would likely not make sense, I am just fantasizing).

Ok that makes sense. But like you say, I'm not sure working so little makes sense.

10x more productive is probably a poor way to phrase what I really mean. 10x more impactful probably captures what I mean better.

Instead of working one day a week, just accumulate enough capital and then quit and do whatever you want?

Even if you do work at a place like that, you can just get a job elsewhere (with similar pay, if you're outside of the US).

I used to work full time (50 hour week including commute) for a company with a really high-performing software culture full time, and quit to do my own thing just before COVID.

I now work about 20 hours a week and pull in a slightly higher wage compared to before. Better yet, any productivity improvements go directly to the bottom line, so I experience more wage growth in a month now than I did in a year back in industry.

A bunch of work is coordination, and it requires everyone to be available simultaneously to coordinate. The fully async engineer with a round trip latency of 3-4 days is frankly the unproductive one in aggregate in their organization. Software is one of the biggest teams sports out there.

If your software business relies on last minute availability all the time, no engineer worth their salt will work there.

https://sahillavingia.com/work

And sahil runs a company that in the world of software doesn't really pay well or is wildly successful. Plenty of engineers 'worth their salt' work in those kind of environments, get paid significantly more and start getting annoyed a 1 day round trip latencies when they are in north america and the other engineers are in europe, india or china.

Not mention meetings are very painful to schedule, because nobody really wants to take meetings at 7am, 9pm, etc.

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