If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal.
Would you take that over $300k to work 40 hours doing something you actually care about? I don't think I would.
Would you take that over $300k to work 40 hours doing something you actually care about? I don't think I would.
I WFH with amazing TC and WLB. I do my hobbies all day and then work just a few hours. But I feel like an absolute piece of shit just coasting at work. Doesn't matter how well my hobbies are going, I'll always have the quiet stress of not contributing what I'm capable of doing. The times I feel good about myself are when I actually ship something cool with my team.
$300k is (around here) over 7x the mode of income [1]. That's a significant amount (basically the yearly income of 7 "regular joes") and raises (to me) the ethical question of whether I'd deserve it. For a full 40-hour workload, perhaps a case could be made.
But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasite on society. And that's not something I would want.
Note: this, by itself, does not imply no one would deserve that sort of compensation. It simply raises the bar - perhaps to a level that is beyond human reach, perhaps not.
That isn't the case with the power of scaling. If the product you happen to be working on 4 hrs a week happens to have X billion users, your tiny contribution gets multiplied by 9 orders of magnitude.
There's still something arbitrary and random about it, but it's not accurate to say you aren't producing net value for your employer/users/society/whatever.
It's not as obvious a "yes" as I first thought. I do high-leverage work, but that just means my work builds on the work of many others. I couldn't do anything near what I do now we're it not for thousands or even millions of other people doing low-leverage work that provides the fulcrum for my work. It's society that allows me to do my high-leverage work -- why should I personally collect the pay check for it?
Also I won the genetical lottery to have the interest and intellectual capacity for this work. Is that something I should be rewarded for? Or is it an unfair advantage that other people should be compensated for not having? There's nothing about my personal effort that has given me that advantage.
Not to mention the education and relaxed upbringing that allowed me to reach this potential. That's also a gift from society to me. Should my response be to not repay? To hoard the rewards alone?
I don't know! That's the system we live in. But is it the system we ought to have?
Indeed. And I would argue that society answers this question already, in the form of teacher salaries. Teachers have the mightiest of levers: the not-yet-capable enter and the capable to highly capable leave. Any high-impact individual was molded by them.
Granted, there's not a trivial 1-on-1 relating between future excellence and a particular teacher. On the other hand, every person who had an outsized impact on the world had teachers that helped him/her along that path.
So I'd say society is pretty comfortable with a big "naah" here: teacher salaries are nothing special. (In the West - I remember reading about rock star salaries for good tutors in some Asian country.)
Do you have any aspirations to build something of your own at all, whether profitable or not? Well you’ve now been given 300k/year of funding without giving up any equity, with the only condition that you put in 4hrs/week for your “job”
Or maybe you like fixing houses? Same thing, etc etc
Uh.. I think you got that backwards. Nearly anyone would recognize that as a major golden ticket!
Seems like lots of ppl still can’t fathom something better than an interesting, high paying, but still fulltime job as their “ideal”, or don’t have any passions they’d rather spend their time on.
IMO one reason why so many haven’t found any passions is precisely cause all their time has been spent working, which is sad, honestly.
There is definitely a lot of work out there that needs to be done that isn't going to be anyone's passion. Still needs to be done, and it can pay well, and then you can do all kinds of fun things that you'd never be able to get paid for on the side.
A lot of people aren't monogamous in their passions either, which is kind of what you need to be in order to turn it into a career. Personally, I can't imagine every being so focused on one thing that it's all I'd want to do. I like my work, and I also love a lot of things that aren't my work.
If I’m working 4-hours a week, that’s a 4-days a week I can be skiing. And reading, and hanging out with friends, and working on actually interesting code projects that aren’t beholden to the whims and timelines of a company. I’d absolutely do that for a while.
And not many pay $300K.
I can fill 36 hours a week of my time better than anyone else can. If the money's equal and the time difference is that steep, I'll take the shorter time commitment.
I’ll take 4 hours a week at work, a livable salary, and 36 hours sitting in a coffee shop reading a book and shitposting on Reddit thanks.
Any fiction recommendations?
Still worth it?