And how many unproductive hours of work do you spend per day? I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours.
And we wonder why employers want us back in the office. I mean come on.
One day, there are threads here saying $120k is considered underpaid for an entry level dev out of a bootcamp. The next day, we talk about how all the RTO companies are only doing it because managers want to feel productive. The day after that, there are threads of remote devs boasting they don't even consistently work 4 hours a day. And the day after a thread about how we're all going to unionize to protect our rights.
This is truly an interesting phenomenon. Either these anecdotes are just that, anecdotes and not representative of most people, or there's a huge misalignment between employer and employee expectations.
Edit: to be clear, I fully support the author of this blog post because he works 3 hours per day working for himself. More power to him. If you truly think you’re underpaid and overworked, do what the guy in this article is doing! Stop making excuses and become an entrepreneur. Work for yourself, set your own hours, no managers, and you’ll leverage the full earning potential of your skillset. No employment contracts to comply with!
Yes, because one can't work 4h tops while being in office... Truth is, they can't tell how much working hours this individual is putting. And maybe it's not that important.
I worked less than anyone else on my team at my last job. I was probably doing "active" work for 3-4 hours a day -- plus meetings. I was also a senior engineer with good performance reviews, and contributed more to the codebases of my team's major projects than anyone else on the team.
It's important to note that I was also often thinking about work when taking my dog for 45-minute middway walks, cooking lunch for myself and my wife, etc.
Yes, we are underpaid. Just look at the bank balances of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Software engineers aren't illiterate construction workers. We have the means to build and destroy tech companies that think they can do whatever they want.
No. The amount they pay is a function of supply and demand of workers and the necessity of filling the position within the company.
> Software engineers aren't illiterate construction workers.
Construction workers have the ability to build and destroy buildings probably more easily than SWEs can build or destroy companies.
Just like a skyscraper is more than just concrete and steel, a software company is way more than just code.
And juniors are getting paid above 100k usd. Deal with it.
> Construction workers have the ability to build and destroy buildings probably more easily than SWEs can build or destroy companies.
Sure but they would go to jail. The programmers that destroyed companies by creating better open source alternatives not only didn't go to jail but managed to build multi-million dollar businesses. Which then becomes too big at some point and ready to be disrupted again.
I’m not sure what your point is.
Isn’t this a good thing? Lots of opportunity for you to leverage the full value of your skillset to maximize your earning potential by starting a company, being your own boss, set your own work schedule, etc.
(Re: junior devs, $120k is fine for junior, I was recollecting a thread with people saying $160k is more appropriate for juniors which IMO is absurd.)
Throughout most of the world (including most of the US), $120k a year is enough to buy and fully pay off a mortgage on a house in a city in < 10 years - even after tax.
I fear you may have a very skewed sense of a software engineer's place in the world.
The world's largest companies today were founded by software engineers. There's no inherent need for a designated "business" person within a tech company.
And we didn't even talk about FOSS and indie development which are both as big as big tech and driven exclusively by programmers.
I’m sure there are a handful of Zuckerberg type people (let’s be extravagant and say there at 10k such developer/entrepreneurs who have built unicorns by dint of their software skills) but the software engineering discipline is orders of magnitude bigger than 10k.
Edit - Since the original comment was focused on dollar value created by software engineers, we can discount much of FOSS where value has been captured by the likes of AWS and RedHat, not the FOSS community.
Your edit makes more sense than the original post, which sounds like you are resentful because many SWEs know their worth.
I've worked with people with very strict working hours who will never respond to an email outside of those hours, and other people who would be late into the office most days, but would respond to a support problem at 11pm at the weekend. We're not all the same, and there is strength in depth.
Honest question, do you unilaterally ignore any other parts of the contract?
What (most) managers want is your output, irrespective of how long it will take, may be 12h or 3h.
One could argue, that while working 3h or 4h one should still be available to support, help, communicate, meet with, your team and stakeholders for the remaining hours of that contract.
I would not have an issue with less hours provided you don't ghost for the remaining hours, if one of your colleagues hits a block, or your manager gets hit with a shitstorm, then you need to have a communication line open (which should also not be 24 hours but for the hours in your contract).
Some of my employers had flexible timekeeping, and then I would often work a bit over 40h/week so that I could take extra days off for extended weekend trips when I felt like it.
But you don't tell your management and trust your fellow engineers not to rat you out (or they are not your colleagues, just people on HN?)? Because this sounds more like quiet quitting. Or you over-perform even though you work 50%?