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Something about this bothers me. Time-keeping is already not straightforward for an engineer. Because the work is done in our heads and doesn't necessarily stop

by gfody 10y ago

Something about this bothers me. Time-keeping is already not straightforward for an engineer. Because the work is done in our heads and doesn't necessarily stop just because the workday is over. You don't have to be sitting at a keyboard for your head to be grinding on a problem. More often some problem takes hold of you, occupying some mental bandwidth even while you're away, at home trying to enjoy time with your family or whatever - technically you're still working, your mind is preoccupied, you might not be able to sleep or when you do you dream about the problem. From the outside it might appear like you came back to the office after a nice weekend break and quickly knocked out whatever task it was that was on your mind. But it's not that simple and after unloading that task, even though it's Monday you could be feeling like you need a break because you actually just worked through the weekend on it. Because of this, I feel like engineers are already massively overworked and/or underpaid when you consider their salary based on a 40hour workweek when the real mental effort can be pushing 60-80 hours a week. Things like unlimited/discretionary PTO, flex hours, and management that understands the balance of overtime and undertime keeps things fair. Establishing a 30-hour workweek just seems like going hard in the other direction.

zeeveener 10y ago
Programmers can suffer from this problem as well as engineers. The project never fully leaves your mind and often I'll go home and mull over the reasons why things might not be working or how to start another task. No "actual" work gets done, but I'm still working; just as you described.
- ender7 10y ago
  In this context, "programmer" and "engineer" are probably meant to be synonymous.
  - zeeveener 10y ago
    I don't doubt it. Some people see the two as similar trades, others are adamant they are completely separate. I figured I would make the post for the second group.
- vectorjohn 10y ago
  Nope, you're not working. You or the parent. That's a nonsensical definition of work. Nobody is making you mull things over, you're doing it because you want to, because you find your job interesting. Some may try to claim the contrary, but I'm sure if you're doing something other than a mundane task like driving or cleaning, your mind instantly gets sidetracked from "working". You can't possibly actually be thinking about work in any real sense while you converse with friends and family, read a book, watch a movie, etc. Do you think carpenters never think about work after hours?
  - belovedeagle 10y ago
    > Do you think carpenters never think about work after hours? This is a false analogy, because on the whole, carpenters aren't paid to think. A better analogy would be if the carpenter kept on building the house (or whatever) even after leaving work - an impossible feat, which just shows the unique challenges of knowledge work.
  - erklik 10y ago
    Actually, many times i do not want to think about it but my brain often gets stuck on that hinge. That may not be how everyone works but i am just presenting what happens to me. Also, Carpenters are physical workers. Their work is fundamentally physical, it'll be like saying that the Carpenter was always making the table or whatever product he is working even while he is not at that location. That doesn't even make sense, its actually impossible.
  - Steeeve 10y ago
    To your point everyone who has ever worked a reasonable length of time in restaurants has had the experience of their work environment permeating their nightmares and dealt with stress about work outside of it. It's perfectly normal in every industry to have a constant stream of thought going about work. However, in many engineering and scientific fields, that constant stream of thought is frequently productive due to the nature of the work being based in problem solving - and solving problems while physically checked out happens a lot. That's not to say other positions don't do productive work outside the office, I'm only emphasizing that with engineering and science the phenomena of productive offline time is more frequent. --- There are a lot of ways to look at wages and job titles in order to justify both higher and lower wages, but at the end of the day pay scale is determined by the market. Software developers/engineers generally make more money than a lot of other careers. It's hard work. It's stressful. It takes a good deal of training/education. And it takes a particular kind of mind in order to both manage doing it long term and do it will long term. They don't get paid well for any of those reasons. They get paid well because the industry is relatively young, tasks related to software are deemed important, and there is a constant shortage of people who do it well. Not all people get paid exceedingly well. There are sub-industries that pay very poorly for essentially the same level of work. If you look at a senior software engineer at Netflix and compare salary to a senior software engineer at Infosys working a project in small town Tenessee, you'll find one person who is in the top 1% of earners globally, and one who doesn't hope to save a down payment on a house anytime soon. Same job title, very similar work, enormous discrepancy in pay. If you look at the Bay Area specifically, salaries are high, but cost of living is also high. While there are many jobs available, at the higher salary levels companies are not just looking for good software people, they are looking for good software people with experience in very specific areas - shrinking the available pool of potential workers significantly and increasing the amount of training and education that's required to attain one of those positions. Apologies. I've gone off on a long tangent here mostly directed at the general discussion in this thread and not to your points.
Kenji 10y ago
More often some problem takes hold of you, occupying some mental bandwidth even while you're away, at home trying to enjoy time with your family or whatever - technically you're still working, your mind is preoccupied, you might not be able to sleep or when you do you dream about the problem. Oh my gosh, exactly this! When I am working on a theoretical maths problem, there is just no end to the work! On the train home, when I'm eating, when I'm taking a shower, it goes on and on (it's especially bad for maths because it's pure mental gymnastics - not even pen & paper needed unless you have specific calculations). I have to make a conscious effort to stop that - but then I have to clear many 'temporary variables' in my mind (losing time and effort) and the problem remains unsolved for the time being. Plus I cannot work on any other intellectual pursuits in the meantime because my mind is exhausted. It drives me nuts.
- notyourwork 10y ago
  You sound like you resent this which makes me question whether you genuinely like what you do?
  - jdavis703 10y ago
    Right, we are getting paid to solve puzzles essentially! Lots of people would love to do that kind of work, and many do it for free solving Sudoku or what not (not that it's mathematically comparable to what OP does, but in a similar vein).
    - Kenji 10y ago
      I love Sudoku! The best way to pick up the essentials of a programming language is to write a Sudoku solver in it. So I've done that plenty :)
  - Kenji 10y ago
    You are asking a good question. I love programming/solving maths problems more than any other work activity but I wonder if I have made a mistake with turning this hobby into my job or if the environment is the problem. I'm going through some big changes in my life now, so time will tell.
vadym909 10y ago
While all previous evidence goes towards pointing this to be another way for AMZN to squeeze more out of their employees, I think we could give them the benefit of doubt. I think they may have seen a segment of talented developers saying I don't want to be in this ratrace. I'd rather work 30hrs/week and make $100K to maintain work-life balance. 6hrs/week or 4 days/week. I wish more companies were open to this. It would reduce internal competition. Some of the 60 hr/week employees are gunning for promotions and probably don't care about work life balance. Why should everyone have to compete with that?
- jchendy 10y ago
  > I think we could give them the benefit of doubt I've found that this is a much less stressful and more productive way to approach most things in life. > Some of the 60 hr/week employees are gunning for promotions and probably don't care about work life balance. Why should everyone have to compete with that? That seems totally reasonable. It's similar to the way tech companies have a concept of a "terminal level" where it's considered fine to spend your whole career with no pressure or expectations to earn further promotions.
  - Chronic9q 10y ago
    > It's similar to the way tech companies have a concept of a "terminal level" where it's considered fine to spend your whole career with no pressure or expectations to earn further promotions. And who else besides Jeff Dean, enjoys such a distinguished role?
    - jchendy 10y ago
      Terminal level is usually "senior software engineer" or the equivalent. Something that every competent engineer can reasonably be expected to achieve.
    - serge2k 10y ago
      Senior dev is usually fine to stay at as long as you keep producing. Amazon states that SDE-II is fine actually. I think that's just their way of keeping the bar for senior higher.
drawkbox 10y ago
Agreed, we really need time off after a project ships or major milestones. Usually after a long sprint on a project to ship you just have to start another one and are less effective immediately. Output would be the same or better with breaks after ebbs and flow of pressure shipments and into design/new projects.
Buge 10y ago
Well these workers get 75% salary, but still get full benefits. So they get more than 75% overall value.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  And they likely do more than 75% work in those 75% hours as your marginal utility goes down after perhaps 20 hours a week.
jchendy 10y ago
On the other hand, I'm a software engineer who is able to keep a clear separation between work and personal life, and I would very much appreciate the ability to spend fewer hours on work. Though as others have suggested, a 3 month vacation every year might be an even better approach to a 75% work schedule.
- jdavis703 10y ago
  And you wouldn't worry about people plotting on either how to get you fired, or I suppose in the "best" situation loosing out on working on the good/funner projects? From what I've seen from other people taking extended time off from work, it is super dangerous. Hell, I took three extra days for Thanksgiving and found myself removed from an interesting project and placed on some maintenance tasks afterwards.
  - jchendy 10y ago
    I'm sorry your workplace is so hostile :( Luckily I've never experienced an atmosphere like that.
    - elmigranto 10y ago
      Or your place is that much sneakier about it :)
  - bjornsteffanson 10y ago
    That sucks, man. It really hurts my heart that we're still doing shit like this in 2016...
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    If you work in a country with mandatory leave, like anwhere in the EU, this couldn't be a problem. Everyone has 4/5/6 weeks of leave, and is expected to take them. Planning around people on leave is a normal part of management.
wallacoloo 10y ago
This is interesting to me, because I have never experienced anything of what you describe when working for somebody else. Maybe it's because I work in an office, and so there's a very clear change in environment that affects my ability to focus on different things: office=paid work, anywhere else=not paid work. In any case, what you describe seems like a pretty big limitation to me. If your employer isn't asking you, or pressuring you, to do more work, then they really shouldn't be held responsible when you do. I wouldn't paint my neighbor's house without having been asked to and then be upset with them for not asking me to (and therefore not paying me to) paint their house. That's nonsensical, but it's also an analogy with limited applicability.
- crazy_ant 10y ago
  That's cute but not how the world works. Employers will rarely explicitly ask you to do free overtime because that's illegal in many jurisdictions. What happens instead is this: an unrealistic deadline will be imposed and you will be expected to meet it. How you will go about doing that is up to you, but it usually assumes working overtime if you want to keep your job.
  - solotronics 10y ago
    Maybe push back? You aren't a slave and by allowing yourself to be forced to work for free you devalue your work and ours as well.
    - crazy_ant 10y ago
      I fully agree with you. The issue is not people like you and me, it's 22 year old kids who are willing to work 16 hours a day and undercut everyone else.
dav43 10y ago
This is true of many more jobs, jobs that require you to think and use judgement. This isn't just engineering jobs.
- fratlas 10y ago
  Yes, especially for those jobs that already require 60-80 hour weeks (doctor, IB etc). We get paid well for our hours.
  - proofmaster 10y ago
    Depends on where you live. Doctors aren't paid that well in most Eastern European countries.
ared38 10y ago
This is hardly unique to engineers though. Almost everyone whose job involves coming up with ideas and thinking through problems does some of it in the shower.
notyourwork 10y ago
I agree with your general premise but disagree with the conclusion. I think this gives you an ability to commit to delivering less which results in less deliberation outside of your primary work hours. Frankly though, if you love what you do you always take your work home with you (mentally anyway). So at the end of the day, there is no on/off switch for engineers (along with other types of careers) so although engineers are some of the highest paid you want them to be paid higher? I am not saying I would disagree but also not saying I think I am under paid by any stretch of the imagination.
boardwaalk 10y ago
I'm not being facetious, but this might be a personal problem (not being able to get your mind off of work). For people who experience this, something like meditation might help, seriously. I certainly wouldn't fault an employer. I'd love a 30 work week (if I wasn't trying to fast track towards retirement): those 10 hours (or more if working 4 days and not having to commute one weekday) would be entirely mine.
- logicallee 10y ago
  gfody's description reads to me like a description of genius-level work. it's not "not being able to get your mind off of work". it's, wow, you're a genius for being able to do this at all - it's not some fungible thing anyone could do instead of you. yours sounds like the description of more fungible work, that could be done by someone else and for which hours may even be a good measure. it just doesn't sound like you two are talking about the same thing.
- crazy_ant 10y ago
  >I'm not being facetious, but this might be a personal problem (not being able to get your mind off of work). For people who experience this, something like meditation might help, seriously. I certainly wouldn't fault an employer. It's not that most people can't take their mind off of work, it's that they often have to meet various unrealistic deadlines, or else. It's not their own choice, insofar as they want to keep their job.
  - ak4g 10y ago
    That would be their manager's problem. Go home at end-of-business. If they fire people for, um, working during working hours, they'll be going under from the churn in short order anyway. It's not like there's an oversupply of developer capacity - obviously, seeing as how they keep scheduling 60+ hours of work every week!
guy_c 10y ago
I think this applies to many roles, not just engineering. I could imagine a copy-writer getting stuck on some exact word choice, a salesperson mulling over every reaction and word from a previous meeting. A designer taking in everything the see.
jfoster 10y ago
Does this mean you'd consider a 60 hour work week an improvement? Is 40 hours the perfect number for some reason? At what point are we just resisting any change to the status quo?
nilkn 10y ago
I'm skeptical of claims that developers are underpaid. Maybe I feel differently about this because I'm not in a major tech hub and am not faced with the prospect of buying a multimillion dollar cottage, but when I compare my life as a software developer to that of more or less anyone else I know, including doctors and lawyers, I struggle to find a single person who seems to have a more comfortable life than me. I'm not the highest paid person I know, of course. My low six-figure income can't compete with $300k+ salaries that many surgeons get. I couldn't afford the $1.2M Mediterranean mansion that my dentist lives in. And I'll never get the sort of pay package that big law firm partners can command. But I'm not performing life-altering surgery. I didn't even have to go to medical school, let alone complete a residency. I didn't have to start up my own dental practice. And I'm not in my hypothetical dental practice every Saturday morning at 8AM taking care of patients who couldn't make it during the week or couldn't afford to take off work. I never had to go to law school. I didn't have to pass a single licensing exam. I took out no loans to get to where I am. And I was never worked 80+ hours a week as a young associate. I worked less than these people to get to where I am, and I continue to work less than them. My work is easier than theirs too. It's less stressful. Even if a problem does consume me for days, including outside of work, it's just not that big of a deal. I started making this income when these other folks were doing nothing but accruing debt. My lifetime earnings won't be all that different from theirs because I got such a tremendous head start. If I look at friends who are not in any of the above three professions, not a single person comes to mind who makes as much money as I do. Many make half as much as I do but have much more stressful jobs, fewer perks, etc. And yet apparently I'm underpaid. I don't buy it.
- icelancer 10y ago
  Underpaid is an interesting term, I guess. When you think about it, software (in its many forms) isn't like retail or hard goods; it can be sold - usually - an infinite amount of times. The upside is massive since all hard overhead is eliminated. Where then should that overhead go? To management? It's all about ratios, of course. If the owners/management of a company are grossly overpaid in comparison to the workers who produce - especially if physical overhead is nearly eliminated - then yes, developers are indeed underpaid. And I would posit this is true in many areas of software development. Perhaps not your situation, but overall? I buy it.
ekianjo 10y ago
Sorry but why do you think the mental load of work after work applies only to developers? I can tell you it applies to a bunch of jobs that have nothing to do with development.
GarrisonPrime 10y ago
Good point. This is one reason why I advocate a fee-per-service model over an hourly one. Potential client wants XYZ done, and seeks someone who can fulfill that need. Engineers quote prices, client chooses someone based on price and their reputation and portfolio. Etc. Or in a simpler sense: You need someone to perform weekly maid service? $X please. You want a foundation dug and poured for your new satellite office? $Y please. Hourly wages in many cases are just inviting abuse and drain employee productivity and motivation. Of course a flat fee would be rather difficult to implement in direct customer service sectors. Hiring a cashier to process a certain number of customer check-outs or a certain amount of purchases for a flat fee would be problematic, because there's no way of knowing how long that would take (so the employee can't schedule the rest of their life) and the employer wouldn't want the employee to have much control over what time of day they work.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
Don't bring your work home with you on a regular basis. It requires effort because it's easy to bring your work home with you no matter your job. Keep work at work.
abalashov 10y ago
In addition to that, I'm frankly not sure that a 10 hour/week (2 hour/day) savings is going to be worth a 25% pay cut to most people. I'm not saying two hours per day (or an extra weekday or whatever) is entirely trivial, just that one has to be very fastidious and organised to take advantage of it. Even so, the economics of human task-switching and overhead, particularly in high cognitive load professions like software, are such that the marginal utility of two extra hours is going to be low. Life is not a spreadsheet, where one gets home at 3 PM and $ENJOYMENT or $NECESSARY_ERRANDS immediately commence. I'd probably just catch a breather for a few hours, if lucky, or catch up on the traffic from other life stressors gnawing at me. Is that worth making 25% less? I don't know about that. I suspect most people would just negotiate a "75%" salary that still makes them reasonably happy.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  If they are fair and honest about this (not handing out 40 or 50 hours work and calling it 30), I think that 4 days * 8 hours per week would be pretty nice. I did a 4 * 10 job one summer when I was a teen. It was REALLY nice to have Friday as "recovery" day before the real weekend started. I'm not sure how my family would tolerate me being gone 4 * 10, though.
  - abalashov 10y ago
    Maybe I've just been self-employed for too long. In this mode of existence, one has immense schedule flexibility and yet is always working, all at the same time, in some weirdly paradoxical way. It's a lot like the life of professors; they don't have to be in the office except when teaching or having office hours, yet they're always busy. From the vantage point of that mode of existence, an extra day doesn't do anything for me. Nothing I'd take a pay cut for, for sure. I can take a random Wednesday off anyway if I feel like it. On the other hand, I am working at least some time every day, and some days a lot. I guess if I think back to when I was W-2 employed my butt had to be in some cube farm at 9 AM every day, a Friday off might seem more valuable.
scrabble 10y ago
what bothers me about it is the 75% pay, because I could never imagine not putting in additional hours. Were I only getting 75% of the pay of a full time worker, you can be sure I'd never put in a single additional hour. I could say that a drop in my hours to 40 / week would be nice, but I'm the one who chooses to work longer hours. There's no expectation of longer hours where I am. I'm also usually not productive 8 hours in a row every day, sometimes significantly less than that. It ends up being very much a give / take scenario.
posterboy 10y ago
The unit of measure for work is not time. It's work. The measurement in units of time is related to a constant output of energy, ie. work. If you find that too rough an estimate to be applicable, that's fine, but how does that warrant more pay? Anyone could claim eating, staying healthy and taking the required time to relax after work are also work related, just e.g.
angmarsbane 10y ago
I don't believe this applies to just engineers alone. I suspect teachers, marketers, almost every other, if not every other job has problems that require a mental effort in off-work hours in order to solve.

by gfody 10y ago

zeeveener 10y ago

Programmers can suffer from this problem as well as engineers. The project never fully leaves your mind and often I'll go home and mull over the reasons why things might not be working or how to start another task. No "actual" work gets done, but I'm still working; just as you described.

ender7 10y ago
In this context, "programmer" and "engineer" are probably meant to be synonymous.
- zeeveener 10y ago
  I don't doubt it. Some people see the two as similar trades, others are adamant they are completely separate. I figured I would make the post for the second group.
vectorjohn 10y ago
Nope, you're not working. You or the parent. That's a nonsensical definition of work. Nobody is making you mull things over, you're doing it because you want to, because you find your job interesting. Some may try to claim the contrary, but I'm sure if you're doing something other than a mundane task like driving or cleaning, your mind instantly gets sidetracked from "working". You can't possibly actually be thinking about work in any real sense while you converse with friends and family, read a book, watch a movie, etc. Do you think carpenters never think about work after hours?
- belovedeagle 10y ago
  > Do you think carpenters never think about work after hours? This is a false analogy, because on the whole, carpenters aren't paid to think. A better analogy would be if the carpenter kept on building the house (or whatever) even after leaving work - an impossible feat, which just shows the unique challenges of knowledge work.
- erklik 10y ago
  Actually, many times i do not want to think about it but my brain often gets stuck on that hinge. That may not be how everyone works but i am just presenting what happens to me. Also, Carpenters are physical workers. Their work is fundamentally physical, it'll be like saying that the Carpenter was always making the table or whatever product he is working even while he is not at that location. That doesn't even make sense, its actually impossible.
- Steeeve 10y ago
  To your point everyone who has ever worked a reasonable length of time in restaurants has had the experience of their work environment permeating their nightmares and dealt with stress about work outside of it. It's perfectly normal in every industry to have a constant stream of thought going about work. However, in many engineering and scientific fields, that constant stream of thought is frequently productive due to the nature of the work being based in problem solving - and solving problems while physically checked out happens a lot. That's not to say other positions don't do productive work outside the office, I'm only emphasizing that with engineering and science the phenomena of productive offline time is more frequent. --- There are a lot of ways to look at wages and job titles in order to justify both higher and lower wages, but at the end of the day pay scale is determined by the market. Software developers/engineers generally make more money than a lot of other careers. It's hard work. It's stressful. It takes a good deal of training/education. And it takes a particular kind of mind in order to both manage doing it long term and do it will long term. They don't get paid well for any of those reasons. They get paid well because the industry is relatively young, tasks related to software are deemed important, and there is a constant shortage of people who do it well. Not all people get paid exceedingly well. There are sub-industries that pay very poorly for essentially the same level of work. If you look at a senior software engineer at Netflix and compare salary to a senior software engineer at Infosys working a project in small town Tenessee, you'll find one person who is in the top 1% of earners globally, and one who doesn't hope to save a down payment on a house anytime soon. Same job title, very similar work, enormous discrepancy in pay. If you look at the Bay Area specifically, salaries are high, but cost of living is also high. While there are many jobs available, at the higher salary levels companies are not just looking for good software people, they are looking for good software people with experience in very specific areas - shrinking the available pool of potential workers significantly and increasing the amount of training and education that's required to attain one of those positions. Apologies. I've gone off on a long tangent here mostly directed at the general discussion in this thread and not to your points.

Kenji 10y ago

More often some problem takes hold of you, occupying some mental bandwidth even while you're away, at home trying to enjoy time with your family or whatever - technically you're still working, your mind is preoccupied, you might not be able to sleep or when you do you dream about the problem. Oh my gosh, exactly this! When I am working on a theoretical maths problem, there is just no end to the work! On the train home, when I'm eating, when I'm taking a shower, it goes on and on (it's especially bad for maths because it's pure mental gymnastics - not even pen & paper needed unless you have specific calculations). I have to make a conscious effort to stop that - but then I have to clear many 'temporary variables' in my mind (losing time and effort) and the problem remains unsolved for the time being. Plus I cannot work on any other intellectual pursuits in the meantime because my mind is exhausted. It drives me nuts.

notyourwork 10y ago
You sound like you resent this which makes me question whether you genuinely like what you do?
- jdavis703 10y ago
  Right, we are getting paid to solve puzzles essentially! Lots of people would love to do that kind of work, and many do it for free solving Sudoku or what not (not that it's mathematically comparable to what OP does, but in a similar vein).
  - Kenji 10y ago
    I love Sudoku! The best way to pick up the essentials of a programming language is to write a Sudoku solver in it. So I've done that plenty :)
- Kenji 10y ago
  You are asking a good question. I love programming/solving maths problems more than any other work activity but I wonder if I have made a mistake with turning this hobby into my job or if the environment is the problem. I'm going through some big changes in my life now, so time will tell.

vadym909 10y ago

While all previous evidence goes towards pointing this to be another way for AMZN to squeeze more out of their employees, I think we could give them the benefit of doubt. I think they may have seen a segment of talented developers saying I don't want to be in this ratrace. I'd rather work 30hrs/week and make $100K to maintain work-life balance. 6hrs/week or 4 days/week. I wish more companies were open to this. It would reduce internal competition. Some of the 60 hr/week employees are gunning for promotions and probably don't care about work life balance. Why should everyone have to compete with that?

jchendy 10y ago
> I think we could give them the benefit of doubt I've found that this is a much less stressful and more productive way to approach most things in life. > Some of the 60 hr/week employees are gunning for promotions and probably don't care about work life balance. Why should everyone have to compete with that? That seems totally reasonable. It's similar to the way tech companies have a concept of a "terminal level" where it's considered fine to spend your whole career with no pressure or expectations to earn further promotions.
- Chronic9q 10y ago
  > It's similar to the way tech companies have a concept of a "terminal level" where it's considered fine to spend your whole career with no pressure or expectations to earn further promotions. And who else besides Jeff Dean, enjoys such a distinguished role?
  - jchendy 10y ago
    Terminal level is usually "senior software engineer" or the equivalent. Something that every competent engineer can reasonably be expected to achieve.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    Senior dev is usually fine to stay at as long as you keep producing. Amazon states that SDE-II is fine actually. I think that's just their way of keeping the bar for senior higher.

drawkbox 10y ago

Agreed, we really need time off after a project ships or major milestones. Usually after a long sprint on a project to ship you just have to start another one and are less effective immediately. Output would be the same or better with breaks after ebbs and flow of pressure shipments and into design/new projects.

Buge 10y ago

Well these workers get 75% salary, but still get full benefits. So they get more than 75% overall value.

brianwawok 10y ago
And they likely do more than 75% work in those 75% hours as your marginal utility goes down after perhaps 20 hours a week.

jchendy 10y ago

On the other hand, I'm a software engineer who is able to keep a clear separation between work and personal life, and I would very much appreciate the ability to spend fewer hours on work. Though as others have suggested, a 3 month vacation every year might be an even better approach to a 75% work schedule.

jdavis703 10y ago
And you wouldn't worry about people plotting on either how to get you fired, or I suppose in the "best" situation loosing out on working on the good/funner projects? From what I've seen from other people taking extended time off from work, it is super dangerous. Hell, I took three extra days for Thanksgiving and found myself removed from an interesting project and placed on some maintenance tasks afterwards.
- jchendy 10y ago
  I'm sorry your workplace is so hostile :( Luckily I've never experienced an atmosphere like that.
  - elmigranto 10y ago
    Or your place is that much sneakier about it :)
- bjornsteffanson 10y ago
  That sucks, man. It really hurts my heart that we're still doing shit like this in 2016...
- Symbiote 10y ago
  If you work in a country with mandatory leave, like anwhere in the EU, this couldn't be a problem. Everyone has 4/5/6 weeks of leave, and is expected to take them. Planning around people on leave is a normal part of management.

wallacoloo 10y ago

This is interesting to me, because I have never experienced anything of what you describe when working for somebody else. Maybe it's because I work in an office, and so there's a very clear change in environment that affects my ability to focus on different things: office=paid work, anywhere else=not paid work. In any case, what you describe seems like a pretty big limitation to me. If your employer isn't asking you, or pressuring you, to do more work, then they really shouldn't be held responsible when you do. I wouldn't paint my neighbor's house without having been asked to and then be upset with them for not asking me to (and therefore not paying me to) paint their house. That's nonsensical, but it's also an analogy with limited applicability.

crazy_ant 10y ago
That's cute but not how the world works. Employers will rarely explicitly ask you to do free overtime because that's illegal in many jurisdictions. What happens instead is this: an unrealistic deadline will be imposed and you will be expected to meet it. How you will go about doing that is up to you, but it usually assumes working overtime if you want to keep your job.
- solotronics 10y ago
  Maybe push back? You aren't a slave and by allowing yourself to be forced to work for free you devalue your work and ours as well.
  - crazy_ant 10y ago
    I fully agree with you. The issue is not people like you and me, it's 22 year old kids who are willing to work 16 hours a day and undercut everyone else.

dav43 10y ago

This is true of many more jobs, jobs that require you to think and use judgement. This isn't just engineering jobs.

fratlas 10y ago
Yes, especially for those jobs that already require 60-80 hour weeks (doctor, IB etc). We get paid well for our hours.
- proofmaster 10y ago
  Depends on where you live. Doctors aren't paid that well in most Eastern European countries.

ared38 10y ago

This is hardly unique to engineers though. Almost everyone whose job involves coming up with ideas and thinking through problems does some of it in the shower.

notyourwork 10y ago

I agree with your general premise but disagree with the conclusion. I think this gives you an ability to commit to delivering less which results in less deliberation outside of your primary work hours. Frankly though, if you love what you do you always take your work home with you (mentally anyway). So at the end of the day, there is no on/off switch for engineers (along with other types of careers) so although engineers are some of the highest paid you want them to be paid higher? I am not saying I would disagree but also not saying I think I am under paid by any stretch of the imagination.

boardwaalk 10y ago

I'm not being facetious, but this might be a personal problem (not being able to get your mind off of work). For people who experience this, something like meditation might help, seriously. I certainly wouldn't fault an employer. I'd love a 30 work week (if I wasn't trying to fast track towards retirement): those 10 hours (or more if working 4 days and not having to commute one weekday) would be entirely mine.

logicallee 10y ago
gfody's description reads to me like a description of genius-level work. it's not "not being able to get your mind off of work". it's, wow, you're a genius for being able to do this at all - it's not some fungible thing anyone could do instead of you. yours sounds like the description of more fungible work, that could be done by someone else and for which hours may even be a good measure. it just doesn't sound like you two are talking about the same thing.
crazy_ant 10y ago
>I'm not being facetious, but this might be a personal problem (not being able to get your mind off of work). For people who experience this, something like meditation might help, seriously. I certainly wouldn't fault an employer. It's not that most people can't take their mind off of work, it's that they often have to meet various unrealistic deadlines, or else. It's not their own choice, insofar as they want to keep their job.
- ak4g 10y ago
  That would be their manager's problem. Go home at end-of-business. If they fire people for, um, working during working hours, they'll be going under from the churn in short order anyway. It's not like there's an oversupply of developer capacity - obviously, seeing as how they keep scheduling 60+ hours of work every week!

guy_c 10y ago

I think this applies to many roles, not just engineering. I could imagine a copy-writer getting stuck on some exact word choice, a salesperson mulling over every reaction and word from a previous meeting. A designer taking in everything the see.

jfoster 10y ago

Does this mean you'd consider a 60 hour work week an improvement? Is 40 hours the perfect number for some reason? At what point are we just resisting any change to the status quo?

nilkn 10y ago

I'm skeptical of claims that developers are underpaid. Maybe I feel differently about this because I'm not in a major tech hub and am not faced with the prospect of buying a multimillion dollar cottage, but when I compare my life as a software developer to that of more or less anyone else I know, including doctors and lawyers, I struggle to find a single person who seems to have a more comfortable life than me. I'm not the highest paid person I know, of course. My low six-figure income can't compete with $300k+ salaries that many surgeons get. I couldn't afford the $1.2M Mediterranean mansion that my dentist lives in. And I'll never get the sort of pay package that big law firm partners can command. But I'm not performing life-altering surgery. I didn't even have to go to medical school, let alone complete a residency. I didn't have to start up my own dental practice. And I'm not in my hypothetical dental practice every Saturday morning at 8AM taking care of patients who couldn't make it during the week or couldn't afford to take off work. I never had to go to law school. I didn't have to pass a single licensing exam. I took out no loans to get to where I am. And I was never worked 80+ hours a week as a young associate. I worked less than these people to get to where I am, and I continue to work less than them. My work is easier than theirs too. It's less stressful. Even if a problem does consume me for days, including outside of work, it's just not that big of a deal. I started making this income when these other folks were doing nothing but accruing debt. My lifetime earnings won't be all that different from theirs because I got such a tremendous head start. If I look at friends who are not in any of the above three professions, not a single person comes to mind who makes as much money as I do. Many make half as much as I do but have much more stressful jobs, fewer perks, etc. And yet apparently I'm underpaid. I don't buy it.

icelancer 10y ago
Underpaid is an interesting term, I guess. When you think about it, software (in its many forms) isn't like retail or hard goods; it can be sold - usually - an infinite amount of times. The upside is massive since all hard overhead is eliminated. Where then should that overhead go? To management? It's all about ratios, of course. If the owners/management of a company are grossly overpaid in comparison to the workers who produce - especially if physical overhead is nearly eliminated - then yes, developers are indeed underpaid. And I would posit this is true in many areas of software development. Perhaps not your situation, but overall? I buy it.

ekianjo 10y ago

Sorry but why do you think the mental load of work after work applies only to developers? I can tell you it applies to a bunch of jobs that have nothing to do with development.

GarrisonPrime 10y ago

Good point. This is one reason why I advocate a fee-per-service model over an hourly one. Potential client wants XYZ done, and seeks someone who can fulfill that need. Engineers quote prices, client chooses someone based on price and their reputation and portfolio. Etc. Or in a simpler sense: You need someone to perform weekly maid service? $X please. You want a foundation dug and poured for your new satellite office? $Y please. Hourly wages in many cases are just inviting abuse and drain employee productivity and motivation. Of course a flat fee would be rather difficult to implement in direct customer service sectors. Hiring a cashier to process a certain number of customer check-outs or a certain amount of purchases for a flat fee would be problematic, because there's no way of knowing how long that would take (so the employee can't schedule the rest of their life) and the employer wouldn't want the employee to have much control over what time of day they work.

nommm-nommm 10y ago

Don't bring your work home with you on a regular basis. It requires effort because it's easy to bring your work home with you no matter your job. Keep work at work.

abalashov 10y ago

In addition to that, I'm frankly not sure that a 10 hour/week (2 hour/day) savings is going to be worth a 25% pay cut to most people. I'm not saying two hours per day (or an extra weekday or whatever) is entirely trivial, just that one has to be very fastidious and organised to take advantage of it. Even so, the economics of human task-switching and overhead, particularly in high cognitive load professions like software, are such that the marginal utility of two extra hours is going to be low. Life is not a spreadsheet, where one gets home at 3 PM and $ENJOYMENT or $NECESSARY_ERRANDS immediately commence. I'd probably just catch a breather for a few hours, if lucky, or catch up on the traffic from other life stressors gnawing at me. Is that worth making 25% less? I don't know about that. I suspect most people would just negotiate a "75%" salary that still makes them reasonably happy.

Roboprog 10y ago
If they are fair and honest about this (not handing out 40 or 50 hours work and calling it 30), I think that 4 days * 8 hours per week would be pretty nice. I did a 4 * 10 job one summer when I was a teen. It was REALLY nice to have Friday as "recovery" day before the real weekend started. I'm not sure how my family would tolerate me being gone 4 * 10, though.
- abalashov 10y ago
  Maybe I've just been self-employed for too long. In this mode of existence, one has immense schedule flexibility and yet is always working, all at the same time, in some weirdly paradoxical way. It's a lot like the life of professors; they don't have to be in the office except when teaching or having office hours, yet they're always busy. From the vantage point of that mode of existence, an extra day doesn't do anything for me. Nothing I'd take a pay cut for, for sure. I can take a random Wednesday off anyway if I feel like it. On the other hand, I am working at least some time every day, and some days a lot. I guess if I think back to when I was W-2 employed my butt had to be in some cube farm at 9 AM every day, a Friday off might seem more valuable.

scrabble 10y ago

what bothers me about it is the 75% pay, because I could never imagine not putting in additional hours. Were I only getting 75% of the pay of a full time worker, you can be sure I'd never put in a single additional hour. I could say that a drop in my hours to 40 / week would be nice, but I'm the one who chooses to work longer hours. There's no expectation of longer hours where I am. I'm also usually not productive 8 hours in a row every day, sometimes significantly less than that. It ends up being very much a give / take scenario.

posterboy 10y ago

The unit of measure for work is not time. It's work. The measurement in units of time is related to a constant output of energy, ie. work. If you find that too rough an estimate to be applicable, that's fine, but how does that warrant more pay? Anyone could claim eating, staying healthy and taking the required time to relax after work are also work related, just e.g.

angmarsbane 10y ago

I don't believe this applies to just engineers alone. I suspect teachers, marketers, almost every other, if not every other job has problems that require a mental effort in off-work hours in order to solve.