5 ms·

Most tech workers could easily work fewer hours for less money in second-year cities or take months-long sabbaticals but choose to do the opposite. When given

by aianus 10y ago

Most tech workers could easily work fewer hours for less money in second-year cities or take months-long sabbaticals but choose to do the opposite. When given a choice between more money and more free time everyone around me chooses money and prestige.

xxs 10y ago
>>everyone around me chooses... I guess it's quite a biased (limited) view.
dv_dt 10y ago
It's typically not an accepted proposition to offer to work 4 days for proportionally less pay (even if one does the math to fix the ratio for benefits). So it's not really a sliding scale for less time for less money, the choice is predominantly full time for more money or full time for less money. So this idea that people always choose more time and more money is a red herring.
- aianus 10y ago
  There's full time and then there's full time. You can certainly choose to work for a 40h company instead of a 60h company but the latter type of company doesn't seem to have any problems recruiting.
  - dv_dt 10y ago
    That's on the other side of the issue. My point was that there isn't anything like a 'proportional electiveness function' for the hours of work people are able to get with employment agreements. I think it looks like this for salaried professional employment: anything less than 40 is very low probability, 40-45 is very typical, and decreasing popularity in bins afterwards 50-60, 60+ etc. Given that's the distribution, you can't say people won't don't want to elect for <40 for less pay, it's not a really a choice in the current environment.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      > anything less than 40 is very low probability, 40-45 is very typical, and decreasing popularity in bins afterwards 50-60, 60+ etc. Oh god. America is even worse than I thought.
- mason240 10y ago
  There certianly is when choosing where to work. >It's typically not an accepted proposition to offer to work 4 days for proportionally less pay I currently have a 40 hour work where I can set my own hours and earn "flex time" (future PTO) for any hours over 40. I am paid well now, but I could certainly earn more by switching to company that would expect me to work more than 40 hours. The people complaining about working extra are absolutely choosing more time and more money.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    How often do you get to actually use that flex time, though? I think most of us have plenty of horror stories about being offered "time in lieu" for overtime, and then the boss conveniently "forgets" that he offered us this.
    - mason240 10y ago
      I earn and use about one every month just working an extra half hour a day. I can see why that would that would be a concern. It's a company wide thing, so that helps.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I'd second this. All the responses to the contrary seem to be about >40 increase, but there aren't many chance to take a 20% (30%, realistically) pay-cut and work 4 day weeks. Partly I think that's an efficiency thing - if you're critical path on a task, having you available when everyone else is becomes worth a large multiple of your salary. Partly I suspect it's just about not opening the floodgates, where people either resent you or take the same deal. I wonder what the real cut would be, though? For work like software where adding shifts can't be done cleanly, you risk all kinds of major benefit, payroll-tax, and hardware/facilities costs. Still, there have to be programmers willing to take a 50% pay cut for a 33% hour cut. (There's an essay somewhere for programmers about how to ask a manager for this, which is full of notes on how they'll be confused and try to reject it without considering it.)
patricklynch 10y ago
I'm going to guess that you don't spend many hours 9-5 Monday through Friday at a beach or on a golf course. If you're in the right places, you'll definitely see people who value free time over money and prestige.
- aianus 10y ago
  I spent three years making the other choice and working remotely from various beaches. I had to stop because of how lonely and isolating it was and how I couldn't maintain any relationships with my girlfriends and the 99% of my peers that were back home working 60h a week.
user5994461 10y ago
Most tech workers could easily work fewer hours by simply leaving the office when their time is done. Look around you and count how many people are working overtime on their own, sacrificing their life for free food, a fuzzball table, the expectations of 0.1% equity down the road, the hope of giving a good impression to their manager, the expectations of a raise later for hard work, or the pressure to work night and week-end unpaid on-call. When not thinking about it, people choose neither money not free time :D
- matwood 10y ago
  If someone is eating and playing fuzzball then I'm not sure I would count that as working overtime. In tech companies in particular at work does not necessarily equate to working.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I'm always confused by the hatred for people staying late at tech companies doing not-work. It's described like some elaborate anti-worker scam, but a lot of people I know are genuinely friends with coworkers (and often pretty introverted outside of that) and just enjoy doing that after work. I suppose I can understand the conspiracy theory of "they want you to only have work friends", but I really don't understand "they're replacing a good raise with a $100 ping-pong table". It's just not a sane model of what's happening, keeping employees in the building is not inherently profitable.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      It's not hatred. It's about running a business efficiently, while the employees don't even realize it. 1) Keeping tech employees in the building is profitable. 2) In tech companies in particular, you don't have to be at work behind a computer to be productive. Once you both understand that these things are true and correct, you can begin to understand the business of the SV and why these perks come to be. While people are in the office, they are with co-worker, thinking about work, talking about work, progressing on their work. And the magic thing is you don't have to pay them for it, because they ain't working officially. A bad thing happen in production late? Fine, they're already there and they won't even think that fixing it is doing actual work because they are already there. That foosball table was way cheaper than paying overtime. How about serving breakfast at 9 am and dinner at 19? Then people who wants both will stay. Most likely, people who are a bit close to one or the other might extend their schedule slightly just to grab it. But no way they think of it as extra work.
Arizhel 10y ago
>Most tech workers could easily work fewer hours for less money in second-year cities or take months-long sabbaticals but choose to do the opposite. What universe do you live in? In my universe, this is simply not true. No tech company is going to allow you to work, say, 30 hours a week for 75% of your salary, plus full health benefits. And taking a months-long sabbatical means you don't keep your job, and you have a hard time getting a new one because of a resume gap, which employers absolutely hate.
- aianus 10y ago
  You obviously have to be in a field like software engineering where there's a shortage of employees and employers can't get too picky about things like that. I did it myself for years modulo the health insurance part (we have universal healthcare in my country).
- amag 10y ago
  I just negotiated the option to work 80%-100% (in ~5% intervals) at my own discretion. Basically I'm allowed to take up to one day/week off. I'm a software engineer working in tech.
- stuaxo 10y ago
  You can negotiate all sorts of things when you join a company. Previously I've worked every 4th week off. These days I do contracts which provides some nice gaps if you don't try and line something up before the current one finished. It's been possible to take a year off - I was using that to work on my own projects, so that went on my c.v.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  For someone straight out of school, that's pretty much true. After a while, if your CV is strong enough, your universe gets more flexible.
amag 10y ago
I actually negotiated the possibility to take one day off per week at my own discretion, thus working flexibly between 80%-100% in ~5% steps. In my mind this is a compromise with my dream of early retirement "Mr Money Mustache"-style. Early retirement is just something I don't see happening for a salaried worker in Sweden. Comparatively low salaries (for developers), high real estate prices and high taxes makes that pretty impossible. But now I have the choice of either taking a day off or pay 61% of my salary for that day to the government.

by aianus 10y ago

xxs 10y ago

>>everyone around me chooses... I guess it's quite a biased (limited) view.

dv_dt 10y ago

It's typically not an accepted proposition to offer to work 4 days for proportionally less pay (even if one does the math to fix the ratio for benefits). So it's not really a sliding scale for less time for less money, the choice is predominantly full time for more money or full time for less money. So this idea that people always choose more time and more money is a red herring.

aianus 10y ago
There's full time and then there's full time. You can certainly choose to work for a 40h company instead of a 60h company but the latter type of company doesn't seem to have any problems recruiting.
- dv_dt 10y ago
  That's on the other side of the issue. My point was that there isn't anything like a 'proportional electiveness function' for the hours of work people are able to get with employment agreements. I think it looks like this for salaried professional employment: anything less than 40 is very low probability, 40-45 is very typical, and decreasing popularity in bins afterwards 50-60, 60+ etc. Given that's the distribution, you can't say people won't don't want to elect for <40 for less pay, it's not a really a choice in the current environment.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    > anything less than 40 is very low probability, 40-45 is very typical, and decreasing popularity in bins afterwards 50-60, 60+ etc. Oh god. America is even worse than I thought.
mason240 10y ago
There certianly is when choosing where to work. >It's typically not an accepted proposition to offer to work 4 days for proportionally less pay I currently have a 40 hour work where I can set my own hours and earn "flex time" (future PTO) for any hours over 40. I am paid well now, but I could certainly earn more by switching to company that would expect me to work more than 40 hours. The people complaining about working extra are absolutely choosing more time and more money.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  How often do you get to actually use that flex time, though? I think most of us have plenty of horror stories about being offered "time in lieu" for overtime, and then the boss conveniently "forgets" that he offered us this.
  - mason240 10y ago
    I earn and use about one every month just working an extra half hour a day. I can see why that would that would be a concern. It's a company wide thing, so that helps.
Bartweiss 10y ago
I'd second this. All the responses to the contrary seem to be about >40 increase, but there aren't many chance to take a 20% (30%, realistically) pay-cut and work 4 day weeks. Partly I think that's an efficiency thing - if you're critical path on a task, having you available when everyone else is becomes worth a large multiple of your salary. Partly I suspect it's just about not opening the floodgates, where people either resent you or take the same deal. I wonder what the real cut would be, though? For work like software where adding shifts can't be done cleanly, you risk all kinds of major benefit, payroll-tax, and hardware/facilities costs. Still, there have to be programmers willing to take a 50% pay cut for a 33% hour cut. (There's an essay somewhere for programmers about how to ask a manager for this, which is full of notes on how they'll be confused and try to reject it without considering it.)

patricklynch 10y ago

I'm going to guess that you don't spend many hours 9-5 Monday through Friday at a beach or on a golf course. If you're in the right places, you'll definitely see people who value free time over money and prestige.

aianus 10y ago
I spent three years making the other choice and working remotely from various beaches. I had to stop because of how lonely and isolating it was and how I couldn't maintain any relationships with my girlfriends and the 99% of my peers that were back home working 60h a week.

user5994461 10y ago

Most tech workers could easily work fewer hours by simply leaving the office when their time is done. Look around you and count how many people are working overtime on their own, sacrificing their life for free food, a fuzzball table, the expectations of 0.1% equity down the road, the hope of giving a good impression to their manager, the expectations of a raise later for hard work, or the pressure to work night and week-end unpaid on-call. When not thinking about it, people choose neither money not free time :D

matwood 10y ago
If someone is eating and playing fuzzball then I'm not sure I would count that as working overtime. In tech companies in particular at work does not necessarily equate to working.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I'm always confused by the hatred for people staying late at tech companies doing not-work. It's described like some elaborate anti-worker scam, but a lot of people I know are genuinely friends with coworkers (and often pretty introverted outside of that) and just enjoy doing that after work. I suppose I can understand the conspiracy theory of "they want you to only have work friends", but I really don't understand "they're replacing a good raise with a $100 ping-pong table". It's just not a sane model of what's happening, keeping employees in the building is not inherently profitable.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    It's not hatred. It's about running a business efficiently, while the employees don't even realize it. 1) Keeping tech employees in the building is profitable. 2) In tech companies in particular, you don't have to be at work behind a computer to be productive. Once you both understand that these things are true and correct, you can begin to understand the business of the SV and why these perks come to be. While people are in the office, they are with co-worker, thinking about work, talking about work, progressing on their work. And the magic thing is you don't have to pay them for it, because they ain't working officially. A bad thing happen in production late? Fine, they're already there and they won't even think that fixing it is doing actual work because they are already there. That foosball table was way cheaper than paying overtime. How about serving breakfast at 9 am and dinner at 19? Then people who wants both will stay. Most likely, people who are a bit close to one or the other might extend their schedule slightly just to grab it. But no way they think of it as extra work.

Arizhel 10y ago

>Most tech workers could easily work fewer hours for less money in second-year cities or take months-long sabbaticals but choose to do the opposite. What universe do you live in? In my universe, this is simply not true. No tech company is going to allow you to work, say, 30 hours a week for 75% of your salary, plus full health benefits. And taking a months-long sabbatical means you don't keep your job, and you have a hard time getting a new one because of a resume gap, which employers absolutely hate.

aianus 10y ago
You obviously have to be in a field like software engineering where there's a shortage of employees and employers can't get too picky about things like that. I did it myself for years modulo the health insurance part (we have universal healthcare in my country).
amag 10y ago
I just negotiated the option to work 80%-100% (in ~5% intervals) at my own discretion. Basically I'm allowed to take up to one day/week off. I'm a software engineer working in tech.
stuaxo 10y ago
You can negotiate all sorts of things when you join a company. Previously I've worked every 4th week off. These days I do contracts which provides some nice gaps if you don't try and line something up before the current one finished. It's been possible to take a year off - I was using that to work on my own projects, so that went on my c.v.
robotresearcher 10y ago
For someone straight out of school, that's pretty much true. After a while, if your CV is strong enough, your universe gets more flexible.

amag 10y ago

I actually negotiated the possibility to take one day off per week at my own discretion, thus working flexibly between 80%-100% in ~5% steps. In my mind this is a compromise with my dream of early retirement "Mr Money Mustache"-style. Early retirement is just something I don't see happening for a salaried worker in Sweden. Comparatively low salaries (for developers), high real estate prices and high taxes makes that pretty impossible. But now I have the choice of either taking a day off or pay 61% of my salary for that day to the government.