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>The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours. So if you work 45 hours one we

by ipnon 6y ago

>The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours. So if you work 45 hours one week and 36 hours the next, that’s supposed to be okay. I am satisfied with my salary because I finish my responsibilities in 2 to 4 hours, then spend the rest of the "work day" maintaining a green dot on Slack and promptly responding to merge requests, looking as busy as possible. My coworkers who feel the need to work a certain number of hours (40), invariably work overtime every week because their work expands to fit their perceived availability. They all get paid twice as much as me, but if I'm working half the hours is that equal compensation? I say no, because I still have my hair and my doctor says my blood pressure has improved.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rubicon33 6y ago
Where do you work where employees who work twice as much, make twice as much? The issue I have with salary structure is that you have no opportunity for going above and beyond. If I work a minimum hours to get my job done, I get payed the same amount than if I went overtime and finished my tasks sooner. It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work, but struggle to see the reason to when it’s just another company that will do nothing about it. To be clear - salary is much better than an hourly + overtime system. The former provides a ton of flexibility. It’s just that it provides little to no incentive for going above and beyond.
- etothepii 6y ago
  Maybe too many companies have been burned by the undocumented mess left by the "above and beyond" crowd who move on after two years?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > The issue I have with salary structure is that you have no opportunity for going above and beyond. Yes you do. This should be recognized via bonuses, raises, and/or promotions as appropriate. It's not immediate, but it does manifest over time. If it doesn't, use the experience gained to move to a company that appreciates such work and rewards it appropriately.
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    Bonuses are a joke in most companies. The difference between a year of coasting and one of efforts is in 3 digits.
  - staunch 6y ago
    > "...move to a company that appreciates such work and rewards it appropriately." Which takes 1-2 years of very hard work to discover, by which time the employee has invested a huge amount of effort for 10-30% more salary and 1-20% more equity than a new hire who has contributed nothing. And this employee has to wonder why they're contributing so much more when other people are doing almost nothing and getting nearly the same reward. Which leads to the best people quitting and the worst people staying. Most startups treat "The Senior Leadership Team" like unique people who matter and have to be compensated like they're hard to replace. They get employment contracts, large bonuses of equity/cash, and special treatment. Everyone else gets lip service and the treatment of replaceable cogs in the chain. For example, the 10x programmer typically gets 10-20% of what an incompetent VP will earn in total comp. Because they're treated like two different classes of employee. And this fact hurts most companies deeply in ways they'll never understand. It shows up in project delays and huge problems, which ultimately cost far, far more than it would've cost to keep the best contributors.
  - hshshs2 6y ago
    “work harder and hopefully someone will be nice to you”
  - rubicon33 6y ago
    Not sure where you've worked, but where I've worked, the raises have never matched the effort. At nearly every job, I've gotten a raise nearly every year. But the raises generally are very small, 5-10k a year. I'm not going to work nights and weekends for another taxed 5k. No company I've ever worked at has a bonus system. I would gladly get a feature out in 2 weeks, instead of 4, if it meant a extra $5k check in my bank. Instead, repeatedly doing that for a whole year means a taxed $5k raise at the end. Not. Worth. It.
- tikhonj 6y ago
  Tech companies do have a bonus system, not just in literal bonuses but also in stock grants that depend on your performance. Coupled with an engineering promotion ladder that tops out at the equivalent of a VP (or even SVP?) role, it seems like there are financial incentives to go "above and beyond". Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean working longer hours! Out of the people I've worked with, the overlap between working extra hours and having outsize positive impact is smaller than you might expect. Incentivizing extra hours for their own sake would be actively counterproductive. I'd also say that people generally overestimate the effect of formal financial incentives and underestimate informal social incentives. Company and team culture can have a much larger effect than compensation, especially when everyone is being paid a lot in absolute terms.
  - dilyevsky 6y ago
    I seriously doubt there are many places where principal eng makes as much as vp and 0 for svp. Even at google and aws I don’t really think it’s the case
- jonas21 6y ago
  > It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work, but struggle to see the reason to when it’s just another company that will do nothing about it. This is essentially how the bonus system works at the big software companies. People with the same title might make roughly the same salary, but have very different stock compensation, which gets updated every year based on performance and can be much larger than the base salary. It's why you see such a wide range of numbers on sites like levels.fyi (for example $300K to $900K for a staff engineer at Google). https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engineer/L6/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work No, no we don’t. I like working just as much as the next person, but I prefer my evaluation to be based on me and my peers working 40 hours, as opposed to me working 40 and them working 60.
  - tharkun__ 6y ago
    This, so much this! Employees, at least a lot of them, ask for bonus systems. They seem to love bonus systems and shun/dislike companies that have a proper bonus system: none. Bonuses (and other shenanigans) only kills team work and team spirit and make it an everyone against everyone game. And don't tell me that you get too many slackers without a bonus system. Slackers are actually usually pretty good at playing the bonus game, i.e. doing exactly what is required to get the right numbers to get a bonus. Whether that's helping the company or the team in the long run is none of their concern.
lnsru 6y ago
It’s cool, that your colleagues are paid twice. I tried working 3 hours a day and 9 hours a day. With 9 hours a day I made my manager angry showing how lazy my colleagues are. So I ended up with working 3 hours a day and staying green the other 5 while learning skills I need for my side project. That’s the perfect working setup for me, though I would love to have a manager who wants me to work 9 hours a day for the company.
- nerbert 6y ago
  Sounds perfect to me.
- honkycat 6y ago
  I wouldn't call your colleagues lazy, i would say they have other responsibilities and a life. Not everyone has a SO to clean and cook for them and maintaining relationships takes work Also: you dont have 9 hours of productive work in you a day. Nobody does. You have 4 good hours and then a bunch of wasted time where you are performing being busy because you want everyone to know how smart you are.
  - robocat 6y ago
    > you dont have 9 hours of productive work in you a day. > Nobody does. You are making an overgeneralisation, or assuming a context. For lots of jobs productivity is fairly linear with time - some of those jobs work on piece rates or hourly wages. Some people are productive for 9 hours in professional jobs, and they are billed accordingly, although maybe the marginal productivity per hour falls. Not everyone is “wasting time, busy working, and showing off” to paraphrase you.
    - dheera 6y ago
      In the general scheme of things you're right that many jobs are near linear, but I think for the intended audience of TFA (people likely to be scammed by the salary system and made to work longer than 40-hour weeks without overtime pay) it's a valid generalization. The jobs that actually are linear actually do tend to get paid by the hour and often even have 1.5x pay for overtime, and the fact that salaried workers don't get that is precisely where the scam is.
tolbish 6y ago
It boggles the mind why half-time and three-quarter time employment isn't more popular. I guess UBI would allow that to happen instead of employers having to worry about benefits.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  The coordination and knowledge sharing costs go up at least linearly with number of people. Twice as many people each working half-time mean a lot more of that time is chewed up with communication/knowledge acquisition.
  - beefield 6y ago
    That's the employer's problem. What I find weird is that more people working in high tax-progression countries do not realize that doubling your annual holidays[1] is actually dirt cheap - and require that as a perk instead of the slightly more expensive car or whatever they are spending that marginal income. [1] or 4 day work week or 6 hour work day or whatever suits your life at the moment
    - colinmhayes 6y ago
      And the employer solves the problem by only hiring developers full time...
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Employers’ problems and employees’ problems are probably closer than you might think when it comes to sustainable business and employment practices.
    - laurent92 6y ago
      I had an employee who had a clear opinion that some stuff weren’t his duties and that arriving sleepy at work was ok. So, as I said, I “had” an employee. Let’s count in jobs. Basically a man fully dedicated to his job 37hrs/week creates about 1 new position a year, every year, because he makes the processes so efficient that we serve 2x more customers, so we can hire. That guy and another intern, they created -1 job in a year (his project brought literally no customer) and cost us 16k€ + his salary + the intern (I pay my interns, I give hefty bonuses to everyone). I’m not complaining, it’s my job to root out the weed and prune it, and I did a mistake, but you need to understand, as a nation, how many jobs don’t exist because employees live off their colleagues (as for my share, I have created 6 jobs myself so I’ll just collect the huge margins, I’m just vexated he doesn’t collect his margins too). In sectors where everyone thinks it’s not their jobs, people end up harassing each other for the remaining positions. In growing companies, it’s the American dream with free food. The correct middle ground is to own your product for 37 hrs a week, and not delegate questions to be solved by the employer.
phendrenad2 6y ago
Watch out, they're going to ML models that keep track of what apps and websites you have open. Best to sit there and add/remove blank lines to a python file for the remaining 6 hours.
- whatatita 6y ago
  They can bloody well try. It's illegal in many places and I would refuse to work anywhere with that level of micro management. I know it's a privileged position to be in, but I'll excercise that position as long as I have the option to do so.
ryanSrich 6y ago
> "I am satisfied with my salary because I finish my responsibilities in 2 to 4 hours, then spend the rest of the "work day" maintaining a green dot on Slack" This is precisely why when I started my company I committed to only hiring contract devs for 10-20 hours per week. No meetings. No bullshit. I pay you a high hourly wage, you do as much (often more) work than if you were a salaried 40 hour FTE, and you likely make more money in the process. The model of work and the 40 hour work week is so fundamentally broken I feel like I'm in a perpetual twilight zone state when I talk to people. They think it's normal and okay to have 3+ hours of meetings per day and barely get any work done. I will never understand it. My first 7 years of work life outside of college consisted of THOUSANDS of pointless meetings and months of pretending to be busy. I've promised myself I will never do that shit again, and I will not let my business succumb to that style of work.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hellisothers 6y ago
  One problem with hiring only contractors is they’re in it only for the money. “Well duh!” You say, but they’re not incentivized to do anything beyond beyond what they’re asked to do and will need to be highly managed. They’re not going to improve performance, make long term tech investments, or (the big one) innovate. Because they have no incentive to, they have no skin in the game. This is obviously a generalization and of course this may well work great for some companies, including yours.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    One problem with hiring only contractors is they’re in it only for the money. I don't think that's totally true, it certainly wasn't in my case. I started contracting because I had had enough of the corporate grind. Quite a lot of my peers seemed to have the same attitude.
    - stefanfisk 6y ago
      Having a customer is so much more intuitive to me compared to having a boss.
busterarm 6y ago
Emphatically this. This is also why I choose to work in automation. My work-life balance is a direct result of the investment I've made into doing my work well. I've engineered the company's systems and processes in a way that results in less work for people as a whole. That lets us all work more efficiently. For the handful of weeks I've worked every night until 2am, there's 20x as many where I've done a couple of hours work in the morning and then been a paid SME the rest of the day. And seemingly unlike most engineers, I think getting paid to talk to people is FANTASTIC. You simply cannot do this if you are hourly.
- repartix 6y ago
  Why can you not do this if you are hourly?
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Because if your labor is being measured in windows of time, you are either putting yourself out of work or admitting that they don't need you for 40 hours. You need to shift the conversation away from hours worked to value of your work. If you are an hourly employee, you are being paid to be a cog, not to be a brain.
    - codingclaws 6y ago
      How do you determine how much value you're creating? And how do you convince clients of that value?
      - busterarm 6y ago
        Not knowing this skill is probably why people remain hourly, as I did for many years. I'm not sure that's really teachable, either. If you can't figure out what moves the needle for a business...
1-more 6y ago
> promptly responding to merge requests This counts as work to me though?? Like there's something that feels like it's not real work because I'm not writing code, I'm reading it. But it's 100% real actual work; if you weren't doing it they'd have to hire someone else to do it.
- tharkun__ 6y ago
  Of course reviewing PRs is work. I bill the time I spend on PRs to _their_ ticket all the time and that's how it should be. I think what the OP just means is that just like keeping slack green and responding to people there, responding quickly to merge requests shows that "you're there" (i.e. "working"). If that's what's required to not get any dumb questions about the rest of his day, that's very smart. As in, it seems that the hours he "works for real" + helping out others on the team/in the org are enough to satisfy his boss that he's doing the work that he's being paid for. Awesome for him I'd say.
africanboy 6y ago
> The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours That's the opposite of how it is supposed to work when you are on salary. You are paid for units of work, which is hours worked. The output is not what you produced, but what the working force globally produced. Being salaried means being paid a flat rate (forfait) for being there: sometimes you produce more (you lose), sometimes less (you gain), but the pay stays the same.
- theamk 6y ago
  > You are paid for units of work, which is hours worked. Nope, "units of work" is features delivered, bugs fixed, new people trained and so on. As the parent commenter said, if you can do it in 2-3 hours per day -- this is great and you are getting benefits of being exempt. Of course sometimes people pay you like you are exempt, but expect you to be present for 40 hours anyway like you are hourly -- and in this case, being exempt is a scam as the article said. But while common, this is far from universal.
  - africanboy 6y ago
    > Nope, "units of work" is features delivered, bugs fixed, new people trained and so on Wrong: in a salaried job units of work is hours. Unless your contract says otherwise. > As the parent commenter said, if you can do it in 2-3 hours per day You never do it in 2-3 hours per day, consistently. If you are that good, don't tell anybody because they will start thinking they are paying you too much.
hnick 6y ago
Interesting point I saw on this site a while ago - most people are well trained to work out hourly compensation by time spent working. By that metric, ignoring hair loss, you and your coworkers earn the same per hour. Let's flip it and measure something else of value. How much free time you have left over. After all overheads (work, sleep, commute, chores) 1 extra hour worked per day can be a 25% reduction in your free time. What is that worth? How much are you selling that 25% for? Would the overtime or pay rise be worth this? Sometimes you just need cash in the bank even at a poor exchange rate but I think it's useful to look from different perspectives.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
> I still have my hair and my doctor says my blood pressure has improved. Wise man.

by ipnon 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rubicon33 6y ago

Where do you work where employees who work twice as much, make twice as much? The issue I have with salary structure is that you have no opportunity for going above and beyond. If I work a minimum hours to get my job done, I get payed the same amount than if I went overtime and finished my tasks sooner. It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work, but struggle to see the reason to when it’s just another company that will do nothing about it. To be clear - salary is much better than an hourly + overtime system. The former provides a ton of flexibility. It’s just that it provides little to no incentive for going above and beyond.

etothepii 6y ago
Maybe too many companies have been burned by the undocumented mess left by the "above and beyond" crowd who move on after two years?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> The issue I have with salary structure is that you have no opportunity for going above and beyond. Yes you do. This should be recognized via bonuses, raises, and/or promotions as appropriate. It's not immediate, but it does manifest over time. If it doesn't, use the experience gained to move to a company that appreciates such work and rewards it appropriately.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  Bonuses are a joke in most companies. The difference between a year of coasting and one of efforts is in 3 digits.
- staunch 6y ago
  > "...move to a company that appreciates such work and rewards it appropriately." Which takes 1-2 years of very hard work to discover, by which time the employee has invested a huge amount of effort for 10-30% more salary and 1-20% more equity than a new hire who has contributed nothing. And this employee has to wonder why they're contributing so much more when other people are doing almost nothing and getting nearly the same reward. Which leads to the best people quitting and the worst people staying. Most startups treat "The Senior Leadership Team" like unique people who matter and have to be compensated like they're hard to replace. They get employment contracts, large bonuses of equity/cash, and special treatment. Everyone else gets lip service and the treatment of replaceable cogs in the chain. For example, the 10x programmer typically gets 10-20% of what an incompetent VP will earn in total comp. Because they're treated like two different classes of employee. And this fact hurts most companies deeply in ways they'll never understand. It shows up in project delays and huge problems, which ultimately cost far, far more than it would've cost to keep the best contributors.
- hshshs2 6y ago
  “work harder and hopefully someone will be nice to you”
- rubicon33 6y ago
  Not sure where you've worked, but where I've worked, the raises have never matched the effort. At nearly every job, I've gotten a raise nearly every year. But the raises generally are very small, 5-10k a year. I'm not going to work nights and weekends for another taxed 5k. No company I've ever worked at has a bonus system. I would gladly get a feature out in 2 weeks, instead of 4, if it meant a extra $5k check in my bank. Instead, repeatedly doing that for a whole year means a taxed $5k raise at the end. Not. Worth. It.
tikhonj 6y ago
Tech companies do have a bonus system, not just in literal bonuses but also in stock grants that depend on your performance. Coupled with an engineering promotion ladder that tops out at the equivalent of a VP (or even SVP?) role, it seems like there are financial incentives to go "above and beyond". Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean working longer hours! Out of the people I've worked with, the overlap between working extra hours and having outsize positive impact is smaller than you might expect. Incentivizing extra hours for their own sake would be actively counterproductive. I'd also say that people generally overestimate the effect of formal financial incentives and underestimate informal social incentives. Company and team culture can have a much larger effect than compensation, especially when everyone is being paid a lot in absolute terms.
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  I seriously doubt there are many places where principal eng makes as much as vp and 0 for svp. Even at google and aws I don’t really think it’s the case
jonas21 6y ago
> It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work, but struggle to see the reason to when it’s just another company that will do nothing about it. This is essentially how the bonus system works at the big software companies. People with the same title might make roughly the same salary, but have very different stock compensation, which gets updated every year based on performance and can be much larger than the base salary. It's why you see such a wide range of numbers on sites like levels.fyi (for example $300K to $900K for a staff engineer at Google). https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engineer/L6/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
Aeolun 6y ago
> It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work No, no we don’t. I like working just as much as the next person, but I prefer my evaluation to be based on me and my peers working 40 hours, as opposed to me working 40 and them working 60.
- tharkun__ 6y ago
  This, so much this! Employees, at least a lot of them, ask for bonus systems. They seem to love bonus systems and shun/dislike companies that have a proper bonus system: none. Bonuses (and other shenanigans) only kills team work and team spirit and make it an everyone against everyone game. And don't tell me that you get too many slackers without a bonus system. Slackers are actually usually pretty good at playing the bonus game, i.e. doing exactly what is required to get the right numbers to get a bonus. Whether that's helping the company or the team in the long run is none of their concern.

lnsru 6y ago

It’s cool, that your colleagues are paid twice. I tried working 3 hours a day and 9 hours a day. With 9 hours a day I made my manager angry showing how lazy my colleagues are. So I ended up with working 3 hours a day and staying green the other 5 while learning skills I need for my side project. That’s the perfect working setup for me, though I would love to have a manager who wants me to work 9 hours a day for the company.

nerbert 6y ago
Sounds perfect to me.
honkycat 6y ago
I wouldn't call your colleagues lazy, i would say they have other responsibilities and a life. Not everyone has a SO to clean and cook for them and maintaining relationships takes work Also: you dont have 9 hours of productive work in you a day. Nobody does. You have 4 good hours and then a bunch of wasted time where you are performing being busy because you want everyone to know how smart you are.
- robocat 6y ago
  > you dont have 9 hours of productive work in you a day. > Nobody does. You are making an overgeneralisation, or assuming a context. For lots of jobs productivity is fairly linear with time - some of those jobs work on piece rates or hourly wages. Some people are productive for 9 hours in professional jobs, and they are billed accordingly, although maybe the marginal productivity per hour falls. Not everyone is “wasting time, busy working, and showing off” to paraphrase you.
  - dheera 6y ago
    In the general scheme of things you're right that many jobs are near linear, but I think for the intended audience of TFA (people likely to be scammed by the salary system and made to work longer than 40-hour weeks without overtime pay) it's a valid generalization. The jobs that actually are linear actually do tend to get paid by the hour and often even have 1.5x pay for overtime, and the fact that salaried workers don't get that is precisely where the scam is.

tolbish 6y ago

It boggles the mind why half-time and three-quarter time employment isn't more popular. I guess UBI would allow that to happen instead of employers having to worry about benefits.

sokoloff 6y ago
The coordination and knowledge sharing costs go up at least linearly with number of people. Twice as many people each working half-time mean a lot more of that time is chewed up with communication/knowledge acquisition.
- beefield 6y ago
  That's the employer's problem. What I find weird is that more people working in high tax-progression countries do not realize that doubling your annual holidays[1] is actually dirt cheap - and require that as a perk instead of the slightly more expensive car or whatever they are spending that marginal income. [1] or 4 day work week or 6 hour work day or whatever suits your life at the moment
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    And the employer solves the problem by only hiring developers full time...
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Employers’ problems and employees’ problems are probably closer than you might think when it comes to sustainable business and employment practices.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    I had an employee who had a clear opinion that some stuff weren’t his duties and that arriving sleepy at work was ok. So, as I said, I “had” an employee. Let’s count in jobs. Basically a man fully dedicated to his job 37hrs/week creates about 1 new position a year, every year, because he makes the processes so efficient that we serve 2x more customers, so we can hire. That guy and another intern, they created -1 job in a year (his project brought literally no customer) and cost us 16k€ + his salary + the intern (I pay my interns, I give hefty bonuses to everyone). I’m not complaining, it’s my job to root out the weed and prune it, and I did a mistake, but you need to understand, as a nation, how many jobs don’t exist because employees live off their colleagues (as for my share, I have created 6 jobs myself so I’ll just collect the huge margins, I’m just vexated he doesn’t collect his margins too). In sectors where everyone thinks it’s not their jobs, people end up harassing each other for the remaining positions. In growing companies, it’s the American dream with free food. The correct middle ground is to own your product for 37 hrs a week, and not delegate questions to be solved by the employer.

phendrenad2 6y ago

Watch out, they're going to ML models that keep track of what apps and websites you have open. Best to sit there and add/remove blank lines to a python file for the remaining 6 hours.

whatatita 6y ago
They can bloody well try. It's illegal in many places and I would refuse to work anywhere with that level of micro management. I know it's a privileged position to be in, but I'll excercise that position as long as I have the option to do so.

ryanSrich 6y ago

> "I am satisfied with my salary because I finish my responsibilities in 2 to 4 hours, then spend the rest of the "work day" maintaining a green dot on Slack" This is precisely why when I started my company I committed to only hiring contract devs for 10-20 hours per week. No meetings. No bullshit. I pay you a high hourly wage, you do as much (often more) work than if you were a salaried 40 hour FTE, and you likely make more money in the process. The model of work and the 40 hour work week is so fundamentally broken I feel like I'm in a perpetual twilight zone state when I talk to people. They think it's normal and okay to have 3+ hours of meetings per day and barely get any work done. I will never understand it. My first 7 years of work life outside of college consisted of THOUSANDS of pointless meetings and months of pretending to be busy. I've promised myself I will never do that shit again, and I will not let my business succumb to that style of work.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hellisothers 6y ago
One problem with hiring only contractors is they’re in it only for the money. “Well duh!” You say, but they’re not incentivized to do anything beyond beyond what they’re asked to do and will need to be highly managed. They’re not going to improve performance, make long term tech investments, or (the big one) innovate. Because they have no incentive to, they have no skin in the game. This is obviously a generalization and of course this may well work great for some companies, including yours.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  One problem with hiring only contractors is they’re in it only for the money. I don't think that's totally true, it certainly wasn't in my case. I started contracting because I had had enough of the corporate grind. Quite a lot of my peers seemed to have the same attitude.
  - stefanfisk 6y ago
    Having a customer is so much more intuitive to me compared to having a boss.

busterarm 6y ago

Emphatically this. This is also why I choose to work in automation. My work-life balance is a direct result of the investment I've made into doing my work well. I've engineered the company's systems and processes in a way that results in less work for people as a whole. That lets us all work more efficiently. For the handful of weeks I've worked every night until 2am, there's 20x as many where I've done a couple of hours work in the morning and then been a paid SME the rest of the day. And seemingly unlike most engineers, I think getting paid to talk to people is FANTASTIC. You simply cannot do this if you are hourly.

repartix 6y ago
Why can you not do this if you are hourly?
- busterarm 6y ago
  Because if your labor is being measured in windows of time, you are either putting yourself out of work or admitting that they don't need you for 40 hours. You need to shift the conversation away from hours worked to value of your work. If you are an hourly employee, you are being paid to be a cog, not to be a brain.
  - codingclaws 6y ago
    How do you determine how much value you're creating? And how do you convince clients of that value?
    - busterarm 6y ago
      Not knowing this skill is probably why people remain hourly, as I did for many years. I'm not sure that's really teachable, either. If you can't figure out what moves the needle for a business...

1-more 6y ago

> promptly responding to merge requests This counts as work to me though?? Like there's something that feels like it's not real work because I'm not writing code, I'm reading it. But it's 100% real actual work; if you weren't doing it they'd have to hire someone else to do it.

tharkun__ 6y ago
Of course reviewing PRs is work. I bill the time I spend on PRs to _their_ ticket all the time and that's how it should be. I think what the OP just means is that just like keeping slack green and responding to people there, responding quickly to merge requests shows that "you're there" (i.e. "working"). If that's what's required to not get any dumb questions about the rest of his day, that's very smart. As in, it seems that the hours he "works for real" + helping out others on the team/in the org are enough to satisfy his boss that he's doing the work that he's being paid for. Awesome for him I'd say.

africanboy 6y ago

> The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours That's the opposite of how it is supposed to work when you are on salary. You are paid for units of work, which is hours worked. The output is not what you produced, but what the working force globally produced. Being salaried means being paid a flat rate (forfait) for being there: sometimes you produce more (you lose), sometimes less (you gain), but the pay stays the same.

theamk 6y ago
> You are paid for units of work, which is hours worked. Nope, "units of work" is features delivered, bugs fixed, new people trained and so on. As the parent commenter said, if you can do it in 2-3 hours per day -- this is great and you are getting benefits of being exempt. Of course sometimes people pay you like you are exempt, but expect you to be present for 40 hours anyway like you are hourly -- and in this case, being exempt is a scam as the article said. But while common, this is far from universal.
- africanboy 6y ago
  > Nope, "units of work" is features delivered, bugs fixed, new people trained and so on Wrong: in a salaried job units of work is hours. Unless your contract says otherwise. > As the parent commenter said, if you can do it in 2-3 hours per day You never do it in 2-3 hours per day, consistently. If you are that good, don't tell anybody because they will start thinking they are paying you too much.

hnick 6y ago

Interesting point I saw on this site a while ago - most people are well trained to work out hourly compensation by time spent working. By that metric, ignoring hair loss, you and your coworkers earn the same per hour. Let's flip it and measure something else of value. How much free time you have left over. After all overheads (work, sleep, commute, chores) 1 extra hour worked per day can be a 25% reduction in your free time. What is that worth? How much are you selling that 25% for? Would the overtime or pay rise be worth this? Sometimes you just need cash in the bank even at a poor exchange rate but I think it's useful to look from different perspectives.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

> I still have my hair and my doctor says my blood pressure has improved. Wise man.