8 ms·

> Our team is a Seattle-based reduced-hours team. We don't work Fridays! FYI, in case anyone else has a hard time finding what exactly the hours reduction is.

by darzu 5y ago

commandlinefan 5y ago
Sounds like a trap to me - in theory, most programming jobs "don't" work Saturdays or Sundays or after 6 PM either. On paper, anyway.
- rco8786 5y ago
  Rather cynical. You're basically just assuming everything they say about the job must be a lie.
  - hoseja 5y ago
    Corporations exploit the benefit of the doubt. It mustn't be extended to them.
  - chana_masala 5y ago
    I'd say it's evidence based skepticism
  - femto113 5y ago
    I'm guessing you haven't worked for Amazon.
  - drunkpotato 5y ago
    Sounds more like experienced than cynical to me. In my experience, job descriptions and even the answers you get during interviews are not so much outright lies, as aspirational fabrications you have to take with a grain of salt.
  - EarlKing 5y ago
    Having worked for Amazon before I'd say that's a fairly safe assumption.
  - michaelcampbell 5y ago
    "Foresight is often mistaken as cynicism by those that do not have it."
  - throwaway7033 5y ago
    Job descriptions are forward looking statements; the position may be entirely different. Here are some of the many possibilities: The service has poor uptime and you're on call every weekend. Schedule pressure or poor management means that you're asked to come in on Fridays "until the next release". The reduced-hours position was sponsored by a VP who has lost interest or left the company. Your direct manager has deadlines to meet and pressures you into working full-time.
  - krageon 5y ago
    Amazon became big on lies, and in fact is in the news frequently because it continues to do so.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    Assuming that Amazon is a profit-maximizing corporation that will fully exploit it's human resources to the extent possible, and that forward-looking but non-binding statements cannot be relied on to limit that might be called cynicism but to me it looks a lot like realism.
- romanovcode 5y ago
  Who works on Fridays anyway?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    I work harder than ever on Fridays. Mondays I get nothing done.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  I know that's the popular cynical view, but I'd think with such a position (especially given that it was advertised as reduced hours), there would be 20% lower expectations as to what you'll accomplish. In other words, they'd expect it would take five weeks for you to do what someone else can do in four. I mean, that's all they have to determine/enforce how much you time you put in currently... general expectations. Some people say you work the hours needed to get the job done, but that doesn't really make sense. Somehow the work the company needs to get accomplished gets divided up and distributed to employees. And ultimately you've got to think of how much is reasonable to accomplish. Here, that expectation of reasonableness is going to get reduced by about 20% if they are hired to work that many less hours.
  - scarby2 5y ago
    there have been many studies that show that people who consistently work less hours are more productive per hour. generally going from 40 hours to 32 hours i'd be surprised if the difference in productivity was more than 5-10% (it may even be positive).
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  Besides being a founder, I've never had a programming job that's required such outside of mostly rare incident responses.
dheera 5y ago
Is the salary also reduced or only the hours? Too bad they don't give a probability distribution of salaries for the position ...
- softwarebeware 5y ago
  We know that Amazon has a max salary of $160,000 or some such
  - WaxProlix 5y ago
    Technically true, in Seattle, but a large portion of comp comes in RSUs above that mark. You can see on levels.fyi that new hires in the 5-10 YOE range are getting total comps in the 3 or 400s pretty consistently.
    - CobrastanJorji 5y ago
      Yes, which is a problem. Amazon employees have been watching themselves get steady, significant raises via stock vesting for years, but AMZN flattened out in mid-2020 and the company's done very little to account for that, so everybody's raises have started to dry up.
      - petilon 5y ago
        Amazon employees get RSUs. The difference between stock options and RSUs is that options are worthless if the stock price doesn't go up, but RSUs are worth the stock price, so it doesn't have to go up, it just needs to not drop.
        qqtt 5y ago
        > so it doesn't have to go up, it just needs to not drop. Amazon compensation packages assume 15% increase in RSU value year over year, so when you get a 4 year grant as a new hire, your target compensation will be projected based off 15% year over year growth, which typically means less stock granted in year 4 compared to year 3. With a stagnant stock price, many Amazon employees are potentially at risk of not hitting their year 3 target compensation.
hwers 5y ago
Hey that's not too bad really. Less than a 4 day work week and things might get boring.
synergy20 5y ago
nay Amazon SW is very demanding as far as I can tell(many friends work there), yes it has higher pay but if you divide it by hours, it's not standing out above other companies at all. have a life.
ar_lan 5y ago
From what I've heard of working at Amazon, this sounds like most likely you are expected to still put in the standard 80hrs/week, just cram it into Mo-Thurs (or maybe Sat-Thurs). I find it reallllly hard to trust Amazon when it comes to working less. This really just sounds like a way to get someone to work the same amount for less pay (I assume the position has a paycut).
- tasha0663 5y ago
  > As an Engineer on the Developer Platform team, you will be contributing to the design and development of the end-to-end developer experience across all 50+ teams In other words, when the janky build tools someone wrote >10 years ago break down, you're going to be on-call so much that you'll just run a landline into the back of your head, Matrix style.
linguistiliniw 5y ago
Cool that they're still doing this. IIRC it was in a trial period pre-pandemic. The impression I got was that they wanted to test a 4-day week, but worried it would be disruptive if only one or two team members were out on Fridays. Hence, 4-day teams. Amazon gets a bad rap, but it can be a nice place to work as a developer. The overtime and pressure varies wildly from team to team, and you'd have to figure that people who choose to join a 4/3 team aren't the sort to press deadlines. This listing looks like it is for a position which supports their internal developers and/or retail site. Those systems are probably fairly mature, so maybe it's a good business move to hire people to keep them running on a slow burn with better work/life balance.

> Our team is a Seattle-based reduced-hours team. We don't work Fridays! FYI, in case anyone else has a hard time finding what exactly the hours reduction is.

by darzu 5y ago

> Our team is a Seattle-based reduced-hours team. We don't work Fridays! FYI, in case anyone else has a hard time finding what exactly the hours reduction is.

commandlinefan 5y ago

Sounds like a trap to me - in theory, most programming jobs "don't" work Saturdays or Sundays or after 6 PM either. On paper, anyway.

rco8786 5y ago
Rather cynical. You're basically just assuming everything they say about the job must be a lie.
- hoseja 5y ago
  Corporations exploit the benefit of the doubt. It mustn't be extended to them.
- chana_masala 5y ago
  I'd say it's evidence based skepticism
- femto113 5y ago
  I'm guessing you haven't worked for Amazon.
- drunkpotato 5y ago
  Sounds more like experienced than cynical to me. In my experience, job descriptions and even the answers you get during interviews are not so much outright lies, as aspirational fabrications you have to take with a grain of salt.
- EarlKing 5y ago
  Having worked for Amazon before I'd say that's a fairly safe assumption.
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  "Foresight is often mistaken as cynicism by those that do not have it."
- throwaway7033 5y ago
  Job descriptions are forward looking statements; the position may be entirely different. Here are some of the many possibilities: The service has poor uptime and you're on call every weekend. Schedule pressure or poor management means that you're asked to come in on Fridays "until the next release". The reduced-hours position was sponsored by a VP who has lost interest or left the company. Your direct manager has deadlines to meet and pressures you into working full-time.
- krageon 5y ago
  Amazon became big on lies, and in fact is in the news frequently because it continues to do so.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Assuming that Amazon is a profit-maximizing corporation that will fully exploit it's human resources to the extent possible, and that forward-looking but non-binding statements cannot be relied on to limit that might be called cynicism but to me it looks a lot like realism.
romanovcode 5y ago
Who works on Fridays anyway?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  I work harder than ever on Fridays. Mondays I get nothing done.
robbrown451 5y ago
I know that's the popular cynical view, but I'd think with such a position (especially given that it was advertised as reduced hours), there would be 20% lower expectations as to what you'll accomplish. In other words, they'd expect it would take five weeks for you to do what someone else can do in four. I mean, that's all they have to determine/enforce how much you time you put in currently... general expectations. Some people say you work the hours needed to get the job done, but that doesn't really make sense. Somehow the work the company needs to get accomplished gets divided up and distributed to employees. And ultimately you've got to think of how much is reasonable to accomplish. Here, that expectation of reasonableness is going to get reduced by about 20% if they are hired to work that many less hours.
- scarby2 5y ago
  there have been many studies that show that people who consistently work less hours are more productive per hour. generally going from 40 hours to 32 hours i'd be surprised if the difference in productivity was more than 5-10% (it may even be positive).
SkyPuncher 5y ago
Besides being a founder, I've never had a programming job that's required such outside of mostly rare incident responses.

dheera 5y ago

Is the salary also reduced or only the hours? Too bad they don't give a probability distribution of salaries for the position ...

softwarebeware 5y ago
We know that Amazon has a max salary of $160,000 or some such
- WaxProlix 5y ago
  Technically true, in Seattle, but a large portion of comp comes in RSUs above that mark. You can see on levels.fyi that new hires in the 5-10 YOE range are getting total comps in the 3 or 400s pretty consistently.
  - CobrastanJorji 5y ago
    Yes, which is a problem. Amazon employees have been watching themselves get steady, significant raises via stock vesting for years, but AMZN flattened out in mid-2020 and the company's done very little to account for that, so everybody's raises have started to dry up.
    - petilon 5y ago
      Amazon employees get RSUs. The difference between stock options and RSUs is that options are worthless if the stock price doesn't go up, but RSUs are worth the stock price, so it doesn't have to go up, it just needs to not drop.
      - qqtt 5y ago
        > so it doesn't have to go up, it just needs to not drop. Amazon compensation packages assume 15% increase in RSU value year over year, so when you get a 4 year grant as a new hire, your target compensation will be projected based off 15% year over year growth, which typically means less stock granted in year 4 compared to year 3. With a stagnant stock price, many Amazon employees are potentially at risk of not hitting their year 3 target compensation.

hwers 5y ago

Hey that's not too bad really. Less than a 4 day work week and things might get boring.

synergy20 5y ago

nay Amazon SW is very demanding as far as I can tell(many friends work there), yes it has higher pay but if you divide it by hours, it's not standing out above other companies at all. have a life.

ar_lan 5y ago

From what I've heard of working at Amazon, this sounds like most likely you are expected to still put in the standard 80hrs/week, just cram it into Mo-Thurs (or maybe Sat-Thurs). I find it reallllly hard to trust Amazon when it comes to working less. This really just sounds like a way to get someone to work the same amount for less pay (I assume the position has a paycut).

tasha0663 5y ago
> As an Engineer on the Developer Platform team, you will be contributing to the design and development of the end-to-end developer experience across all 50+ teams In other words, when the janky build tools someone wrote >10 years ago break down, you're going to be on-call so much that you'll just run a landline into the back of your head, Matrix style.

linguistiliniw 5y ago

Cool that they're still doing this. IIRC it was in a trial period pre-pandemic. The impression I got was that they wanted to test a 4-day week, but worried it would be disruptive if only one or two team members were out on Fridays. Hence, 4-day teams. Amazon gets a bad rap, but it can be a nice place to work as a developer. The overtime and pressure varies wildly from team to team, and you'd have to figure that people who choose to join a 4/3 team aren't the sort to press deadlines. This listing looks like it is for a position which supports their internal developers and/or retail site. Those systems are probably fairly mature, so maybe it's a good business move to hire people to keep them running on a slow burn with better work/life balance.