I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.
Would you take that over $300k to work 40 hours doing something you actually care about? I don't think I would.
I WFH with amazing TC and WLB. I do my hobbies all day and then work just a few hours. But I feel like an absolute piece of shit just coasting at work. Doesn't matter how well my hobbies are going, I'll always have the quiet stress of not contributing what I'm capable of doing. The times I feel good about myself are when I actually ship something cool with my team.
$300k is (around here) over 7x the mode of income [1]. That's a significant amount (basically the yearly income of 7 "regular joes") and raises (to me) the ethical question of whether I'd deserve it. For a full 40-hour workload, perhaps a case could be made.
But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasite on society. And that's not something I would want.
Note: this, by itself, does not imply no one would deserve that sort of compensation. It simply raises the bar - perhaps to a level that is beyond human reach, perhaps not.
That isn't the case with the power of scaling. If the product you happen to be working on 4 hrs a week happens to have X billion users, your tiny contribution gets multiplied by 9 orders of magnitude.
There's still something arbitrary and random about it, but it's not accurate to say you aren't producing net value for your employer/users/society/whatever.
Do you have any aspirations to build something of your own at all, whether profitable or not? Well you’ve now been given 300k/year of funding without giving up any equity, with the only condition that you put in 4hrs/week for your “job”
Or maybe you like fixing houses? Same thing, etc etc
Uh.. I think you got that backwards. Nearly anyone would recognize that as a major golden ticket!
If I’m working 4-hours a week, that’s a 4-days a week I can be skiing. And reading, and hanging out with friends, and working on actually interesting code projects that aren’t beholden to the whims and timelines of a company. I’d absolutely do that for a while.
And not many pay $300K.
I can fill 36 hours a week of my time better than anyone else can. If the money's equal and the time difference is that steep, I'll take the shorter time commitment.
Still worth it?
It was shocking coming from startup world.
It's not so much "gee I only have 4 hours of work to do this week"
It's...well, it's impossible to say how long it takes to do anything in particular, so I shouldn't feel stressed trying to get it done...
oh there's actually no real management style/pressure to get things done here?
Promo is seniority-based?
There's silly unspoken rules like after you get promoted, you're _guaranteed_ a middling performance rating because its an easy horsetrade to do?
Your manager doesn't have to argue $X was super important and strategic and this newly promoted character needs a better rating, and the other manager doesn't need to argue $Y needs to keep a high rating to show continued momentum in his growth, they just do it.
There's no way to rebel against this system, or work within it, other than transfer companies?
It's a rather horrific situation and I don't think it's helping anyone or anyone is particularly satisfied with it. The problem is, any other solution is worse and will hurt The Vibes in the short run. Interesting to see Zuck move towards Dark Zuck and say things I've never heard at FAANG
I complained about a bug that blocked our CI for a week, which I'd shepherded around; that the company needs people to be prepared to work on things that they "don't own" because surprise, we don't have anyone assigned to owning the interaction of those six systems! Actual response: well, you didn't have to do that work.
Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet.
Unfortunately management only saw the “picks ambitious tasks” and were blind to everything else.
You can’t really blame people for responding to absurd incentives in absurd ways.
There's nothing like being annoyed at waiting for a blocker to motivate me to do the dishes. Second best motivation is being in a boring meeting I'm not really needed in.
Working under conditions of pressure and stress provides few long term benefits and is the refuge of those who don’t have the smarts to perform well and need to look like they do.
It's not a bad thing, but the parent you are replying to never said otherwise. They were talking about a fake performance rating that is given for political reasons.
Also a lot of people don’t realize that being available for questions or if something comes up IS work - it severely limits what you can do with that time even if working remotely.
So were you near your computer 9-5 today and could respond on short notice? Well then you worked 8 hours basically. And that availability itself is hugely valuable to employers.
It's also a problem with the Navy.
More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime and for maintaining peace on the seas. There are some. Acquisitions has been fraught with problems and weighty opinions of captains and admirals who want to feel important on enormous ships. Enormous ships which aren't as useful in the day to day operations in the Navy and would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry.
A lot of what gets done around the world is heavily influenced by how a decision will influence the feelings of people in power.
If those people have control over the schedules of other workers, then those workers lose their focus time.
You need guardrails to prevent org & overhead from overwhelming everything else.
Oh, you're bucking for CEO!
A lot of companies could have cut out four to eight hours of meetings a week and still maintained the same level of productivity.
