So, gig economy. Or, at best, hourly wage at Amazon warehouse, but for developers. I heard those warehouses are super extra no-bullshit efficient.

I mentioned benefits in another post, so I wouldn’t say it’s gig economy.

What other environment could give a developer $100+/hr, ability to make their own schedule, and essentially all legal protections to work on side projects, work for other companies, etc. at the same time?

Is it for everyone? No. But we’ve had more quality devs interested than we can employ at this point, so I’d say it’s attractive to a good portion of the market.

Your success in this direction to turn software development into some kind of cattle feedlot is only a mirage. Let me make it clear in economic terms: you're up a few chips at the casino, for now, because the market allows you to be. In the long run it's not sustainable, and won't yield any major feats of engineering with any level of competence.

At what point did I say or lead anyone to believe that we 1.) expect developers to be autodidacts? Because we don’t have meetings? Seems an odd way to measure engineering culture and 2.) this had anything to do with cutting cost? Our hourly wages are high enough to where the cost savings is negligible compared to fully loaded salaries. I’d be happy to share the numbers over email.

Your idea of the master-apprentice relationship seems overtly romantic. I never said we don’t train staff, or haven’t brought on younger engineers. I literally onboarded an intern last week. They’ll likely make more working less than any intern at any FAANG is making this summer.

> Your success in this direction to turn software development into some kind of cattle feedlot is only a mirage.

I have to straight up disagree on the premise that it’s a mirage. Nevertheless, this is certainly an experiment, and one where we’ll adapt as needed.

I feel as if you’re focusing too much on the contractor concept. Would you be as opposed to this model if say I hired FTEs at 20 hours per week? So essentially half salary. How is this any different (note my previous comments about benefits).

But if this "hourly wage for hourly work and nothing else" becomes a norm, that's what we'll eventually get, I'm afraid.

CleverControl employee monitoring pitch: "This software offers powerful features: keylogging, screen recording, live viewing, remote settings, clipboard control, Skype monitoring, and more. The software records time that was spent on this or that activity and shows you stats in graphs. Besides, the app captures screenshots at all important events like right-clicking and window change, and it can record activity near the device with the help of a webcam and microphone. Moreover, CleverControl records employees’ active and inactive time, letting you detect lazybones and reward hard work."

"Another unconventional tactic is work-to-rule (also known as an Italian strike, in Italian: Sciopero bianco), in which workers perform their tasks exactly as they are required to but no better."

I treat it as a total, humiliating devaluation of creative engineering work (and thus their identity!) to that of unskilled factory workers.

Unions would be helpful for both, in my view.

This is how it works already in many companies, also infamous 996

There are (sad, imo) people whose entire lives revolve around work. Their friends are there, and they enjoy social outings with their work colleagues.

To me, social outings are just an unnecessary risk. I do not talk to my coworkers like I talk to my friends, I do not want my coworkers knowing too much about my personal life, and especially when booze is involved it's too easy to find yourself on the receiving end of something awkward, or witness to something awkward.

Meetings are simple: if it's important enough to take an hour of my day it's important enough to count as seat time. When my productivity drops and my manager asks why I tell them that meetings are taking up too much time. It's their job to make sure I have what I need to do my best work. If they tell me to work later I start looking for other jobs. It's so easy to get a senior developer job now, and there's really no long term benefit staying anywhere, that I'm not exactly sorry for leaving in this case.

I have literally zero interest in "culture". I wouldn't even work for a company if I didnt need the money to live. I don't understand how you've derived the dichotomy that you can either have mindless time sink "culture" bullshit OR an amazon warehouse slaveshop.

Call me a pessimist. I think people obsessed with "work culture" are sad. You shouldn't hate the 8 hours of work you do, but you also shouldn't center your entire life on it. Afterall, it could be taken away from you with a penstroke the next time the CEO needs to make room in the budget for their salary.

That line started off well, but ended off terrible. I really don't want to be working in a place where I'm treated like a replaceable machine. You do you, man.

This seems like a leap. Where did I insinuate that anyone is a cog in a machine? Just because I said work should be about work? Why does it have to be about anything else? If you need your job to provide a social aspect to your life that’s completely fine. It’s just not a part of the business I’m building. It’s why I think having options is great. Everyone works differently.

I interview fairly often with potential employers, sometimes just for the experience and insights. Never once did I consider taking a job for other reasons than the type of work and its pay (commuting time and factors not directly in control of the company aside).

I'm not even the type of person who hates team events and the like, at least at the companies I have been working at these usually were a lot of fun. It's just nothing that keeps me from moving on from or motivates me to take some job.

But in the US you see the opposite happening at a lot of large companies. I think what you described would be the future of a company with a homogeneous type of worker. However, we are humans we are not machines ignoring that we are humans can be detrimental. Not to mention worker equality is becoming important to be a stable work environment. It’s important to forget you have other roles and industries that simply cannot function the way you described (doctors, nurses, flight attendants, pilots, plumbers, etc.)

Also, I want I’m not saying the current technology corporate environment doesn’t need optimizing. It certainly does but it seems that we are moving towards that and trying to focus on what matter in HR as well.

I just fly home from the US. And … I still have to work instead of just spending time with my parents that I haven’t seen in years.

I earn more than 200k. ( not west coast ) it’s a decent salary right? Why can’t I have vacation, too? I asked and putted and asked again…

All that will accomplish one thing: one day in the next 2 years I will wake up, look at my bank account. And quit. To have actual free time.

I told that to my boss in those term, we have a decent relationship. But … he gave me some HR bullshit.

That's how it works in Europe. It's common that a boss will ask an employee to work less, because the amount of time they work is not even legal sometimes, or to force people to go on vacation for weeks to use their vacation days. It's also more fair and don't put pressure for other employees that value their life outside work.

It’s worth more than the proportional time I would take off. It’s very valuable to me. Like 5k / week would be a good price tag. I have no debt and more stuff than I need. Now let’s me enjoy life while I still can ( and keep working on that job that I actually enjoy )

I’m not sure to understand about the net positive. The response I got was that taking time off without pay would 1) set a bad « example » or something of that sort and 2) make it hard to plan for resource availability.

Does that answer your question?

It's a pretty infuriating setup. From the employers perspective, the amount of money you lose by having someone not work is so obscene, so quickly, that you have to fight your monkey brain pretty hard to not be a total asshole about it.

Even in this well paying industry, you could give everyone obscene raises, before time off makes any financial sense for the average employer. I don't think enough employees realise this.

I heard this argument in North America but not here in Australia. I mean, small businesses might require critical people at critical times, but generally in larger orgs this shouldn’t be too hard.

This is the weird and intuitively wrong stuff that happens, when employers make more through their employees work than their employees do, even after factoring in their salary.

There is something that make me think something is fishy in that approach : why are more and more places switch to unlimited PTO if it’s that costly to give folks time off?

I had unlimited PTO a couple of times, it can sucks ( pressure NOT to take any PTO for the company sake ) Or he just fine.

"Why do people get more time off now than ever before in human history (which they do)?"

There are now more forces than ever, that work against unlimited exploitation of human labor. For example, human beings in most countries have enforceable rights and they want time off, and the market that has to compete for those people. Humans are shitty machines. If you piss them off, they do shitty work. If you treat them poorly they leave. (In reality, "treating them poorly" translates to "treating them slightly less good then someone else") Since having someone quit working for you is pretty fucking expensive (assuming, of course, that they are actually being productive), you better make sure they do want to continue working for you and so you make it worth their while.

Another important example would be worker protection laws, that simply dictate certain amenities.

"Why is everyone doing unlimited PTO, specifically?"

Less clear on that one. Part of it is certainly it being a trend. If other people do it and employees want it, then you might have to go along, again, to not get pushed out of the market.

But since it clearly does not ever actually mean "unlimited PTO" (you'd be out of a job pretty quickly if you tried), an interesting followup question might be what the fuck it actually means and who benefits? Maybe employees are a little confused about how much time off to take and take less than before? Or maybe they feel pressured to underbid each other? Maybe it's also just that the flexibility it adds to the job leads to more loyal employers, which is pretty nifty in a market starved for workers.

I think that everyone is a bit wary of setting difficult precedents in employment situations, as well as the possibility of creating rifts between people with different ‘deals’. That said, I think we should all place a higher priority on coming up with mutually beneficial arrangements.

As I stated it’s easily worth 5k for me. ( 7 days, 5 days would be $3500 )

That négociation did not go well. I got 2 extra day off and was told to stop making noise.

Oh. well.

It’s crazy how they don’t realize it’s just alienate workers.

Its always interesting to see how other people live.

Sick/vacation days are harder because we pay for whatever I get an invoice for. Since we don’t track what people do on a day by day basis (I often don’t even know if someone is working that day until I reach out to them or slack, or vice versa), there’s nothing stopping them for billing me for extra hours. And to be honest I really wouldn’t care. I just care about output and quality of that output.

If you don't know if they're working, don't fucking slack them. How about you check their calendar or send an email.

Slack is not for asynchronous communication.

It's amazing how high and mighty people can be and then they ping people for non-emergencies while they're on vacation.

Depends on the organisation.

Where I'm currently working, we use Discord. Discord is similar to Slack.

It is explicitly for asynchronous communication. We are supposed to not expect immediate replies to questions and comments on Discord, especially as other teammates are in different timezones. Sometimes there's real time chat, but it depends who is on at the time.

I posted some comments yesterday. There was one reply within a few hours, and two more this morning.

Email is pretty much deprecated. Nobody uses it, except to set up calendar entries for meetings, and formal things like HR and invoices.

Some, not all, but certainly some people use work as their only form of social life and interaction. Which leads to a lot of time not working. I’m not saying this is inherently bad. It’s just not the type of company we’re building. Filtering for contract work has taken care of this so far. Will continue to evaluate as we scale up.