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.

the point of those enormous ships is to minimize the chances of war happening.

>More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime

Russia lost the big ship on the Black Sea and have the situation you're describing - ie. their fleet is several missile frigates, and such their situation is very weak. The fleet can't really operate. (And with recent successful attack on a Russian airfield in Crimea the air support for those remaining ships is expected to dwindle which will be a clear show case of how [in]capable fleet without air support (which we do actually know since WWII really), and that air support usually, until you operate near your shores, can only come from aircraft carriers)

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.

Being the person who comes up with mediocre solutions to hard problems is way more impressive than the guy who has expertly designed solutions to easy problems. One of the devs on my team is like that. Everything he writes is like 30% broken from the get go but all his stuff ships and nobody else has the moxy to blindly charge into the unknown and not get stuck because their afraid to cut themselves on edge cases.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics)

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.

It's not as obvious a "yes" as I first thought. I do high-leverage work, but that just means my work builds on the work of many others. I couldn't do anything near what I do now we're it not for thousands or even millions of other people doing low-leverage work that provides the fulcrum for my work. It's society that allows me to do my high-leverage work -- why should I personally collect the pay check for it?

Also I won the genetical lottery to have the interest and intellectual capacity for this work. Is that something I should be rewarded for? Or is it an unfair advantage that other people should be compensated for not having? There's nothing about my personal effort that has given me that advantage.

Not to mention the education and relaxed upbringing that allowed me to reach this potential. That's also a gift from society to me. Should my response be to not repay? To hoard the rewards alone?

I don't know! That's the system we live in. But is it the system we ought to have?

Indeed. And I would argue that society answers this question already, in the form of teacher salaries. Teachers have the mightiest of levers: the not-yet-capable enter and the capable to highly capable leave. Any high-impact individual was molded by them.

Granted, there's not a trivial 1-on-1 relating between future excellence and a particular teacher. On the other hand, every person who had an outsized impact on the world had teachers that helped him/her along that path.

So I'd say society is pretty comfortable with a big "naah" here: teacher salaries are nothing special. (In the West - I remember reading about rock star salaries for good tutors in some Asian country.)

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!

Seems like lots of ppl still can’t fathom something better than an interesting, high paying, but still fulltime job as their “ideal”, or don’t have any passions they’d rather spend their time on.

IMO one reason why so many haven’t found any passions is precisely cause all their time has been spent working, which is sad, honestly.

There is definitely a lot of work out there that needs to be done that isn't going to be anyone's passion. Still needs to be done, and it can pay well, and then you can do all kinds of fun things that you'd never be able to get paid for on the side.

A lot of people aren't monogamous in their passions either, which is kind of what you need to be in order to turn it into a career. Personally, I can't imagine every being so focused on one thing that it's all I'd want to do. I like my work, and I also love a lot of things that aren't my work.

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.

I’ll take 4 hours a week at work, a livable salary, and 36 hours sitting in a coffee shop reading a book and shitposting on Reddit thanks.

Any fiction recommendations?

Still worth it?