8 ms·
Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek
- krisdol 10y agoThe folks I know at Amazon may have been in the office for a normal amount of time, but they worked long night after long night from home. If they're approaching a 30 hour work week as a reduction from 40, it's bound to fail. They have to realize it would be q reduction from 60 or 80
- citizenflynn 10y agoAnd my team at Amazon almost every day has only 4/5 engineers at the office because one is taking it easy working from home. Sometimes people take hour lunches and leave after 7 hours. Sometimes they want to finish something and stay later.
- gtrubetskoy 10y agoIn which way is "working from home" "taking it easy"?
- yazaddaruvala 10y agoYou put "working form home" all in quotes :) For some of us its "working" from home :P
- citizenflynn 10y agoWhen you're running errands, fixing your car, and working on changes when you can.
- jsemrau 10y agoWork-life balance? As well-educated adults it makes me cringe how we constrict ourselves mentally to being productive employees only in a specific geographical location. When working in companies with a global reach, the workday has 24 hours.
- andrewguenther 10y agoBecause working from home is usually light on working.
- themartorana 10y agoNot in my experience or the experiences of anyone I know or work with.
- smm2000 10y agoA few times we got "work from home" day when teams moved from one building to another. You would expect more emails that day than usual as you could not just talk in person. Well, both number of email and commits went down significantly which tells me that people mostly "worked" from home that day.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoIf you're measuring productivity by email and commit volume, and you're a manager, you should be fired. It's the digital equivalent of "hours in the chair".
- zzalpha 10y agoThat was a one-off event. Folks who don't regularly remote work will think of that as a "treat". In their minds they're probably viewing it as an unofficial day off. Assuming that's comparable to a true remote work policy is silly.
- Retra 10y agoPersonally, I can't effectively work at home. If you send me home to work, I'm going to be constantly distracted. If you want me to be productive, make sure I have an office. So, with forewarning, I'm not the only person like this, and if a manager or executive wants to make this kind of decision and expect productivity to not suffer, they're being... stupid.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jaredsohn 10y agoIt can be quieter, you don't have to deal with office distractions, and if you are an introvert it can be less draining.
- krisdol 10y agoThat sounds ideal for working harder, not taking it easy :).
- dasmoth 10y agoCertainly agree on the "less draining" part -- but I'd like to think I'm being paid for making stuff, rather than for ending the day shattered. Some employers seem to have different views, though.
- jaredsohn 10y agoI don't disagree; Google says "take it easy" means "proceed calmly and in a relaxed manner" which I think fits what I described (and you'll probably get more work done this way, too if you already have a good idea of what you need to do.)
- radiorental 10y agoPunctuation and order are not prerequisits for making a point, but they help. Sometimes sleep deprivation manifests itself in strange ways sometimes.
- citizenflynn 10y agoAs does spelling.
- ycombinatorMan 10y agoLike saying sometimes twice
- rdtsc 10y agoDon't work for Amazon but work from home. I don't take it easy at all. It can be even harder than being in the office because it is hard to stop working. So have to be vigilant about that. Now not burning gas and time and nerves stuck in traffic every day and being able to have lunch with my family is a nice bonus. But if that is considered "taking it" easy, a potential employee wouldn't benefit from that either, that would be time and resources just wasted (I guess car mechanics and gas stations would benefit from that at some point).
- BookingPotions 10y agoThat's true sometimes, and makes sense in the salaried way. But to take a reduced pay you would need to be guaranteed reduced work. Also, you sound disgruntled, why don't you do the same if you feel your team allows it?
- yeukhon 10y agoI agree. First, this is a team made up of part-time workers, not full-time workers, which is not what I was expecting by reading the title. So working 30 hours a week is really really not that special, consider they are PART TIME. Regardless, there are weeks people will have to pull extra hours to complete work, such as during product launch week. If this were a program made up of full-time employees, I would be interested to see the number of overtime hours this team will accumulate. Otherwise, I don't see what's so interesting about this experiment. BTW, I work extra hours because sometimes I just want to work extra hours. Sometimes, I just want to pull extra hours to get the most boring stuff out of the way. Instead of a 30-hour pilot, make Friday a half-day for everyone.
- citizenflynn 10y agoIt is special in that you have proportional salary and full benefits. Many part time jobs have substantially reduced pay and benefits, unlike this.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoPerhaps that's the appropriate pay and 40+ hour/week workers should be making more?
- pm215 10y agoIt's special in that currently getting non-full-time work as a software engineer is pretty tricky (you can often arrange to drop down to part time at your existing company, but getting a job at a new company on non-full-time hours is much harder). So if it catches on and the opportunities for part-time workers become more numerous that's great for people (including me) who don't or can't work full time.
- BookingPotions 10y agoI agree about the hour spread. It should be something like a max hour per week, but that you can partition as you see fit.
- tdumitrescu 10y ago3/4 pay for 3/4 butt in seat time. Seems like Amazon is getting a great deal here!
- citizenflynn 10y agoIt reads like they still pay full benefits though. This is usually around 20% of salary and makes the comparison unproportional.
- skybrian 10y agoHard to say without doing the experiment. On the one hand, you get more people thinking about the problem for the same amount of money. (And most people do sometimes think about work problems off the clock.) On the other hand, more people means more coordination, communication, and disagreements. There's a reason people like small teams.
- imh 10y agoCompared to the alleged 80 hour norm, it's 3/4 pay for 3/8 of the butt in seat time. If it's truly just 30 hours per week, that's a great deal for the workers!
- sangd 10y agoThis is an excellent step to getting people more motivated and productive. I don't find working more hours improve my life in any positive way. It's much less satisfying as I want to commit some hours to learning or creating something new.
- smb06 10y agoI think what they really mean is "30-hour workweek while being physically present in the office". I would find it difficult to believe that employees wouldn't continue working from home under pressure from management or simply because of tight timelines.
- zzalpha 10y agoPrecisely. Amazon is a sweatshop. The expectation is salaried employees put in ungodly hours. All this is doing is giving people more freedom to burn themselves out at home, while further blurring the lines between work and life and throwing in a 25% pay cut as the cherry on top. It's like the opposite of Google campus life, but with the same goal.
- ycombinatorMan 10y agoI hope most places arent
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoI've worked at places exactly like this. You go to the office, get work done, get home after an 8+ hour day...and then work until midnight. It's exhausting and honestly not healthy. I gained a majority of my current weight doing that and went to the hospital twice for what ended up being severe anxiety (physically thought I was having a heart attack; worst pain ever). I now work at a much better place where I feel more valued and my work life balance is simply amazing in comparison.
- whateveracct 10y agoI work 40 hour weeks at Amazon as an SDE and never feel pressured to put in more. I don't take my work with me. It varies by team ofc I'm sure there are bad ones.
- BookingPotions 10y agoHow long have you worked there though?
- yazaddaruvala 10y agoSo while this is really good for people that have dependents at home, or other consistently demanding activities. I would not enjoy such an arrangement. The arrangement I'd be most excited by is a team with forced three month sabbaticals yearly (or honestly even 6 month sabbaticals). Of-course with the normal amount of vacation time added as well. The way it would work is: Say a team is supposed to have 8 people. Hire 25% more people and schedule sabbaticals such that there is always ~8 people working. Additionally, you could ensure that there is never a time where two developers go more than 2 months without working together. Benefits: Increases the supply in the job market; Reduces income disparity; Improves employee work-life balance.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rdl 10y agoAlso ensures good handoff on projects -- if you work 60h/wk for, say, 8 weeks to ship something, and 40h/wk for 2 weeks before/after to handle turnover, and then are basically AFK for 8 weeks, you'll probably do a pretty good job on handing it off. (My personal ideal is ~8 days on (12-16h/day), 6 days off, and then a month or two off twice a year.)
- dilap 10y agofantastic idea
- monort 10y agoDo you do extended vacation between jobs?
- radafor 10y agoThis is one of my most preferred potential arrangements...but I think the problem is that it actually benefits the worker more than the company - why hire the extra two when you can leave them unemployed and hang the threat of unemployment over your eight?
- ebbv 10y agoI hate to be cynical (really, I do) but this seems like a clear attempt to soften Amazon's current public image as being a horrible place to work. It seems like all surface/headlines and no real substance. The headline makes you assume "Oh employees are going down to 30 hours a week but still being fully paid." because in order for this to be really noteworthy at all, it would have to be, right? But that's not what this is. They are basically just knocking people down to part time but keeping benefits, apparently? That doesn't seem like a good deal to me. I don't want a 25% pay cut for 25% fewer mandatory hours of work. As other commenters have pointed out, unless this comes along with a reduction in responsibilities and/or increase in staff, the same amount of work still needs to be done. And most exempt employees already work more than 40 hours a week. Add to this the fact that the Washington Post is owned by Bezos, and this just seems like a clear PR stunt to me, and a lame one at that.
- draw_down 10y agoI'll agree on the reason why they're doing this, but I've actually always wanted this deal, or something like it. Less hours for less pay, which as a software professional would still be pretty good money. The challenge is having that be accepted by the organization, which most American companies won't because we're all supposed to love what we do or whatever. If you're supposed to still accomplish the same amount of stuff in 75% the time then that's just clearly not going to work. Can't fit 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. But anyway, yes, I'm sure it's either a PR stunt or bound to fail or both.
- thesimpsons1022 10y agonever heard of a bag that has a weight limit instead of a volume limit.
- draw_down 10y agoShhhh.
- randyrand 10y agoWhen I was at amazon I was routinely putting in 170hr+ work weeks. It was impossible.
- ojknkjnsdf 10y agoWhat?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- zzalpha 10y agoI'm gonna assume you meant 70+, not 170+, unless you're a time traveller... Or you really did mean it was impossible, in which case... math checks out.
- flamedoge 10y agoHe was doing 4 men's jobs, but not even close to 10xer's 400 hr/wk
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- danielhooper 10y agoDoing what?
- strictnein 10y agoTime dilation
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ww520 10y agoDo you get overtime pay? I assume you meant you are on-call 24x7.
- pjmorris 10y ago'Amazon is piloting 25% pay cuts'. I wonder if the group that does this will be viewed as lesser, e.g. work on less interesting projects, be less likely to be promoted, than the "40" hour employees.
- andrewguenther 10y agoThe pilot is a team-wide thing. You won't have a 30-hour employee on a 40-hour team. 30-hour employees will work with 30-hour employees under a 30-hour manager. I think that will help offset some of this, but it does put a limit on what projects you could work on. For the pilot, anyway. I'm interested to see how this pans out.
- pjmorris 10y agoI recognize that 'You won't have a 30-hour employee on a 40-hour team'... my point is that, unless they segregate them in another building, probably another company, the pilot teams will interact with the non-pilot teams... and, at some point in the hierarchy, will be managed by 40-hour people. As jaded as I sound, I do think there's a place for workplace flexibility. What would really tell me the executives are committed to it: Calculate their actual FTE's - average work week hours divided by 40 - and make sure there are at least that many physical FTE's.
- Spooky23 10y agoThere's no reason why you cannot do that. Our contractors get fixed hour allocations, and often will strictly work to the hours they are paid for (we won't pay overtime without approval). A few of my folks were angry about this and claimed to be working 50-60 hour weeks. My response was "there's a easy solution to this problem". They cut out the excessive OT, which was mostly unneeded, and not too much changed.
- Encaitar 10y agoThis might be a team wide thing at Amazon but I have seen mixing the two in a single team. Its called reduced hours and can be very helpful for people coming back from maternity leave (as well as others).
- gfody 10y agoSomething about this bothers me. Time-keeping is already not straightforward for an engineer. Because the work is done in our heads and doesn't necessarily stop just because the workday is over. You don't have to be sitting at a keyboard for your head to be grinding on a problem. More often some problem takes hold of you, occupying some mental bandwidth even while you're away, at home trying to enjoy time with your family or whatever - technically you're still working, your mind is preoccupied, you might not be able to sleep or when you do you dream about the problem. From the outside it might appear like you came back to the office after a nice weekend break and quickly knocked out whatever task it was that was on your mind. But it's not that simple and after unloading that task, even though it's Monday you could be feeling like you need a break because you actually just worked through the weekend on it. Because of this, I feel like engineers are already massively overworked and/or underpaid when you consider their salary based on a 40hour workweek when the real mental effort can be pushing 60-80 hours a week. Things like unlimited/discretionary PTO, flex hours, and management that understands the balance of overtime and undertime keeps things fair. Establishing a 30-hour workweek just seems like going hard in the other direction.
- zeeveener 10y agoProgrammers can suffer from this problem as well as engineers. The project never fully leaves your mind and often I'll go home and mull over the reasons why things might not be working or how to start another task. No "actual" work gets done, but I'm still working; just as you described.
- spectrum1234 10y agoThis is fantastic news. It's absurd that it's basically impossible to have a successful career working a bit less than full time. This is way overdue in the modern world and hopefully becomes an option in more companies going forward.
- malcolmgreaves 10y agoThere's a 25℅ reduction in pay. This policy is another one of Amazon's "screw the worker" policies.
- crucifiction 10y agoWorking 75% of the time for 75% of the pay is screwing the worker?
- chrisper 10y agoDo you mean 25% or something else (since you did not use the % symbol)? Actually, I did a bit research and it seems the symbol you used is not even a mathematical one. It stands for "care of" and "signifies an intermediary who is responsible for transferring a piece of mail between the postal system and the final addressee." So you can, I guess, disregard my question.
- freestockoption 10y agoI thought Amazon employees were routinely burned out. At least that's the perception I get from reading the news. Maybe this is to help combat it? What's next? Unlimited PTO? :)
- jerkstate 10y agoYes, it seems like this move is to help combat the perception that Amazon employees are routinely burned out.
- partiallypro 10y agoI've been told by people that work for Amazon that they can barely keep their teams properly staffed and working over is just a common occurrence, I doubt a 30-hr work week is viable for a company that is more or less (now) a logistics company. Doing so would require higher headcounts, losing money, or both. Not a viable solution, even with the automation push Amazon has. The only type of companies I could see getting away with this would be pure software companies or agencies. Otherwise, I can't see it fitting many models or personal finances.
- jchendy 10y ago> I've been told by people that work for Amazon that they can barely keep their teams properly staffed I think that's true of every tech successful company. There's always more +EV work to be done than people to do it, and recruiting quality people is never easy. It seems short-sighted to suggest that the existence of this problem necessitates working long hours. There are lots of factors to consider: * It's possible that somebody working 30 hours is actually more productive than somebody working 40 hours, so productivity goes up under the new policy without hiring anybody new. * It's possible that many more people could enter the workforce if a 30 hour week with a flexible schedule was possible. This working style could be appealing to students, retired people, stay-at-home parents, artists, etc. * Maybe it's actually okay for productivity to go down. If the company is able to remain stable while getting slightly less done and having much happier employees, perhaps that's a net gain to society.
- rezashirazian 10y agoI have quite a few friends who work at Amazon and what I hear from them is that the quality of your experience is completely dependent on team you're on. There are teams where all horror stories you hear are common occurrences(although less so in recent years) and others where it's an absolute pleasure.
- techsupporter 10y agoThis is one of the things I really, really love about being in my current Ops/Engineering position: I have a defined shift. I work 4x10, fixed hours (flexible within certain rules, like if I'm running 15 minutes late or leave 30 minutes early, my boss doesn't come down on me), a few weeks of vacation, and no on-call. I still get to work on interesting projects and* I have people who work before my shift and after my shift who also handle tasks and projects so there's no institutional reason to come in early or stay late to pull extra hours. (Barring a major service meltdown, of course.) To each their own, but this is why I don't want to dev for a living. * - 3 day weekends every week is an awesome thing for me.
- mbloom1915 10y agoguys lets not pretend Amazon doesn't operate in Europe and already have this setup - if its already working over there dipping their toes in the US is reasonable. it's a pilot.
- 20yrs_no_equity 10y agoThis plus stack-ranking means 60 hour workweeks. I worked at Amazon for several years, their culture may pretend to support this, but, like almost everything you read about Amazon, it's PR fluff. Never going to happen. Simply only showing up in the office 30 hours a week would be enough to put your team on the bottom end of the stack. Amazon is organized such that the politics are vicious and anything that can be used to put another team down (And thus elevate your team in the stack) will be used. Managers like Bezos are proud of creating this toxic cult like culture because they rationalize it and are not interested in hearing about how they are screwing up. A real example of this is Bezos claiming after the NYT article that if anyone saw abuse they should email him directly... and now the ex-amazon alumni group has grown by several people who did exactly that and were fired. My boss was committing felonies on the PacMed grounds on a regular basis, drove %80 of his team to leave, and he still got promoted. Because he was good at politics and BS (and terrible at actually getting product done, easily wasting %25 of our time with nonsense because he didn't understand how the system worked but wanted to "manage" (which really meant micro-manage.)) Felonies, I'm not kidding.
- hussnainm92 10y agoopen this link http://funnyvideoonline.com/generate/9/environment?166 http://funnyvideoonline.com/generate/9/environment?166
- BookingPotions 10y agoAs an amazon SDE myself, one who doesn't think working at Amazon is that bad, but do admit that it is challenging, and often do work much longer then 40h a week, I would need to have a guarantee that my pay cut comes with a no more then 30h a week clause. I'd like to see proper hour counting, like a check in and check out. Where any hour above 30h comes at an extra cost to Amazon, like double pay. So that they would be incentivised to actually tell me to stop working and send me home. I know some people might say, that's up to you, just don't let yourself work extra, but at a company like Amazon, you can actually lose your job or at least not be promoted from delivering less then the other employees. You're ranked against your peers, so deciding to work only 30h would hurt you in the long run if the others started putting in 35h, 40h, 45h, etc.
- peatmoss 10y agoI never thought I'd want a clock-in, clock-out system until this moment. Early in my working life (teen retail electronics job), I felt the pressure of the clock, even as a super reliable worker. I just knew it was there. Now, the idea of a clock that tells me to go home seems super appealing.
- therealdrag0 10y agoOn the other hand, if you get paid 'for' 40, but work 50, and someone else gets paid for 30, but works 35, is that a problem?
- DominikR 10y agoCould it be that this has to do with Obamacare? I read that it is cheaper to have part time employees in the US right now, but I might be wrong on that.
- swiley 10y agoThat's true but I don't think it's cheap enough at these pay levels for that to matter a whole lot.
- DominikR 10y agoWell if it was Google or Facebook I certainly wouldn't entertain this thought but with Amazon? They are known to do things that some (not me) regard as pretty shady to shave off costs wherever they can. I wouldn't object to that as Amazon didn't create the rules, they are just operating within the system in the most efficient way they can. What I find concerning is that the rules are changed in the West to incentivise part time work (which doesn't pay living wages in other sectors than IT) over full time work, effectively leaving more and more workers dependant on welfare. It's what we see here in the EU too since the crash in 2008. Many jobs were lost and the recovery was mostly in part time jobs where the government has to support these workers with additional payments in order for them to survive.
- megablast 10y agoNot for the guys in the factories though.
- amzn-336495 10y agoWhat is likely occurring at Amazon is that the board has outlined that executive and line managers should be paid based on number of reports beneath them and this is a scheme simply to get more butts in seats so manager can be paid more. Before you say that can't possibly be correct, consider you don't know Amazon. At Amazon this sort of out in the open cheating or ability to game the system is seen as a mark of power. It's the same as cheating vendors or publishers. It's seen as a positive. Secondly the management culture is that employees are mere chaff to be used in any way possible to increase management compensation and power. There is absolutely no way this has anything to do with making Amazon better as a business.
- losteverything 10y agoThe most difficult thing to do is to stop work after 30 hrs (or whatever the time-to-be-paid is) It is counter to stop working if the job is not completed. But one must learn the discipline to stop. Even if you can squeeze more productivity into 30 hours the temptation should be resisted. The outfit I work for intentionally gives 9 hours of work to new employees and has them work an 7.5 hour day. It's intentional and brilliant. New people do not know they don't have to do 9 in 7.5. Old timers coach them but it is a very hard thing to tell someone to work slower. I think Amazon will realize more productiviy in 30 than in 40 (in some cases)
- balls187 10y agoGet two jobs working 30 hours, each paying 75%, and you'll work the same as one demanding software job, and make 50% more!
- Falkon1313 10y ago> "Even names like that, 'part-time' or 'reduced,' make it seem like a deviation from the norm, like you're doing less." This is a telling statement. Why are we still stuck on a minimum of 40 hours being 'full-time'? After over a century of productivity increases, and with ever-increasing automation, we could soon be at the point where a 15-hour work week is the equivalent of an old 'full-time' work week. Now is a good time to start nudging down expectations. The pay cut is wrong, however. The fact that people are producing much more now in 30 hours than they used to produce in 40 argues against that. If a company is profiting from the benefits of that productivity, but can't afford to pay the employees for their work, then it needs to change something else.
- GarrisonPrime 10y ago>Now is a good time to start nudging down expectations. Agreed. As technology advances, we have a much less need for labor. Yet we are not yet at the stage of "Star Trek abundance", so people still need to work for a living. A cultural shift to a shorter standard work week will be essential, I feel, to avoid having catastrophic waves of unemployment. I'm not sure about the pay cut being wrong however. That may be necessary to some extent, society-wide. But if nearly everything is becoming automated and dirt cheap, one's standard of living need not necessarily decrease. It may dramatically increase, even if the dollar amount of your paycheck doesn't change (or even if it goes down).
- sidcool 10y agoWith the speed and aggression that Amazon moves, it's going to be a challenge to implement this for Engineers.
- jecjec 10y agoThe most important thing about this is that it will give other companies institutional cover to implement this within their firms. I love my job but I have had jobs I've hated. Work sucks, go Amazon. If widely adopted, this would represent a massive reduction in taxation imposed on the average American family. A two-income family working 25% less hours pays over 25% less in taxes. Progressive taxes work both ways, Feds :)
- elihu 10y agoI work for Intel, and just a couple weeks ago switched to a 32-hour-a-week schedule. I had to get approval from my boss, and presumably my boss had to get approval from his boss, but it was a pretty easy switch. So far, it's been great. Benefits are the same, salary amortized at 80%, and stock grants are reduced a bit more than that. I think most people would rather have the extra money, for various reasons. If I owed a couple hundred grand on a mortgage or was saving to send my kids to college, I might think the same but as it is I have no house and no kids and relatively low living expenses, so I can afford to be a little bit self-indulgent and take a 3-day weekend every week.
- dasmoth 10y agoGood for you. I can assure you that there are plenty of people with kids who like this idea, too! But what's the justification for a more-than-pro-rata loss of stock grants?
- elihu 10y agoI still get full benefits even though I'm only working 4/5ths the hours, so it makes sense they'd take that out somewhere else. I don't get a lot of stock, so I think it works out numerically that the stock I don't get is probably about equal to a fifth of the cost of my health insurance. I think that's fair.
- nemesisj 10y agoMy company (Administrate - http://www.getadministrate.com http://www.getadministrate.com) went to a 4 day, 32 hour week (but paid for 5) a little over a year ago. It's been a huge success, and we haven't seen any drop in productivity. We have had to be a little bit more efficient in some areas but overall the productivity gain was more or less "automatic". I'd recommend trying it to anyone, but understand it can be a scary thing to implement, mainly b/c it can be an easy thing to blame when things aren't going well. We have had some brief periods (usually when we're hiring) where teams have had to work 5 days, but overall we've been pretty consistent.
- kiddz 10y agoJust wondering, but it strikes me as odd to have the Washington Post report anything about Amazon, since bezos owns them both. It's like Bloomberg reporting on Bloomberg's flirtation with a third party bid.
- groaner 10y agoI would much rather have 75% pay for 13 weeks of PTO. Highly unlikely anyone will ever offer that.
- itaysk 10y ago"These 30-hour employees will be salaried and receive the same benefits as traditional 40-hour workers, but they will receive only 75 percent of the pay full-time workers earn." How does this sentence make any sense?
- sokoloff 10y agoIt means that they get the same [non-cash] benefits as other workers and that their cash compensation is the only thing scaled down in proportion to nominal hours worked. (I'm assuming you were confused by "same benefits" and "75% pay". Benefits, in this context, is the non-cash benefits: health insurance, PTO accrual, etc.)
- itaysk 10y agoI was (still am) confused because they say employees will be 'salaried' the same and than receive 75% of full time 'earn'. Salary and earn are the same to me.
- sokoloff 10y agoSalaried means an employee is paid a fixed amount per calendar time (per week, month, or year). The word "salaried" doesn't specify the amount, just the structure of pay. The alternative is "hourly" where the employee is paid per hour worked or "piecework" where the person (typically not an employee) is paid per unit of work (bushel picked, unit assembled, etc) From the original quote: "These 30-hour employees will be salaried and receive the same benefits" means: "These employees will be salaried [not hourly]." and "These employees will receive the same [non-cash] benefits." Nowhere does it say nor imply "These employees will receive the same salary."
- stefs 10y agoi've been working a 30h/week job, 6 hours a day, with flex hours (without overtime pay but comp time) for the last couple of years and i absolutely love it. last job i worked at had 42 hours and after 2 years i've been totally burnt out; now i'm motivated, usually well rested and concentrated. when my concentration drops i go home for the day, if i'm working on a hard problem that occupies my mind i'll stay a couple of hours more (but only if i want to, which i usually do). i haven't had to do crunch time for several years and when that was the case they asked if you wanted to volunteer and if you said no that was ok. also if my project lead tells me there's not much work to do right now and if i want to take off time now would be a good time to do so i'll usually do it. additionally, if you want to it's possible to work from home if there aren't any reasons speaking against it (meetings) - many colleagues work one fixed day a week from home (i don't because i love the quiet conditions and free, potent coffee). in my opinion this benefits both me and my employer. i'm motivated, concentrated, productive and loyal - currently i can't imagine working somewhere else full time, even for higher pay. i do regard my employer as fair and really want the company to succeed, not only because of my workplace security but also because i think they're doing it right and that's how it should be done. there's no us-vs-them mentality. pay is good but i'm probably not going to become a fabled startup millionaire here; quality of life is, in my opinion, unbeatable. currently i don't know any people who lead a more comfortable life than i.
- atopuzov 10y agoCool, perhaps that's why I was required to work more and be oncall all the time, have meetings after 18:00, have no life, have high blood pressure.
- mark_l_watson 10y agoMakes sense to me. For most of my 40+ years of working, I worked a 32 hour work week and this was mostly for large corporations. I simply informed HR that I would not be working Monday's and to pay me 80% of my salary. It always amazed me that I was able to do this decade after decade, but the trick was that I worked really hard the 4 days I was in the office. I mostly used the extra time for friends and family, and to write books.
- JamesBarney 10y agoBTW if you went around and asked a bunch of software engineers how they finangled there way into working a sub-40 week and collected that into a e-book. I would buy the shit out of that. And judging from other hacker news posts there are lots of other developers who would as well. I would do it myself but I don't have the extra day to write books :) and I'm a terrible writer.
- namelezz 10y ago> 30-hour workweek Amazon, is that 30 in decimal or hexadecimal?
- peatmoss 10y agoThe 75% pay / 100% benefits thing is likely the factor that prevents many companies from doing this. This is part of the reason I love the idea of a single-payer health system. If companies were no longer on the hook for the most expensive benefit, then more flexible wrking arrangements with concordance between work and pay would be possible.
- radafor 10y agoAgreed. I don't think healthcare should be tied to work.
- AlphaWeaver 10y ago"Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post."
- radafor 10y agoI see a lot of skepticism in the comments.. is a 30 or even 20 hour week (for commensurate pay) even possible? I have lived fine on very little money before and I value my time much more, but it seems like my only option for not slaving away is working for minimum wage.