5 ms·

So, people sometimes suggest deemphasizing long hours as a solution to the wage gap. I once worked at a startup where we'd established product-market fit, and

• Cole_Jontrane 9y ago
  The opposite of "quality" is "equality". If we kept on the course we were on until a few months ago, we'd have to run society at the lowest common denominator.
• aaronblohowiak 9y ago
  "some people work too hard so it makes other people look bad by comparison" is a shitty argument from the beginning. It is the wrong approach. I like shorter workweeks, but this isnt the right way to get there.
• scryder 9y ago
  Trivially: fire you, and hire another poor shmuck at your starting salary to spend 90 hour weeks in time for the next launch. If they are willing to do that once, rewriting everything using a coding pack animal, it is pathological and they WILL be willing to do it twice, regardless of whatever reassurances to the contrary they give you on a death march. The 40 hour workweek as a standard isn't arbitrary, it's about preventing workers from creating a race to the bottom on hours worked, because that ends with anyone unwilling to be driven like a slave becoming unemployed. Do your part and defend your right to your personal time and to go home unmolested after your workday ends.
  • safek 9y ago
    Wait, but it wasn't like they forced me. In fact the founder openly talked about the importance of work-life balance. Believe it or not, I actually wanted to do it. (As for why I'd be so masochistic, I'm weird in that I actually enjoy mundane work like refactoring and rewriting abstractions. It's interesting to me.)
    • scryder 9y ago
      If I can be extremely frank, you don't HAVE to force someone gullible enough to do it willingly. And though this is conjecture on my part, even if you find refactoring and rewriting interesting, if you had the 50 hours back from doing these things and were instead rewriting and refactoring your own personal projects, I suspect you'd be equally as happy and would be something like 30x as likely to get fair remunerations for your work, rather than either enjoying the pittance they're going to give you or feeling the eventual heartbreak when they realize you're demanding a lot of money and they could just hire another passionate drone to pick up where you left off.
      • safek 9y ago
        Yeah, on a personal note, I do actually wish I had more time for my own stuff. And I'm not so sure I could get up to 90 again these days :) But the point is, even if working 90 hour weeks was a stupid thing to do, for better or worse it positioned me to negotiate more pay. Not because the company somehow had a fetish for long-hour workers, but because of what I learned during those hours. Is there a real way to prevent that? If not, is part of the pay gap inevitable?
    • mdpopescu 9y ago
      Heh. I no longer enjoy 90 hours a week (I was doing that 20 years ago), but I love refactoring / rewriting. In fact, when this contract ends, I should really look for one where refactoring is the main thing to do.
• adrianN 9y ago
  Where I work, the union would get rather angry if someone continuously works overtime and your supervisor would get a stern talking to. Some overtime is okay, for more overtime you need to get explicit permission, and I think there is a hard ceiling around 70 hours a week.
  • safek 9y ago
    What if I secretly kept coding at home?
    • hueving 9y ago
      You would quit in a few days in a union shop because it doesn't align with your personality. They expect clock punchers and care more about process/seniority rather than productivity. People who want to complete tasks with ruthless efficiency will struggle immensely with the waste at union (and government) orgs. Sorry for the rant, but you're question isn't worth worrying about because people that would want to work from home wouldn't be working in a union shop that barred work.
      • adrianN 9y ago
        Did you work in a company with a union? Because what you write is not true in my experience. We most definitely don't care more about process or seniority than productivity. Compenent, productive people get promoted. The union working rules make sense for the company. It's not sustainable to work that much. Worker burnout and churn is bad for the company. Fostering a culture that forces people to work until they drop if they want to get ahead is toxic.
    • adrianN 9y ago
      You're free to do what you want on your own time of course. The important difference is that the company can't expect you to work more. This prevents a culture of overtime from developing.
  • ludjer 9y ago
    Where we work we also have rules about working over time but when deliveries come we can if we want to, and even more then the limit set by HR. We then give it to our boss who writes it down in a book and we can take special work leave later when the stress is down. No one finds out. Always ways around things.
• guitarbill 9y ago
  > How do we stop me from doing that? By not hiring somebody who isn't a team player? Look, I don't know you, and sometimes there's a real deadline. But on a big project, I'd rather take two guys working 35 hours a week than one guy working 70 hours a week (all other things equal). And while most cooperations don't care about ethics, societies should. How the hell are you going to be a good parent after a 90 hour week? So we're going to rely on underpaid teachers to teach our kids everything? Hmm, I guess Adderall is the next best thing to parenting. All in all, nobody would stop you from being so stupid, and when you end up burned out, your fault. In a country with decent labour laws though the business might end up paying your salary during sick leave. Suddenly overtime is a massive liability. We could also make managers responsible. For example, somebody has a crash on the way home because he fell asleep at the wheel after weeks of overtime. The manager should have some blame for not managing the workload of his employers better. Of course, this is all moot as long as there's some asshole out there who thinks he needs to one-up everybody else and put in massive amounts of unpaid extra work. Generally though teams wise up to this quickly, and code written at 2am isn't an asset - it's a liability that somebody else needs to fix. I'll bet that's how your code ended up laden with technical debt, and I'll bet the next guy who inherits it from you will curse at the technical debt, maybe rewrite it in a frantic effort - and so the cycle begins again. It's always easy to make more money with a short-sighted view. In the long run, it's usually not worth it. But you only hear the stories about the exceptional successes, and rarely the tragedies.
  • hueving 9y ago
    >How the hell are you going to be a good parent after a 90 hour week? Not everyone has offspring. Stop projecting your insecurities about not working overtime onto the rest of us about how people who choose to work extra with their time are a detriment to society. Some people work well in grinds, particularly when it is pretty mindless refactoring and they have a strong grasp of the language. If this person put in the extra mile and actually delivered something that wasn't a turd, good for him/her for choosing to use the asset of time to boost the company and his/her career.
    • qb45 9y ago
• yowlingcat 9y ago
  Kinda skeptical of your assumptions. First of all, no codebase simply needs to be "rewritten" -- it's a nice thing to have the luxury of doing, but in production, you consciously aim to minimize the surface of churned code with every change. You made a choice, with certain tradeoffs against other potential choices, to rewrite the codebase. Fine. I've heard folks insist a lot of times that they get extra productivity from putting in more than 40-50 hours / week. From those who I've actually worked with, I have been able to verify that it's more of a psychological conviction than anything. You say that your 90-hour work weeks got you familiar with the codebase so that you became the person on the team who knew the most about it. But, a more experienced professional could have done it in even less time if than you, without such absurd hours. If you have so much tech debt that you absolutely need to refactor a bunch of things, 90% of the work should be grokking the original codebase (mostly reading and comprehension), as well as redesign. Of the remaining 10% of the work, 5% of that 10% should be writing tests. The remaining 5% is slicing and dicing the old code. If I was your manager (and I've had to talk engineers away from the ledge in similar situations before), you would likely be running this plan by me before you did it, and I would very strongly recommend you to take a different, less risky strategy to get whatever changes we needed for the client launch. If you decided against that, it's likely I would fire you for poor performance, although it's likely I wouldn't have hired you in the first place. Solid engineers don't need >50 hr workweeks to hit their deadlines, and they can sustain productivity reasonably indefinitely at healthily run organizations.
  • safek 9y ago
    I can't get into too much detail, but I didn't rewrite it just because I was a stubborn stickler. At one point it became impossible to read our code and explain the logic of our asynchronous workflow, which was spread out over and interwoven through about ten monstrous functions. Speaking with humility, at that particular company, no one else was going to rewrite it, because everyone had the mentality "we may as well keep stacking as much debt as needed, as long as we meet this deadline." Meanwhile every bug fix introduced two more. I'm relatively inexperienced, so I can't comment on the rest of your comment. There's a good chance you're right. Beyond my own anecdote, the larger allegory I was trying to get at was: I can't think of any real way to stop someone who really wants to work long hours; and at least some of the time, those extra hours will translate into more pay, resulting in a pay gap. Edit: I like your username! I yowl, I yowl.
• therealdrag0 9y ago
  Seems people are digging into your comment in a way that's going off topic. I think you make a good point; we shouldn't fight that pay reflects time/effort put in. But I think that when we 'engineer' society, we want to make sure we make it as easy as possible for people to make the decision between work or other endeavors. There's nothing we can do to get around that women give birth and men don't, but we can at least afford them both the same generous paternity leave. And on the other hand, the more we empower women to have educated careers, the less men will feel pressured to make as much money as possible just to support their family.