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Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of an old adage about tech work and other skilled labors: If you give me a task that takes a normal perosn 8 hours, and I finish it in 30 minutes, you're paying me for the skill, knowledge and experience that allows me to do it in 30 minutes. I do not owe you another 7.5 hours of work. I owe you the job being done, not the hours it should take to do it.

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Isn't that one of the reasons Hacker News exists, to fill those other 7.5 hours?

> I do not owe you another 7.5 hours of work.

Only if you are a contractor and you've fulfilled your contract. If you are a salaried employee I expect you to keep your hopper of tasks full so you aren't sitting around idle 95% of the day waiting for me to feed you 30 minute taskers

Why? As a salaried employee you're literally paying me for my ability to get work done, not for my hourly output. If the goal is to keep me busy for X number of hours a day, instead of getting a job done whatever it requires, why am I salaried?

> If the goal is to keep me busy for X number of hours a day, instead of getting a job done whatever it requires, why am I salaried?

The "goal" in a lot of cases is nebulous (i.e. "keep developing the product", "improve stability", etc). There might not be a manager feeding you tasks every time you run out. At least in my company, you are expected to figure out on your own how to continually make the product better and proactively do it, not sit around idle after rapidly finishing the last task your manager gave you.

If you are just a dumb worker that can only work when your manager fills your queue, you are not valuable to me as a salaried employee (you are more valuable as a contractor who I can call upon for a one-off difficult task that you can then complete in 30 minutes).

So you're not trusting the salaried employee to use their judgement on how best to utilize their time, but instead assuming they instead use their skill to be a butt in a seat and working for at least 40 hours? What's special about the salary then? It's just easier than an hourly system?

You seem to be presenting confused ideas.

Here's what I believe:

If I pay you a salary, I want (roughly) 40 hours per week of productive work at your current skill level. Note: I consider sitting around thinking about things relevant to the product or company to be productive work. If you believe your level of output deserves higher compensation than you are receiving, come talk to me or find a company that will pay what you think you are worth. However, accepting a salary and then doing tasks really fast and then going idle (watching netflix, working on side projects, etc.) until your manager cattle prods you is not acceptable for a salaried employee; that would be more appropriate for a contractor where you can idle on your own dime.

If this is happening, it's 100% due to bad management. It means the employee wasn't given creative freedom and a strategic direction to go in. The very last thing any manager should ever do is punish their best employees (e.g. the person who can finish a whole day's worth of work very quickly).

> The very last thing any manager should ever do is punish their best employees (e.g. the person who can finish a whole day's worth of work very quickly).

They are not the "best employees" if they are constantly idling, waiting for me to tell them what to do next. People here seem to think the ideal manager/subordinate relationship is that of a worker thread pool where the manager fills the queue and the worker threads pull tasks off the queue.

Not so. The "best employees" are ones who can examine the current state of affairs, and then come to me and propose things to work on. The ideal manager/subordinate relationship is actually one where the workers are all artificial general intelligences that learn over time what the product is, how to improve it, and proactively create tasks to work on.

If you are a rockstar but only work as a a super-fast super-efficient thread in a worker thread pool, you are less valuable to me than a non-rockstar AGI who can dynamically recognize which tasks need to be done and only occasionally needs guidance and course-correction.

It sounds like you do value creativity and autonomy. If that's the case why would it matter how many hours someone was working? Judge them by their output, not how they got there.

This depends a lot on what the value of their output was. If they want to do their tasks 5 times faster than the interns and leave then they can do that for intern pay since that's the value they bring. If they are actually doing more valuable work that involves understanding the product, working with other teams, designing new systems, and they can still do it in less than 40 hours then that is fine. Being effective at driving projects and making decisions are a different kind of work that usually take some time.

So basically let me get summarise this:

- you have an employee that works faster than others, in the same pay grade.

- You are annoyed that he or she has empty queue of work

- You expect employees to look for tasks on their own when they are done

so either that employee:

- has no creative control over the work he or she is doing and cannot move forwards on their own.

- is severely underpaid and undervalued

- is under bad management that cannot fill their work queue fast enough

All of that will lead into them doing tasks at the same speed as other ones - you just turned a good, valuable and fast employee into another drone.. or worse - they'll go work for competition, and you'll have to both suffer the loss of a good trained employee and a cost of hiring someone else.

Judge people by their output. If someone is performing well and shipping, then it doesn't matter if that takes 10 minutes or 8 hours. Many people work better with a lot of space. If you fill someone's hopper so they're forced to work 8 hours a day, then you'll quickly find the tasks that used to take them 10 minutes to complete now take multiple hours due to: burn out, stress, context switching and most likely bad management.

Great way to turn that 30 minute task into 8 hour task.

If employee is getting extra works as a reward for being efficient guess what will happen.

As someone who works with client billable hours, actual work usually takes the least amount of time. The communication about your completion, testing/confirmation, documentation and shadow/knowledge sharing take the remaining 7.5h (using your analogy).

If you're truly doing all those things in 30m, you should be running the show.

Sometimes taking the full 8h allows you to put in the packaging to confirm you've done the "hard" part.

Everyone in this thread below is assuming after the 30 minutes I just fuck off and do nothing. LOL, why would anyone pay me if I did that? Obviously, there's always a ton of stuff to do. But, again, it's about results, not hours worked. There's times when you have to put in almost 48 hours non-stop, others where you don't have to work all week. The point is that if your employees have tasks to do and they're doing them, who gives a fuck about how long it takes them? The 40 hour work week is fucking horrible, anyway, and as is pointed out later in this thread, creative work like coding goes on in your mind pretty much 24/7. If I come up with the solution to a problem Saturday night you can damn well be sure I'm taking some time off to compensate for that. Otherwise I'll burn the fuck out.

Sure, some unknown quantity of people can just fuck around and hide from work, but again, you're not paying me because I'm a fuck off person, yer paying me because I have the decades of experience, and because you know with certainty I'll do the damn work, find more work when I need more, and will never miss a deadline on my own fault. Everyone on HN just assumes bad faith all the time, geez....

If I finish stuff early there’s always more that can be done to help the team. Our ci can be improved, our ux can be polished, app perf can be profiled, engineers can be mentored, customers can be listened to, relationships can be strengthened, unit tests can be added, refactoring can be done, architecture can be simplified, etc.

It feels good to help people, as long as it’s with healthy boundaries so as to prevent burnout.

This is only true if you're getting paid the equivalent of a normal person working 8 hours.

Most tech workers get paid a bit more than that.

I would find it unethical, including in team where I am fastest.

What's unethical about it? If someone produces what needs to be done, then does it matter how they do it?

Just like I don't want employer to flip it into "we need 12 hours worth of work" or hold unrealistic deadline over mu throat, I will ask for new task if original estimate was too short.

I did actually signed contract that actually specifies fI'll time - 40 hours.

That's not how creative work works though. Do you ever think about your code at night or the weekend? Mental work is basically always on and can't be judged by the amount of time at the keyboard implementing it. The whole concept of tasks per hour doesn't map well to software development.

The actual example was "I was done in 0.5 hour, I dont owe you another 7.5 hours of work". Unless you signed contract that is for specified amount of work, you do.

I you wanna count weekend thinking into it, is a different question.

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