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Comment by jmchuster | Hacker News Reader

I think for lower-paying jobs, then they are paying you to sweat, and there also is a tighter correlation there with productivity. But higher-paying jobs are all salaried rather than hourly, which seems to indicate that society has already decided pretty low on the scale that more valuable jobs and work has less and less of a correlation with your hours worked. And at the top end, we pay people exponentially higher salaries, with CEOs making hundreds of millions, which in no way means that they're working thousands of times more hours than everyone else.

The easiest way to get promoted isn't to work more hours, it's to manage other people. So leverage and scale of impact seems to be what society has decided is most valuable.

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In theory, salaried positions pay you for adding value, not for your time. In practice, people on salary often work more hours, not fewer hours. (When I had a corporate job, one manager once joked to me "I make less than minimum wage for the hours I put in.")

We tend to pay better for positions of trust. This may or may not involve more skill and such positions are often primarily given to people with certain traits, like upper class white males.

Certainly, some people have gotten the memo on how to line their pockets for less time and effort. But I think we generally do a somewhat poor job of elucidating how to get paid for the value you provide rather than for who you know, what you are, how many hours you clock, etc.

If we want a better world where good things happen, this is a problem. It actively creates social injustice and also maximizes for teaching people to get over rather than add value per se.

> In practice, people on salary often work more hours, not fewer hours. (When I had a corporate job, one manager once joked to me "I make less than minimum wage for the hours I put in.")

How I wish that stuff like this, instead of being worn like a badge of honor, was seen as a dunce cap.

Why _the hell_ would you work more than agreed to?

Agree with this. My father was conned by this attitude. He was never at home and died a month after he retired.

The people telling you to work hard and promoting that ideology are the ones who will benefit, not you.

> In theory, salaried positions pay you for adding value, not for your time.

A significant part of salary is basically payment for availability: for that when you need to do a specific job, you already have a person hired and onboarded which you can immediately assign the job to. As opposed to looking for a contractor on a short notice (and paying them more for this short notice).

Yeah, I was responding to this:

But higher-paying jobs are all salaried rather than hourly, which seems to indicate that society has already decided pretty low on the scale that more valuable jobs and work has less and less of a correlation with your hours worked.

A quick google gets me this:

While 40 hours of work per week is considered full-time, the average salaried employee does not often exceed 45-50 hours per week. This is because, according to Upcounsel, “If a job requires 55-60 (or more) hours to perform, many would consider it a poorly-designed job.” Even then, The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that almost 10 million American employees in all industries work 60 or more hours per week.

https://www.bamboohr.com/hr-glossary/salaried-employee/

Ah, sorry, in my industry (tech) most of our salaried jobs pay way better than minimum wage when considering your dollar per hour worked. So I'll happily work 50 hour weeks instead of 40 hours ones when I'm getting paid 10x as much. It's really quite a nice tradeoff vs, say, having to work two full-time minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. It even compares quite nicely to other high-paying industries, e.g. in i-banking you work 80-100 hours a week the first two years (still making six figures mind you), but then those who survive get promoted, with a nominal salary bump, but the main difference being that you now get to work more normal 40-50 hour weeks.

I don't know if I would use the word "trust". I'd probably characterize it more as "responsibility". You get paid more because you are the one responsible if those who report to you don't deliver. Your boss will only yell at you, not your reports. Management does not require necessarily _more_ skill, but still requires a skillset nonetheless. If you can make 100 people 10% more efficient, then theoretically you are worth 10 people. I _do_ believe that you need to be able to make your managers "trust" you in order to get promoted, but that's talking a bit more about how to actually move up in the corporate world.

I also don't know if it's really that much a mystery how to make more money. Move into management. Move into higher-paying industries, like finance and tech. Own your own business (half of it being defacto making yourself a manager). I think mostly people don't have the privilege that allows them such mobility. You can usually get promoted to shift manager pretty easily within retail by, um, just never being late. But moving higher probably requires various social skills (such as gaining trust mentioned above) that certain upbringings will give you a massive head start on. Many industries require advanced degrees that require a heavy initial cash disbursement. And so on.

Or are we saying, that you've chosen an industry that doesn't pay well because you personally like it, and want to get paid more? That's difficult if your company/industry just doesn't have that much excess money to throw around. Or are we talking about how to get paid more for your job without switching into management? There's probably an upper limit to what you'll get paid (usually companies have pay bands for each position), based on what the company considers to be the maximum value that can be provided by that position. So you want to make sure that you're getting paid commensurate with your output relative to your peers. And I guess that requires similar skills to getting promoted positions, but with a much lower bar, usually just around convincing your boss that you're generating the value that you are. If you've capped out that pay band, then your options are to convince the company to rethink their value system (generally impossible), switch to a different position, or switch to a different company.

I like how you mention that upbringing gives a head start in these positions.

The majority of my bosses were incompetent as hell from a technical or project management perspective and I always wondered how they could be in these leadership positions. And I have a feeling it's knowing the culture of management and the terminology, communication style, and hierarchy enough to build trust with those leaders above them. I had a pretty rough childhood and have always struggled with fitting in with this managerial group and wonder if partly because of that upbringing.

Right. Presumably that your bosses held those positions while being incompetent, meant that no one else in the company was able to convince the higher-ups that the company would make more money if they were managers instead.

My upbringing only ever emphasized two approaches, do your job and be a good line employee, or own your own business and be your own boss It's only recently in my career, within the past 5 years, where I had a manager want to groom me and started showing me how companies work.

One of the fun ways of looking at things, is that a manager can only get promoted once they have nothing left to do. They need to delegate out all of their tasks and responsibilities, and once they have none left, they can start taking on new tasks and responsibilities at the next level above and get seen for promotion. That then also means that the fastest way for you to get promoted is to make your boss get promoted, so take as much as you can off of her plate, which then also has the dual effect that when her position opens up, you, being the one who's doing the majority of her title's responsibilities, would be the natural fit to slide right in to that promotion. Of course, it's not enough just to do all the work, you also want to make sure everyone knows that you're the one doing all the work and that everyone wants to vote for you to become the new boss.

I would love to have a salaried job. I hate tracking hours and I am very aware that any kind of creative work is inherently hard to track in that manner.

Dilbert has done a number of comics mocking this. In one, he flicks his fingers at work and talks about "Look! I am getting paid to flick my fingers!" I think in another he is getting ideas for work in the shower and the comic makes the point that if you get paid for ideas, it's really hard to say when work ends and when it begins because you can't turn the brain on and off like that.

I currently try to do paid freelance work on a project basis because I don't like tracking hours. I also blog and do various projects online and I try to monetize that with Patreon and tip jars.

Out of respect for the many valid criticisms of online ads I have seen on HN over the years, I don't think I currently have ads on any of my sits. I also tend to not have Amazon links, though I think I did add one of those to something recently and I am not averse to using them. I'm aware of the criticisms, but it's not so much a "moral" stand on my part, like with the ads. It's more just that I have never figured out how that works.

If I were making sufficient money from Patreon, tips and other paid work, I probably wouldn't bother with Amazon links. But my income remains stubbornly below what I really need and it's an avenue I'm willing to try given how poorly other avenues are doing.

Ah, contracting work is really really hard. I've only ever done consulting as part of a company, and the conditions there that made it sustainable seemed to be:

    1) pick a specialty, so you have little or no competition, in a field where your clients all have a lot of money to spend and then must spend it on someone (with their only option being you)
    2) have very skilled very connected sales people constantly getting your next contract, you need to have maybe a half year's worth of projects always lined up and ready to go
    3) build a reputation, so then even amongst your very few competitors, people ask around when they need a job done, and your name always come up near the top of the list

When you crunched the numbers at the end, 60% of the employees were always making billable hours on a project at any time, and our clients paid the company maybe 4x per hour what they paid the employees. So very little profit total for the company, but enough to be sustainable. Oh, and the sales guys were the best paid by far, all making at least double what our founders/c-level made.

Now, if I was just on my own, I have no idea how I would be able to recreate those conditions. I don't currently have some kind of ridiculous specialty or reputation, so I'd just be nameless in an endless pool of candidates. Then with such a lopsided demand-supply balance, I'd get paid the minimum level humanly possible, and then even lower than that if they were willing to put up with remote workers from different timezones. There's no way I'm hiring a sales guy to build me a pipeline, and if I was that good at doing so myself, I'd be way better off just joining a company and get paid millions to sell much more valuable contracts instead. So, instead, probably once I find a client, I would probably want to maximize how many times I come back to them as a repeat customer. So then at point I'm basically now an employee of sorts, who gets paid as little as possible, and is actively trying to be replaced by someone cheaper at any time.

So, uh, yeah, that all just translates to, I'd always go for a salaried employee position. The calculus in the company's mind with regards to compensation just changes completely once you're at that point, more along the lines of what I've referred to previously.

> So I'll happily work 50 hour weeks instead of 40 hours

But why? If your contract says 40/wk is expected, then just work that and set targets based on that. Why give your employer 500+ hours per year of your life that you don't owe them?

Mostly because I view the relationship with my company and CTO as a partnership rather than an adversarial one and I like what I do. (I do things a lot like it for free at home anyway...)

If there’s a crunch time or a production issue, I don’t mind going above some contractually obligated minimum that helps the company disproportionately compared to the drag on my time.

At the end of it all, I’ve also gotten promotions that I’m 100% sure I’d have not gotten if I timed each of my workdays with a stopwatch and clipboard.

Do you have reason to believe the company will see it the same way when things get tough? A lot of people think a relationship is strong, then they get The Talk one day and find out they were the only one who thought that.

I do, because I’ve seen behind the curtain how these decisions get made, at least here. (Given that a sizable part of business went to zero when tradeshows went away, we’ve been tested as a company in the last 12 months.)

Now, if I became no longer useful to them for whatever reason, I’m sure I’d get The Talk, but I don’t know why that shouldn’t be expected, normal, and OK.

This is a good point.

If an employer pays Y for X, but gets X+1 for the price of Y, why would he then bump you up to Y+1 if they don't have to? You're communicating through your actions that this is an okay state of affairs. You might do a bit of that X+1 work for some time to give you leverage during EOY reviews, but that's because you want that salary bump. Whether it will actually result in one is a different matter.

Jobs aren't charity and business is business. There's nothing inherently noble about doing a disproportionate amount of free work for a profit making company, especially when you have other obligations outside of work. Believing it is noble is a kind of Stockholm syndrome. The very essence of companies is to provide a service or product for a price as a just exchange of goods. The very nature of your employment is that they need someone to help make the service or product to get the money they want in exchange for a just fraction of the profits. When employees stop caring about adequate compensation, this results in a creeping exploitation.

I don't do work beyond the bare minimum to not get fired out of a sense of nobility or self-sacrifice. I do it in part because I enjoy it and I do it in large part because it pays quite well for me and my family.

By all means, if you're being inadequately compensated or exploited, quit and find a new employer (assuming you're in software).

I just checked my most recent offer letter, and there is no reference to amount of hours worked. I'd probably be surprised if that was referred to in any of my past offer letters as well.

At least in tech, hours seems to be determined moreso by the societal norms (culture) of the company, which is then an extension of the "type" of company and what is normally expected of such. You might choose to perform above or below what those norms are, and might or might not see rewards/consequences for doing so. So these are things you might gauge by, say, the size of the company, asking various people before or during the interview process about the work culture, and so on. There are of course also variations across teams and departments within the company, so you'd probably get the best information from your future boss on what they expect.

For example, one tech company I worked at was very 9 to 5. People start shuffling out around 4 and the place would be a ghost town at 6. People are also not particularly prompt about showing up in the morning, maybe rolling in at 10 or 11. So there were certainly many people there working closer to 30 hour work weeks. Some definitely had an attitude of trying to have little responsibility as possible and do as little work as possible.

I personally like working hard on interesting problems, which I guess is what the article is referring to. So having problems that I can choose to spend as many hours I like working on sounds great to me. And when I've had enough enjoyment for the day, I pack it up, some days earlier, some days later. And if there's a pressing issue or deadline, then I'll gladly put in extra hours to match, because such accomplishment under pressure is enjoyable to me as well. So, this is the type of company culture I enjoy, where no one is asking you to put in hard work and hours, but everyone who works there is intrinsically gladly doing so anyways.

Tied in with that, then, is the type of company that would most get value out of such individuals, so they would presumably be ones where the individual impact is much more amplified. Which also means that you have a much more powerful enjoyment feedback loop, in that you more directly see the impact of your effort on the company itself.

I agree with most of what you're saying, but the work will still be there the next day. I just dont see the reason to give more than agreed on, with the exception of emergencies of course.

So what is "agreed on"? There's no contract or anything in place, so is "agreed on" to always do the minimum amount of work required to not get fired? I'm sure many people enjoy going through life like that, it's just not for me.

The assumption that the free market's "decisions" represents "what society has decided" is both bad and dangerous.

If anything, society has abdicated its decision making responsibilities.

That a CEO is "worth" hundreds of millions is an artifact of a system that is owned and operated by those the system identifies as valuable. Hmmmm....

No system is free from this. Human beings will corrupt any system they're a part of. The trick is to overthrow the system every now and then.

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