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Comment by quantumofalpha | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a fair share of googlers who work 4 days a week and getting 80% of the pay. Most prefer to get 100% of the money though, especially since at review time you're judged on what you accomplished, not raw butt-in-the-seat time.

Likely sub-100% work time is something you'd have to negotiate with your managers after spending some time at a company, not right from day 1. One case I've seen - a guy working 50% between google and PhD (working on alternating weeks) flat out said there's no way in hell he'd get hired into this kind of arrangement - it was only after building trust with management and moving to a team with lower workload/stress.

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The problem is that 40 hours is seen as 100%. If I can accomplish my job in less than 40 hours, I'm giving more than 100% by working 40 hours.

It shouldn't be based on time

From what I've seen, it's mostly not based on time in big US tech companies for salaried full-timers. Nobody cares if you put 20, 40 or 60 honest hours a week into a project. Ultimately, visibility and impact of your work is what matters, usually in comparison to your peers. If you get same impact working half the time than the person next to you, more glory to you. (Just don't let your manager directly or indirectly know that you're idling, that's essentially asking for more work - so don't complain if they oblige)

But pay is not based on results. If it were, you would not get paid when you are down on productivity.

Salary is an aggregate solution that works as insurance for both workers and employers to not have to do the above calculations.

Pay is sometimes certainly based on results. CEO's aren't getting paid by the hour, they are compensated based on stock performance, financials, roadmap, future guidance, etc.

That is certainly not true, as CEO of failing companies also get paid.

> Most prefer to get 100% of the money though, especially since at review time you're judged on what you accomplished, not raw butt-in-the-seat time.

Why aren't they being compared to 80% of the others' accomplishments? This seems like it is designed to get rid of those who want the 80% schedule. Has this been addressed by management?

At Google, expectations are scaled for part-time employees. In other words, a 60%/80% part-timer is expected to do 60%/80% as much as a full-timer at the same level.

Source: I work part-time at Google (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17133830)

Thanks. I figured, otherwise it would defeat the purpose.

That's the theory but it isn't that trivial to measure engineer's productivity, especially in small +/-20% range we're talking here. We aren't like bricklayers where you can directly and precisely measure the output.

That's why in practice google's famous "20% time" is 120% time and on other hand it also has a lot of coasters working at half pace while cashing in 100% pay.

Because it’s not always a 1 to 1 ratio. Especially generically.

An 80% worker with paid benefits doing just 80% productivity provides less productivity value per comp $ to the employer than a 100% worker doing 100% of the work due to the cost of benefits.

So a smart employer realizes that for it to make value sense, an 80% worker with benefits better be providing more than 80% productivity.

That just sounds like an inability of Google to aptly scale work.

No it’s a benefits thing they can’t scale

Can you elaborate?

You can’t offer give someone an 80% health plan, or match 4/5ths of their 401k. The structures that exist around those benefits aren’t customizable at that level. They’re bought as a package.

Exactly. A 32 hour employee with same benefits package as a 40 hour employee likely costs the company about 85% of the cost of the 40 hour employee. If you are giving the company 80% value for a 85% of FT investment, it’s a diminished return to the company.

Would you agree then that those employees are systemically set up to be forced out?

No. I think it depends on the situation and people involved. If you intend by working 32 hours instead of 40 hours to deliver only 80% value to your org, you would be at a disadvantage. If that extra 8 hours off has value to you, you will likely make sure your employer stays happy and maximize your value for that 32 hours you work. Conversely, if that 8 hours of payroll savings is needed for them, they will likely provide some grace during evaluation.

Now if you are an exempt salaried employee, all bets are off. Whether you work 20 hours or 80, you get paid the same and are expected to deliver 100% value.

> If you intend by working 32 hours instead of 40 hours to deliver only 80% value to your org, you would be at a disadvantage.

Well you would be delivering 100% of the possible value you could in 80% of the time. The same as someone who works 6 days a week would have a comparably higher output than their peers working 5 days. Are the employees who work 48 or more hours a week being compared to those who work 40 hours as well?

You might be delivering 100% or you might not. You might be more productive at 32 than 40. It’s not necessarily linear. At the end of the day you need to provide a perceived value beyond whatever your rate of comp

At 48 hours you have a similar situation, if you are hourly those 8 hours cost the company an extra 50% per hour so you better be providing appropriate value for the overtime rate they are paying you.

Like some of the other posters mentioned 401k and health care are typically not scaled. Also overhead/management/hr and facility costs are still payed out in full.

What percentage of a Google engineer's salary do you think is taken up by benefits that don't scale with time/compensation? Looking at the data I can find on the web, it looks to me like a pretty small number.

I can tell you that my company (which is not Google) has a pretty good benefit package which I value is probably a 15-20% of what my salary is…so it it’s not peanuts.

That's not quite what I asked. I asked which parts don't scale with time/compensation, which is the only bit that matters for shorter-than-full-time schedules.

Google developers start at $191k per year. The market price of Platinum health care plans for a 30-year-old single person in Google's Zip code is ~$1000/month. So that's ~6%.

That's nothing to sneeze at, but it's also not huge. If they drop to an 80% schedule and 80% comp, health care's now ~8% of their salary. That's something that Google can surely handwave away.

For companies that can't, I think there are reasonable solutions. The obvious one is that they scale their health care subsidy with the hours worked. In many places employees pay a percentage of their health insurance costs already; it's not hard to change those numbers for people on less-than-full-time schedules.

You think health care is the only benefit that costs the company? LTD/STD, 401k matching, tuition matching, life, PTO, ESP…it adds up. Healthcare is probably a quarter of the package if it’s a company like google.

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