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Comment by nhance | Hacker News Reader

As an employer I don't want to be constantly micromanaging work for you to get done. I want to make a list of tasks and have you work through them as fast as you can. If you're working for someone else, that means you're either taking longer than you need to take or you're not being honest about how quickly things can get done.

I don't want to manage people at that level. I want there to be trust so we can both grow the company together. How can I do that if I am competing with you for your own time?

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> I want there to be trust so we can both grow the company together.

Do you offer equity, then? Does an employee working harder, faster, also benefit them because they share in the company's success, or does it just increase your profits while they slave away building widgets for you?

> I want to make a list of tasks and have you work through them as fast as you can

If you treat your employees as cogs in an assembly line, well, they're just going to think of you as a checklist they gotta complete in order to get paid. Doesn't sound like they have much reason to be loyal.

I dunno, the power dynamics in these relationships can vary so much between companies and individual managers/owners. The good ones take care of their employees and inspire loyalty and share their success. The bad ones just treat them as commoditized labor, and in turn get treated as commodity jobs. It's a two-way street.

>> I want there to be trust so we can both grow the company together.

> Do you offer equity, then?

Employees complain a lot about pay, but those surely don’t deserve a dime. As an employer, I grew the company from 0 to 6 jobs. Now I employ people to delegate missions to, one of them is that each employee creates 6 jobs too. And the type of “post-Covid” employee is, in practice, useless to the economy.

> I want there to be trust so we can both grow the company together.

You're expecting partner-level commitment from employees, are you offering them partner-level compensation, ownership and decision making?

If you pay X to get Y amount of work done and are happy about it why would you care that the person is also doing Z amount of work somewhere else? Z could be an other job, or a hobby or anything else, but it is none of your concern.

The issue is they want to maximise Y.

If you're working for someone else, it is by definition meaning that Y has plenty of room in it and can be done better.

They could replace the worker with anyone else that has the same skill as them, but who would put all effort into Y, and effectively double the rate of production for not much change.

It's even better than that, because they now have one big lever to tweak the workload. Some weeks it might be 1.5Y, other times it's 2.1Y, software engineering definitely has its good and bad periods, week-by-week.

If the person who works two jobs isn't replaced, not only do we have less work done than what's possible, but they can also burn out easier.

And we can't change what their other work is telling them to do.

If an engineer is burning out or need a break, there's only so much could be done (other than stopping work altogether.. but again, why? For another company to burn out our employees?) - there's a lot less wiggle room in 1Y than 2Y.

(Note: I said "we" from pov of manager but I am not one, I'm just an engineer, and I thought about the two job question for quite a while, but determined that it's definitely not worth my time. I get more fulfilment from doing my own things.)

> The issue is they want to maximise Y.

Exactly - they want to maximize Y while keeping X constant.

I think most places will give you more money if it's a reliably true way to get more work done.

That's always been my experience anyway.

You can't blame people for wanting to conserve money, especially against unknowns.

>If you're working for someone else, it is by definition meaning that Y has plenty of room in it and can be done better.

And why would I care about that as an employee? It's the employer's problem to use my time effectively, not mine. It is ridiculous to assume I should have interest in helping you make me work harder for the same amount of pay.

>They could replace the worker with anyone else that has the same skill as them, but who would put all effort into Y, and effectively double the rate of production for not much change.

So there's this pool of magical workers who can do twice the amount of work for the same salary as the current employee and yet the company is not utilizing this opportunity at all? This scenario makes no sense, if it was possible to do then the company should already be doing it regardless of whether someone has a second job or not.

> And why would I care about that as an employee?

You don't, the company cares. And whether or not you're a part of that company affects how much you care.

> It is ridiculous to assume I should have interest in helping you make me work harder for the same amount of pay.

You are making yourself work harder. Not the company.

I guess we're having a miscommunication here because you're thinking in terms of "value of labour" and all that cruft.

> So there's this pool of magical workers who can do twice the amount of work for the same salary as the current employee ...

We have people on our team who don't know what CSV files are, and who spend 3 or 4 days on typing out things from spreadsheets, rather than using copy paste. Labour is not inherently valuable for the sake of labour.

The value from a software engineer isn't from hours worked. It's the quality of the result. Man is more than machine.

As long as you can produce twice as much quality software from two companies, then there's no issue with moonlighting a job.

But I'm saying that you're painting yourself into a corner, because now you have to negotiate and do all the "non-labour-related" BS twice as much, and I would argue that the quality of your output degrades, not improves.

It would be more effective to double your money with the current employer as it gives you and them (and you) more space, vacation, room to slow down and speed up when you need, etc.

I'm not aware of any salary arrangement where they are paying X to get Y amount of work done. Your describing per-project contracting work, and this is plenty common in the software industry. Instead they are paying X dollars to get Y hours of your time (usually in the US 40).

> or you're not being honest about how quickly things can get done.

If you get an estimate from someone on how long it takes to do something, and you approve that estimate, and it's delivered in that amount of time, that should be good enough for you. Realizing later, the guy could have potentially banged it out twice as fast is you imagining injury where none exists.

If that person _does_ do the work twice as fast and comes back asking for extra work, do you pay them more? What incentive would employees have to work this way?

> I want there to be trust so we can both grow the company together.

You are not partners with your employees, and the idea that someone spending their free time doing X or Y undermines your trust in them is garbage. I live in MA where everybody is an employee at will and can be fired tomorrow without explanation.

> How can I do that if I am competing with you for your own time?

This is the most toxic part. Your employees time is not yours. If they are salaried, it's expected they will pull their weight without having to track their hours. It's often expected that if the work takes longer, you'll put in the extra time, but again that's about tracking the work. You aren't their owner. Jeez.

If you hire a plumber to fix your bathroom, and the plumber completes the work twice faster than expected, you don't get to make him do more work for free. You may hire a cheap crew, pay them by hour and direct their work, but they'll just work slowly to bill more hours. I understand that it would be nice to have a competent plumber with hourly rate, who works as fast as possible without cutting corners, but that's not the world we live in.

Sure, but they didn't hire a plumber to fix their bathroom. They hired a plumber to spend 40 hours a week maintaining all the plumbing in a building. If you discover this plumber is only spending 20 hours fixing the most pressing issues, then instead of resolving lower priority issues or backlogged maintenance they instead went across the street to handle their most pressing issues, your naturally going to be upset.

If you want to work on a per-project basis there are plenty such consulting gigs out there, but with salaried work the general understanding is you are buying a chunk of someone's time rather than specific projects.

You may hire a good plumbers to do what you're describing, but he is going to bill you for each repair separately, and will be incentivized to find as many issues as possible. That's going to be very expensive. Greedy owners would try to reduce the cost by writing a fixed monthly rate into the contract, and would cry later when the contract attracts a cheap slacker who pretends to be competent.

Many large buildings maintain full-time maintenance people on a salary basis. For your smaller general office parks these are usually generalists, but for your larger skyscrapers, data-centers, etc you absolutely can and do see electricians, plumbers, etc working on a regular salary. No they do not bill per-repair in this situation.

That's a team of cheap slackers who do just enough to keep the water running. It's against their interests to find more work for themselves. You may try to force them by adding personal liability for failures they neglected to prevent, but that's going to have the opposite effect: now only cheap and dumb slackers would sign up. The contract we're discussing is like the impossible ladder: it has many cool properties, but it can't exist in reality.

That flies in the face of my direct experience working with these people, but sure let's take your assumption at face value.

By this logic everyone on salary in any career must be a cheap, dumb slacker, after all there is no difference between accounting on salary, plumbing on salary, writing software on salary or working in a warehouse on salary. The exact same logic applies.

Or maybe, just maybe doing plumbing on salary has the exact same set of tradeoffs as doing any other job on salary and people choose either for different reasons.

Analogies are frequently weak tools because they are describing something inherently different from the primary object, and the conversation then comes to be merely about enumerating those differences. If there is a good argument to be made, it can usually be made directly, without having to resort to making an argument vicariously about something else and then having to argue why it is equivalent to the first thing in the context of the original argument.

Analogies are more suited to understanding the point of view of the person making them.

I mean, I've hired plumbers to fix a problem, they had a 2 hour minimum charge, but it only took 30 minutes to fix the problem. So I had them do 90 minutes of other plumbing stuff that wasn't urgent (mostly hey, where does this pipe go), no additional charge.

> I want there to be trust so we can both grow the company together.

Who are you talking to here? Surely not a wage labourer?

I'd like to know how much equity the person gets in the pursuit of "growing the company together".

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