Hacker News Reader

Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

Based on most of the studies i’ve seen, at least for office/information jobs, that pay cut is unjustified. People mostly get as much done in 4 days as 5.

View on HN

Usual counterpoint is that you're not being paid just for the things you get done, but also for availability - for being there when there's a need to handle something unexpected. This has real value to a business, so you being available for 80% of the time justifies some degree of pay cut.

Maybe for some jobs. But for the majority of software jobs? Not really.

It depends. There are some people who bring a lot of value by just being there to answer the occasional questions. When I'm oncall and I know that some colleagues are on vacation, I'm definitely more tense. In an ideal world, knowledge would be spread within the team, but with turnover it's hard to reach and maintain that state.

I can't really tell. I mean, there's enough people on HN who say they do pair programming at work, and some even that they do whole projects almost exclusively in some sort of group coding sessions - to me this seems like a bizarro world, so what do I know about majority of software jobs?

For me personally, every software job I've done so far - including both the ones where I was one of few (or even the only) coders in the company, and ones where I was but a small cog in a multinational corporation - all of them had an availability component. Usually in the form of being there to answer some question, or help someone who's blocked or slowed down by an issue I'm the best suited to resolve (or the only one in the team/branch/company who can).

I've only had successful paired programming in one situation and it was amazing. I believe it worked because we were friends and at the same knowledge level. In three days, we ripped through a project that should have taken a month. Our 'C' code was perfect because there was always someone looking at it in real time and catching the errors on the spot.

I do not think that I will ever encounter this level of productivity ever again.

It’s beautiful when that happens.

I've done a lot of pair programming with mentees and it's very rewarding. They usually learn a lot and it helps building a relationship with them. Bonus points if they see you struggling with a problem/bug.

If only I was paid for all those "on call" hours when I was a sysadmin :)

Our team is paid no overtime, because we're considered "able to tend any emergencies and organize themselves if required" at off-hours too.

Well, our system almost never creates that kind of emergency, but we think this is a fair assumption.

> Our team is paid no overtime, because we're considered "able to tend any emergencies and organize themselves if required" at off-hours too.

Imagine a private business accepting these terms from a client.

The private business in question will suddenly find enough time to fix the repeating problems, in that case, eliminating the need for overtime.

My point is this would be an unfair clause, no private business would sign terms that would force them to work for free. Yet, somehow it's enforced and acceptable for private individuals.

In our case it's not enforced, and we're not under any 5 nines obligation.

On the other hand, we're a bunch of lazy sysadmins and don't prefer to work if it's not necessary. As a result, we design our systems for resilience, so any problem both doesn't get big, and can wait the next morning, or next Monday 99% of the time.

Also, we definitely love what we do, hence we sometimes choose to take some work off of our colleagues' hand on a slow night. So, I personally prefer to read a tech doc, learn something and apply to on our systems if I have nothing better to do instead of watching TV.

IOW, we're not losing sleep doing our job.

TL;DR: It's acceptability depends on the circumstances a lot. If the employer is abusing you with that stick, that's bad. Otherwise, I see no problem.

What kind of fucked up country lets you be on call without getting paid for it?

The kind that leads the world in software development and also happens to have the highest ceiling for take-home pay.

Which makes not being paid overtime for being on call even more appalling.

You know the answer to that.

If that's the case, then there should be a clear understanding that I am completely unavailable from the moment I leave the office for the day.

...that's how I've been forever, aside from those few jobs that required more availability. In those cases, it was part of my job description, so agreed upon by all parties before I took the job.

Are you doing unpaid overtime?

That's usually the understanding everyone has by default, unless you're doing some specific job that requires greater availability (and are compensated for it), or... you're eroding this understanding yourself by doing something unwise, like replying to company e-mails or IMs after hours.

One rule I learned to stick to: never install apps for company e-mail and IM chats on your personal smartphone. Just don't. Otherwise, you never truly "leave the office for the day".

We've had to explicitly tell just-out-of-college new hires to stop at the end of the workday. The reasons are different for each but a lot of them have gone home and kept working without being asked or expected to.

Plenty of places just assume you can do on-call or it's required, including high-tech companies. I'm not compensated outside of normal salary/equity for on-call hours. If I don't get paged, great. But if it's a heavy week I don't get anything extra.

I'd love to join a union to be able to reasonably bargain against this.

The usual counterpoint to that is that for highly skilled work 95% of what you do can be done by someone else who takes 1/2 to 2/3 your salary and it's the last 5% that you're actually being paid the big bucks for. This is stuff that you have to do rarely but it brings a lot of value; whether you have 5 days every week or 4 days every week to get that out of the way doesn't matter, because you do it for a couple hours a week at most.

Honestly I don't even care. If I could take an extra day off at only 20% cut from my pay check I'd do it in a heart beat.

It may be "justified" while five days remains the norm, as it may be possible to get similarly-capable employees to take the position for lower pay, to get that extra day off every week. This should provide a pretty big benefit to companies that can leverage it while five is still typical (assuming that the shift to four is in fact going to become a trend)

Thinking like an employer - how can i leverage social norms to get same or more work for less pay. If you’re not an employer, why are you thinking about it this way?

Oh, sure, I think employees ought to organize to increase wages in general. But absent that, the value of perks like a four-day work week (while it remains an unusual perk, at least) do factor into wage negotiations, and individuals can't do much to resist that on their own (aside from... not get the job and keep working five days somewhere else). I'm talking "is", not, "ought", in describing it the way I did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com