What Bezos and Amazon are doing might not be exactly this, but it’s along those lines. You hear it with the front line warehouse workers, but I’ve known a couple of actual managers at Amazon who left because that kind of thing was happening even at their level on the org chart.
Along the same lines as the latest posts on this thread, my old firm gave twice a year bonuses. Part of the bonus was determined by how much you worked over 40 hours a week. I was mostly a project manager, but instead of being rewarded for bringing in projects under budget, they would reward you of it took you double the amount of time than somebody else to do something.
I should absolutely be rewarded if I can get the job done well in half the time as my coworker. It was just asinine to use hours as a metric and not project profitability.
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Yes most people that work 60 hours a week need that amount of time.
I tell people up from I don’t have a good first or second gear. My 3rd gear is great and my 4th gear is awesome.
Sometimes it’s hard to figure how much time to bill as a consultant. I’m a “back of mind” thinker and I’ll chit chat and bounce concepts off and get their insights then bang, a mostly formed idea will just dump out of my head.
So ya in an office setting I look like I’m just loafing for 3 hours and then in the next 30 minutes I’ll accomplish a ton.
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No model is more broken than lol lawyers. Don’t fucking ask me how my weekend was at $900 per hour ($15 per minute), asshole. And I really don’t need two snot nosed associates “joining the call” for an extra $1,000. Fuck you.
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I work with lots of lawyers. One of the best law firms I work with doesn’t bill by the hour. Instead, they get paid a percentage of the deal value for completed transactions. They end up making more than almost everyone else and their approach to staffing is completely different. But their small team gets things done like you wouldn’t believe.
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As a programmer any job where I have to track hours to ultimately bill to a client has been rife with BS. I basically learned on the job from scratch on the client’s dime. You quickly learned which clients you could pad hours to if you had nothing to do. The only sin was not billing 40 hours/week. That’s a paddlin’. But of course if you billed 60, you still only get paid for 40. I will never work in that kind of system again.
I bet they also aren’t still running apps that haven’t been upgraded since Windows 3.1 - like half the law firms and all the doctor’s offices out there.
The lawyer model also rewards fucking up. Inevitably I read their documents (most people don’t) and find stuff they messed up, because they’re working off a template and a fucking paralegal probably did it before a hungover partner “reviewed it,” i.e. opened the attachment while taking a dump. When I complain, the meter starts running again. Infuriating.
Just went surfing with a friend I haven’t seen in over a year and he is ready to quit his job if they force him back to the office full time. I was pretty shocked it’s the only place he’s worked since college and has been there over 10 years and always seemed pretty happy about it. He said once he got a taste of having a flexible schedule that he could have a real life and surf more and spend more time with his wife and kid he knew he was never going back to the office full time. They’re still doing remote 1 day week until September and he says if they don’t allow him to keep working from home after that time he might just straight up quit before even finding another job.
Yesterday i presented to our execs on the plan for WFH for all our contact centres. 1 or 2 days in the office per week, opt out. Approved with no issues.
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I don’t know what my team would do if they had to go back to the office. I don’t think anybody on my team is working more than a couple of hours a day. Guess we would just start at our monitors if we were in the office and pretend we were working.
You’d probably do a bunch of worthless meetings.
Found out that after 18 months at home I will be going back to the office 2 days a week come September. Where I will presumably be sitting alone in my windowless office attending meetings on Zoom since we are all on rotating schedules.
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As good a reason to shop for a job where you don’t have to do that as you’re likely to get.
My company solved this problem by converting to an ESOP and letting the original owners cash out from the business while making the employees the new owners, who of course have as much a role running the business as they did before.
I own 0.37% of this company, how could I not want to work 6 days a week?
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This is the way.
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Starting next week our paralegals are in office one day a week. Attorneys are still “go in to the office as needed”.
Sets up kind of a weird situation. My paralegal doesn’t need to be there any more than I do, which is to stop in for 30 minutes once every week or two and pick up/drop off files, and check the mail. On top of that, seems like most of the other attorneys have been going to the office for full days once or twice a week.
There’s literally nothing that I can do in the office that I can’t do at home, but I’m beginning to feel some guilt for not going in more often. I feel like most of that guilt comes from feeling like the other people in the office are judging me for staying home, though. Being the only person wearing a mask in the office adds on to that.
This post getting a lot of discussion over at Bogleheads: How strong are my golden handcuffs - Bogleheads.org
My company has announced a full time return to office beginning September 1. For a variety of reasons, remote work has really suited me and my family’s dynamic, and I’m thinking about retiring rather than go back full time into the office. From a retirement standpoint, I am not really concerned about the numbers (my spouse and I are both 44, and we have a projected WR of right around 1.5% right now).
The issue is golden handcuffs. If I walk away at the end of August, I’m leaving a lot of money on the table. I could add another 4% to our current net worth if I worked through the end of the year, due to equity vesting and earning my '21 bonus (I’m reluctant to post the actual $ amount I would be foregoing just because I feel like it would bias the discussion).
Long story short, I don’t feel like I need the extra money, but the practical side of me thinks that I would be a moron to pass it up over 4 months of work.
Any useful insights?
It’s not even a question. Even if this person wanted to retire right away, they would be stupid to submit a two week notice right now. Just putter around the office doing a terrible job for 4 months, then resign.
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