[throwaway803453]

FWH has exposed how many white-collar jobs were only full-time in the ass-in-seat sense and how many employees should have Professional Meeting Attender as their job title.

I used to be the guy who would champion efficient meeting practices. Now it's the last thing I want given that I can now work-out, make breakfast, do manual labor, etc., while listening to meeting.

4 day work week in grasp you ask ? For many I'd be surprised if they actually did 15hrs of work a week. I'd never hire a full time employee who can work remotely. I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.

[OldHand2018]

> I'd never hire a full time employee who can work remotely. I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.

That's a knee-jerk reaction that you probably already know has some serious problems ;)

People who are working 40 hours a week have no capacity to take on some important task with no notice unless they go past 40 hours a week. Which generally doesn't cost any extra money.

Hiring a contractor to work 40 hours per week is going to get really expensive really fast when you need them to suddenly ramp up beyond 40 hours on no notice. If you can even get them to do it!

If you're any kind of normal modern business, this is going to eat all your cost savings and probably even cause you to unnecessarily miss a lot of deadlines.

[Animats]

People who are working 40 hours a week have no capacity to take on some important task with no notice unless they go past 40 hours a week. Which generally doesn't cost any extra money.

Which is the problem. What we need is overtime for all. Time and a half after 8 hours in a day. Time and a half after 40 hours in a week. Time and a half after 5 days in a week. Double time on Sunday. Minimum of 4 hours of pay per workday or if called in. Those factors multiply. That's not at all unusual in union shops.

[OldHand2018]

I don't disagree with you at all. If you regularly exceed 40 hours with exempt employees (especially developers) the compensation structure will have to reflect that or you will have retention problems.

That cost is far more transparent when dealing with hourly contractors, and maybe the employer prefers this! But, you know, theory of the firm etc tells us that in the long run you are usually better off with exempt employees even if they are frequently working less than the 40 hours you expect from them.

[welshwelsh]

>I'd never hire a full time employee who can work remotely. I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.

That's not going to save you any money though.

A FT developer who makes $75 an hour only accepts that pay because it's closer to $300/hr in practice (if you only count the hours they are actually productive, which maxes out at 2-3 per day for knowledge work).

A freelance developer of similar skill, who accurately bills per hour worked, will simply charge $300 per hour.

[CountDrewku]

Yeah I don't understand this mentality. You're paying for finished work not hours. People cannot seem to separate themselves from the hourly concept. If you want finished work faster then who cares about the hours?

All you're doing by requiring a certain amount of hours is ensuring the employee stretches out the time it takes to get things done.

[taneq]

> (if you only count the hours they are actually productive, which maxes out at 2-3 per day for knowledge work).

What's "productive", though? Typing at a keyboard? For creative knowledge work (like designing stuff, not answering technical email queries) sometimes the back of your mind just needs time to chew on something.

[throwaway39203]

Time spent tethered to the computer or in the office looking busy isn't as valuable as real free time though, assuming this fully efficient job market a given dev might take $300 for real work + busywork or $250 for just the actual work

[ajacksified]

I'm not surprised you made a throwaway to hide behind, because not only are you a coward, but this is the worst take I've ever seen on a website full of terrible takes. I can't imagine working for someone with this point of view, and I'll happily say that, on the record, without a throwaway account.

As an engineering manager- an actual one- I'm not paying for hours, I'm paying for output. I couldn't care less if my employee was working 15 hours or 40, as long as they got an appropriate amount of work done for my investment in them.

Are we praising someone for demanding itemized timesheets? How absolutely toxic.

[throwaway803453]

This is why I choose to be a contractor and an engineer. If I work, I bill. I never understood how anyone in good conscience can work 15hrs while the others at the company work 40hrs and still collect full-time benefits. As an engineer I have never had that luxury though, somehow we are always busy and I have to make an effort to reduce my billable hours without needing to pad them. I am probably also culturally biased from working class roots that overpraises hours worked and that mindset is admittedly self-defeating.

Preparing/eating a meal during a meeting is admittedly perk but it doesn't affect my focus or participation.

[piva00]

> This is why I choose to be a contractor and an engineer. If I work, I bill. I never understood how anyone in good conscience can work 15hrs while the others at the company work 40hrs and still collect full-time benefits.

If they are working 15h/week and delivering what is expected from them, who are you to guilt those into working the schedule you judge as "right"? My employer pays me to deliver them value, if I deliver the expected value for my salary in 10h instead of 40h am I in the wrong? Should I be forcing myself to work harder just because? Nah.

> I am probably also culturally biased from working class roots that overpraises hours worked and that mindset is admittedly self-defeating.

Yes, you are. I came from the same roots, had the same twisted view about "hard work" and judging others when I worked my ass off and saw some other people relaxing. After 17 years of career, this is all bullshit. I'm being paid for my expertise and my results, if my employer is happy with my results why the fuck should I bust my ass longer than needed? I have a life outside of work that I care much more about.

I do have a work ethic, I do my work with a lot of care, craft and thought, I deliver value and improve products and processes. I don't fucking care if I do that in 10 or 40 hours a week, it's a motivation for me to allow my laziness to be a driver for being more and more efficient and effective, so I can work less hours while delivering more value, being paid more per hour in the process.

> Preparing/eating a meal during a meeting is admittedly perk but it doesn't affect my focus or participation.

It's also a perk to have enough time (1h-1h30m) in the middle of the day to go enjoy your meal fully, to prepare it with care, without multitasking in some bullshit meeting just because you feel you need to be hyper-efficient.

The best perk I have of being a software engineer is that, comparatively to many other fields, our careers allow us to take back a lot of control of our own schedule and time.

[lupire]

If you feel guilty, give some of your pay to your coworkers or charity, not your capitalist overlord.

[wayoutthere]

> I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.

As a contractor, I would just charge you for the time it takes to itemize an invoice while I do it sitting on a call for another job I’m also billing for. And I would be very thorough with my itemization so you know exactly what you’re getting…

The non-itemized invoice is free. We can argue over contract terms if you want to or come to an arrangement if you don’t feel you got your money’s worth, but if I disagree the result is going to be completion of the terms of the contract and we go our separate ways. I’m not hurting for work, I can fire an obnoxious customer if it buys me QoL.

The pandemic tipped the balance of power from the money men to the workers. We’re going to watch this dynamic play out in ways large and small, but the net is that employees have a lot more power to set the terms of engagement than employers do right now.

[throwaway803453]

Here's what my invoice looks like for today

0.5hr chats, code reviews, time-audit

1.25hr Bug#12345

...

So I have captured the ~15 minutes I spent itemizing/cleaning up my invoice for the past day or two in a "time-audit"/misc line item.

"very thorough with my itemization" implying you'll just over bill your customer because they have the nerve to have you professionally account for your time ?

"tipped the balance of power from the money men to the workers"

Right so if they weren't operating with integrity that doesn't mean the worker shouldn't either. Tit-fot-tat might be an optimal game theory but better to optimize for a clear conscience.

Note, I realize I am being unfair to your comment. When my customer first asked me to itemize my invoice it was an annoyance, but now I am efficient at it and see it as win-win. I just keep adding to it in real time as I work through out the day and then do a periodic clean up and aggregation.

[akiselev]

I think the GP just hasn't discovered the magic of the "minimum billable increment" yet. Lawyers love this trick! Customer wants you to itemize the bill? No problem - it comes with a 15 minute minimum billable increment. The more demanding/PITA the client is, the longer the minimum.

Send me a text a minute after I've finished working for the day to check on the status and it takes me a minute to read and reply? No problem, I just billed the client for 15 minutes. Takes them 15 minutes to come up with and send a response that I need to respond to ASAP? Another 15 minutes billed. Want me to spend 3 minutes at the end of the day itemizing the bill? Perfect, that's another 15 minutes billed!

The more granular the itemizing, the more opportunity to shove the minimum billable increment in their face. Called me for a two minute chat while I'm in the zone on their project? Gotta itemize it! 15 minutes billed and I restart the work (out of the zone) at the top of the next interval.

[AstroDogCatcher]

I'm a regular employee but at a professional services org - you basically described how I generate my timesheets.

The main difference is that at the end of the day I try to just stop when I have "enough" hours, since I don't get paid for overtime like I would as a contractor.

To the original topic: roughly 40% of my week is wasted on pointless meetings or inter-meeting dead time. The other time is roughly equally split between useful meetings, actual work, and admin or training tasks.

The issue with the pointless meetings is that they are generally a series, where one 10-minute slot out of every four one-hour meetings is genuinely useful - but you don't know in advance when that slot will occur. The other kind of pointless meetings generally involve customers who are unprepared.

[jacquesm]

> Called me for a two minute chat while I'm in the zone on their project? Gotta itemize it! 15 minutes billed and I restart the work (out of the zone) at the top of the next interval.

That's double billing and afaik illegal, you can not (and rightly so) bill your customer twice for the same time.

[akiselev]

A minimum billable increment is not double billing when properly outlined in a contract. If one item is an hour and two minutes and is interrupted by a three minute item, the bill comes out to 65 minutes of work and 25 minutes of contractually obligated rounding. Anything that had to be item had to be rounded up to the minimum and that's the price the client had to pay for itemization. I wasn't going to play guessing games about which calls counted as an item and which ones didn't.

[wayoutthere]

There’s a lot of grey area and nobody can prove it either way. If you maintain good relationships with your clients and keep them happy, they don’t ask questions.

Consulting is a relationship business. You’ll make way more money focusing on the people rather than the work. You can cover up sloppy execution with a good relationship, but stellar execution won’t save a project where you fuck up the client relationship.

[eyelidlessness]

I’m very fair with how I bill my clients, and I do bill distinct tasks on separate timers. This means I’ll sometimes have a dangling 5min to be attached later to a 15min increment when I resume it. But yes, if my task is interrupted for another billable thing, that is a new clock that’s started, because it’s another task that’s tracked separately.

[saghm]

Okay, so then just take a 13 minute break after the call and then start working again

[lolsal]

> I'd never hire a full time employee who can work remotely. I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.

I'm just curious as I've been the employer and the contractor in this scenario - do you think the output between a FTE and a contractor would be different? Do you think it would be different financially?

In my experience, developers tend to behave like a gas that expands to fill their container - people tend to work up to their compensation (whether it's hourly contracting or some form of salary + comp), and no more.

[meetingthrower]

I started a management consulting job during pandemic, and quickly realized that this Big 4 firm did nothing but meetings. I had my assistant color code any non client meeting with more than 10 people.

Very quickly I got 15-20 hours a week back.

(And my hourly billing rate was in the 4 figures.)

[taneq]

> I'd never hire a full time employee who can work remotely. I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.

I don't understand this. Doesn't your full time employee itemise their time? Don't you do timesheets or something? Does the full time employee not have deliverables that you track with deadlines that they need to meet?

"Hours of work" is a terrible measure of productivity. I'll take an employee who gets the job done in four hours, goes to walk the dogs, and then spends the afternoon coming up with neat improvements, over a "hardworking" employee who spends 15 hours trying to get the job done.

[nimbius]

an excellent point. speaking from a more blue-collar perspective, i would argue most "real" (non meeting attender) jobs have been 3-4 day for a long time now thanks to automation and a perverse incentive to avoid paying benefits.

bartenders, repair staff, custodial, fast food and construction have never offered a solid 40 hour week. many of these roles are highly automated and simply do not need a full 40 woman or man hours of work anymore. farming has been this way for a very long time and as such, most farmers wives would take jobs as lunchroom staff for the local elementary school to provide health insurance for the family that a farming job simply couldnt.

what i wonder now is that if this affects 'white' collar workers, will the rules change? will nail-swatters in the construction yard see benefits and retirement? or will an elaborate machination take place to ensure only the cloistered ass-in-seat see affordable flu shots and checkups.

[piva00]

You should include your location, I assume you are talking about the USA because this isn't reality in the countries I've lived in my life.

[FredPret]

I went from a corporate job to bill-by-the-hour consulting.

The volume of work I have to get done in 40 hours has roughly multiplied by ten since I now have to justify every hour spent.

It’s pretty easy to ten times almost-nothing though!

[jollybean]

While meetings can be a waste, it's a misunderstanding of communications to suggest they are 'entirely a waste'.

One level above manager (basically Director and above), it's practically all you do, i.e. 80% meetings and emails because that's the mechanics of the job.

Imagine a fisherman fishing at the dock: he is paying attention to signals, and then being super active for short moments, that's the nature of fishing. Managing is a lot of fodder communicating and hyper action / participation in some instances.

Imagine how much time you have to spend interviewing, listening to multiple vendors, talking to the legal department about the 'why you can't use some SaaS and how to get around it', the commercial guys trying to get under budget, your IP lawyers worried about the wording of the license, the DevOps team who are totally understaffed to release your product, the HR team pressuring you to hire 'the other person' in order to meet some strategic staffing targets, or their launch of the new HR portal which is a mess, prepping your slides for the conf. talk next month and the marketing team wants you to tweak your language, the Research Agency completely missed their objectives and you have to get them to re-do part of the research and you're not going to pay them extra, and you have to get your managers to focus on that. It's a lot of meetings.

FYI it's perfectly reasonable to listen to meetings while doing labour if the situation allows for it!

[dboreham]

The true killer feature for the remote tech stack would be to attend more than one meeting concurrently.

[jacksonkmarley]

Tried that with Teams just the other day, sadly no go.

[mensetmanusman]

Once when I was triple booked I logged into three Teams meetings simultaneously (laptop, iPad, iPhone) and turned up the volume to create a cacophony of chaos in my home office while I laughed maniacally to myself. Then I took a picture of the setup with my second iPad for my pandemic scrapbook.

I could only listen to two simultaneously… so I would modulate the volume.

[eyelidlessness]

My ADHD was screaming reading this but my everything else was clapping and wishing you posted a video link.

[p_j_w]

Am I misunderstanding something here? This just seems like a bad suggestion from the get go. I have a hard enough time paying attention to a single meeting sometimes and forgetting some of the information. If there were two going simultaneously, I feel that my absorption of the relevant info would be close to 0.

[kitd]

Lol, look at this guy, paying attention to meetings!

Me, I'd be tempted to hook the microphone to the speakers and create a "crossover" meeting and seeing how long it took till someone noticed.

[FormerBandmate]

> I feel that my absorption of the relevant info would be close to 0.

That's the point lol

[throwaway6734]

You can do this on zoom although