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Comment by danielbarla | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree, but is this a "reasonable" approach to take in a startup world (from the startup's point of view)? Or does this make us incompatible / unfavourable with startups, as OP said?

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Yes. Yes it is reasonable. A startup is hiring people to perform a job in exchange for compensation. If they want you to work weekends, they can pay a fair market rate for that.

Or they can hire more people.

In some countries, it's extremely unusual to perform overtime. If a startup has 10 employees and they each do an hour of overtime a week - they're effectively denying another worker a job.

Yes, it's a bit "mythical man month" - but if there's too much work to go around, your employer needs to hire more people.

I don't think reasonable is a good word, here. Of course it's reasonable. But when all your other coworkers are 20-something singles who can and will stay to 9pm, how do you remain "competitive"?

Obviously, ideally none of this would be necessary. But alas...

> Yes. Yes it is reasonable.

Reasonable, sure. But is it realistic when we have things like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11430596 ?

What about your own startup?

Perhaps you meant an hour of overtime per day.

Indeed!

I think if you can be that high energy contributor while you are in office and draw the line clearly stating your expectations, most colleagues can understand and respect that. 6 hours of high quality work any day trumps 8 hours of low quality work. Why should anyone expect that. The guidelines and rules are created for "everyone" who can't define their own schedule. If you can then more power to you.

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