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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

If you believe you are hiring him for that reason, then I see why you felt the need to use a throwaway.

You're buying his time and experience for agreed upon hours. You don't have the ability to make him put your work ahead of his anymore than you have the ability to make him put your work ahead of his family, personal life, education or retirement savings.

In discussions like this I tend to fall on sympathizing with employers because until you've taken the risk, hired and managed people you don't fully appreciate just how hard it is or how difficult it is to keep people happy.

What you're describing is closer to buying his life - which would be an understandable arrangement from a business partner but not an everyday employee.

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Of course, you're forgetting the most important part!

People get paid for all sorts of reasons. If you are being paid specifically to put work in front of your hobbies, then that is your job! Think database uptime employees who are paid to get up in the middle of the night to fix a bug, etc. Heck, I even paid a friend to eat a shoe once; you can pay people to do all sorts of things. Paying someone to put work in front of hobbies is hardly novel or extreme.

Of course, this should be clear in the job description!!

"If you are being paid specifically to put work in front of your hobbies"

...then it is most probably illegal in quite a lot of countries. Labor codes exist for a good reason. Most people are a) employees b) not willing to put life ahead of work and c) not willing to be forced to by competition from desperate/workaholic co-workers.

Database uptime employees work shifts, so even they should not be forced to put life before work.

I suspect you are wrong about legality, but lets put that aside.

Do you think it's reasonable to expect a CEO to put work in front of hobbies?

Not as a goal in itself, no. In the case of real priorities, yes. In the case of apparent priorities, no.

Nevertheless, how numerous are CEOs compared to other employees?

By whose authority are you imagining that expectation is enforced?

Pager jobs at smaller companies are often not on shifts. Larger companies are usually much more realistic about it. Larger companies tend to give you shifts, along with the better compensation and more realistic expectations, at least in my experienice.

Legally, as an exempt employee, at least in California, my employer is in the clear. Hell, I believe they do it to hourly workers, too. I have worked in the computer industry my whole life, but I am told that it is not uncommon for minimum wage jobs to insist you come in at unexpected hours to cover unexpected events.

Sir, you have clearly been trolled. Don't feed the trolls.

Sometimes a troll is worth replying to if it gets a discussion going. The troll no longer needs to be a part of the discussion.

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