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Comment by t0mbstone | Hacker News Reader

Investor: "Your employees are only working 10-5. You need to crack the whip on your slaves so they work harder and make me more money."

CEO: "Ok, how can I spin this so my employees don't get angry at me. Oh, I know! I'll make a presentation and write a blog article!"

The article represents just about everything wrong with the startup world and the cult of workaholism. The toxicity and brain washing is real.

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Yeah right "startup culture". It's not like tech industry is systematically affected by this problem from smallest startup to largest Mega Corpo. It's not like if you're a software eng it's seen very normal to work 9 to 6 and occasional overtime plus weekend work. When I work in a startup at least I can talk to my manager as a friend and say "I'm under the weather today, won't make it to work"; whereas in Mega Corp big managers are unreachable aliens living in Saturn managing their assets and "this is company policy".

We used to like it especially when management referred to their employees as "resources" .. you know.. "we have 5 resources devoted to this". So we started referring to ourselves as meat bags. "We have 5 meat bags on this project."

In an effort to fool us meat bags companies have moved to the term "Human Capital" in place of "resources".

Maybe in an IBM megacorp but Facebook and Google at least are totally cool with people working 9 to 5 and taking sick days (outside a few bad managers).

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