Note, this is not a “lifestyle job” | Hacker News Reader

Note, this is not a “lifestyle job”

61 pointslifelesswork49 comments

I just came across this YCombinator-backed company careers page (https://www.bottomless.com/jobs) and saw this:

"Be part of our founding team. Note, this is not a "lifestyle job". Our goal is to build something great for a lot of people, not to maximize work/life balance."

I am genuinely curious what type of people actually decide to take these jobs? I understand that working at a startup will be different than working at BIGCORP, but what kind of people decide to go for a company that clearly announces long works hours (and probably below average pay) like that?

It's difficult for me to understand whether the founders of these companies are genuinely deluded, or whether they just hope to find someone dumb enough to buy into their "mission"? As long as you're an employee, then being a part of the "founding team" doesn't mean anything. Am I missing something?

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What I learned is that these jobs are only really fun if you are the founder. Over 20 years, I was the technical co-founder at 3 different startups, and I had crazy fun at each of those jobs, even when we were working 70 hours a week. Because when you are a founder, you're really only under the pressure that you yourself set for yourself. Yes, I worked very hard, but I was working on my ideas, I was meeting cool people, I had absolute freedom to set my own hours. It was fun.

I then made the mistake of thinking that I would also have the same kind of fun as an employee. I became the tech lead at a startup, thinking I would have the kind of freedom that I previously had. This was a mistake. I was very excited about the technology that this startup was working on, but in the end I found, these jobs are much less fun, if you are not the founder, because there is a lot of pressure that comes from up above you, and when you come up with what you think is a great idea, you don't get to implement it. And there are additional frustrations: for instance, on this project I came to believe that it was crucial that we fire our initial data scientist, but the top leadership refused to fire him. This was a major roadblock that I would not have faced if I was the founder, as I would have had the authority to fire someone if I was the founder.

For anyone interested, I wrote in great detail about the experience here:

https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...

Im in the same boat. It would be nice if there was someway to get a group of us to work together without just 1 or 2 of us enjoying ourselves. I would do well in most SRE positions, but not when someone else can overrule me. So that makes me the CTO, but I don't enjoy 100% of the CTO responsibilities.

Did you also learn the culture of lying about your passion for someone else's idea?

A lot of founders are oblivious to the fake cult they create

There are times in life where sometimes you just want to built something amazing, and you don't want that process hindered by those who only work 9-5. I personally worked this way until my mid 30s, and the best companies I was a part of were those companies where most of coworkers were young, smart, and passionate about what we wanted to do, our lives had no balance because we all obsessed over what we were building.

To me, this is likely who they are looking for, and why they are unapologetic about putting it there.

Typically founding team means a stake in the company, and that your efforts can shape the company and you have a voice at the table.

I'd say everyone could benifit from working on a passion project like this at least once, but that's just me.

"Typically founding team means a stake in the company"

Which usually ends up being nothing. I've been promised this multiple times in my 20s for working crazy hours and no 'life balance'. Even if you get a sliver of a percentage, it will be much less when the company gets future rounds of funding..if it even lasts that long.

Hey, I think we all know the stakes of the game, I went through like 9 companies, before I ever saw a return on my stake.

As I've gotten older, the gamble that is this model is less appealing to me, as are the 18 hour days, and zero home life.

But that is a young persons game, and can be really fun and exciting, no one is forcing anyone to take, or even apply for the position.

At least they are upfront about it.

this company sells coffee.

“We’re making the world a better place through heat-induced liquid caffeine dosage vendor solutions.”

That was a great one-sentence reality check.

One of the coolest projects I ever worked on, was automating a handbag production system. I long ago divorced the idea that the projects and the tech should be judged by the product of the company.

From my perspective, the message that "we don't care about work-life balance" is equivalent to "we expect you to prioritize your job over your physical, mental, and emotional health".

That, to me, is a really big red flag. The founders are making it clear that they care more about their bottom line than they do about their future employees. I think this is an immature and problematic way of going about business.

It’s also bad for business. Healthy workers do healthy work and they can do it for years without becoming disillusioned or overly invested. If the company fails because of uncontrollable factors like an economic crash they will still have a healthy personal life and all of that time won’t feel like a waste.

The attitude of trying to solve one big problem now so that everything else will fall into place doesn’t work. If the company does well you still only have your work. You don’t just win a great life because you reached a finish line in one area. I take issue with the term “work-life balance” but every job is a lifestyle job. The line that the OP quoted is just start-up talk for “hustle culture”.

That is intentional. They don't want people who are looking for red flags. They are looking for people to go all in on changing the world.

Three years from now the company will be bankrupt or the applicants will be expendable because the company will be much larger.

I also saw this ad, and was amused by one of their perks being "unlimited PTO". The combination of that and "not a lifestyle job" tells you everything you need to know about so-called unlimited time off policies.

Hah, last time I interviewed for a remote job in an American startup with unlimited PTO, I said: you know, I'm from Europe, here we don't have unlimited PTO, but 5 or 6 weeks of vacation are common - so I don't really want unlimited and would be happy with just 5 weeks. Are you OK with that? That was met with a bit of an uncomfortable silence, and then they said that the standard is that everybody takes 2 weeks of vacation once a year plus maybe an occasional day off a couple times a year. Which was exactly what I suspected.

In the previous US startup I worked for, which also had an "unlimited PTO", I checked the company calendar and it was standard to take at most 2-3 weeks of vacation per year. Seeing what I saw, I now consider the unlimited PTO a red flag, as in - somebody is looking for suckers.

Accrued vacation must be carried on the books of a company as a liability until the vacation is taken. So you have two weeks vacation a year, you work a year without taking any vacation, the company has actually paid for 54 weeks for their accounting.

Also, in many American states, accrued vacation must be paid out when you leave the job. So it's not just an imaginary liability.

No, it says that unlimited PTO _can_ be abused, not that it's inherent to the policy.

I'm currently at a company with unlimited PTO, and the way it works in practice here is that people feel free to take random days off without having to count beans, on top of a pretty normal amount of scheduled vacation: I currently have six weeks of vacation on the calendar for the rest of the year (that's more than I would've liked, but I have a few important family things going on overseas). On top of that, I'm taking this Friday off for a visiting friend. This unavoidably means my career will be worse off than if I had an extra couple months of productive work this year, but I'm an adult, capable of making this decision to trade off marginal career success for marginal quality of life improvements.

It's beyond me that some people who don't want to take responsibility for their careers are so desperate to tear down policies that treat employees like adults capable of making their own decisions. It's not like unlimited PTO is being offered to those who are one paycheck away from starvation. Take a normal amount of PTO if you want, take less or more if you want, but don't pretend like this choice being offered is exploitation.

> No, it says that unlimited PTO _can_ be abused, not that it's inherent to the policy.

> I'm currently at a company with unlimited PTO, and the way it works in practice here is that people feel free to take random days off without having to count beans, on top of a pretty normal amount of scheduled vacation: I currently have six weeks of vacation on the calendar for the rest of the year (that's more than I would've liked, but I have a few important family things going on overseas). On top of that, I'm taking this Friday off for a visiting friend. This unavoidably means my career will be worse off than if I had an extra couple months of productive work this year, but I'm an adult, capable of making this decision to trade off marginal career success for marginal quality of life improvements.

> It's beyond me that some people who don't want to take responsibility for their careers are so desperate to tear down policies that treat employees like adults capable of making their own decisions. It's not like unlimited PTO is being offered to those who are one paycheck away from starvation. Take a normal amount of PTO if you want, take less or more if you want, but don't pretend like this choice being offered is exploitation.

I personally dislike the term "unlimited" because it truly is not. If you can't legitimately take a whole year off, don't call it unlimited. I'm sure some who take issue with "unlimited PTO" feel similarly.

It's more useful to think of it as "unmetered PTO, and you're still responsible for your performance".

Sure, we could call it "flexible PTO" but nomenclature isn't the point. The comment originally was the person wanted a guaranteed 5 weeks, no more, no less. That is "fixed PTO". A high growth startup needs flexibility and thus "flexible PTO" policy helps. Some employees need just 1-2 week. Others 2-3 weeks. Yet other 3-4 weeks. Flexibility helps both employee and employer

I thought the exact same thing about unlimited time off but there is another aspect of unlimited PTO that I hadn't thought of until my current company said they were making the switch. The reasoning that was given for my company is that by switching to unlimited PTO it is going to free up cash and that cash can be used on other parts of the business. Two of the three major office sites for my company are in states that require payout of unused accrued PTO when an employee parts ways with the company. Companies that have offices in states that have the same rule about accrued PTO will have to have a larger cash reserve so that they can pay out to employees when they need to.

Is that supposed to be a bad thing? PTO is time earned by the employee. It's money they're supposed to get.

Right, but that is a reason that some companies moved to "Unlimited PTO". It isn't accrued and so doesn't get paid out. It saves the company money while typically screwing the employee

Right out of school that’s exactly what I wanted, and put me in a good position to start my own company 3 years later. Now, in my mid-30’s, I’m optimizing for flexibility more than anything else. Just depends where you are in your life / professional goals.

Seeking compliant robots eager to trade their physical and mental health for excessive work hours and minimal compensation so that the real founders can cash out as quickly as possible. Does this sound enticing? Inquire within.

I respect their honesty.

Translation: 70 hour work weeks (minimum). You better not have a family. Not answering your phone at 2:31AM on a Sunday is grounds for instant dismissal.

Hopefully, they're including a decent sum of equity (even if you're more likely to win the lottery).

I wouldn't touch this with a 400 meter pole.

How hard can it be to make a wifi food scale? Why do you need data scientist. Inventory management is very well studied science. There are plenty of formulas to calculate optimal reordering points. You probably can use seasonal ARIMA to forecast coffee use. I know this is just going to come off as sour grapes, but how does a company like this get into YC?

Someone should be able to whip this up in a few days.

It seems a bit like Juicero - maybe investors are trying to find a corner of market based on food subscriptions.

Just sets the tone for the culture fit.

What they describe is the reality for most small tech businesses, other companies just lie about it for recruitment purposes and then subject employees to various pressures to make more commitments. This just cuts through that and there are people available for it and it saves everyone a little time.

All these operations are based on getting your job done in an optimal time.

> It's difficult for me to understand whether the founders of these companies are genuinely deluded, or whether they just hope to find someone dumb enough to buy into their "mission"?

There is also the desperate. People that have just been laid off elsewhere with no cash reserves, people just trying to break into the industry (they mention a student loan allowance), people with a criminal record, the list goes on.

Preventing the desperate from being exploited is why we have labor laws to begin with.

> Our goal is [..] not to maximize work/life balance.

Maximizing work/life would mean work is large compared to life. So not maximizing it means work won't take up much time - your worries are misplaced, OP!

At least they're upfront about I guess. Unlike most companies including those that fall into BIGCORP where you're stack ranked out if you aren't competing on hours spent in office.

The flipside is the BIGCORP will likely be around in 5 years, will offer a decent healthcare plan and any share-based compensation is likely to be worth more than $0 when you vest.

This is why burnout is a thing amongst tech workers, especially for Silicon Valley style startups. I also can't understand why some employees would fall for these YC cliches "changing the world", "hustle, work hard play hard", "passionate about our business" but the fact is a lot of people do fall for that. They end up working long hours, for a company that really doesn't do anything remarkable at all, if this company didn't exist no-one would care. Yet their peers and the YC-culture tells them that they should be really passionate about this so when the reality doesn't live up to that people burnout.

This is exactly a lifestyle job. Lifestyle for people who think their work is substitute for personality. It's very saddening that software development became this.

A company that doesn't balance work and life is a company who doesn't want people to be sane.

There are many reasons why I cannot work long hours. Disability. Kids. Wife. Family obligations. And that's just to name a few. And I'm a guy, I never will become pregnant. To ignore those is to basically say "we only hire guys in peak physical and mental health with no obligations who are willing to destroy their body and mind for profit."

I've worked in seven different start ups as a Dir of Tech, CTO, software engineer, etc. It's naive to assume that these guys, although amateur as far as job postings go, don't represent 95% of tech starts up. I had no problem putting in 70+ hours a week for years. The moment I became a mother, even before I actually had the baby, this career trajectory seems to have evaporated. The company I worked for at the time, the offers from the start ups I received later on, all have the culture that promotes this form of enslavement, really... and with acquisition, finance rounds, etc that nice looking equity becomes meaningless at payday.. if there is ever one. A new framework is needed to support a diverse workforce... really; and it can start with VCs making calls on where the put the money but most likely, the cultural shift will need to come from the ground up... like every other revolution

If you really wanted to learn how to manage supply chain of coffee, maybe working at an actual coffee shop (where you actually see the action happening) would benefit more than working at this startup.

It is just amazing how much more hype (YC-backed, millions of funding) a tech startup gets for doing this work versus other jobs that also solve similar problems.

I actually really enjoy jobs like that, where you can just intently focus on a mission. Even if the mission is coffee.

However, companies that put it as a job requirement take the fun out of it.

In a sense, it's nice to constantly give presents to your spouse and her family. But a forced tribute is not fun.

My first job was more or less like this, I guess vicarious ambition (i.e. making someone else's dream come true) can carry naive young people a long way. I'll never do that again though.

There's plenty of people who enjoy a period of intense growth and hard work.

To me the bigger issue is sustainability and scalability. You can build a small dedicated team with a culture like this, but once you have that culture it won't go away easily. When you're trying to scale up and retain a large staff, I would argue that a culture of overworking is detrimental. Good luck retaining employees who have less equity and are not directly connected with the founder, but who are still expected to work 60+ hours a week.

If you do decide to accept a position, then do yourself a service and negotiate a market-value salary that reflects all the overtime you'll be contributing.

As for equity: that is what you get for the risk that the company will go bankrupt. The earlier you join the company, the higher the risk, and therefore the higher the equity.

Don't mix salary and equity! If things don't workout.. say, a month before your cliff, then at least you'll walk away knowing you got paid fairly.

I'd totally be a sucker for this type of job description ~6 years ago (32 now, married and a kid on the way).

I want(ed) to build something that made a dent in the world (so perhaps not coffee refills). And somehow making a dent & working long/hard hours were conflated.

A more mission driven company with a similar description would have totally lured me in. :D

I've met with a person who said "holiday is the enemy of work" and he really meant it. When he worked he wanted to work 80 hour for months when he wanted holyday he rested for months. For him mixing the two was just unnecessary complication.

Probably someone who is young and wants to eventually start their own company.

That company in particular has only 2 employees right now (the founders).

With respect to this particular company, I only know them from trying their product, so I wouldn't necessarily make any assumptions around comp when the data doesn't exist yet. Presumably the early employee offers are generous in equity. Usually founding team means high equity, and the company is pretty green as well. They have just raised a $1.9M Series A and they presumably have revenue coming in from their current customers. It's good that they are upfront about the stage.

I think this kind of job can be good for someone who wants to go all-in on their career, potentially right out of school (see their student loan repayment perk), and compress years of learning down to learn things several times faster than a bigger startup and tens to hundreds of times faster than a big company. Seed stage can be extremely fun and rewarding but of course there is increased risk of burnout. Another reason to consider this type of opportunity is if the company or problem they're solving is obsessively interesting to you (e.g., you'd consider founding your own company in the space).

Bottomless is having real scaling pains right now. They have initial traction but their software needs help. As a user, I get the impression from a quality perspective that they've outsourced initial development. There are bugs going unfixed for weeks and months. My first experience with their product was okay: there is potential, but the scale and first coffee arrived weeks late so I had to buy coffee from somewhere else when the projections were missed more than once. They are clearly overwhelmed right now. The second experience was bad: my credit card was charged overnight by surprise for a product I didn't want with the sole warning and option to opt out of the charge occurring overnight < 8 hours beforehand while I was sleeping, then my card being charged before I woke up, then they refused to cancel the shipment and put up a fight refunding to my card. (Their recurring shipping does not run on a fixed calendar schedule so the customer has to rely on the business to notify them of when it determines new orders will be created.) Though I pointed out that this process is unreasonable and also does not match what is listed on their website ("12-24 hours notice"… which is still too low especially when traveling), they did not offer to or issue the refund initially without me being extremely persistent and I had to fight with them for it. They could really use people focusing on these kinds of challenges full time to make the product / service better. I am going to give their product another chance because I like the concept, but for a software engineer interested in this space I'd imagine they're offering an opportunity with significant product ownership given how clearly strained they are right now, how much needs to be built, and their fresh funding.

You are much more forgiving than I am. It should have been an instant refund.

If they make you fight for what is yours, then charge back. You don't have tolerate that kind of service.

That line stuck out to me as well, but I got to hand it to them the filter probably works great.

It's like spam emails. They are ridiculous exactly so that they only deal with people who have already fallen for the con.

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