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Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

> I really want to work at a startup. Also the things that are really important to me are: work/life balance, high salary, gold benefits, stability, working from 10 to 5 on the dot, never being on call, never needing to think or care about work out of hours

Do we still need to discuss about the barn that long hours do to health and productivity. If your business model needs developers that don't sleep enough and have no personal live then your company does not deserve to exist.

It is frustrating how entitled business are. Work/live balance is a human right. You have to sacrifice your life so I earn more money is a horrifying statement.

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It's batshit crazy to ask workers to "sacrifice" for their job. Unless they're co-owners. Talking 5%, minimum, of the company, and even that seems low to me to start asking for ownership-level commitment, which is to say anything at all beyond what any normal job would reasonably expect. Otherwise you're just taking advantage of people. Congratulations, you're an asshole.

Isn't it obvious? You have to sacrifice your life so your employer can afford to feed their extravanagnt ice cream cone habit. Seems like a fair arrangement to me.

Counterpoint: Most start-ups are going to have crunch times periodically where extra effort is called for. At least if they are trying to solve an ambitious problem. I doubt she is talking about a 24/7/365 death-march.

Every company is going to have crunch times periodically, but that isn't touted as "standard" like with startups. She's saying that if you care about work-life balance you're not the person they are looking for, which is complete bullshit.

There's a difference between crunching at a company with thousands of employees, and being on-call for the first year of a startup because if you aren't the entire business could go under overnight

> It is frustrating how entitled business are

I think that, on the whole, in the long run, unionization ends up doing more harm than good… but if tech workers ever _do_ unionize, business owners will really, really, really have brought it on themselves.

it's less that startups want to milk you for their own personal gain; it's more that they can't afford the things that BigCo can, such as gold benefits and perfect 8-hour schedules (because you might not be able to afford enough people to make this happen!)

that said, there are, absolutely, startups that milk their non-founders purely for the founders' gain

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