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It's funny how often I got rejected after saying that I am not 24/7 available and that I believe that, if someone needs to have this kind of availability, it means that something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed. The words they used in the rejections were always something like: "we feel like you are not willing to put enough skin in the game" or "everyone else sees the opportunity here is is willing to work their asses off, why are you different?" It's specially funny to hear all this after the CEO has basically told me that they are planning for an exit in a couple of years, and being someone who has seems this first hand a few times., it usually means everyone works til the point of burn out and, in the end, the CEO gets handsomely while everyone else has a regular Wednesday.

I don't like having to be on call 24/7 either and would prefer to work on a team that has 24/7 ops, so the devs don't have to do that. However, in the case of a startup where the devs also do ops, what is the option? I don't understand the part where you said that this means something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed if devs need to be on call. What happens if something goes wrong with an environment and an auto restart doesn't fix the issue? I am curious because I'd like to have a better answer for potential startup opportunities that won't spend money on a 24/7 ops team and ask this of their devs.

Hire for it? Don't coerce your employees into doing something you you don't want to pay for?

What most people don't think of is that when you're on 24/7 duty your salary is less than half of what it should be.

Halfway decent enterprises will reimburse you for off-hour duty usually at multiple times your normal rate plus a minimum pay. Or just hire someone in a different timezone.

The reality is though, most people don't need panic calls from their CEO at midnight and the company would still do perfectly fine without it. There really is no excuse for this.

Isn't that what the company in question was trying to do, hiring the devs who are willing to do 24/7 too?

Sure, but then the lesson to take away from this is that the company in question apparently isn't offering enough to make that job worthwhile, and that's not the fault of the people turning them down.

When the company phrases their rejection as "we don't think you're committed enough to do this", that's when things smell off to me. They're hiring for a specific role, they should act like it.

As an analogy, if you hire me to build software, and then slip in that you expect me to spend 10 extra hours a week doing cold sales calls, I might turn down your job because I don't want to do sales, I'm an engineer. And the problem at that point isn't my commitment to the company, the problem is that the company hasn't figured out it needs to make the sales tasks part of the job description.

How do interviews get to this point? How does a company get to the point where you're talking to the CEO, they're laying out their exit strategies, and the job requirements still haven't been made clear?

> "we feel like you are not willing to put enough skin in the game" or "everyone else sees the opportunity here is is willing to work their asses off, why are you different?"

Those quotes say to me that the owners are viewing this as a question of "loyalty" or moral obligation, not as a normal part of a job negotiation. A good test: if the CEO feels offended that you ask for more compensation in exchange for being online 24x7, then this isn't about trying to hire a specific role, it's about their ego/entitlement.

You could be right and it could well be the case, but we don't know really. We are only aware that the GP turned them down, but it's quite possible they had the position filled.

One person wearing many hats is rather typical in small companies and early stage startups. Being asked to do extra is not something insulting per se, as long as you compensated accordingly, either with more hard money or (a lot more) equity.

It is a non-starter proposition to many, which should be respected. But it's not something borderline criminal.

> How does a company get to the point where you're talking to the CEO, they're laying out their exit strategies, and the job requirements still haven't been made clear?

Look, if we're still talking about a startup it could well be the interviewer is the CEO, the guy who brought you coffee is CFO and you're interviewing for CTO/dev/ops/support in one :)

> CTO/dev/ops/support in one <

That one little phrase sums up the problem with most startups. Hire someone who doesn’t know any better and tell them they are the “CTO”.

I think you're basically right. At the end of the day, if the servers catch fire, you probably need to call the responsible developers for help getting things back on track.

The real questions then are how is the work divided, what does escalation look like, what steps are taken to reduce incidents outside of office hours, what's being done to allow for urgent maintenance to wait until office hours, etc, and also like how well is that all working, and where is the leadership in this?

I worked somewhere with not great answers to a lot of these questions, but it was okish because the cofounders were waking up with all the pages and hoping on to fix things too, and I had a mediocre experience with a dedicated ops team at a previous job that I didn't want to repeat. Eventually, as the team got bigger, we made a lot of things better, including on call responsibilities.

The option is to compensate for it on top of extra salary to the point where you get enough volunteers for rotation, and/or hire for it.

I had a side gig that very explicitly was being hired to be the guy that gets woken up by PagerDuty. They paid me about an extra $1k/month purely for having my phone on in addition to what they paid me for the time I spent dealing with actual issues. Even then $1k/month was only enough because most of the other work I did for them was explicitly to improve site availability so I could ensure the platform was resilient enough that I rarely got woken up. In effect my hourly rate for being woken up probably translated to $2k-$3k/hour, with it sometimes going half a year between being woken up, before suddenly a bad release might cost me sleep a few nights in a row.

But having felt the stress of this on a full-time basis in the past, without that kind of compensation, I don't think it's cost-effective to have your dev team serve this role vs. having a few people on retainer to at least triage and try the obvious things. You're going to pay for it with staff that do not get proper rest (even when the phone doesn't go off it'll be there at the back of your head).

Where I work, being on call means being able to respond to a call by being at your laptop, with a reliable internet connection within 10 minutes - and able to keep working for as long as may be needed.

That means no stopping at the gym on the way home, no going into the city to see a show, no lengthy car journeys, no getting drunk, no going on dates, no evening classes, no school plays, no sport that takes you more than a block away from home, no taking your kids to the park to feed the ducks.

The idea you could have people be on call constantly sounds crazy to me.

Funny how those same companies never are willing to pay you for that 24/7 availability. I'd be happy to do that, if they paid me for it, and not with bullshit options.

They say “skin in the game” but they mean “skin in the machine”.

These sorts of word games work on young naive people, especially young men. Maybe we need to broadly educate people that this sort of exploitation is not okay...

The valley is a machine, caked with blood, running on flesh.

The valley is mostly mature companies that don’t do this.

> if someone needs to have this kind of availability, it means that something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed.

The crazy thing is, they think they can just throw manhours at bad planning and somehow make it work.

You can literally plan well, have a good life and still come out ahead of these chaotic organizations that make everybody run in circles out of pure panic.

I have seen this so often in film projects: people believe by exploiting themselves, their crew and their cast they somehow "extract" more value and magically make it work. And that one one the point, relexad, but well-planned project will always achieve better results. Because oh wonder: crews and casts that are not overworked and that use their maximum potential where it matters instead of spreading it out over the whole project will always produce better results.

I read a book by a consultant who said he could immediately gauge how well a factory was operating by looking at how relaxed the average workers were. The most efficient factories almost looked like nothing was happening, because they had a smooth and efficient process and knew how to calmly handle emergencies.

if you can share the title/author of the book please do, I've seen this pattern in work as well

I can't be sure, but I think it was "Slack" by Demarco.

And what is true for the factory is also true for a film set.

The thing many dont realize is: If you have a good plan and follow it, you will very often have more freedom to try out new things than when your planning is chaotic or non-existent — because then literally every step is made out of fear, out of panic, to avoid pain or because other decisions froced you into something.

I say this because startups would argue about creativity and all that, but having worked aomw time both in art school and on film sets I can guarantee that the qell prepared always have more freedom than those who just try to figure things out as they go.

Thinking it is somehow more honorable to plan badly, throw peoples lifetime at the thing and getting a somewhat okayish result is really problematic in my eyes. Romantizing things that could have been solved by realistic (or even pessimistic) planning is not cool, it just shows me that you have no experience.

Your discounting of the budget factor among many others is brave. Many hardworking directors with high expectations have very different priorities, some which are simply big distractions from producing a quality production. This “be relaxed and chill to make a good film” idea is delusional, but its not necessarily wrong as much as it is just nonsense. And the ability to merely plan and execute plans, regardless how good they are, depends tremendously and straightforwardly on budget.

> This “be relaxed and chill to make a good film” idea is delusional

I studied film. I directed films and I was on more films sets than I wish I would have been. While this is certainly uncommon (especially in low budget productions), it is definitly not delusional. Quite the opposite, as I already argued.

There certainly is a place where working extremely hard pays off, John Carmack is an example of this, though he was a founder at the time.

So i wholly agree that the old adage "work smarter, not harder" applies here.

The fool is most likely yourself if you are available 24/7 and work long hours more often than not.

There's a difference between being on call 24/7 and actually being called frequently.

I consider myself on call 24/7 and tell my team this but in 3 years have never been woken up, nor have I had to wake someone else up. One day it will happen but once in 3+ years is perfectly reasonable.

I’ve never had these abuses working for a startup. I feel like you have to push back against things instead of just going with it. Or choose the position better because they sound like bad jobs regardless of the type of business. That’s what I can’t help thinking when I hear that because I’ve now worked for 5 different startups and while there was some crunch time occasionally the majority by far was an 8 hour day and then I was out, even for one of the companies when I was the 4th engineer. And they just closed another 20 million round recently.

I really don’t think people do enough due diligence about where they should work plain and simple. Work is a mutual contract where you want to try to extract as much value from your employer while negotiating to the point they’ll still hire you. And a lot of the negotiation is figuring out if it’s a good job anyway and walking away to another option if you get the sense it’s not a good from either a financial, time or social perspective.

We either need agents who will negotiate on the employees behave or some kind of training that is part of a 4 year degree. Negotiations and finances are hard - this is why some people are good at selling and some are not. Engineers are usually good at their primary job and usually not that good at defending against other social engineering tactics founders use

edit: don’t want to blame founders, they also need to preserve their equity for future employees but there has to be a better balance

> I feel like you have to push back against things instead of just going with it.

In a bad startup you typically can’t ‘push back’ meaningfully. If the management doesn’t understand how to treat people well, people pushing back won’t educate them, and employees have to get work done to justify their presence rather than fighting battles all the time.

In that case, you leave.

If you're a decent engineer you'll find work in a few weeks and any other startup will be happy to have you.

Unfortunately for non engineers I understand that may be more difficult and for those starting out too. So matter of perspective definitely since engineers aren't the only employees at a startup, but I would hope with due dilligence that is caught while you're interviewing.

> In that case, you leave.

Depending on how long it takes you to get to this point, it could have cost you a great deal in lost opportunity and benefits.

The fact that you can get another job is irrelevant to that.

Which is the point of this overall thread - you could easily have been better off at an established company.

I don't know how that follows, you're not going to necessarily escape terrible bosses just by going to an established org. If that's the thought you'll have quite the rude awakening.

Everything you just said is true of working at a big co as well.

Plenty of people at big cos have bad bosses, plenty get over worked. Plenty feel they have no input etc etc, this is a human organizational and work issue that is true of both small startup and big org.

I've listened to my mother gripe about some of the biggest financial companies in the world from various positions all the way to fairly senior management for the last 20 years with everything that has been said here. The only solution she had was to jump to another company after investing sometimes up to 5 years of her time in places like that.

> you're not going to necessarily escape terrible bosses just by going to an established org

No, but you will be paid more over time and switching jobs won’t cost you deferred payment in terms of vesting.

If you can land a startup job with the same salary and benefits as a bigco, then by all means do so. This is more about the poor value of deferred compensation.

> In a bad startup you typically can’t ‘push back’ meaningfully. If the management doesn’t understand how to treat people well, people pushing back won’t educate them, and employees have to get work done to justify their presence rather than fighting battles all the time.

Is what started our sub thread here, I didn't believe we've been talking financials. If we have been, then in base salary I guess I still disagree, but yeah at least with RSUs it's hard to beat. That said I've interviewed for startups where the base salary for an IC position was like 230k+, they're rarer, founded by exceptional past founders who raised ridiculous sized rounds, and all just as rare as a job at a FAANG so I don't know, is the real problem that all 85th percentile and below of all jobs pay like shit or treat people poorly?

> Is what started our sub thread here

Our sub-thread is in the context of the overall posting, which is about what a bad deal it is to work at startups. The entire point is about the risk not being worth the financial reward. Our sub-thread is discussing one aspect of that.

There's certainly some selection bias on these sorts of threads, but I agree with you that it's important for individuals to take as much responsibility as they can for the outcome they expect.

That means vetting a company before joining it, pushing back during negotiations and being willing to walk away, giving necessary feedback to your coworkers regardless of their title, and personally practicing the style of leadership you expect from others.

It takes a team of people though, and if the team isn't solid then you need to either try to fix it or walk away. A good team will build individuals up and support them rather than wear down and exploit them.

I just passed the 5 year mark at my current company. When I joined there were about 30 people, and now it's probably around 400. I took 4 days off this week, but on Friday afternoon I popped into the old "office", which are some portable buildings on a cattle ranch. It turned out to be the once-every-few-years junk cleanup day, and the CEO, possibly a billionaire on paper at this point, was limping around with leather gloves and a sore back, and all he had to talk about was the recent ultrasound of his first baby, and how proud he is of how the company has grown since the last cleanup day.

They're not all that bad. I've worked in a horrible startup before and they absolutely forced everyone to work harder with longer hours instead of working smarter. We had a few ~12-16 hour deploys that started after a full work day where the entire engineering department was required to stay and the oncall was brutal 2 week long slogs because no effort was allowed to be put into actually fixing stuff.

But on the other hand, I've also been at ok jobs that were pretty great companies and the one I currently work at is absolutely amazing and it's a joy to work at. The pay has been pretty awesome as well.

Larger companies in my experience can be soul crushingly beaurocratic and the slower pace means your skillet grows more slowly (no big tech companies in the valley, just some large public companies after startup acquisitions).

It's just anecdotal from my experience and I'm not really sure how big of a haystack the amazing startup needles are in but they are out there. Work is work, but you spend a huge portion of your life at work, if you can enjoy it thoroughly, you can live a happier life.

If you're saying not all startups are bad, I completely agree with you, but we're talking about a specific kind here. I've worked at some really challenging startups where I also did overtime during deploys(I did get to charge the hours though) in which I learned a lot. AND THEN we actually worked on reducing those issues for the future.

They didn't actually make that part of the job either. I could have rejected if I wanted to. And there was never a vision alignment talk with miniscule equity with an unwritten agreement of doing anything that was asked otherwise I'd kiss my equity goodbye.

EDIT: I can't believe I have to clarify this. Most of the startups that would fit my above description don't market themselves as startups to begin with. I.e. they don't think their distinguishing feature is to be a startup with equity.

You’re saying not all startups are bad, just a specific kind are bad: bad startups. Seems tautological.

> that's what you have to do to change the world

It may be what you need to change the world. But making a n uber clone for dogs is not changing the world.

Literally 99% of startups have zero claim to trying to change the world.

Doing this for dogs is a good way to productize research if it’s too regulated to cheaply do for humans.

Thank you for sharing. As a worker passionate about labor rights, I believe sharing these stories is an important step in raising awareness to what happens when we waive our labor rights.

In a just society these kind of labor violations would be as criminal as a bank robbery. There would be prison time involved and the victims would be paid, both for the value of the work that was stolen from them, plus compensation for the crime committed.

> This is exploitation plain and simple

If so, it's voluntary exploitation. She can quit on Monday. Don't give 2 weeks notice if you feel the situation is abusive.

You'll lose a paycheck, but you always have to be prepared for that when at startups. Mainly because they die all the time, but also for these kinds of scenarios.

> Don't give 2 weeks notice

If they want you gone too, then sure. Otherwise, consider if and how that move may affect your next job's reference or background checks.

So... why does your wife stay there?

Possibly golden handcuffs (the options are worth much in theory, but cannot be exercised or cashed in until IPO for instance). Another reason why it's often bad to be a normal employee in a startup when it comes to equity. The terms of the options are often against you.