Hacker News Reader

Comment by president | Hacker News Reader

To be fair this happens because there are those who are willing to hurt themselves in order to get ahead in their career. We've all had coworkers that send late emails at 2am in the morning or don't use up their vacation days because they want to appear as hard working and as loyal to the company. Many of these people have no real skill and sacrificing their free time is the only real edge they have. This is fairly common and observable at your standard big enterprise software corp. Not trying to shift the blame from companies but it does take two to tango.

View on HN

This perspective ignores the power dynamics. The tangoing duo are not equal partners, the company has the power to exert pressure on the employee to burn themselves out, and in fact did in this story.

Shouldn’t management be able to identify that their team is comprised of these otherwise incompetent individuals? I see those 2am emails as a symptom rather than a catalyst.

The managers do it too. I've seen it all the way up to the VP level. There is just too much bloat in these large companies.

Xoogler here. Back at Google, there was an explicit policy that "heroic" efforts result in at most a bump of one level on the internal assessment scale - there was an idea that you should be doing productive work without having to overwork yourself, and too much "willing to work constantly" from reports was a danger sign for the manager's performance review. (Granted, this also could be super stressful for borderline employees, who are essentially told that even if they work hard, we'll still fire you.)

It make sense for a startup to heavily reward employees capable of "heroic" efforts because the company might not be there next week if the MVP doesn't ship.

But for a company like Google, nowhere near an existential threat, it makes sense to prioritize long term players capable of delivering for years.

Can you name some companies that have died from a week's worth of developer shortfalls?

Should probably restrict this to companies that had revenue and paid its employees.

If the sleep actually really matters and if long hours do damage long term productivity the way studies suggest, then the frequent heroic effort is irrational and detrimental to productivity. There is no way around it.

There is no way around it for borderline employees too. Assuming these studies are correct, what the heroic effort for borderline employee do is signaling desperation and emotional investment.

Depends on your view on cycling through resources. Who cares if someone who no longer works here is burnt out? Ergo, you have to tie that into the understanding that good employees are hard to find, and rotating them comes at a cost that's greater than not burning them out.

Even then you'll still get "just this once" people who understrand the problem but can't help themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com