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Comment by itsmemattchung | Hacker News Reader

> Just before launch date, we stayed up the entire night fixing polish items. I remember going to sleep in a phone booth and waking up early in the morning to try to finish out some last edits while Michelle worked on the blog post

God damn, I'm old. That start up scene used to sound appealing to me but now makes me cringe.

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Not to mention the preceding paragraph:

> When I started at Stripe, I asked to delay my start date until after a family vacation, but my manager just told me to start sooner and take time off later (Stripe was just shy of 100 employees and moving incredibly quickly). I now had an artificial deadline of one month to ship my first project.

That’s a reasonably sized red flag. Asking someone to miss a family vacation so they can go after some arbitrary deadline?

Yikes.

Wait I read that as they start earlier, and take the time off as planned, later. Only because the exact same thing happened to me, maybe it's ambiguous?

For what it's worth, when I joined Stripe (a bit closer to 400), I told my manager that I had a 2-week vacation after my first week of work, and they were totally fine with it! I suspect this is more of a "setting expectations early" and the cost of making a change

Author here: to be clear, I asked if it was OK to start later after the family vacation, but my manager said I could just start earlier and take the family vacation as a large amount of PTO. There wasn't anything malicious there.

If there was a fundraising event in between, this was a generous offer. The strike price on those options could've gone way up. I'm not sure if that's the case here but I've heard it happen at other fast growing startups.

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