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Comment by DSingularity | Hacker News Reader

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DSingularity

Yeah, or you can avoid all that by going to startups.

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Working 60hr/week for a startup is completely illogical. It's the sort of thing you only do drunk on kool-aid.

> It's the sort of thing you only do drunk on kool-aid

Did not realise believing in a mission is akin to joining a suicide cult.

Work doesn’t have to suck. It doesn’t have to be everyone’s calling. But it is for some of us, and sixty+ hours a week can be time well spent. My time at start-ups has been time around colleagues I love, work I enjoy and a mission I believe in. (I was also decently compensated while there and exorbitantly so on the upside.)

There are countless public servants, non-profit employees, artists and public-company workers putting in those hours and more finding reward in their work. No need to deem everyone who doesn’t fit your lifestyle an idiot.

I mean - feel free if you actually think your job is aligned with your life's goal.

Me? I'd rather do what I can to make Art. So it's nice that I can get a software company to subsidize it thoroughly.

I'm just glad I can get paid effectively for being Skilled instead of laboring with my Skill. Availability is the best ability after all.

There's a balance between passionate hustle and diving into burnout. Some people can do more than others. etc etc. It's more sustainable for mental health to not make every waking minute about work, and take breaks and vacations. If you don't have a life, there's no point to working.

It doesn't have to, but the most likely outcome in a startup is it goes bankrupt, what you did disappears into the dark hole of failed ideas, and no one sees it.

It's a suckers game: the default behavior needs to be "when the founders get greedy and kick me out...what will I do then? How will I feel about that time?"

> what you did disappears into the dark hole of failed ideas

If the work is for financing a life outside it, yes. But if the work is rewarding in itself, then said failure is—while highly disappointing—balanced by the relationships, stories and skills gained therefrom.

This is absolutely a risk tolerance and personality matrix thing. I just want to push back against this recently-popular philosophy which idealises the Western European work ethic and lifestyle. It is one among many local optima.

Working 60 hours a week probably leaves you with less relationships+stories+skills than working 40 hours a week.

I would say the opposite - the only job I can imagine (outside of the first two years of investment banking) working 60+ hours/week would be a startup - where each and every hour in those first 2-3 years can make the difference between building a Billion dollar company or just getting left behind.

The only time id do that is if I was the founder.

Employees are too likely to be screwed over, even if the company is successful

Define screwed over? Because in my view getting screwed over is joining the industry on promise of working on deep tech and ending up a tiny cog in a machine.

I mean, a lot depends on your level of seniority, what type of equity you negotiate, how likely it will be diluted, whether you are likely to have a $100mm/$500mm/$1B exit. A lot depends on the integrity of the CEO in the event of an acquhire (probably the most common exit) and how well the Principle engineers will be compensated (Retention Bonuses usually).

I will agree with you - it's probably batshit insane for a working stiff without a good chance of a $2mm+ payout to be working 60+ hours/week for years on end.

Most startups aren't engineering-bound though

Amdahl's Law

And do a lot more work for way less money? Your work will have more impact, that's for sure. But at some point you'll have a higher-level realization that you're still working in a capitalist hellhole and you're not being fairly compensated for the risk compared to the VCs or the founders. If I was going to work in a startup or FAANG from 22-30, I'd pick FAANG for the guaranteed million dollars in the bank.

The only exception I'd personally make is to found a startup with people I enjoy on a problem that I'm personally motivated by. This is basically a band for capitalistic nerds. Even then, you still have to allow VCs to suck out your soul.

And given what kinds of products and services the vast majority of startups out there provide, even "impact" is questionable.

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