Both startup founders and investors alike seem to forget this (for obvious reasons) so it is good to put this on your toilet wall so you see it often.
CEO = Chief Enslaved Officer.
Enslaved to your investor obviously.
Enslaved to your customers.
And even enslaved to your employees. This one may need some elaboration — the CEO constantly needs to manage their motivation through ups and downs and ensure they are productive, and be responsive to them.
CEO = Cheap, Enslaved Officer.
For obvious reasons — CEOs intentionally take very little if any pay.
Anyone with not-too-distant relatives that were _owned_ by wealthy old white dudes may find the equating of CEOs with slavery an "I have no time for this person" level offense.
I understand why the topic at large is a sensitive one, and more for some than others. That doesn't mean I'll be overly concerned with someone who responds to such an analogy with some variation of "I have no time for you".
The problem with a CEO calling themselves a slave is that it pretends that someone who has made an active choice to start a company is a victim. As this article shows, a CEO can choose to walk away from their company without fear of violence or starvation. If I meet a CEO who labels themselves enslaved, that tells me they are unwilling to recognize their responsibility for their own choices. That mindset makes them unfit to hold the power of the leadership position they aspire to.
Wage slavery obviously is nothing like the others, but in the context of applying to a CEO, and given the frequency that it comes up (especially with the recurring universal basic income discussions), I think it is a much closer analogy that jumping straight back to the time before the american civil war.
Sure, if Zuckerberg jokingly called himself “chief enslaved officer” that’d be a little tone deaf given his power and privilege, but the founder of some pre-pmf startup working 10hr days 7 days a week jokingly commenting that is just a small way to soothe the pain. Obviously they aren’t a slave in any real sense (no one in America currently is), it’s a comment on the real sacrifices and effort and stress of the job.
> no one in America currently is
Sadly, this is false. If I knew more about the current state of human trafficking, I’d provide some links.
We’re all on someone’s dollar and beholden to them so by the “chief enslaved officer” logic we’re all slaves which really cheapens and nearly erases a very real and very recent thing.
Using a trauma that you haven't experienced as a point of reference can also be seen as minimizing that trauma. Especially if you're going for a purposefully extreme juxtaposition like "being at the very top of a business with control over other people's labor and livelihoods is just like being a slave."
Because it's nothing like that at all to someone with deeper experience with the subject, and is as false to them as other shocking juxtapositions like "stubbing your toe is like having your entire family murdered in the holocaust (because they both hurt!)" or "needing to have a license to operate a car is like being gangraped (because you don't want either!)." Those kinds of analogies can be interpreted as purposefully trivializing and mocking that trauma, because there are quite a few people out there who really enjoy doing that sort of thing.
So when language is used like that, people who are hurt by the reference have to decide whether the speaker is simply ignorant of how it's going to land or if they are doing it on purpose. Some of them are going to chuck Hanlon's razor out the window and assume it's done on purpose as part of some sort of power game or sadism.
- recent historical labor slavery (predominantly but not exclusively race based, US focus)
- modern labor slavery (less common in the US than other parts of the world)
- sex slavery (with a debate over when sex work counts)
- "wage slavery": being in a position where you must work to sustain yourself, without an expectation of receiving compensation based on the value you create
Wage slavery is not an uncommon phrase, and you see it bandied about on HN semi-regularly, especially whenever the topic of universal basic income comes up.
I would peg wage slavery as the closest context for analogy, though it's not perfect; in this case, the startup CEO is working predominantly for equity in the hopes that the equity will eventually be worth more than if they had taken a standard salary.
They have the most knowledge of anyone and are the ultimate decision maker about the future of the venture. The CEO gets to make the choice: they can walk away any time, they can quit and they can shut things down.
If they don't want to walk away, they get the strongest voice in decisions about what paths to take. They have all the knowledge they need about the venture on which to base those choices. They have the full picture, access to all the financial knowledge, the conversations with the investors, the data from the customers - everything.
No one else in the venture has that. Even if others have the knowledge (in the case where the CEO operates with a rare level of extreme transparency) - they don't have the choices.
That is not enslavement.
With power, naturally, comes a lot of responsibility and that can feel heavy. Especially if you are ethical. But that is not enslavement.
When you are enslaved, you have zero power.
>With power, naturally, comes a lot of responsibility and that can feel heavy. *Especially if you are ethical*. But that is not enslavement.
Sometimes I try to imagine how the alternative would be in a planned economy for software.
On one hand, it would be very slow and very inefficient.
But on the other hand, venture capitalism also has its flaws. Sometimes it sounds like there is an "excess efficiency" that leads to burnout and non-sense, where you constantly need to quote-unquote "innovate".
In my view there is a limit about innovation, you can't always "disrupt" over and over and over again.
If I get paid that much money, I'm going to work on my own terms, there is no way somebody will compromise my health like that.
On my own company, when single, and living in my one room apartment? Absolutely.
With a family, children, with tons of responsibilities and in someone elses employ? Not on your life.
We have been conditioned to call things like this a waste of time but it doesnt mean it is. Not for everyone. Capitalism would have us believe we must constantly be delivering value that is defined by external standards but that is a dangerous game.
4000 Weeks is a pretty good book with more on this topic.
> If you have a family, then there's no way you have time for 70hr weeks
The argument is _not_
> If you do not have a family, then you _do_ have time for 70hr weeks
I don’t think you should overwork yourself cuz you don’t have kids. Do what you want with your life.
I love working (activity) -- coding is a hobby I long ago made the mistake of monetising haha.
My stuff? I'll spend a weekend chasing a dead end without a second thought.
General sort of cog in the machine day to day work? You're paying me to be a bit bored a lot of the time. Not a complaint or anything, just the routine stuff that can't be automated yet.
Fun comes from learning new things, money comes from being paid for what you already learned.
Of course this is just me, if everyone was like me the world would suck. Absolutely no judgement if you get your fun outside of an IDE!
E: bit of context I'm currently single and have no dependents, I would imagine (hope) my priorities would change if that changed
Working for somebody else, where I have little stake in the company? I won't just put in the bare minimum to not get fired, but I also won't work absurd hours, especially on a salary.
My own stuff? I'm ready for the 40 (job) + 60 (my own projects) work week!
For reference, I'm very young and no where close to having a family.
Since you said you're very young I assume you're still at school/university and haven't had a tech job yet.
This doesn't work. Time is not the biggest factor, energy and focus are. You can only put in 40hrs and be extremely drained.
It's very unlikely you're going to be able to perform well at work and then be productive for another 60hrs on personal projects, especially not at your first job when you're learning a very large amount of new stuff.
Even just 60hrs of personal projects is probably way too much time relative to energy and focus (Your energy and focus will likely be drained before the 60hr mark).
I see it in smaller business. I once got a phone call from my then boss, a sort of VC, who was clearly drunk, who could not make my meeting because he was doing BD. They worked collosal hours on this, in the corporate entertainment suites of the local sporting venues, in the city bars etc. Even lunch was a work activity for them.
Nobody is saying single people have "nothing better to do". Just that they very often have more flexibility with what they can reasonably choose to do.
If you’re around 20 maybe. Before you’ve already developed a hair-trigger on chronic disorders.
Speak for yourself. I have hobbies, a workout routine, friends to meet up with, family members to visit, and beauty sleep to catch. If you're working 70h a week you're sacrificing most if not all of those things.
You can fit working out in there (~30-60 min a day, plus travel time if you don't have your own equipment) if you're willing to burn the candle at both ends like that. At that point you will have committed the overwhelming majority of your time, and if you try to add anything else to your life, any kind of unexpected outing or emergency, or even just waking up one day and not feeling up for it, will have to come directly out of the time you've budgeted for your work and health.
> On one hand, it would be very slow and very inefficient.
Why do you say that? Large, "boring" sectors of the economy would probably work just fine being algorithmically steered.
Anyways, more concretely: huge vertically integrated megacorporations behave much like centrally planned economies, and they seek to be doing just finem
Computing and software was researched and invented in a planned manner (NASA etc).
Maybe you can't "expand" and "generalize" software in a planned economy, if you want everything to be made with software. The article talks about about 80 competitors, so it can easily be said something should be planned.
I can think of several. The grandiose ones: your kid has cancer, the kind that might be fixable, but there is no treatment, and you have to design one. You have a viable theory for nuclear fusion or carbon sequestration and need to get funding for and then perform the experiment. There is a verified meteor/comet strike and there's some hope of saving people underground, but it needs to be built and stocked.
In reality, you don't need grandiosity. This life is 'acceptable' to a lot of people, especially small business owners, the store owner/operator, or car mechanic, who effectively lives at their store. For others there is "paying your dues", doctors doing a residency, grad students doing slave labor on something only tangentially related to their degree. For others, like farmers, they work like this for some part of the year, every year.
if someone is passionate about their job, I'm not sure they're being well paid, or they also have very rare skills, so it's an exception, not a rule.
also I live in a country with good healthcare.
For better or worse, devotion to a cause is a proven motivator of human action.
As for alternatives in the business world, we'd need some economic system that wasn't analogous to warfare in which one firm outcompetes all others to take most of the winnings. If you want a lesson from the US losing in Afghanistan, and arguably losing in Iraq, in spite of being able to drive its labor force to such extreme exertion, consider that a massive advantage of the insurgency was their ability to mobilize a part-time gig-based workforce that mostly worked from home. But which lesson does business learn from that? Allow work from home? Or getting part-time contractors with no benefits to kill themselves and sacrifice children for you?
What about the workers actually building the product, making far less, and probably putting in more time. Why is the issue of their valuable time compared to money almost never discussed.
We all only have one life and ot should be able to be enjoyed. Why do we always forget the pursuit of happiness, except as it applies to the upper class.