Hacker News Reader

Comment by jof | Hacker News Reader

No number is made explicit -- they can't really be demanding more than 40 hours / week for exempt employees in California. You're expected to "find your own work/life balance", but there is strong social pressure to stay in the office nights and weekends.

I would expect to work 70 - 80+ weeks there if you're really into it (and checking in / working at home in the evenings and mornings).

View on HN

US employment law is nuts, here in NZ you'd have an amazingly hard time firing people who don't work the 80hr weeks you wish they did.

How many startups come from NZ? The point here isn't "employment law", it's the fact that in the USA (generally, in the private sector) employment is considered a contract, not an entitlement.

If people at Square don't like the environment, they are free to find another job. Similarly, if Dorsey doesn't like an employee's output for any reason, or "the cut of his jib" for that matter, he pays him up to the day and fires him. If it can't be shown to be due to discrimination (race, gender etc), and there was no employment contract, that's that.

Without this culture, starting a company would be nearly impossible. You can see evidence of this in the number of innovative startups out of more heavily regulated countries vs. the US.

[edit: I would add that there is a perverse incentive here: I believe US startups under-hire women and people of color _precisely_ because it is not that difficult to make a case for discrimination in promotion, compensation, and treatment of employees here. Hiring white, upper-middle-class males greatly reduces that risk. I think it's an unfortunate unintended consequence of the desire to redress discrimination.]

I'm not sure there's a very solid correlation on that. It's true that the U.S. has a lot of startups, and also at-will employment, but actual experimental data is pretty weak, and the U.S. has been a technological leader through various routes for decades, not all of them startup-ish. For example, the old-line engineering firms (AT&T, Boeing, Lockheed, IBM, etc.) drove technical innovation for decades, and had much more "Europe-like" working conditions, where working more than 40 hours/wk was uncommon, employees were rarely fired except for gross incompetence, etc.

If anything, the 80-hour/wk and ready firing of employees thing was traditionally seen as a more "mom-and-pop business" type culture, associated with lower-status industries like the family-owned restaurant, not with technology.

Everyone here likes to believe there's a bit of a startup boom in Wellington at the moment - government R&D grants and the Grow Wellington business incubator certainly seem to have gone a long way towards helping the culture along. In any case you can't walk down Cuba St without running into people from all the different tech startups these days. It's great, since fifteen years ago the only other employment options in this town were cafés or the public sector.

> How many startups come from NZ?

Quite a few startups come from the UK, Ireland and Germany; in all three countries the alleged behavior by Square would be highly illegal.

Like who? How much revenue do they make, combined, compared to the combined revenue of US companies? Let's not kid ourselves here - I'm European, there are many things I like about the place I live, but the tech company scene is laughable here. It's hard to find anyone who is even capable of thinking beyond the 'I set up Active Directory network and fix pc's' or 'I make websites for the local pizza place' level.

(yes there are some counter examples, I know, but I'm talking about magnitudes, not frolicking in the margin)

Personally, as I said in another thread, I think the US anti-discrimination laws are fundamentally flawed. Hiring is an art, not a science. But that is another topic.

I'm not sure what you mean about "US employment law is nuts". If you are an hourly employee, you get paid so many dollars/hours, for the number of hours you work, and after you work so many hours a day, you get paid overtime.

If you are exempt (Salaried) - you basically work when your manager tells you to. I've been at (several) companies where we had 3-4 month death marches with _everyone_ working late and on weekends in the office to push the ball over the line.

> If you are exempt (Salaried) - you basically work when your manager tells you to. I've been at (several) companies where we had 3-4 month death marches with _everyone_ working late and on weekends in the office to push the ball over the line.

This is probably the point of confusion. In most of Europe, at any rate, salaried employees are subject to the working time directive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive

That is nuts... Here in Australia, my salary is paid based on a 40 hour working week, minus 4 weeks holiday and sick leave. This is pretty standard for a full time job.

I can choose to work over that amount, and time worked over those 40 hours is time-in-lieu, which I can take off pretty much whenever I want (although I have to get approval if I want to take more than one day off at a time - but if it's just a day, or half a day then I just shoot them an email that morning)... My company are a bit more flexible on taking that time off than a lot of places, but apart from that, the conditions are similar to a lot of other places...

I think he means exactly what you just described. That if you're paid hourly you'll get overtime so don't complain lest you be fired. That simply deciding you don't want to work those hours regardless of the overtime pay is not on the table. That if you're a salaried employee and a white collar worker, somehow any and all abuse is justified in the name of making you really earn that 85K a year plus some options we're probably going to screw you out of anyway. That you can be fired for trying to organize. That you can be fired for being sick, subsequently lose access to health care, and die. That you get two, maybe three weeks vacation a year, if you're lucky. And we'll shit on you for taking it, btw.

I guess what he's getting at is that the US is a pretty terrible place to work and live, gilded though the cage may often be, and it is hard to disagree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com