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Comment by subradios | Hacker News Reader

It's not a cultists devotion. It's business. Your competitor can exceed you if you aren't willing to pull all nighters.

Well run companies do all nighters, and aren't so cultishly devoted to a "work life balance" that implies 4 hour workdays on slack.

Well run companies also understand sustainability. Max effort will need to be demanded to exceed current capacity, but it is important not to rely on it as a crutch to get past poor design, poor process, or other management misfires.

This is something games are seeing now, most of the industry luminaries cut their teeth in an era where the whole game fit on one disk. They assume that the weekend long anger coding to bash that one bug is the same as what they're asking their company to do.

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Honestly I think your comment shows part of the problem here, though I do understand your point. But if "mere" employees feel that they are personally in competition with basically the rest of the world it easily becomes a war of attrition and employees become kind of soldier-ants. I'd rather be my own person thank you very much. People can in fact be loyal and productive in 8 hours per day without being a slacker and maybe have some energy left to partake in society outside of work. Nobody likes people with a bad work-ethic but if a good work-ethic is considered to require regular overtime than maybe it's time to reconsider that concept.

The unfortunate part is that your company is in competition with the rest of the world.

I made the comment about slackers because having moved from retail to military to tech, the amount of privilege shown unironically by tech employees on "crunch" is borderline unbelievable.

Well run companies do not do all nighters (except in exceptional circumstances).

I think there's a valid point hidden in your insane comment: there is a competitive advantage to abusing your staff, so it's really up to governments to force companies not to. Things like reasonable holiday allowance. Good statutory sick pay. The EU working time directive (which was sadly made optional but it at least set the tone).

All of that is missing in the US which is presumably why companies there don't hesitate to push people as hard as they want.

I worked once for an investment bank and there it was mandatory to take once in year min 2 week vacation minimum. It wasn't because of their sympathy, it was due to the fraud prevention :-) Forced 2 week long vacation, locked out access to the systems for that period of time.

How does forced vacation for a minimum of 2 weeks prevent fraud?

Frauds are very often hidden or disguised as "bad investments" (yeah banks do mistakes as any other human beings) and covered with money from "slush funds". When they are on vacations, rogue traders cannot cover their intentional bad investments, losses, close warning notifications and so on. More kn this topic here https://www.fdic.gov/news/financial-institution-letters/1995...

Two reasons: lots of fraud requires continual maintenance, and when you're away someone will presumably take over your duties and might notice what you're doing.

> it was mandatory to take once in year min 2 week vacation minimum

That’s actually the law in some countries. It’s not really enforced much, but the idea is that you have a weapon to sue your company if they prevent you from taking 2 weeks off once a year.

> Well run companies do all nighters

Well run companies have adequate resourcing so that staff don't need to work all night

Adequate resourcing is irrelevant.

Think of the holidays for retail - do you pay 2 to 3x the employees year round to support the November to December shopping season?

If you did that, you would be very silly.

Conditions will frequently demand that an "adequately resourced" company has to run overtime to take advantage of an opportunity, beat a competitor to a new feature, or other such situations. This happens all the time.

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