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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the logic that can make a company like Citadel, which fires 10% of their staff per year, work out well. If you have no expectation of job safety, it attracts a certain kind of person, but there's also no love lost if a layoff round is a little bigger than normal.

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Exactly. I worked at a Citadel like fund and that's the vibe. The calculus was like this - I'd rather risk being fired than work in a place where low performers are cozy.

The reality is that working at a place like that or a FAANG for just a few years sets you up for a great career no matter what happens. So even if you get fired after a few years you are still better off.

It's good to have coworkers who can think rationally and make decisions this way, too. It's a virtuous cycle.

I bet people like that drift into voluntary unpaid overtime.

> I bet people like that drift into voluntary unpaid overtime.

Drift? I think you mean Sprint.

Or, equivalently, "people like that are paid a lot and are engrossed in their careers."

When someone makes $500k+, what does "unpaid overtime" even mean?

I wouldn't want my $500k+ engineer to even remotely get close to burning themselves out.

> When someone makes $500k+, what does "unpaid overtime" even mean?

It means shit work/life balance, thus missing on a lot of people that would want to have it and results in worse productivity (people need time off or they break).

> It means shit work/life balance

Solution: take a job that doesn't pay $500k.

I hate this saying and rarely say it, but "you can't have your cake and eat it too"

No one should take a $500k job and expect the culture to be 9-5, clock in clock out.

It takes most people 10+ years to earn $500k (often still working their asses off overtime). $500k is a shit ton of money.

Money doesn’t magically make burnout go away.

In fact, it will make it worse, because you’ll keep telling yourself to hold on for the money while your mental health exponentially deteriorates.

Only things that ever gave me burnout were incompetent coworkers, and organizations that were doomed to fail.

Great anecdote, but burnout generally isn't caused by that for most people. At its core, it's because of stress. Incompetent coworkers and organizations may certainly cause stress, but rarely is it so bad that it causes burnout.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in... https://www.helpguide.org/articles/stress/burnout-prevention...

The ambitious people who take 500k/year jobs at HFT firms are to top .25% of "workers" in some abstract measure, and have different expectations and causes of burnout relative to the median burnout experiencer who is for example a school teacher or administrative assistant in an office job. Some people have an addiction to the fast pace, feeling of being need, and stress.

This is a really good insight! I am not an HFT guy but ex hedge fund and I think this is spot on with my experience and former colleagues.

Loss of efficiency/productivity might not be the product of burnout. It might be the cause.

People get addicted to the dopamine hits of getting things done and when they hit a wall, enter a vicious cycle of depressive withdrawal. Recovering from burnout by taking a break is simply resetting that dopamine addiction. Just a personal theory.

If you work in a high paced environment with competent colleagues, management and tooling, you can just keep rolling with the punches and never hit the wall.

The job being interesting does though.

Being ambitious and having an environment that lets you run (and rewards you for it) is what prevents burnout at a place like that.

A lot of people at hedge funds like having a baseline level of good stress in their lives. It's only when the stress starts to make you feel insecure that it creates problems.

I worked at one of these firms for a while, and my "burnout" point came when I realized I wasn't actually getting rewarded for my extra contributions to the company (my bonuses were going up by a small amount each quarter, no matter what).

Every person I know who’s gone into roles like that was fully aware the expectations and hours were intense.

Your contract doesn't say 40 hours a week. It says get the job done and make sure your role keeps the company making money.

I’d rather do actual work than generate signals for wealth managers to personally capitalize on in a government protected and policed fiat currency scam. It’s no different than a church deeming priests the most pious.

Fingers crossed white collar jobs are on the verge of being AI’d away.

Real logistics information should be made public and democratically planned online across the globe in an organized way, not micro managed by elites who spend a lot getting us to memorize and recite that they own imaginary things.

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