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Unfortunately, there are his blind followers trying to emulate him. Not sure what havoc they are planning to unleash on their employees.
https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-benioff-elon-musk-ceos-...
paywall-less link - https://archive.ph/HbC3k
It doesn't make sense from the outside (or in hindsight), but it happens
I’ve done this. I had lots of fun—everyone, from the CEO down, was crunching—and became financially independent after it.
It’s usually a sign of under-resourcing. But almost every start-up experiencing unexpected growth should be ready for it. It’s unusual at Twitter’s scale, but closed to mismanagement than abuse.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3876505-twitter-employ...
Only the company would really have insight into that.
Pulling a late night and sleeping on the ground does not make you immune to a layoff.
OK, but this doesn't seem relevant to the situations Twitter's (former, in many cases) employees are in at all. There's no quick path to financial independence working at Musk's Twitter--the company is losing money faster than it was when it was public, Musk is cutting costs everywhere, and there are well-documented instances of employees being shown the door after sleeping on the floor.
In general, I'm pretty sure that in the vast majority of cases, people who sleep on the floor at the office do not end up financially independent for it.
Doesn’t matter. In the context of software design it’s a well known trope and most who do it enjoy the work:
I've pulled late nights, they bought us pizza and gave us a half day later. Sometimes you have to put in work during critical times.
It's certainly not construction work anyway, people are kinda soft here sometimes.
If a business operates expecting this from employees, that business is being abusive. If a business got into trouble and employees are sacrificing to help it out, that's just an emergency. And it should be exceedingly rare -- if it's not, that's a poorly run business.
But I don't mind working late every now and during crunch time, it gets paid forward, usually with time off later.
It's about your relationship with your company.
My point was from the sounds of it GP had a good relationship and had fun and no-one on HN should tell them what to do because they don't know the situation.
Shall we source our percentages or just keep throwing them out?
I think our best estimate of corporate behavior is to look at union contracts, and union demands. Almost universally union contracts prohibit workers from working outside of set number of daily, weekly, and monthly hours. Usually there are some clauses for extraordinary circumstances, but I’ve never worked under a union contract which had less than 11 hours mandatory rest between shifts (even in an emergency) which effectively prohibits all nighters. I’ve seen contracts that go down to 7 hours if absolutely necessary (and every hour infringing on 12 hour rest is payed with 90% penalty) but never 0.
Why do unions demand this? My best guess is that this is a common exploitation tactic by corporations, and thusly a common complaint from union members. Thus we can reasonably assume that many (most?) workers who have worked unreasonably long hours have not seen their just benefits for doing so and felt exploited.
Now it would be nice if corporations kept statistics on this, or if there ware regular surveys by governments or impartial research centers so we could get a more accurate picture, but as far as I know, as it stands, this is our best method, and it is not in favor of this practice.
I worked some 16 hour shifts (got OT) and I regret it.
I disagree. There is a race to the bottom and a tragedy of the commons. A company could easily exploit this by gamifying the work and hiring workers with addictive tendencies. Most national labor laws and labor contracts set a maximum number of daily and weekly working hours for a reason. Workplace safety is only one of those reasons.
If you enjoy your work, that’s great, just do your work during work hours, don’t use your free time to undervalue other workers in the industry.
Yes, shit companies exist and abuse their employees. You quit and move on. There's no indication that this was happening.
Like you said, if you work for a company which expects this from you, and you quit as a result, they can simply hire someone else that takes the abuse, and that is not a good prospects for us workers in this industry. Which is the reason I’m asking OP not to do this. Even though they had fun and were handsomely compensated, this behavior does a net disservice for the rest of us.
I had equity in the outfit, I made my first million from it, and again, I had fun. If the CEI were at home partying, it would have been a different story. But we were all there. Kidding, coding and trying to keep something we were building together alive.
Those overnighters and the value they created mean very different things to someone who has equity vs the rest of us. As you can tell I’m a little bitter still, I realise now this amounts to wage theft and violates various protections we have in law - I just wish I had known at the time :(
"Now is the time you want to work hard ... trust me"
"It isn't in the budget now, but we're just about to close ... "
"If we pull through this, everyone here will be rewarded!"
"Now isn't the time to leave ... trust me"
It's shameless!
And they should have recourse. That doesn’t mean we ban or automatically condone the practice.
I’m not saying that. I’m saying doing the time isn’t equivalent to abuse. The facts and circumstances matter, e.g. who is doing it, how often it’s required, and what everyones’ stakes are.
This much abuse. What abuse? Can you tell us more in detail?
What if, just what if, the workers actually like working hard and making their lives better? That seems to never enter the conversation here.
Honestly, the culture on HN makes workers like me more resentful. It's 100% negative, there is absolutely 0% optimism in these threads. Not even one comment here (or elsewhere on HN).
> ... like working hard and making their lives better
It's true that work can be very rewarding - "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life" and all that. Plus who doesn't like making their lives better? I guess it is up to the reader to decide whether a job in Musk-era Twitter is one of those jobs, and whether working for the new "hardcore" Twitter would make your life better. I can only speak for myself but if I worked somewhere and I saw that after a takeover:
- half of my colleagues got fired one day
- some people occasionally get fired for on-the-spot violations like answering a CEO's question
- the company went from nearly-profitable to incredibly unprofitable (let’s even ignore how it got that way)
- the company stopped paying some bills and were kicked out of some offices and services
- the owner-and-CEO had become an extremely ... divisive figure, shall we say
- the owner-and-CEO declares that the existing product is brittle and broken and needs a ground-up "2.0" rewrite (a second system so to speak...)
... then I wouldn't see this as some wonderful opportunity, I'd see it as my workplace being turned into a plaything for a tempestuous billionaire who might not be as competent as he wants us to believe. And if I was a wealthy and financially-secure US permanent resident looking at a buoyant jobs market then I'd probably leave, take a bit of a breather then start looking for a new job at a different company. However if any one of those things didn't hold (maybe I'm an H1B visa holder, maybe I am young and don't have much savings or experience, maybe the job market kinda sucks, maybe I have am the sole earner in my family) I'd be in a much different and more depressing situation - maybe not literally "in shackles" but certainly not as free as you are suggesting.
In other words, what exactly do you think the people working there will "realize years later"?
Could you specifically list the abuses being done to these engineers that they are unaware of?
There’s a whole swaths of science and research behind this. It’s why domestic violence can continue for years unknown to anyone, even from friends, until it’s not.
OP isn’t saying they’re being abused as a fact, but if they are — at a workplace that seems as objectively toxic as Twitter right now — many who are still there won’t likely realize they were until afterwards.
I simply asked OP to list the abuses they think the engineers are unaware of.
> OP isn’t saying they’re being abused as a fact,
OP literally said "It would feel amazing after this much abuse"
> they will _probably realize_ years later that they were abused.
Their "probably" was about them probably realizing, not probably being abused.
OP was absolute in their accusation of abuse in his above post that I quoted.
That's why I asked them for specific examples.