Did you see the photo of the employee sleeping on the floor? I'd link it but twitter is down.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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:
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.