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Comment by blue2u | Hacker News Reader

The entire video was on youtube and has since been taken private.

The media are taking his relatively tame opinion on work ethics and blowing it up into click-bait.

His comment wasn't targeting remote work or WFH specifically - but general work ethic of companies. He praised TSMC and Musk - who are notorious for poor treatment of workers. That's all you need to know about this. If WFH or remote work to blame - why isn't Musks' AI company taken off and overtaken Google by now?

This guy will get rich off of his startup investments where he's mostly an advisor - and he wants you to work 12 hr days to make it happen for him.

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Once again Jamie Zawinski's 2011 blog post (which I won't link from HN) nails it:

> He's telling you the story of, "If you bust your ass and don't sleep, you'll get rich" because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they'll just slot a new one in.

> I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it's true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people from the software industry, I'll bet you get a very different view of what kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented here.

> So if your goal is to enrich the Arringtons of the world while maybe, if you win the lottery, scooping some of the groundscore that they overlooked, then by all means, bust your ass while the bankers and speculators cheer you on."

He’s right, Americans won’t work like employees at TSMC in Taiwan. There were _decades_ of struggle to get eight hour per day/five day work weeks.

If Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, wants to work all the time, that’s his prerogative and right. He shouldn’t be allowed to force that on his workers though.

> He shouldn’t be allowed to force that on his workers though.

If you want to work under those conditions, it should be your own prerogative. There are plenty of places to work.

There are reasons there are regulations on safety conditions and hours. He shouldn’t be able to just ignore those because he’s rich.

https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs

Until inevitably every employer requires it. Then you either work long hours or starve. It's only the collective effort of workers that protects us from exploitation by those with money.

I'll put in my 8 hours for sure -- but I'm not going to burn the midnight oil to make my capitalist overlords richer.

I only have about 6 hours of producivity per day in me. The res, better be mindless meetings or such or I go negative value.

He admired "how much Elon Musk got out of his employees," as if employees are some kind of copper mine that you're supposed to extract as much from as fast as you can. He kind of said the quiet part out loud. The leadership class measures other leaders by how much they can "get out of" people.

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