Is 7 days a week the new norm (for YC)? | Hacker News Reader

Is 7 days a week the new norm (for YC)?

113 pointsbschmidt183 comments

I've worked for 2 major YC companies and done some one-off/contract work in recent years at a few others here in SF. Really like the startups coming out of YC.

I had to unfortunately voluntarily quit the last on-site contract due to it being 7 days a week (I tried to take off a Sunday, didn't work), on top of a requirement to be there until 8-9pm daily and occasionally pull all-nighters when there are sales demos (at the office until 7AM the next day - then stayed at work for the next day). I tried to stick it out, and even though I consider myself to have the best work ethic of anyone I know, being at an office nearly 24/7/365 to do basic React work with constantly changing directions/requirements felt pointless to say the least. It wasn't like we were building something with a clear goal in mind - and the founders did nothing. They would shoot hoops with the nerf basketball, leave for 2-3 hours at a time, come back with food, talk, etc.

Anyway, so I quit to find another gig, and in my first interview (YC company, just raised) the CEO says "We work weekends, so it's 7 days a week, just want to make sure that's ok with you".

So my question to the YC community is:

Is this the new norm for YC startups?

YC founders who are requiring 24/7/365 work:

What do you feel you're getting out of it? Better output? Or is it more about a person completely dedicating themselves to you?

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Would love to hear some perspectives on this.

I worked at a YC company a couple years ago. They did not say they were 7-day-weekers, but the culture encouraged it.

There were 2 planning meetings per week, one on Thursday and one on Monday. So if you set a goal on Thursday… you should have it done by Monday.

A young manager there would work 24/7, stressing the hell out of most people who worked with them.

Of course, things would be broken that required weekend death marches.

The thing with startups is, it’s easy to default to this. After all, to the founders, this is the most important thing ever. It’s their ticket. And they try to make it seem like your ticket as well (it’s not).

But smart people don’t work like this. Smart thoughts don’t come out of exhausted brains. It’s a meat grinder for no reason. It’s sadistic.

I have never worked at an SV startup but have worked at couple in other areas. We mostly had weekends off but coming in for a half day on Saturday was certainly not uncommon. 10+ hour days during the week, longer days or all-nighters approaching a deadline.

It can be fun in a way, for a while, if you don't have a family and you get along with all your coworkers and have a good team dynamic established. But it's not sustainable and it doesn't produce high quality code. When you are working with a deadline of "tomorrow morning" you make all kinds of compromises to get stuff working, that are then immediate technical debt that slows you down on the next feature and it just keeps piling up (this was also in the days before automated testing was popular, so you ended up breaking a lot of stuff that you didn't find out about until the QA team started reporting bugs).

We had a couple of middle-aged folks in the company and they tended to disengage from this, not so much because they did not have the stamina but because they had families and responsibilities outside of work, and they had enough experience to know that it was ultimately a path to burnout.

>When you are working with a deadline of "tomorrow morning" you make all kinds of compromises to get stuff working, that are then immediate technical debt that slows you down on the next feature

It makes total sense to create technical debt if you run against the clock spending VC money. If you don't make it till the next round -- it doesn't matter how great everything was.

But they time to pay it all back will come.

You're right but you're looking at a very small part of the picture.

> After all, to the founders, this is the most important thing ever. It’s their ticket... But smart people don’t work like this. Smart thoughts don’t come out of exhausted brains. It’s a meat grinder for no reason. It’s sadistic.

They're smart, but they're angry.

Go around and ask the 22 year old YC founders, "How do you deal with anger?" and their answer is "grind." I've asked 5 YC founders on different occasions, every single person said grind! They even used that word.

Some kids didn't deal with their anger, with their parents hitting them and the capriciousness of cram school. Other kids took Women, Gender and Sexuality classes, or they painted, and addressed their anger earlier.

Once a YC founder told me that "this" was "about" what sounded like a college aged vengeance. To proverbially prove all the haters wrong. Dude, that's nuts! These people are angry.

YC sincerely wants people to succeed. It's attractive for people who deal with their anger by working a lot. That's reasonable. Is it sustainable? I don't know, it's a complex question. I wouldn't do it to myself. But I don't feel angry every day.

> To proverbially prove all the haters wrong

I disagree on both points 1) that only young, inexperienced founders have this mindset and 2) that this mindset is somehow better than other forms of inspiration/opportunity.

No amount of "being angry" equals having the skill, finesse, or revenues to see a successful exit. I recently read the avg. age of a founder who exits (acquisition or IPO) was age 45. The 20-something founders who "grind" are not more successful.

Creating a company to "prove the haters wrong" seems misguided and actually far less potent than doing it out of survival, or because there is an incredible financial opportunity in front of you.

> Is it sustainable?

An adjacent question, but the answer is an obvious "No" right? Anyway I was really getting at the question: Is this what to expect from YC founders in 2024+? Context being I've never been asked to work weekends as a normal schedule in 15+ years of working at startups in San Francisco, but recently got asked twice in a row, both from YC.

interesting that you interpreted you interpreted the text as praise. to me it sounds more like a caricature of some hustle bros with anger issues.

It sounded like glamorizing because of:

> YC sincerely wants people to succeed. It's attractive for people who deal with their anger by working a lot.

Equating the success metric to people who have anger problems from the perspective of YC.

people who are angry are easy to manipulate. so, it's a win for yc. but of course for anybody else it's at best financially lucrative but more often than not just a highway to hell.

Maybe they should recruit founders out of prison, surely they're angrier. I still don't see a correlation to a lucrative exit.

> The 20-something founders who "grind" are not more successful.

Was there ever a consensus that 20-somethings who grind are more successful? I don't think so.

They simply do not have the requisite broad life skills that are required in business to succeed. They may have the energy, grit, a narrow set of skills and then stumble upon a goldmine product, but the combination of these factors results in what, a 1-2% successful exit rate?

As for the answer of "is it sustainable", it really depends how rich their parents are and how much they can fail upwards. Apparently, there are a lot of rich parents in the US.

> Apparently, there are a lot of rich parents in the US.

Another point of view is that, if what you say is true, then this isn't as important as it seems.

This sounds overly specific and unlikely to capture a majority of the founders there, but it is a new perspective I hadn't considered.

I disagree, I think you can trace pretty much all self-destruct behaviors to negative emotions, particularly fear. Anger is just a higher-level presentation of fear.

Fear is opposite to love, everything is between.

> It's sadistic.

That's the point.

New norm?

My first job was at a startup in the mid 1980s. This was the norm then. Ever hear of the term "Death March?"

In the 1990s we started to understand that working developers too much was counterproductive - they ended up adding more defects to the system than they were resolving or delivering. Part of what we learned was a developer is shot after being in the office for 10 hours. We also learned that you need at least one day a week where you weren't in the office at all. Altogether, that means we learned 60 hours per week is the max you can get and maintain quality and morale.

So, companies today are going to re-learn these lessons, you say?

Those who refuse to learn to learn history are doomed to repeat it, they say. I wouldn't want to return to the period from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s. It was counterproductive and morale-destroying.

I have seen this as well and we literally called it a "Death March." You'd get a product in time for the demo but it wouldn't be pretty.

There's even a book, published in 1997.

https://www.amazon.com/Death-March-Developers-Surviving-Impo...

We’re talking the kind of founders who are too young to be any sort of wise and pivot every time their VC coughs and whose only drive is to be fabulously rich. Most will fail and leave a trail of burnout all the while running off the fumes of survivor bias in startups that succeeded. If one wants to go along for the ride, they should really know what they’re getting into.

You have founders who are too young to be any sort of wise along with engineers who are too young to be any sort of wise. The two together will almost surely fail. This is why most startups are a waste of time and energy. It's the blind leading the blind over the edge of a cliff.

60 hours? I've never seen more than maybe 25 or 30 hours a week of useful work from developers. I don't think most brains can sustain that level of focus for that long. Sounds like a recipe for making a bunch of buggy code that some other poor overworked sap has to go in and re-break in new ways later...

Or maybe that's where the 10x developers shine. I wouldn't know, not being one and never having met one...

As mentionned elsewhere, 30h of being "in the zone" is already above average.

Above that, the teams will be present, or rather their bodies will be, but non productive.

Death march is a real thing and it results, as the name implies, in death.

As a manager, if you choose to run your team in death march mode, then it implies reaching your goal is more important than the well-being of your team and the ability to function long-term. Short term is... short term.

I worked for YC company around 2014-2019 an it was all chill. I guess that's because the office had 10 hours difference with SF and I wasn't getting any shares, just the usual above the market compensation.

I would laugh in the face of whoever suggests to work literal 7 days a week as total nutjob, but I'm hopefully done with the whole VC and big tech thing.

In my experience, long hours and death marches are a sign of inept management, or unrealistic goals, both being very bad for long term company health.

I've had all-nighters, 7-day weeks, and death marches, but those were the exception, the result of unplanned, temporary circumstances. The norm was 5 days, engineering shouldn't be a sweat shop.

Some thoughts

- Planning for 7day weeks results in no slack for actual emergencies, because the baseline is emergency mode

- This is not sustainable from a quality or output perspective, but people trick themselves into believing it is by using the wrong metrics (butts on seat vs outcomes)

- This is not scalable as the company grows and as successive rounds of employees get less and less equity and thus less motivation for outsized success

- This is great when voluntary and self-driven and terrible if mandated.

- Even if done voluntary, nights/weekends work should focus on learning tasks rather than just increasing the volume of work.

> emergency mode

Founder mode. :cool:

^/s I agree with all of your thoughts, especially:

> great when voluntary and self-driven and terrible if mandated

It's an interesting psychological thing: No matter how easy or even comfortable a job is, if you have to be there at X time for Y hours it's now work. It's the scheduling that kills all the joy.

Even if it's your favorite hobby that you do everyday anyway, but now you have to do it for someone at a specific time, even if they agree to pay you for it. Why does it now suck? Add in other layers like: Do it this specific way, do it in a group of others with competing opinions, do it in a distracting office 1 hour away, etc. and it quickly becomes the polar opposite of what you previously considered to be a rewarding hobby or skill.

On the flip side it can be the hardest work in the world but if I do it on my own terms when I feel like it (sometimes I really want to fix something) - then you don't even have to pay me! It's my pleasure. Glad I could help.

Funny how that works. To truly "love what you do" in a career sense is trickier than it seems, because it often involves tolerating a lot of peripheral stuff that everyone naturally hates like commuting or having a bad manager (among other things). For the capable, it takes changing things at your job to get as close to imitating the fun hobby as possible (tech, meeting schedule, hours, flex time) - so that you can actually think and perform from a place of comfort and well-being (why every manager is not perfecting this art is beyond me).

Yes exactly! For Product Managers who dont get it, i've had this argument:

PM: OK, so you did your 5 tickets for this week, but it seems you also put in this cool other feature. If you had time for the cool feature, then why couldnt you just have done the 6th ticket instead which I had prioritied?

Me: Because I dont want to spend Saturday and Sunday on that 6th ticket, I want to do it on something I find interesting.

PM: ?

Me: I'm totally happy not to work on the cool features on my Saturdays and Sundays if that is creating problems, I can just work on open source projects instead, no problem at all.

PM: No please dont do that.

Many companies start like this. All of them have to dial it back at some point if they expand and are successful. The question is just when to dial it back.

If the founders are working 7 days a week, the first employees are excited about working 7 days a week, then it's kind of weird to hire a new person who isn't. Most likely, everyone will just quickly be thinking, hey the new guy sucks. Just gets everything done slower than everyone else.

At some point you have to, though. Anecdotally it seems like at some point the founding team gets tired and the CEO makes a call, okay it's time to go down to 6 days. And then later 5 days.

Different companies work different ways. I personally wouldn't want to work 7 days a week at this stage in my life. Or 6 days a week. Weekends with my kids are too important to me. But when I was younger and just breaking into the tech industry I would have done it. So, find a company that fits what you want. It's okay if not every company is a fit for you.

> the first employees are excited about working 7 days a week

> the new guy sucks. Just gets everything done slower

You made 2 mistakes here.

1. The first employees were not excited, they were all on paid trial periods and have no equity.

2. The other developer who quit and myself by far did all the work. Staying all night does not mean you get the most work done. Actually, the founders played basketball most of the time and got no work done. Over the years I've learned to become increasingly productive during the day (with the help of coffee, eating right/being active) and I effectively built most of their product even though I would "sneak out" at 7 at times. Staying late at night or going in on weekends never advanced the product. Most nights would end in the VP Eng. and founders drinking wine and whiskey (this is a YC startup mind you). They didn't do anything despite being there all the time.

That was a lesson learned in the 90s - people would show up to put in face time, but they weren't getting productive work done. It was all about politics and appearances, not good engineering.

My advice? Don't work for a startup without Eff-You money.

There's a reason they want young, inexperienced engineers - and it isn't because they know the "latest and greatest" tools and technologies.

When I started at my first job, at a small startup, I was definitely excited to work 7days a week. For me there was nothing better than doing what I loved every day. It lasted for about 6 months until I learned that it's not really healthy to do it, but I was enjoying it while it lasted.

I agree completely about the founders doing less work. That's also what I experienced. For them, it's less like a job. They are free to come and leave whenever they want, play hoops or whatever... it's less stressful than having a specific task that needs to be finished by some deadline.

I'm pretty sure this is illegal under California law:

https://starpointinjurylaw.com/articles/information/work-7-d...

Startups don't fit into one of the excepted categories.

When I started my company I personally worked 7 days a week, but expecting it of employees seems completely bonkers.

Founders working 7 days a week? Wouldn't bat an eye.

Expecting that of employees? Ngmi.

I've been in startups for 15 years, and I've only worked for one YC company. It had the least experienced and most clueless founders and "senior" management of any place I've ever worked at.

I've worked 7 day weeks in companies during crunch time, trying to seal deals for early customers. But working 7 days a week "just because" is busywork.

I haven't been specifically in a 7-day situation, but was at an early stage startup where the founder/CEO expected us to work Sundays. I think this was intended to be a temporary thing due to the company not having found product-market fit. But the company never produced a product that had any traction, and folded.

In retrospect, the company made a lot of choices about how we worked that were rather inefficient and arguably we would have moved faster by abandoning some bad practices. These included:

- Diluted ownership meant that too many people were involved in each discussion. This included backend engineers being in meetings on relatively aesthetic design considerations (e.g. color schemes, rounded vs angular graphical forms).

- The founders wanted the team to have an engineering thought-leadership brand and position, and a non-trivial amount of attention was paid to separating out libraries which could be open-sourced and polished.

- Meanwhile, the code for our specific product was quite tangled. We worked in clojure, and did a terrible job creating clear definitions, so to understand what keys should be in some map received by a function, one would typically need to read the full pathway that created it. Naturally, this made it quite challenging to make rapid changes.

- And because we were always trying to hack together new functionality as quickly as possible, we rarely had the time to go back and rewrite a cleaner version of anything.

- Perhaps most surprisingly, a large portion of the work was done in pair programming.

So we worked more hours than we should have but the way we worked as inefficient, and not even consistently directed at solving the problems the company needed to solve to succeed. I might be over-indexing, but I now treat long hours demanded of engineers as an indicator that something else in the organization is probably broken, desperate, or ill-considered.

If a dev can put in 30 solid hours of fingers to keyboard work in a week, they are already outperforming most of their peers.

I've been a startup manager for 12+ years and I can count the number of times I've asked someone to work a Saturday on one hand.

It sounds like YCombinator needs some training on talent management.

Without more context, it kind of just feels like signaling that the founders can tout to peers and investors. So the the benefit is accreted in a prestige and respect way, now actual development.

Not saying I agree with the practice or the value of the signaling, just kind of speculating here.

Man, I cofounded 3 companies (2 bootstraped & 1 VC backed) and I never expect employees to work 7 days a week. From my cofounders I did expect that when there is really a deadline to hit (usually a big customer changing his specs on the whim, security bugs or infrastructure migration/upgrade)

However if "the founder" works less that his employees, you should start looking for a new job right away. This startup most probably won't gonna make it and to swap your limited time to work for them is a bad choice. Even if they pay you very well with investors' money it's best to be in a succeeding company and build the relationships that will give you chances to cofound/rise with the company growth.

Never really understood any company of any size that pushes for this type of workload. Do you really produce high-quality work on hour 100 of the workweek versus hours 0-40? For every startup that succeeds with this type of 996 dystopian work schedule, I'd argue more fail because of high employee churn, low worker motivation, and burnout even in a high-paid tech startup. In my opinion, even for those highly motivated, the human body simply can't do productive work in that type of environment. Some of the best startups I've seen are those with actual work-life balance. Not necessarily saying in and 9 and out at 5 on the dot, but certainly far from 996 or 997.

> the human body simply can't do productive work in that type of environment

investor appears

Investor: "But 10x'ers can"

/cape

investor disappears

Founders: "Whoa"

It's normal to work 6-7 days a week if you have founder or near-founder equity and believe the company actually has a high chance of a successful exit, and you are highly motivated by money or by their mission.

In any other case I'm not sure why you'd let your life be thrown away like that.

We were all on long term paid trials. (I assume we were all being paid, maybe not). Besides that, what employee has preferred stock or any other provisions that would prevent their equity from being simply diluted the moment the preferred stock owners wanted more (e.g. in the case of raising another round)?

I've never heard of any employee who has "founder equity" (AKA preferred stock), but I guess I wouldn't know, people don't really share. Are there any famous examples?

As a rule founders get common stock, just like employees. "Founder or near-founder equity" here simply means "lots of equity".

It's rare, but not totally unheard of, for key early technical hires to get, say, 4-5% of the company. Typically though the first few get 1-2%, and it tapers off quickly. By the time you hit employee twenty-something, they're getting 0.1-0.3%.

> founders get common stock

Not any company I found. The only "founders" who totally give their company to investors are kids who just graduated who get to raise a huge seed round because of family connections, and half the time it's not even their idea nor their company really.

My wife and I run a local business here in SF that does well on its own, but if at any point we wanted to take on VC funding, we would never in a million years do a deal where we give up the board and all the actual ownership of the business we started and grew ourselves.

You aren't familiar with the mechanics involved.

Selling preferred stock doesn't "give up all the actual ownership of the business". The norm is literally the opposite: Preferred shares don't come with voting rights. Common shares do.

What preferred shares give investors is their investment back first in the event of liquidation. If an investor gives you a million dollars for 1% of your company, and you turn around and sell it for a million dollars, then the investor gets their million dollars back and you get nothing. Obviously. But if you sell the company for two million dollars, then the investor gets their million back and you get a million for yourself.

That's called a liquidation preference. Under standard deal terms investors get 1x. Nothing else to it.

So your fantasy of founding a company and giving yourself preferred shares makes no sense because a) no investor will put money in without seniority rights to recoup the investment if you fail, and b) preferred shares don't mean anything if you don't have investors.

Profit sharing has nothing to do with the type of equity, any profit sharing agreement is specific and can be anything. An investor can ask for royalties forever if they want.

I think you aren't aware of how the real world works, and have a textbook understanding. But not even that because you don't realize you can end up with basically nothing at the end holding only common stock that is given to W-2 employees.

> your fantasy of founding a company

You misread? Maybe intentionally. The company exists and has more customers than 99% of these YC startups. How many businesses are you operating?

> preferred shares don't mean anything if you don't have investors

Obviously, that's the context we're talking about. Bringing on investors. You think common stock is no different than preferred stock which is your main error.

Seniority rights have nothing to do with profit sharing or royalties.

I've founded two successful venture-backed companies. The current one raised a $25m Series A earlier this year. My investors have no control over the company, which is completely normal.

You're deeply confused about all of this.

> We work weekends, so it's 7 days a week, just want to make sure that's ok with you

This translates to "I am a bad manager"

I guess some respond with “yes”. We have a saying around here something like: “is not stupid who is asking, is stupid the one that gives”.

What you are describing is terrible management.

My God, why would anyone decide to work(?) in this way? Even if you are a junior and are a desperate to learn new skills, this is a totally wrong direction. And even if they a huge salary (like 3 x above the average, which I doubt), is your health really worth that? That's insane!

Ultimately it's not worth it, which is why I left. Sucks though because I have to find another startup in town and hope it's not basically the same thing.

Basically you correctly identified a toxic workplace and should stay away. Thank you for raising this in a location where YC-associated people (founders, funders, and engineers) will see it.

Founders: don't do this. To your employees, or yourself.

What a terrible company. Quality work needs big uninterrupted chunks of time by a well-rested person of healthy body and mind who feels motivated by the problem itself. Those don't happen when you're motivated by butt-in-chair mandates - all you get from that is a frat boy environment of constant interruptions and amphetamine abuse. Most startups fail for mysterious reasons so why create a culture where nobody is thinking clearly

Take the job. Document der forced 7 day work week. Get burn out diagnosed and sue them.

Ah yes, we are back to fetishising over-work for no reason. I sort of understand if a CEO wants to work 7 days a week. Go ahead. If it's worth hundreds of millions, sure. Normal workers? You'd be nuts to let anyone do this to you. We should be working less, not more. The arguments against it are all the same: You can't work anyone effectively for 7 days a week 10h+ per day, so it just becomes an exercise in control / loyalty / devotion to the higher ups (who, as you so rightly point out, don't actually put in anywhere near that much work).

Why governments aren't regulating this more, is beyond me. In Europe you'd probably struggle to do a 7 day, 10h+ work week legally, but in the US it appears to be fine.

Why YC isn't enforcing better standards is another question. I suppose, again, that it's extremely skewed to the founder's perspective and to them it's obviously worth it.

I think it depends on incentives. Are you properly incentivized to work that hard? Also - do you believe in the vision of the product? The answer should be yes to both to warrant that kind of commitment. Even a lot of equity or cash cannot sustain hard work if you don't believe in the product.

Additionally, this type of time spent can only be done on short time periods and you need to see success at each milestone to warrant ongoing work. So is the big picture vision broken down into reasonable success milestones?

Finally, your physical and mental health is paramount. Working that hard will take a toll on both if you dont have a balance. 7 days of work per week is feasible if you can take some time to exercise or relax within each day. Your mileage (MPG) can increase if you go slower, even if you are working everyday - and will take you further on the long stretches. Its a balance...

That is probably not even legal, let alone smart.

An extra 10 hours never made or broke a business in the history of civilization.

I was rejected from a recent YC startup for basically saying I am not going to put unnecessary nights and weekends. And after recently having a kid I definitely am never going to ever put unnecessary nights and weekends as frankly I just can't if I want to continue having a family.

Though this seems to be a more recent phenomenon of hustle culture. My company has worked with a couple dozen YC companies over the last 8 years and most seem to have a work hard and intensely during business hours but take it easy outside of that mindset. Which I think is the right mindset to have.

The interview I just had (with the YC founder that inspired this post) also asked "Do you have kids?" point blank as one of his first questions - seconds after I met him on the video call. Should have mentioned that in the post as it's also pretty inappropriate. This was before he asked if I was okay working 7 days a week.

> work hard and intensely during business hours but take it easy outside of that mindset

I am all for a work hard/play hard mentality, and I embody that truly, even moreso in my 30s. I don't have a lot of family commitments and often work longish hours anyway (~8-7) but even in a 9-5 context there's something rewarding about seeing how much I can possibly get done before some milestone like lunch or the end of the day. I optimize the entire morning around time spent coding and in my head I've already solved the problem the night before, and am optimizing on my commute after sleeping on the solution. By the time I get there I jam through the code, hit a stopping point at PR or something else, and it's usually only early afternoon. Hit a second wind around 3-4, ending around 7. Meanwhile I'll see founders do nothing until 5, then half-work from 5-9 and pat themselves on the back for "staying late", and go so far as to ask why I'm not staying later than 7 like them (despite me building most of the product).

Even more than a 9-5, I love environments where I can say "waves are good this week, won't be at standups" and nobody cares because the work will still be done, and it will be higher quality work with better documentation and presentation because my lifestyle is still in tact - I'm happy - and you see it in my work. When founders focus intensely on breaking their employees' lifestyles, they're almost asking for lower quality work from less happy employees. Something only an inexperienced founder who doesn't care about financial success would be involved in.

I think to add to your point I don’t think a lot of recent YC founders have real world experience or have minimal real world experience outside of school. I mean what’s the point of getting a job when you can go from school to directly starting a startup especially when offered a significant amount of upfront capital for really taking on no risk other than getting accepted and a chunk of equity.

Unfortunately, this has a negative consequence of people who may think studying engineering at a top tier university with late nights and weekends are how you create a functional work environment.

> The interview I just had (with the YC founder that inspired this post) also asked "Do you have kids?" point blank as one of his first questions - seconds after I met him on the video call.

I believe this would be considered hiring discrimination and is illegal.

Yeah, just not sure what to do about it though. They are based here in SF but the founder was in Toronto when I took the call, he probably is not an American citizen.

Helps at least just sharing it here and having people like you echo that it's not legal and founders should stop asking.

There are countless studies (mostly in the game industry, as crunch time and 7 day weeks are common) that show this doesn't work. Productivity for knowledge workers breaks down. And while I can sit 80h/week in meetings, I can't code 80h/week (not that I want to do both).

Yeah I know, worked at a startup, founders where pressuring everyone to work harder, asked why people left before 8pm, they got at million exit, no-one else got anything.

And they were spending company money on cars, travelling and expensive lunches each day (most expensive steaks in town), living the life.

Eh, startups are filled with people that are all-in the hustle culture. I am not at all surprised at that.

It's the main reason why I avoid working for startups too. Had a brief stint working for one a decade ago, although they didn't ask me to work weekends, there was this pervasive idea that people had to work more than what was stipulated in their contracts. This was already a big red flag to me.

Not all startups, thankfully! Perhaps startups founded by younger and less experienced people are more likely to work that way? The last three startups I've worked for were all founded by experienced people who had sane ideas about management, embracing the marathon-not-a-sprint attitude, and it's been great. I just hit the two-year mark at my current startup job, and it feels like a totally sustainable pace. I hope it continues for years.

> Or is it more about a person completely dedicating themselves to you?

It's all ego. These people are about to become billionaires and are practicing for their eventual rise to the top.

In all likelihood this sort of behaviour is what separates them from people who actually make it.

How are they compensating you for the expected work? If you can earn 50-75% of that compensation while working 40 hours a week, why would you go YC?

Why are you focused on YC/startups? Are you interested in the stock options, as a get rich quick scheme? Or are you interested in working during your life and being employed.

Working 60-80 hours a week is above normal and should be compensated as such. Startup stock is a huge risk.

Are you curious why the founders of a company spend 24/7 working it, and why they expect you to do the same? Well there you go, its the only thing the founder thinks about, and they want people to support them in that.

HOW ARE THEY COMPENSATING YOU. Thats the only thing that matters. If you make $1mil/year plus bonus, 80 hrs a week seems more reasonable.

> If you can earn 50-75% of that compensation while working 40 hours a week

You can probably earn 125-150% of that while working 40 hours a week...

> Why are you focused on YC/startups?

I've worked at a couple of large, well-known companies too but I like startups because there's usually more of a focus on building a product, and usually everyone on the team is interested in the space. In some cases there are early customers with requests/feedback/needs that the iterations are centered around and it's interesting to be close to that, especially when I genuinely care about the problem space.

In most startups I'm also working in an ideal or nearly ideal tech stack - either something I don't mind learning or something I'm already using in my personal stuff. Where at a big corporation it's often a painful tech stack unique to their predicament with devops processes that are outdated and complex. It's also hard to change anything, or introduce new tech which can be much easier at a startup with only a few developers. We can be like "this looks sick let's try it" vs "this looks sick I'm gonna go to Google Docs and create a Request-For-Comment, submit it to my engineering manager for approval, which after some debate he will send to the DofE for approval, which will be mulled over (?) for 6 weeks before being mentioned to the CTO who asks his friend/developer his thoughts who suggests an alternative which sparks a debate in the Google Docs comment section about the time complexity of a click handler".

Why YC: The startups in their directory tend to be more aligned with the problems I care about in tech, and are often quite cutting-edge in terms of mission and tech stack. I used a lot of AngelList in their heyday as well for similar reasons. It felt like a curated list of the startups who were: In SF, have a budget/runway, use modern tech, founders are (ideally) technical themselves or at least passionate about a space and have serious drive.

> Are you curious why the founders of a company spend 24/7 working it

If you read the post I said they were not there 24/7 working, they're often doing other things. Maybe this is the image put forth by YC and maybe it was once the truth, but I'm seeing the opposite now where founders expect 24/7 workers but they themselves are not so passionate and engaged.

> If you make $1mil/year plus bonus, 80 hrs a week seems more reasonable.

Nowhere near that of course, just google market rate salaries in San Francisco (don't forget to adjust for cost of living).

There's lots of software devs out of work and the masters can demand unreasonable work conditions like this, RTO, etc.

This is actually a matter of two-way free choice, after all, there are many subjective evaluations

Work at a normal company, not some preposterous place full of nutjobs. I negotiated and work 4 days a week.

YC has 100+ companies in a batch and funds several hundred new ones every year. It should be obvious that you can't draw broad conclusions about work culture or anything else after working with exactly 2 of them. In fact you can't draw any kind of conclusions at all because they are all going to operate in their own way.

Yes the grind and hustle mentality is alive and well (and is hardly a new thing), but I have also personally worked with a "hot" silicon valley tech startup where all founders were 40+ and everyone went home to their families at 5pm, and they had a multi-billion dollar exit.

On your side the best you can do is find an environment that fits you, have the company make the expectations clear up front, and negotiate accordingly.

1. I'm asking a question "Is this the new norm?" not drawing conclusions.

2. I'm asking it after 2 consecutive experiences with YC founders, after 15+ years of working in a software developer role in this city and having never been asked to work 7 days a week as baseline.

I'm thinking that the only reason to force employees to "work" even more than infamous 996 scheme, up to 7 days a week for a long time (weeks or more), by an adults with high education, some work experience and internet connection to a vast, VAST corpus of medical, social and professional research regarding productivity is one and only one - psychopathy. In a strictly medical sense of course. Such people simply have none empathy to any other human being. Because that is the only possible logical conclusion which can be made knowing all I've listed above.

As far as I understand that’s illegal.

Only in some jurisdictions.

For certain types of work you'd be entitled to overtime, but professional-managerial class jobs like software development are specifically exempted from this part of labor law in most states.

https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_overtimeexemptions.htm

There's 2 types of people in startups: problem solvers and problem creators :)

Not having a clear goal in mind, not leading by example and using time in the office as a benchmark for progress are all red flags.

Meaningful progress is not about how long you can work, it's about how effective you can be in leveraging limited resources. Problem solvers know that death marches are counterproductive in the end. The big question is how to work smarter and solve more problems using less, i.e. how to not die.

To the downvoters: ultimately the market doesn't care how hard you work. It's brutal but it's true.

> ...on top of a requirement to be there until 8-9pm daily and occasionally pull all-nighters when there are sales demos (at the office until 7AM the next day - then stayed at work for the next day)

and

> We work weekends, so it's 7 days a week, just want to make sure that's ok with you

Abso-fucking-lutelty NOT.

Congratulations, you've just identified a CEO with narcissistic and/or sociopath tendencies who thinks they and their business matters more than the individual mental health of the people working with (for) them.

STOP such interviews, say thank you, and walk out.

My guess is that start up culture requires some level of sacrifice to make it, right? I think 24/7/365 is a bit much of course, but I would expect a level of extra work compared to some 9-5's...

24/7/365 and the firstborn son for the 0.5% of stock in the company driven by conservative nutjobs. That's a nice trade offer, sure.

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