Given what Elon has said about valuing people who work long hours and have an "extremely hardcore" work ethic, I can't imagine it's healthy to stay for too long.
I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.
On the other hand, a lot of companies don't offer either and seem to believe that simply rallying the masses to put in 20% more time (on average) will somehow lead to outsized gains.
I agree, and I think that if you look back at the early dot com startups that did things like food, recreation, laundry and even housing right on-campus you'll see a culture that tried to actually meet that need in a way that doesn't seem unfair. The idea was "you give us everything you've got at work and everything else will just take care of itself". Then, as inevitable as death, came the investor class demanding more for less and eliminating the benefits with the hope that the sigma grindset would just perpetuate itself anyway.
Thread makes a good point that everyone should be evaluating their time investment in work vs. their potential upside, especially if they're sacrificing time to other aspects of life. (Relationships, family, travel, etc)
Giving everything you've got with a potential huge reward = risky but possibly worth it
Doing the same without a huge reward = you're a sucker, because your company is getting more from you than they're giving
Yeah they can. That's exactly what someone who does your laundry for you does. They give you that time back, and in exchange for some of your time (in the form of money, which for working people is never anything but time spent doing things other than what you want). If I make $70/hr and can buy an hour of doing laundry back for $20 I can work that hour instead of spending it on laundry, have the same amount of time and $50. Or I can work that hour and buy laundry three times, netting me $10 and 2 hours.
What could possibly go wrong if an employer provided everything for their employees?
One time he told me "In a bacon and eggs dish, the hen contributes but the pig really gets involved. I want all my team to be pigs".
I internally thought "yeah, but you are neither the hen or the pig, you are the guy eating the dish". I left as soon as I could.
Because either (a) the person using them really knows their shit and will have a response or (b) they're just full of shit.
So we can look forward to being asked for many unpaid favors, and a spate of domestic violence around the holidays.
"Ok, then I'll make a decision about..." "NOT LIKE THAT"
But there are absolutely different levels of work ethic and stamina between people. And I'm not even talking about willingness which obviously varies, but some people can work for 12 hours straight and some people are just physically incapable of doing it.
did you know that in EU way back in imperial times some of the worker protection rules where not introduced by angry workers by companies which realized that having well rested and healthy worker will long term produce much better results and then countries following up by enforcing it to boost their countries productivity (and internal stability)?
(and yes I _very_ grossly oversimplified it including lumping all EU countries together even through they had very different inner political histories)
The reason I'm pointing it out is because recently some people seem to be forgetting that at the core a lot of work protection isn't rooted in "being social/nice to your citizens" but in "having a more internal stable and international competitive" country.
Paypal? X even?
I am totally not hardcore, I value my free time, but driving the staff like this seems to have worked very well for Musk's companies.
If I drive my workers to various flavors (emotional, physical, etc) of failure to succeed economically, are you going to look up to me? If so, you've failed the litmus test. Progress is nice, but so is a reasonable balance for our short existence on this rock. Be Woz, not Jobs or Musk.
(high empathy human, early TSLA investor, own Teslas, know people at SpaceX, etc)
If Europe wants to be "more internal[ly] stable and international[ly] competitive", then its 40-hour-per-week, 5-weeks-holiday-per-year companies have to compete with Tesla, Spacex, Paypal, X etc.
And they are clearly failing to do so.
What has US tech built that Europe needs? Europe has services and great quality of life, the US has performance art capitalism paperclip maximizing for shareholder returns and is a third world country [1] [2] [3], broadly speaking. The race is not what you think it is. What are you building for? To just keep grinding or building? Or for people to live happy, healthy lives at scale? Engineering is fun, and leads to progress, but it is a means to an end, not the point of life.
[1] https://worldhappiness.report/
[2] https://dashboards.sdgindex.org/rankings
[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...
Bosch has been building EV’s for literal years. Just because they’re selling them as parts doesn’t mean they’re incapable.
Oh, come on.
And you are confusing personal happiness with company success. Europe prioritises the former, at the expense of the latter.
> Oh, come on.
I stand by my assertion.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43471675 ("Even if I was programming Starship's flight computers, I would miss my family too much to work more than 40 hours per week. Regardless of really believing in their work, people want to have time with their loved ones.")
There's a reason the British industrial revolution was funded by new, sugar/slave-trade money -- because it went to people open to investing in this new, weird steam power thing.
in addition many of them did end up where they are by taking advantage of a major technological change, while being quasi subventioned, while being in a huge country which has until recently exported it's culture and tech, while systematically breaking all kinds of (non employee protection related) laws and regulations (including US laws/regulations, through seldomly with consequences in the US)
there is little which indicates that mistreating your employees was overly relevant for them to get where they are in most cases
actually it's even the opposite to some degree, multiple of the US mega corps have been known to be quite good employers (e.g. MS, Google). Microsoft was also one of the first huge companies which tried out a 32h week in some of their offices (and the results of that study indicated that it was leading to improvements).
and in general I think most people have no issues with highly payed highly skilled people "working hard like crazy" if
- it's well payed (i.e. you work "crazily hard" a few years and then can lay back for years after
- it's fully free of your choice to end up there
- you are also fully free to leave if you realize it's hitting your health to hard
Like company founders working "crazily hard" at the start of their journey is as normal in the EU as it's in the US. And paying people which work "crazily hard" extra, often in form of annual Bonus payments, is also in some markets not that uncommon in the EU. Also jobs which people very often don't do for more then a few years, because it's just not healthy.
But what Musk is pursing is so far beyond that on the unhealthy spectrum.
And a more normal employees has to be able to work their job without larger gap for like what 50 years at least. That just isn't compatible with "working crazily hard".
But Musk is just an extreme example of what you see in in general more in the US:
Indirectly force people to work harder then long term substainable and when it start causing chronic issues take "medicine" to fix it.
And then be surprised if your country has pain killer/drug addiction epidemic which doesn't just affect the people which did fall through society but like all levels of society.
And wrt. internal stability, have you looked at the US recently!? It's more unstable then it ever has been since the civil war.
Basically: 1) you select your bank at the checkout; 2) you're redirected to the bank's payment page with a QR code; 3) you scan the code from your banking app and confirm it; 4) the bank redirects back the merchants page with the payment status confirmed/declined. No payment processor involved and the money goes straight from your account to merchant's account.
For the financial systems version of straight away (2-3 business days, weekends & holidays excluded) ;)
Edit: Then why did you put a question mark at the end of a statement of fact instead of a period? What he said was true, has been true for a long time in fact (not just Europe, but a lot of the rest of the world), and you can easily google for evidence if you don't believe him, without questioning his honesty. Were you honestly that surprised that you had to ask?
The US lags so far behind other so-called "third world countries" not only in banking, but also health care, freedom from gun violence and school shootings, and now also civil rights and freedom of speech and democracy. I don't think Canada or Greenland would vote to give up their advantages and freedoms to become US states, but if they did, they sure wouldn't vote for the current administration.
I am not even sure why you were putting words like shocking, surprised, skeptical seemingly into my response. None of these are accurate descriptions of my question and response.
I hope you are doing OK because it seems like you are struggling with something.
We prioritize the private sector politically and there’s a lot of benefits, and a lot of detriments, to this.
One of the downsides is we have hundreds of more or less identical companies doing the same thing that don’t need to exist. This breeds inefficiency into systems we use, thereby opening the door for even more useless companies that just reduce friction. Friction that we decided we needed to have.
The most obvious example is healthcare in the US, but every industry experiences these detriments.
Stripe has a list of what they support: https://stripe.com/en-dk/pricing/local-payment-methods
And now because of that, there's lobbying against direct bank transfers and capping of interchange fees.
I mean, the US should definitely improve their bank2bank stuff and implement FedNow (I think that's what it's called) but there's less pressure to do so as basically everyone has and accepts credit cards (not true in lots of Western Europe).
through what matters is that in the end you can pay on most EU sites without having either paypal or a credit card
so that use case really doesn't need paypal
and for the p2p money sending you need it even less
and if you buy stuff from outside of the EU you most times can pay with both paypal or credit card, so if you have a credit card you don't need paypal for that either
https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-pay...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/affirm-max-levchin-par...
He didn't create it, it was a (pre-release) working thing when his company (which was failing at building an online bank) merged. He was made CEO, and spent his tenure trying to throw away the working app because it was Java on Solaris for ASP because that's what he knew.
Four months in, he gets married. The BoD attends his wedding on the Saturday, and on the Monday morning when he leaves for his honeymoon, they fire him in absentia. Not "other priorities", "family time", but "fired on your honeymoon".
Since then, most of Musk's "contribution" to PayPal has been cashing the dividend checks.
It’s like a cash advance on a credit card. Great for getting 500 bucks in your pocket, but the interest is steep.
People, like most resources, can be extended past their maximum value at the cost of longevity.
Compared to the US’s $65875, and 6.7h worked on average.
Much of that GDP per Capita for NL can be attributed to high margin industries like Oil Refining (Royal Dutch Shell, Dutch Disease), Financial Services, and Biochemicals Manufacturing [0], which are not industries where at 5.5h workday is realistic.
And once you remove part-timers, the hours worked in Netherlands are comparable to the US [1].
The bigger question should be why part-time labor participation is significantly high in Netherlands, as part-timers and youth appear to earn at least half of full-timers [1], but this could also be confounding due to age along with gender [2].
Imo this makes Netherlands' job market look similar to post 2010 Japan's labor market, which isn't a great thing.
That said, it does go to show that median income and personal living standards are not tied with GDP per Capita.
[0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/528/export-basket
[1] - https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/en/dataset/81431ENG/table
[2] - https://theworld.org/stories/2014/10/01/why-do-so-many-peopl...
Sure, if you remove 40% of all the people working (maybe more?) then you are left with the people working full weeks. That’s… not very surprising? The point is kinda that so many people work part time that it significantly skews the average number of hours worked.
It’s kinda wonky that the average for full-time still sits at 40 hours though. I know very few people working 5 day weeks (e.g. 60 or 80%), and I’d assume they’re still classed as full-time due their contracts.
And how many of those 40% are working at an Oil Refinery owned by Shell PLC, an assay workbench owned by Solvias, or working on Clearing or ForEx at Goldman Sachs Amsterdam?
The majority of Netherlands' GDP is derived only from those kinds of activities in ONG, Biopharma, and Finance (also agricultural exports but that's a whole other story).
Not all jobs are made equal, and this is where productivity (as is defined in economics) comes to play.
It's the same in Japan with almost all economic activity being derived from automotive, medical device, and biopharma manufacturing along with financial services [0]. Most other roles are cost centers in some shape or form, and even Japanese companies have been offshoring roles not associated to those sectors to the rest of Asia.
From a competitiveness standpoint, it's not good, as it prevents other industries from being sparked and prevents economic diversification. If there's an ONG glut, or the EU signs an FTA with a major pharma manufacturer hub like China or India (as is the plan this year), or trade normalization between the EU-UK finally happens, then major sectors of the Dutch economy can become extremely wobbly, and reduce the ability to provide a social safety net, as those cost money. There's a reason why it's called "Dutch Disease".
Even the TNO [1] and CBS [2] has pointed out this issue, as the rise of part time labor in the Dutch economy seems to have been sparked by the Eurozone crisis.
> It’s kinda wonky that the average for full-time still sits at 40 hours though. I know very few people working 5 day weeks (e.g. 60 or 80%), and I’d assume they’re still classed as full-time due their contracts
If you are on HN, most of your peers are probably also working in tech or chill white collar jobs like government or back office work.
[0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/392/export-basket
[1] - https://ioplus.nl/en/posts/dutch-productivity-growth-require...
[2] - https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2024/42/netherlands-lags-behin...
1926: Henry Ford popularized the 40-hour work week after he discovered through his research that working more yielded only a small increase in productivity that lasted a short period of time. Ford announced he would pay each worker $5 per eight-hour day, which was nearly double what the average auto worker was making that time. Manufacturers and companies soon followed Henry Ford’s lead after seeing how this new policy boosted productivity and fostered loyalty and pride among Ford’s employees.
Of course, this is a rarity. Most employee concessions in the US were earned with blood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
TL;DR Henry Ford realized car manufacturing was a semi-skilled job, not an unskilled job, and hired and paid for it accordingly, quality went up and costs went down. It's not rocket science.
And the calculus was not just "the most skilled workers". It was also "diminishing returns".
Not sure why that matters. Enjoy your 40 hour work week 100 years later.
It wasn't a singular case.
He was principled enough about it that Dodge sued to compel him to put shareholders' interests ahead of employees and customers-- a suit Ford fought against, and lost.
You said the two words which will ensure this never happens in the US: "long term". Most companies have zero decision-makers who care about the "long term". They are not the company's stewards, they are its parasites. Despite popular belief, most American corporations are not ruthless money-making machines, they are festering husks being ruthlessly parasitized by sociopaths while they slowly sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Regardless of really believing in their work, people want to have time with their loved ones.
Seems like an incredibly short-sighted and unsatisfying way to live your life.
Plenty of astronauts' kids and spouses are probably super proud of what their family member did, even with the sacrifices they all made.
Conflating Elon's ego into the picture is strawman-ing the question -- whether sacrifice in the service of a greater goal is worth it.
My answer? It depends, and it's everyone's own choice to make.
Why? You cannot critique the decisions of anyone? They are free to ignore me, or think I'm wrong. In respect to you points, an engineer is not a astronaut, a seaman or a pilot. You are not required due to the nature of your job to be away from your children, or sleep in the a cold floor like an animal.
Not even the quality of the work needs it, it's just so you don't hire more people. Sure, there are real emergencies were you might take a rain check with your kid once or twice a year, but a constant culture of grind is different. The whole "hardcore" mentality is cultivated because it is cheaper, the sacrifice is yours and the Elons of the world reap the rewards.
This is not mere personal choice, it's purposely engineered. The plan is that everyone in tech becomes a corporate GameDev, and like it.
LOLOL. These companies have really got some people fooled. My goodness. If you're actually sleeping on your office floor, all you're "in" is "in line for extreme burnout" and all you're "for" is "for making your CEO and shareholders wealthy."
I guess it either isn't enough of a slice, or the slice wasn't going to be valuable enough to deal with Elon, which is really saying something.
On a more serious note, I see this as a net negative, both for employees and the company.
The bigger issue for me is that he's making decisions, ignoring (and now "canceling") regulators who prevent or minimize the impact of decisions he makes along that line to protect our QOL. Because Musk sure as hell isn't bringing along anything up to 8 billion of us with him.
In a way, I value Elon more than the rest, since he has no filters, what you see is what you get, unlike the rest who are walking PR machines, saying one thing while meaning and doing another. The devil you know is better than the ones you don't.
These are not your kind of years, procrastinating underperforming you cannot judge.
He's in the public eye because PR is one of his primary skills. He constantly says one thing and does another, just that his following is such that people believe him and do significant internal justifications and contradictions to do so. Musk leads the marketing hype of his companies, which consistently promise one thing and deliver another. He's doing the same with DOGE. Tesla FSD is not going to be delivered in 2017. Mars is not going to be colonized by 2050. Elon Musk lies, a lot, and a large number of people's identities involve celebrating each of those lies.
Indeed. At this point, he's a real world manifestation of an Instagram influencer: 'You'll be wealthy with these 3 tricks!' (ignores thousands of hours off-camera or how money was really made)
I'd much rather live in a world where the fascist lying sociopaths are under societal pressure to hide their true selves, rather than the one where they can openly do Nazi salutes and threaten to jail their political opponents. Give me the walking PR machine any day.
I have never heard this before, but it's an interesting perspective given some of his less coherent actions (tarriffs for you! Oh wait no, actually wait have some more tarriffs).
Also, your premise is flawed. CEOs get a lot of justifiable hate, and yes, many surely wish for employees devoted to the business, rather than proportionally devoted to each aspect of their life. However, there are also plenty of CEOs who genuinely don't want employees to work overtime. And Musk's attitude is arrogant/authoritarian even by the standards of less reasonable CEOs.