For AI Startups, a 7-Day Work Week Isn't Enough | Hacker News Reader

For AI Startups, a 7-Day Work Week Isn't Enough

forbes.com

19 pointsiancmceachern25 comments

> Six days a week isn’t required at Decagon, a San Francisco startup building AI agents to answer customer calls, but has become part of the company culture, cofounder Jesse Zhang told Forbes. Up to one-third of the 80-person company typically work Sundays in its office in the city’s South of Market district, according to Zhang.

Founder mode means you’re proud of how bad you are as a manager.

Bad manager? It sounds like they immediately solved the problem of weekend call centers with AI!

I'm going to go the other way: if 7 days is not enough then you are not thinking hard enough about how you want to solve the problem that you have. Because if you have to do so much, type so much code, organize so many things, just to get your problem resolved, and it cannot be split up or delegated, then you are doing it wrong.

I do not know how it is for other people but I cannot be in a creative and problem-solving mood 8 hours a day. Heck: I have the best days were I actually type very little but still get to _finally_ understand and solve whatever I'm looking into.

Working efficiently is underrated.

I work in manufacturing; my boss could use this lesson real bad. Dude works every single day, 14-16 hours a day. Always going on about how he doesn't have time for this or that, too much going on. Always forgetting stuff because he's got 472 things on his mind. Probably has trouble finding any of those 472 things in his Excel-based wall of notes that gets called "task management". Constant miscommunication within the company. Total lack of systematization. He openly admits he he can't take a vacation because the company can't run without him there constantly.

Absolutely refuses to consider revising the processes he's used for 20 years. Where have I worked? What's some young buck gonna come in there and teach him? Meh, not my problem. I systematized my one little area and the rest can go to heck.

This guy has constructed his own prison and chooses to live in it everyday.

even if one can be creative for morw than 8 hours per day she/he shouldn’t :)

There's a concept in economics called the winner's curse[1], which says that, in an auction with uninformed bidders, some fraction tend to significantly overbid, and whoever wins tends to have significantly overpaid. Having briefly lived in San Francisco, in particular, and worked in the early-stage startup scene, I'm inclined to believe that working for most early-stage startups is a winner's curse. Too many of your peers overpay with their time and energy for too high of a price (too low of a rate). The only way to get in is to overpay.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner%27s_curse

If only we could vickrey auction the situation. 2 developers bid their time per week on a role, and the winner contributes however much time the 2nd place bidder had bid + 1 minute.

Unfortunately (fortunately?) - people aren't fungible like that.

Also, note that 2nd-price auctions don't help if many bidders overbid. You'd have to take some sort of consensus price. It's possible, but I'm not aware of any well-known examples.

Technically if more than 1 party bids high, the market rate is that high and the majority of parties have just underbid the market rate.

But yeah agreed, 1 hour for me is not equal to 1 hour for someone else. Just a fun thing to think about.

Interestingly, the winner's curse doesn't talk about market rate. It supposes that the thing in question has some sort of objective, anchored value, which, importantly, the bidders don't know or are misinformed about ahead of time.

From the outside, it seems especially baffling. You and I know these companies likely won't make it, and the toil will have been for nought. Something in the water is making people glorify working this hard for its own sake. To each his own, I guess.

> “There is no way to sugarcoat it. At startups, you work extremely hard,” CEO Kenneth Chong told Forbes. Chong, 30, compared the all-consuming role to that of being an athlete, who trains intensely and dedicates time and energy to the sport beyond normal business hours. “Not everyone wants to be an athlete. And if you do, then you chose that life.”

Hahaha. I’m sorry, but comparing being an athlete with working 7 days a week is completely bonkers. I can maybe, maybe get an endurance argument, but in general unlike being an athlete where you are actually improving you and your craft, and your body, (to a point, of course) working at a company mostly only improves the company, and working 7 days improves the company to the detriment of the employee.

The real reason they would make this argument is because athletes are held in high regard and they want to make it seem that working at a startup is like being one of those “highly regarded” people, and the way you achieve that high regard is to work to the bone. It may fool some people, I guess.

It doesn't make sense, of course, but it doesn't have to. It just needs to attract a bunch of developers naive enough to believe it.

I'm not defending their arguments, but I think that some employees can also improve themselves on the job, it's not just the company improvement, I guess it depends on which projects, what kind of management, and the mindset of the employee.

Of course, and I have been pretty junior at an early stage startup where I improved and learned a lot (more than I think I would have at a larger company, at least), but I definitely wouldn’t have worked as many hours if I had more experience, and I think the arguments that center around you needing to work extremely hard (7 days a week, and/or like 70-80hrs) are predatory and have no sympathy for them. As other commenters have mentioned, if you need to exploit people in some way to be sustainable then you’re not sustainable.

Yes, but as Buffett says, you only have one body and one mind, for your whole life.

If either wears out, you're done. This means that sleeping consistently, avoiding stress, exercising, having a social life, having normal family relationships, investing time in your children, etc. are not optional.

Imagine doing that for a bet that almost certainly will return nothing!

The athlete metaphor undermines its own point. Yes athletes work very hard, but they also specifically build in rest, recovery, and structure. Their training is periodized and supported by coaches, trainers, and nutritionists to _maximize_ their performance without burning out.

It’s understood that this level of output isnt sustainable without significant individualized support. Without it even elite athletes plateau, regress, or get injured.

A real athlete isnt left to figure it out alone, theyre backed by an entire system designed to _help them thrive long term_.

This article exists because it is a spectacle, and that alone should tell us something.

Edit: The athlete metaphor is used here because it is an “appeal to heroism” (greatness demands this of you) which is the root of all hustle culture inspo.

Im sure that Chong believes this framing himself. In the search for purpose, it is common (very human) to attempt to transmute pain into purpose. And sometimes it does help people find clarity or endure hard situations. An individual can choose that path, it is their right.

But it is a dangerous alchemy when applied at scale and by leaders.

Right, you best believe people in the NBA are getting a nice 8 hours of sleep a night. You just can't compete at that level if you aren't 100%.

These people are working 7 days a week, sure, at like, 60%. They're making mistakes, they're forgetting things, they're approving PRs with obvious bugs.

A business that can’t afford to pay enough people at market rate (cash and/or equity in a public company) and have them work only 40 hours doesn’t deserve to exist.

I understand the founder has a “vision” and that’s fine. I have bills and life.

Remember like a mere thirty months ago the tech industry was talking up three-day weekends as the future of work? Post-ZIRP phenomenon right here.

> an AI startup that helps students apply to study abroad programs

That product requires working 7 days a week? And it somehow is AI powered?

This has to be a joke.

> he thinks schedules should be broken into smaller increments of work and rest, with intense working sessions followed by naps, instead of waiting for weekends to catch a breath.

Oh - This is just reddit-incel brain polyphasic sleep nonsense “Einstein slept 4 hours a day with micronaps, so my employees will do the same”.

Perhaps these CEOs have enjoyed crunch mode at the end of college projects and pre-exam cramming so much that they decided to live that way all the time, forgetting that other aspects of life need time too.

This is part of the problem, in my opinion. Many of them are kids right out of college, not adults with families and responsibilities and experience with such.

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