Cognition CEO offers buyouts to let workers flee 'extreme' work culture | Hacker News Reader

Cognition CEO offers buyouts to let workers flee 'extreme' work culture

sfgate.com

43 pointsStratoscope35 comments

They should all take the buyout.

From what I’ve heard, the shell of Windsurf was purchased for their certifications. So all the staff except a single digit few (the ones who do the compliance certification work) will probably be laid off in the not-too-distant future, regardless of whether they take the buyout.

So everyone should take the it, rather than get worked to death and then unceremoniously RIF’d in a months.

Are certifications really that hard to get that it's easier to purchase a company which already has them? Windsurf isn't a bank, anybody can get Soc 2

It's not just SOC2[1], they can do military contracting work.

> Windsurf delivers AI-powered coding solutions built for federal agencies, contractors, and system integrators. FedRAMP High authorized and compliant with DoD IL5 and ITAR

[1] https://windsurf.com/enterprise/government

If not offered competitive pay and sometimes founder-preference-equivalent stock, it's stupid to volunteer to be an eager slave on perpetual artificial timelines and crash schedules for peanuts.

Total garbage move & good disclosure/warning of future work culture.

Open source really has shown how you do not need so much cruft/guilt-tripping to build on top of good models.

How sad is it to over work folks & be proud of it, sure if Cognition equity is going to the trash just as Windsurf's lol, the irony of all this grind.

Is the logic that working with AI will need grind, waiting for the burnout blogs to show up here in some time.

The major thing that put John Carmack at the top of his field, even more than his extreme intelligence, was his unrelenting grindset. He would work days and nights, often taking a weekend and locking himself in a hotel room, to solve a problem. He has said in interviews that unless you work those 12+ hour days you just aren't going to write world-class software.

If you really want to develop on the cutting edge, you need a lot more than smarts. You have to have that dog in you. That fire in your belly that makes you obsessed, consumed with your work and solving the problems you set out to solve. If you don't... you're gonna lose out to someone who does. Go sling Java for a bank or insurance company, then, if you want to punch out at 5.

Scott Wu has that dog in him. It's reasonable for him to expect the same of his employees.

I don't really understand this. Surely working 8 hour days just means that it takes you 50% longer to write the same software (in reality less than that since I don't imagine you will be working at peak efficiency in hour 12).

Passion is a different thing and I agree you need passion you be the best. While there is clearly a correlation between people with passion and people willing to work more, it don't see why someone can't be passionate and also have other interests or responsibilities outside of work.

When it comes to loading pig iron, you're really just doing the same thing over and over, so the amount of pig iron you can load in a day scales roughly linearly with the number of hours a day you spend loading pig iron, all else being equal.

We know that the design of software is fundamentally a different sort of task than loading pig iron. It requires management of complex amounts of state in working memory, which must be acquired before work begins, and much of which is lost after work ends (or is interrupted), requiring reacquisition when work is restarted. I believe that because of this, Carmack's observation is that more contiguous time spent on the task yields superlinear gains in output, because you're just spending that much more time with the system state in your head. And if you're a really smart guy working on cutting-edge stuff you want to take advantage of those superlinear gains because you are messing with much more deep and complex state, in terms of your own cognition, that would take more time to reacquire when lost.

Cognition pivoted from a crypto company. The only thing he's "consumed with" is getting rich.

Get real.

John Carmack is highly successful in software and has a poor work-life balance. Doesn't mean there's causation between the two.

If there's an emergency, sure, work 12 hour days until it's fixed. Maybe if you're really in the zone, go ahead and keep working for 12 hours once in a while.

But, being behind schedule is not an emergency. And if the emergency continues for more than a couple days, it's a situation, not an emergency. 12 hours of focused work is hard to do. And if it's not focused, might as well punch out at 5, live your life outside of work, get some rest, maybe let problems marinate, and come back tomorrow.

“In the zone” is I think the most analogous piece to the CEO/Founder mindset. When I was in grad school I worked 12 hour days because I wanted to. Not because of an advisor or out of fear or anything, I just thought the material was fascinating and I wanted to learn as much as I could.

As a founder, I think there’s a similar incentive to work all day every day, not just because of the potential payoff, but also because you love it and it is your life. It is unrealistic to expect the same intrinsic passion from employee #30, much less employee #300. They don’t have the ownership, both financially and spiritually. It’s not their baby.

Relentless grinding and going well above and beyond make sense when you capture a significant portion of the upside (e.g co founder, or 'well known' tech guru like Carmack).

Grinding and hustling _without_ participating proportionally in the upside is naivete at best and foolishness at worst.

So many counter examples. Who wrote the unreal engine, or unity, or khtml, or Vim. How many people worked a regular 40 hour week at id Software?

This kind of thinking is a disease and a race to the bottom. I don't think we should stop people from doing it, but we certainly shouldn't reward them, in the market or otherwise.

Carmack owned the frigging company. Owners are free to put as many hours into their company as they want, just don't expect employees to do the same.

THIS!!

If it was up to the owners then we would not have labour laws, weekends or decent work hours either. Owners should feel free to work to death alone & with money you can't take with you, just don't expect to get friends/employees to join in this.

Yeah, he did that BECAUSE HE WANTED TO. Very different from a CEO setting that pace.

100%

There is absolutely no reason to believe that this is the only way to write “world class” software. I have bo reason to doubt that this worked for Mr. Carmack. And sometimes when there are product deadlines or production issues, it absolutely makes sense to work round the clock to fix. Sometimes you might even be in the zone and can’t think of anything else. But claiming that this is the only way is 100% Grade A BullShit.

Strive to have a balanced life and be extremely careful not to get burned out. Maintaining that joy for building things requires balance and perspective instead of slaving away your life.

6 days a week for 80+ hours is 14 hour days. With commuting that’s all your waking hours. Who is working here?

Hence the advice to live at work.

Shit like this is why I'm grateful for the worker rights that were paid for with blood in the more civilized parts of the world during the 19th and early 20th century. At least the US seems to be civilized enough that the CEO isn't immediately dragged out to the street to hang from the next traffic light - but maybe that's part of the problem ;)

My reflections -

Windsurf Paradox: When Acquisition Looks Like Extraction

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/windsurf-paradox-when-acquisi...

I'd only have to read about halfway through that email before I accepted the offer if I was one of the acquired Windsurf employees lol

Yeah, I’d be taking the buyout.

As a hiring manager, I _vastly_ prefer hiring someone that values work-life balance over this grind culture bullshit. YMMV, but in my experience, the folks that care about balance tend to be more focused and productive during the hours they are working.

Of course, exceptional circumstances exist where long hours are required. Not disputing that. But making that the default for the company culture is insane.

>> Of course, exceptional circumstances exist where long hours are required

Sorry, but despite your best intentions, even those long hours are wrong and unnecessary. It's the leadership's planning skills and inability to take responsibility of the exceptional circumstances. In such a situation good leadership just cuts scope without flinching and reflects to avoid a repeat.

edit: typo

I’m really only talking about existential threats to the business and things of that ilk. 99% of the things people consider to be “exceptional” are not.

There are no exceptional circumstances where management should require you to work long hours

I don’t think it’s quite that black and white. If it’s a matter of “we’re going to be insolvent if we don’t hit this deadline”, and you want to keep getting paid, long hours can be justified. That’s not to say it’s not a failure of leadership that led to that situation, but I really am talking about exceptional circumstances, not arbitrarily-imposed deadlines.

It shouldn't be possible to do this. We shouldn't let companies save themselves by doing this to their workers. Those companies should just go away. It's not the 1800s anymore.

Perhaps. But if you’re in the US your job is likely providing your primary income + health insurance + identity. Your compensation likely includes equity in the company if you’re in tech. So its in the collective interest to make the company survive.

No your job doesn’t provide equity just because you are in software development. Most of the near 3 million software developers in the US are working in boring old enterprise jobs where they don’t receive equity.

That’s not to mention the subset who do receive equity that are working at startups whose equity is statistically worthless.

And if someone’s identity is tied up in thier jobs, their an idiot.

I’ve worked at 10 jobs in my career of over 30 years everything from startups, boring enterprise, BigTech to now working full time for a consulting company. I’m always prepared to jump ship when facts on the ground change. I need a job - not the current job I have.

That is arbitrary imposition though.

Working more hours wouldn't make the situation any better. In that case it would decrease quality of life.

If you're in that position you should still work your 40, but you need to just get better.

And if the company is in that bad of shape, you’re going to be out of business anyway soon as did the startup I worked for from 2008-2011.

That’s where the whole always being prepared for the shit to hit the fan comes in - having a strong network, enough liquid savings to cover a gap of unemployment, a resume that’s updated at least quarterly, a longer form career document, up to date skillset…

I have never once in 27 years (3 years after my first job) been stressed enough about losing my job to overwork myself and I’ve worked at the shittiest BigTech company (you know the one based in Seattle) where they love to overwork you.

They are probably in trouble

From TFA:

> “We don’t believe in work-life balance—building the future of software engineering is a mission we all care so deeply about that we couldn’t possibly separate the two,” he wrote, per the outlet. “We know that not everyone who joined Windsurf had signed up to join Cognition where we spend 6 days at the office and clock 80+ hour weeks.”

996, American Edition, is almost complete.

Thanks, Elon! /s

I hope everyone takes the bait while they still can. Absolutely repugnant behavior.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com