Ask HN: Just saw a YC25 job posting front page that looks like a 7-day work week | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Just saw a YC25 job posting front page that looks like a 7-day work week

82 pointswalrus0157 comments

This is on the front page right now: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/salespatriot/jobs/M46X6YX-forward-deployed-engineer

Some notable things:

a. Go. Fly out and plant yourself inside the customer's operation. Weekdays are onsite (Wisconsin, New York, Miami, Los Angeles); weekends we regroup at the SF HQ to debrief and keep building.

Sounds like a 7 day work week to me.

b. Absolute grinder. Interested in co-living (though not required). Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change.

You're expected to work 7 days a week and completely blur the line between personal and professional life by "co-living"? What kind of person wrote this?

View on HN

Yes, they explicitly brag about this in their LinkedIn feed:

(1 month ago) https://www.linkedin.com/posts/salespatriot_forward-deployed...

> Forward Deployed Engineers in the wild. We said "go relax." They brought their laptops onto a duck float. Because when you're helping customers manage supplier communications semi-autonomously and speed up America's defense industrial base, "break" is a relative term. This is the energy.

(I don’t make a habit of checking that site but happy to make an exception to answer this post’s ‘did I interpret correctly?’.)

> Because when you're helping customers manage supplier communications semi-autonomously and speed up America's defense industrial base

What a thing to obsessively devote your life to.

yeah, I get the workaholism for companies touting missions to save lives or put man on the moon or build AGI, but who grows up dreaming of working for Accenture but with longer hours...

The same kind of people who want to overwork for the first twenty years of their life in order to not have to work for the last sixty. gestures at Amazon, tech founders, et al.

I clicked through each of the founder's LinkedIn profiles for that posting because something seemed... off about it. One was listed as a Forbes 30 under 30, combined with the language/curation of their pages, made me think these are going to join the likes of Holmes/SBF/Charlie Javice.

We need to start our own "YC sociopath under 30" to keep tabs on them and follow their career path

I got a recruiting email recently for a job that had 5 days onsite, but SATURDAY was work from home, listed like it was a perk.

It’s wild out there.

https://theonion.com/laid-back-company-allows-employees-to-w...

https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...

Do they think their clients aren't going to notice when the engineers they're paying $5k/day for are turning up on a Monday morning already dog tired?

This is a glorified consultancy, and there's a reason why consultancies don't work like this.

The being expected to fly around the country weekly in conjunction with 'this is not a remote position' is pretty wild.

If a person is expected to spend 1.5 to 2.0 days out of a 7 day week in SF and the rest of the time travelling to some random location in the 48 states, you might as well make your legal residence a state with no state income tax (since obviously you don't spend >51% of your year in SF).

The founders look like they can’t be out of their early-mid 20’s… this stinks of a frat-house 3 AM convo that made it to the next morning.

Saw this too.

Their name is Sales Patriot, hiring a "FDE", and they are funded by YC.

That should be enough information by itself.

I guess I’m too European to believe this is in any form real or what is actually expected of you.

Sadly, it’s spot-on for startups that have the power of belief as a core work ethic. They want devotees and they’ll find them. Most techies are no more immune to cults than average (‘I just want to feel like I belong somewhere’ etc.), and it reads like someone running a playbook that they found in a military recruiting manual. Not many will bite, but those that do will have an unquenchable fervor for the great work. At least it’s refreshingly competent psyops!

Even the military doesn’t run people this hard because it’s not sustainable for normal people. For jobs where workers need to think, sufficient rest and time away is required.

Yes, the military is typically better than this, agreed.

It’s not common as far as overall jobs go. The weird exceptions and stories get more attention online, make them seem more frequent than they are.

I’ve never worked anywhere or been interviewed at a place that asked this absurd schedule of their employees.

You get to work from home two days a week: Saturday and Sunday.

But also a good portion of every Sunday is going to be flying coach all the way across the continent to NYC or Miami, because you're expected to be on-site at the customer premises at 8am every Monday! You'd better be sure to get some work done on that flight or the company leadership will notice.

Adding URL here in a comment to make it clickable

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/salespatriot/jobs/M46X...

Is this legal under California labor law?

Probably? I imagine most of these jobs are 'exempt' and so paying for overtime isn't required. Otherwise, obscene hours are legal as long as the employer is paying overtime (including paying hours for missed rest periods)

Anyway, most of the work is going to be done out of state...

Is this better? I can’t tell

https://filthydreams.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/View-Job...

Sounds insane. A delusional lunatic would expect that from an employee, and only a crazy or extremely desperate person would take that job.

What’s the equity and salary for completely dedicating your entire life to this company? Why not just hire two or three normal 40-hour employees?

> completely dedicating your entire life to this company

Catholics like me would refer to that arrangement as “a religious vocation”. So it would come with room & board, wraparound health care, community living, celibacy, hard labor and/or lofty intellectual pursuits.

It’s interesting how the secular world continually tries to recapitulate these phenomena.

Ahh, you almost had me up until the celibacy!

I am not surprised thay this is an AI startup

I mean, for 0.15-0.20% and a top end salary of $200k living in SF that sounds like a great opportunity!

Don’t get me wrong, $200k is a lot of money, but it’s not a top end tech salary in SF.

It’s quite poor given that you don’t get to have a life outside of work, too. I’d start to think that sounds great if it was a 4 day work week, but 7… Bizarre.

Are you serious? That's not much to be able to live there. And for the top end no less?

200k in SF with CA income taxes and SF cost of living is not that much at all. It's low enough that "No, you can't ever hope to afford to buy a home or get a mortgage in the city of your legal residence" is a flat out fact.

Good news / bad news: employees are also expected to "co-live in our Warsaw & SF Hacker Houses" (i.e. corporate frat house).

Not quite sure how they get "teams of 20" living in those houses with a total company size of 15, though.

Maybe they have some ex US Navy submariners that have introduced the concept of hot bunking.

Yeah, it's not much for SF.

Kills me when people don't internally adjust a stated annual salary against a workweek that is almost assuredly brutally higher than a standard 9-5. Between the "grinder mindset," the on-site traveling, etc. you're probably easily pushing 60 hours a week.

A standard 200k full-time job clocks in at around $96 / hour. This job is more like $64 / hour.

Seems more like a cult than a job. Hopefully the equity is like… a lot.

let me guess, the founders must be chinese origin.

Nope

You could have taken 20 seconds to do some casual research like googling name of company + founders, but nope, you just jumped to some casual racism. Good job. For the record, they're not.

Well, i am ethnically chinese myself. There are just too many chinese companies with 996 culture.

Looks like these guys have invented 997

China has no chance against the American spirit of innovation

You can still be bigoted against your own race. Look at how some Hongkongers treat Mainlanders.

I wouldn’t touch this with a 10ft pole. But I know this wasn’t ever intended for me - they’re looking for young single people who’ll buy in to the cult aspect of it.

However, there’s a scenario worth considering. If you believe that early career people are most at risk of being replaced by AI, then doing a job like this for even a single year is a very compressed way to get several years of experience in a short time. Multiple different customer situations (different industries, tech stacks, cultures), and living in the cult HQ also means you absorb a lot of the experiences of your colleagues through osmosis.

After this when you’re looking to go work for a real company, you’re in a much stronger position in a tight employment market when you can point to 10 actual projects you’ve done with lots of variety.

No future employer is actually going to credit you with any additional years of experience, it'll just be "oh, they did a year at a failed startup".

And if you claim to have done 10 projects in your first year of paid employment, people will just assume that they were all very shallow or that you only had minor involvement.

Pretty much any other job would be better.

Yes and? If this is not appealing to you, don't apply. But for some the travel and being at different customer sites is energizing and fun.

I don't know if I'd really define "some" travel as flying SF to NYC (or SF to Miami, or Wisconsin) every sunday afternoon/evening, and then flying NYC to SF every Friday evening. That meets a definition more like "constant" to me rather than "some".

Don't forget that you're flying NYC to SF to "regroup at the SF HQ to debrief and keep building". What, you thought you got the weekend off? Rise and grind.

If you're the sort of person that treats trips to NYC as a perk, you want to spend some of that weekend with a day off in NYC, not flying cross country to spend quality face to face time in the office...

It shouldn’t even be legal.

It isn't, in a bunch of other countries.

Why not? Should it be illegal for someone to have multiple part time jobs?

As a non-US person this mentality baffles me.

What does non-US have to do with it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com