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Comment by PhasmaFelis | Hacker News Reader

"I know one well-known startup who has been trying to fill a role for over four months, and has gone through two dozen candidates, simply because the founder mandates 80-hour workweeks.”

I'm rather surprised that this wasn't a heading topic on its own: Don't Expect People To Work 80-Hour Workweeks. Bleary, burned-out, sleep-deprived, stimulant-addled engineers do not produce decent code no matter how many hours you make them stay at their desks. Obviously. You bloody idiot.

(...The startup founder, I mean, not the article writer.)

Although really this folds into "You’ve Got To Pay If You Want To Play" to make a larger point: If You Want Good Employees, Don't Treat Them Like Shit. Another of those blindingly obvious things that employers all over the world just can't seem to wrap their little heads around.

View on HN

You don't even have to go outside of HN to find this attitude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445484

Now that's a position I would envy: busting your ass working 80 hours a week developing world-changing products ("WordPress plugins and iPhone apps like Santa Strike") so that somebody else, who doesn't respect you as an employee, can get rich off your effort (while they spend their time browsing HN).

> "I want people that think about the product even when they aren't in the office."

God forbid your employees have a social life, hobbies, or side-projects. Enriching some sociopath by building "santa strike" apps is a cause worth sacrificing everything for, right?

Word.

Here's the funny thing, which makes employment a lot like romance- I DO think about my product even when I'm not in my office, but I do this because my employer and colleagues are awesome, and I want to make all of us successful, and we have a common purpose and goal.

People won't love you because you insist it. They can't. You'll have to be lovable to begin with, and you do that by being goddamn awesome.

Possessiveness is for the unenlightened, needy, insecure.

It takes a certain amount of life experience to arrive at the conclusion that many challenging work problems are solved by an insight that hits you in the shower, or while jogging, or during other seemingly idle moments that an 80 hour work week robs you of.

There's something heinous about demanding that a group of people think about "the product" in every waking hour.

I think I'm mostly objecting to the wording -- "product" is such a lifeless, anodyne word. If I want people who are passionate about what we're building, we have to build something that inspires passion, and I can't imagine ever calling that "the product".

I find that post you linked disgusting. Now I see why we need laws for things I feel are obvious. I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal. I mean, sure I understand crunch time as release-to-production draws near. I have slept in my cubicle overnight before to make sure a critical production-change went smoothly, but that's my choice when I deem it necessary or a manager I respect is in a tough-spot and would really like me to help him/her out. In what world does any manager think they can demand >40hrs/week from me on regular basis? Unless I own a significant part of the company, I'm just an employee and as such >40hrs/week for a regular employee is an indication of a problem.

Nah it's cool, it's not so hard to just not work for people who don't grok work-life balance. I mean, yeah, sure, labor laws are a great thing, but in this case and in the current market for tech hiring, it's pretty easy to fix by asking "hey what's your work-life balance like?" in the interview, making decisions based on the answer, and leaving if the answer turns out to have been a lie.

...furthermore the cost for such a company will be not being able to recruit and retain great talent. Intangible cost but very real.

What's really appalling about that post is that the expectation was that people don't complain about working excessive hours. The implication is not only that workers need to work more than the internationally-accepted precedent, but need to do so with total enthusiasm.

I can see people begrudgingly working extra time if the circumstances demanded it, but the idea that complaining about working those extra hours should be a capital offense is horrifying.

They can demand it but they better be paying/equitizing me appropriately.

Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal.

Actually overemploying people should be illegal (at least, it should be illegal without a regulated rate of overtime pay that lets employers and employees rationally negotiate the ethical-lifestyle trade-off involved).

Refusing to hire someone because they won't let themselves be abused is doing them a favor.

> I find that post you linked disgusting. Now I see why we need laws for things I feel are obvious. I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal.

It's interesting that you're so adamant about having the ability to make your personal choices here when you're advocating to take choice away from others.

The article states that the employer demanding 80 hour work weeks cannot find anybody to fill that role for 4 months and counting. Employers have to compete for labor just as employees have to compete for jobs. If somebody offers an 80 hour per week job without offering adequate compensation (multiple times the market rate, a large percentage of ownership, etc), then they'll fail to fill that role.

Your personal feelings are no justification for trying to create laws and interfering with other peoples' voluntary transactions in the marketplace.

I probably shouldn't respond, considering the (very stoner) name of "throwaway420", but the employer is in a position of power, so it is not unreasonable to want laws that draw bounderies around your commitment, especially with salary workers.

Fortunately, we work in an employee driven industry, so employers who demand extraordinary commitment can't find employees.

For now.

They'll always find someone who is hungry.

> they'll fail to fill that role.

while this is true (mostly), the assumption is that there is competition, which isn't always the case. Civilized society should set some decent standards to which employers must adhere to, because the invisible hand of the free-market doesn't take into consideration human conditions when it optimizes for profit.

> Your personal feelings are no justification for trying to create laws and interfering with other peoples' voluntary transactions in the marketplace.

Meanwhile.... http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/08/25/mori...

Your personal feelings are no justification for trying to create laws and interfering with other peoples' voluntary transactions in the marketplace.

Ah yes. Here we go. The fabled "free market".

I'm impressed that you seem think there are functioning markets, of any kind, without the rule of law.

Contract law, intellectual property laws, labor laws, health and safety, etc.

Plus a fair and impartial judiciary.

But I'm not telling you anything you haven't heard before, and chosen to ignore.

The alternative to the rule of law is might makes right. Which is exactly what all the libertarian "free market" scams all boil down to.

No thank you.

If libertarian free markets were perfect then Somalia would be the tech capital of the world.

If socialist centrally planned economies were perfect then Moscow would be the tech capital of the world.

Well, that didn't solve anything. Maybe one-liner hyperbole doesn't add much to the conversation.

> Your personal feelings are no justification for trying to create laws and interfering with other peoples' voluntary transactions in the marketplace.

Actually, doing precisely that is at the core of living in a civilized, democratic nation. If you think full-on free market is better, there is a (not-so-well) working exemplar over in Somalia.

Because Somalia was such a paradise back when it had a government...

'Free market' does not necessarily imply no government. Most libertarians wholeheartedly agree that bringing harm to another, either directly by initiating violence or indirectly by fraud, is wrong and should be legally punished. That is the core of living in a civilized, democratic nation.

The idea that some people should be able to make laws to tell other people what they can or cannot do in completely voluntary arrangements is in fact a return to tyranny, however well-meaning it may be.

> 'Free market' does _not_ necessarily imply no government.

'Free market' doesn't really have any consistent, coherent meaning in terms of actual objective features.

> Most libertarians wholeheartedly agree that bringing harm to another, either directly by initiating violence or indirectly by fraud, is wrong and should be legally punished.

The juxtaposition of this sentence with the last suggest that "Free Market" is a label for whatever a majority of current libertarians prefer; I think this is almost accurate (in use, it seems to mean more whatever any particular self-described libertarian prefers at the moment), and illustrates my previous point.

> The idea that some people should be able to make laws to tell other people what they can or cannot do in completely voluntary arrangements is in fact a return to tyranny

No, that's not true "in fact", its an equivalence based on a subjective value proposition.

Most libertarians wholeheartedly agree that bringing harm to another, either directly by initiating violence or indirectly by fraud, is wrong and should be legally punished.

You don't think that requiring people to work 80 hours/week for months or years on end does them harm? Really?

You think that all of OSHA is tyranny? You think that weekends are tyranny? Vacation is tyranny? Laws against sexual harassment at work are tyranny?

"I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal."

My husband is a low-grade chef. The vast majority of places where he worked/interviewed expected him to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week (sometimes 6.5 days - those employers thought someone only working 6 hours on the 7th day was being treated well).

And bear in mind people like him are working these very long hours under time-pressure, with people barking orders at them; they are using sharp knives, boiling water, boiling fat.

Quite often, the employers kept all tips/service charges. If the staff did get tips/service charges, they went to waiting staff/bar staff.

Only about 5% of the places where he was interviewed did he get offered a 40 hour week, with some of the tips/service charges going to him.

Oh yeah. And all this on minimum wage. Hours worked beyond 40 were never paid as overtime in these places.

He was working in the kinds of restaurants were programmers and other professionals would go for dinner.

He spent the last 3 months living off his savings until he could get a job at one of the 5% of places that operated the kind of working hours that everyone else takes for granted.

>>where he worked/interviewed expected him to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week (sometimes 6.5 days - those employers thought someone only working 6 hours on the 7th day was being treated well). And bear in mind people like him are working these very long hours under time-pressure, with people barking orders at them; they are using sharp knives, boiling water, boiling fat.

Okay, good for him. But I stand firmly by what I said, that should be illegal.

>>the kind of working hours that everyone else takes for granted.

I assume you mean 40hrs/week. When I hear someone say "take for granted" to describe something, I believe they consider that something a luxury. If 40hrs/week is a luxury, then what do we consider normal? I'm not accepting some 3rd-world sweatshop, or even 1st-world Amazon shipping facilities as normal... or even what your husband went through as normal. Nobody should have to live like that.

If your making minimum wage in the US they are required by law to pay you 1.5x overtime after 40 hours. Which is why many low wage jobs push people out the door at 40 hours. Granted, recovering that money can be a pain but it's vary doable.

http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/minwage.htm : http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs23.pdf

Unless specifically exempted, employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay.

> Unless specifically exempted

That's a pretty huge loophole. For example, certain kinds of kitchen staff in hotels and resorts are not required to be paid anything after the first 40 hours of regular pay.

The list of exemptions is ludicrously long and specific. There are exemptions for employees like movie theaters ushers and news announcers, for example.

I believe the distinction is between "exempt" (not due overtime) and "nonexempt" employees. From the US Department of Labor (http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/overtime/jobs.htm):

"Chef - may be responsible for all food service operations and also may supervise the many kitchens of a hotel, restaurant group or corporate dining operation. A chef de cuisine reports to an executive chef and is responsible for the daily operations of a single kitchen. A sous chef, or sub chef, is the second-in-command and runs the kitchen in the absence of the chef. For assistance in determining whether an employee who performs managerial duties or functions in addition to his or her chef work meets the duties tests for exemption from the FLSA's minimum wage and overtime pay requirements, begin with the Executive Employee section. For assistance in determining whether an employee who has attained a four-year specialized academic degree in a culinary arts program and who performs these or similar duties is entitled to overtime pay, begin with the Professional Employee section, and select the learned category. The professional exemption is not available, however, to cooks who perform predominantly routine mental, manual, mechanical or physical work."

You also can't dock pay by the minute or hour, only by the day.

So basically, you're saying that your husband was abused to hell and back, and implying that the authorities should indeed be cracking down, starting with the more severe abuses in lower-paid, lower-demand professions?

In general, workers have achieved 5-day work week for almost a century and the conditions you describe fit a third-world sweatshop. Maybe it's time for USA to stop being a third-world sweatshop for so many its citizens - take a look at the Fair Labor Standards Act you had in 1938, maybe you can try to achieve at least that standard if you pressure your congressmen enough.

Don't you see the value that guy brings? He's an "Idea guy." You just need to do all that work stuff. Hell he's thinking ALL DAY.

I'm thinking all day after I spend 8-10 hours writing code...if that's what you mean.

As opposed to those mindless workers who don't think except when on a time clock.

Hey quit looking at the clock.

Now you're just being hyperbolic.

Your comments aren't doing you any favors. If what they're saying is bullshit, then shut up and don't give 'em the satisfaction (what do you have to prove?). If they're right, then consider what they have to say and act on it appropriately.

Yeah you're right. I was hoping to engage in a productive discussion on the topic, but it's not happening.

For what it's worth, your comments lead me to think you might benefit from some introspection. Burn the thesaurus and whatever business books you're reading, too. I intend only exactly as much disrespect as the preceding sentences would indicate and admire your entrepreneurship despite it.

I wouldn't call this guy an entrepreneur, he's more like a greedy sweatshop master.

Typical capitalist.

>I'm an idea guy

>learning how to code

>WordPress plugins

>iPhone apps like Santa Strike.

lol you wonder why

If he was in the states and not anonymous, this guy could be sued for "requiring" people to work more than 40 hours a week, which is illegal by federal law even for exempt positions. In an exempt position, the worker can decide to work more than or even less than 40, depending on need, but its their decision to make (hence exempt...), and if a manager/owner were to make that a requirement, they would find themselves in court very quickly, even if they made a statement to that effect. Hope parent is not in the states, has a good lawyer, or is anonymous.

True, but only to a degree. Are you the "idea guy" (in addition to coding) or is everyone expected to produce good ideas and those are vetted by a group of smart people? Too many founders think they have some exclusive intelligence that is apart from everyone else which is a conceit that usually leads to unfortunate results.

I suspect I have more time in startups both successful and failures than you, and while no one knows every way to succeed they certainly can detect the patterns of failure. The hardest thing for any founder is to recognize the wisdom of their own employees.

I wrote that part of my profile as a way to say that I love coming up with ideas and putting a small team together in order to build them so we can test their merits. At the time, we had a lot of products and I couldn't lead them all (from a development standpoint).

That's changed as we have shifted focus to fewer ideas and better execution. We maintain a list of things we want to build, and vet every idea that comes our way, be it from a founder, an employee, or a customer.

That said, someone has to be the guy to draw the line in the sand.

Also, FWIW, I spend the majority of my working day writing code.

Do you have a team of coding mercenaries? I am now quite curious about your company. Did you assemble a team to execute ideas for other founders? That seems like a pretty solid industry, if that's the case.

Edit: just saw some of you other posts, thanks for the info.

I love coming up with ideas and executing on them as well, but that's not what provides value in the particular role I'm in at present. It is a good sign that you are worrying less about ideas and more about execution, especially since most businesses revolve around one good idea that needs focused execution at the expense of "things that would be a good idea 6-12 months from now", because a business is what it is at a particular point in time regardless of the end-goal vision.

And yes, at times lines need to be drawn in the sand but those are pretty rare times when you have a good group of smart people and usually involve breaking impasses when there is no clear consensus. There's also the whole "I have a responsibility to shareholders at the end of the day" duty that many employees do not feel, but too often founders use both of these as excuses for "I think X, so it must be so" rather than questioning themselves in the face of disagreement with a group of people you brought on board because of their skills and intellects.

Frankly, I imbue no magical powers to writing code when it comes to founders of tech companies because often the tech is the least difficult problem to address. I know, I know, I speak heresy given the venue but I can code a great product far easier than what is required to build a good marketing campaign and sales strategy, and I at least can depend on my bash/vi session to be predictable unlike those that have to venture out into the customer acquisition arena with all its unpredictability.

You can spend over 8 hours a day, average, writing code? That doesn't seems sustainable to me .

You know, for kids.

◯

You've got a bright future, kid.

If I had a dollar for every "idea guy" who's pitched me on writing his great iPhone app for free (excuse me, for "equity"), I'd have...well, probably about $10.

Oh, yeah.

Sometimes, though, they're friends and relatives who just aren't aware of how much work is involved. I don't want to be mean to them.

I usually just ask them how much capital they have to invest in the joint venture. That's typically the end of it. :-)

A friend of mine wanted to sell me an idea. I laughed in his face and said "I have a list of at least 50 of my own ideas I can work on right now. There's no shortage of ideas. No one pays for ideas, they pay for work".

"Idea guys" who ask you to write their app for free, but not before signing their NDA, of course.

The main issue with these douchebags is they want to pay for 20 hours and have the employee work 80 hours. I would be a lot more enraged if I got the impression that anyone worth his salt would actually consider working for him. 80 hours building wordpress plugin while being paid for 20 or lesser for a startup headed by an idea guy who declares who won't hire anybody who tracks his hours and is unwilling to work overtime? That will happen the day a monkey comes out of your ass you piece of shit. I am still concerned that it's employers' market and some poor soul will end up getting exploited. Man, sometimes assholes make me hate free markets and I wish for regulations.

And then the guy talks about "premium" salaries. Yeah. Right. Even assuming 50 USD/hour(which is pretty reasonable), 50 * 80 per week comes up to 16000/month comes up to about 192000/year. Unless you have that kind of cash, don't go on shitting garbage about 80 hours/week.

What you find is that the interview process is hunky dory and everybody's all "yeah, cool!", then when you sign on for a salary they try to squeeze all the time out of that fixed rate that they can. It's like feature creep when quoting a project rate in freelancing.

Yeah. Hourly rates helps keep things in perspective. But hourly rates also worsens the douchiness where people start feeling that the number of hours it takes is disproportionate to the amount of work being done.

But in that case, I try to first politely explain them that estimates do go wrong, especially in the cases where I am doing things I haven't done before. I recently setup a xmpp based web chat for the first time. I communicated beforehand that I am not familiar with xmpp web clients and whether I would be able to just use a xmpp web client or I will have to code something from scratch using strophe.js or convere.js, or if it can be done at all. The task is basically "it will be done when it will be done" but I will be able to at least tell you if it can be done at all in a week.

Reasonable explanations mostly work with people who start getting restless when things take longer than expected, mainly because I too vet my clients. But the thing with hourly billing is, if the stakeholders are being unreasonable, I ask them to go eat shit and cut my losses(if any) and I don't have to deal with unreasonable expectations that comes with a fixed price bucket.

Sure, "Engineer's Savings Time" is a common imaginary time scale, which has led to a rule of thumb for engineers to triple their instinctive time estimates for tasks by default.

"Double your estimate, and convert to the next higher unit." is what I've always heard.

The corollary to which is "projects always slip by the units in which they were estimated." :)

I actually interviewed for a contractor position at a place last year which was on HN who's hiring. It's a big place and had a good team but they offered well below market rates. I pushed on this an they came up a little (nowhere near enough to entertain). Instead I was greated with an offer to make it up via overtime. I believe the phase was something along the lines of "there's no shortage of work and we don't cap the number of hours you can work per day". I really liked the guys but I thought that was totally disrespectful of my time.

I would be actually ok with that provided that they offered to pay for the overtime. I think they told you the rates they are willing to pay, and left the number of hours up to you. This kind of arrangement works for me. There isn't anything shady going in the background(paying for 20 hours, expecting 60 hours). I have an option to take it or leave it, but they aren't trying to offer a "t&c applied" deal.

But if they're offering below market rate, you're having to work overtime every month just to make a reasonable wage.

I get what you're saying, they're not hiding anything - but you're still losing out. Instead I took another contract for 2.5 times as much - and I was working a lot of overtime on that contract.

You have a finite number of hours in the day, and your life. Don't give them to someone else to profit off. That's crazy.

I am not advocating letting someone use(exploit?) you for his own profit. But I like free markets and I am saying if the employers aren't doing anything shady and just offering low salary, someone who finds the salary good enough can take it.

Recontextualize this for a minute and let me see if it still makes sense.

The company offers a salary of $50/hour when he thinks his market rate is $100/hour. He refuses, countering by asking for $100. The company comes up to $60. He refuses. The company makes the following final offer: "OK, you win. We'll pay you $100 per 1 hour 40 minutes and you can work as much as you want." How have they bettered their offer? Especially when there are (presumably) other market rate jobs out there.

I would be actually ok with that provided that they offered to pay for the overtime.

In the US, salary and overtime are usually not available together.

http://nathanhangen.com/ 80 hours for this???

I've decided that this expectation is a sign that the founders are sociopaths. So far, I've been right.

not founders in particular, but just some people in general.

unfortunately, in a society where relationship debt is replaced with financial debt, this is inevitable - i.e., tribal societies sees less sociopaths because you cannot be "anonymous" and suffer no punishment for sociopathic behaviour, while in modern society, the externalization of costs and harm means there isn't anyone to "blame" when shit hits the fan, so sociopaths can take advantage of this and insert themselves into a position to take advantage of others without repercussion.

And the sad part is, a sociopathic strategy is successful (where success == money earned), because we don't measure things like ethics ("everything is ethical as long as it is legal").

Leading to people like me writing books explaining these painfully obvious things that nobody seems to know. (https://leanpub.com/nightowls)

Most of my readers who write in say something to the effect of "Oh mai god, my <superior>[1] needs to read this!" I'm not sure if they ever do pass it on, but that's the feedback I get :)

[1] <superior> is usually a mother, a wife/girlfriend, or boss.

> How you can help:
> Programmer? I want to buy you a drink!

> Especially if you don't work at night

My brain seems to prefer the afternoon, and as I've gotten older I can't work much at night anymore. After my brain has been fully engaged in a problem for hours at night it can be really difficult to shut it off and go to sleep, even if I'm exhausted.

Give meditation a try for falling asleep. But if you decide to look into it, try guided meditation first (i.e. a recording). Otherwise, you'll just sit there, with your eyes closed, thinking about work.

80hr weeks == lower $/hr. Basic economics.

is it really though if you're creating so many issues with bad code that after fixing it, support issues, et all that you only end up with equivalent 30hr/week?

when you fuck with the formula, 'basic economics' goes out the window.

Except it doesn't, because the manager will shift to a different aspect of Basic Economics and fire the overworked developer for nonperformance and churn through to the next monkey to leap into the meat grinder. Just add H1-B to your recipe for success.

80hr weeks also mean it takes 120 hours to do something that should take 30.

But hey, on the other hand, a lot of my work is "Hey, so err, we have this mess on our hands and we need somebody to come fix it because we can no longer implement new features because we keep breakign everything"

I'm sure those engineers are totally fine guys, but man the code I've seen ... wow.

Problem is that the formula you really want is usually productivity per dollar and long-term productivity over time.

You can try to optimize both, but the problem with labor is that productivity per hour is not a constant. Even manual labor may see diminishing returns when working lots of overtime. In fact with manual labor the diminishing returns are often fairly easy to measure. With programming, it's much harder to predict.

Tell it to the hour-demanders. I've worked for them, I'm pretty sure they don't listen to reason, and they're worse than a crazy girlfriend.

The conundrum is that unlike manual labor, under some circumstances programming can actually see increase in productivity per hour the more time per day you spend at it. (Less mental context switching? I don't know why it is)

But that's usually only if you don't factor in resulting burnout. Experienced developers recognize this and is why they're more reluctant to work for hour-demanders.

under some circumstances programming can actually see increase in productivity per hour the more time per day you spend at it.

What circumstances?

Working more hours per day can mean you're more familiar with the entire project, making your per-hour efficiency higher.

If you really manage to achieve Flow State and have a really good view of the problem clear in your mind, then pulling long hours can be very helpful. I think most really good programmers know just how this feels, and when to do it.

Problem is, it's not a "superpower" that can be switched on at-will; it's a state of concentration that requires not only work ethic but a real, intense interest in the subject and a lack of competing thoughts and obligations.

A manager who is demanding high hours is not going to be refraining from piling on the distractions and obligations, because pushing out those competing demands are exactly why they demand the hours.

I wonder if young programmers and programmers from less-developed countries have fewer competing thoughts and obligations.

I worked with a guy who would go on a big coke binge and was really quite productive for about 72 hours. He would then do almost nothing for the next three weeks but complain about how hard he'd worked.

There is such a thing as programming trance, with working 16hrs a day and very high productivity. But then, you need an environment fully devoid of distractions (like working from home if you are single or a locked personal office otherwise), no interactions with your boss or co-workers etc. Unlikely to happen in a company where long working hours are a norm.

Also, programming trance can last at most a week and you can't do it more often than once or twice a year. There are physical limits to what your brain can sustain.

As you allude, that practice is unsustainable. These points are even supported by science:

http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-w...

When I pull an all-nighter, I build momentum like a freight train. In one 16- to 20-hour session, I can get a solid week's worth of work done.

...And then I'm so exhausted that I'm useless for a week afterward. So it's not really all that useful unless I'm up against an absolutely immobile deadline.

Basic erroneous economics, sure.

80 hr weeks == all the people at your company who have substantial talent and experience go elsewhere because they can make the same money by working fewer hours. Basic economics.

80 hr weeks == vastly diminished possibility of hiring people who have families, other interests, or "lives" outside of work, so your hiring pool is diminished.

80 hr weeks == everyone is overworked and tired, there's no slack in the system to allow for doing things the right way, effective productivity is actually much decreased because the quality of work is low and the opportunity to pay down technical debt is absent. Any amount of extra productivity that could be had by working more hours is eaten up by people needing to "live" at work (pay bills, communicate with friends and relatives, eat, etc.) and by constantly having to pay the interest on technical debt that can't be paid down.

80 hr weeks == no ability to innovate, no agility, so you get stuck plugging away on N-1 ideas while your competitors who have slack have spent their free time spinning up an N+1 prototype that is going to disrupt your entire business.

It's not just startups who take this stand. Sadly. And it's not just in the tech sector either.

Companies expect you to work longer and they pay less. it's the norm now. And you know, I doubt they even care about quality. Most managers I know just want to make their margins.

Investment banks are the worst. But at least you are killing yourself for a percentage. And the smart traders get out after five or ten years.

I've got 164 comments on HN over nearly three months now, and the one I'm replying to is responsible for fifteen percent of my accumulated karma.

o_O

Apparently people feel pretty strongly about slavedriver bosses! I guess I shouldn't be surprised...

I worked at a company where I learned after joining that we were mandated to stay until 6 PM. Yet with my particular job, I was on-call at night (and sometimes was called and would work through the night), had to do weekend work etc. Everyone else worked 9AM-6PM, I had to work the extra 5 hours a week, for complete bullshit corporate purposes, plus all the other hours that were specific to my job. Complete bullshit. At previous jobs I was always there at 6PM anyway, but being forced to drove me crazy. I eventually left.

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