You don't even have to go outside of HN to find this attitude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445484
> "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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the US, salary and overtime are usually not available together.
>learning how to code
>WordPress plugins
>iPhone apps like Santa Strike.
lol you wonder why
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.
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.
Edit: just saw some of you other posts, thanks for the info.
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 know, for kids.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
Fortunately, we work in an employee driven industry, so employers who demand extraordinary commitment can't find employees.
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.
Meanwhile.... http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/08/25/mori...
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.
Well, that didn't solve anything. Maybe one-liner hyperbole doesn't add much to the conversation.
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.
'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' 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.