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Comment by pauleastlund | Hacker News Reader

So I'll lead with "you need to leave." Huge, obvious cultural mismatch.

With that said, I think it's bizarre how some of the commenters here are vilifying your management. I don't know the specifics of your company, but you can't run a startup at crunch time with devs putting in 7.5 hour days. Even at Google, which I considered extremely cushy and laid-back, there was the overt expectation -- repeatedly referenced in internal literature -- that engineer-weeks were about 50 hours long.

I think it's great that you've identified the level of work-life balance that will work for you and are standing your ground. But you need to understand that working 7.5 hours days is not some sort of universal human right. In the (near) future when you search for jobs, you need to communicate that preference up front and make sure that management is on board with it rather than taking for granted that they will be.

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I don't agree with this. Why not be able to have a startup succeed with 7.5 hour days?

For me, I can put in a day longer than that when I need to, in an extreme circumstance. But if it becomes often, I just can't be productive longer than that. I loses ability to focus, and start accumulating burn out. My throughput is greater at 7.5 hour days than 10 hour days.

Of course, if there's like a week leading up to a launch where you need to crunch, that's different. I've been there, and have been able to be super productive like that for a week. But it can't be sustained... I feel like I'm basically borrowing some productivity from the future, and that debt will catch up to me eventually.

The sentence in question was: "You can't run a startup at crunch time with devs putting in 7.5 hour days." The "at crunch time" was meant to qualify the rest of it -- to suggest that standard hours might work some or even most of the time, but not when you get that big client on the hook who wants something custom next week. I think that's in line with what you're saying.

With that said, most of the successful startups I know involved long hours early on, and not just occasionally. It absolutely involves borrowing from future productivity and present quality of life. Sometimes taking that loan is worth it, and sometimes it's just a stupid, pointless death march and the urgency is manufactured. The latter might be more common but the former definitely exists.

Also, just to tie back to original post -- the poster's complaint was not, "I'm really giving this job my best but I just can't be productive for longer hours than I'm working right now." It was, "I'm giving this job all I'm willing to because the rest of my time goes towards work on a separate project."

"but you can't run a startup at crunch time with devs putting in 7.5 hour days"

You can at 8 hours a day / 40 hours / week. The only reason more hours would be required from engineering is bad management that has unrealistic expectations. So what if it takes an extra week to develop the product? It won't matter. You can most certainly run any company with with a 40 hour workweek. If you have evidence to the contrary, please provide it.

An eight hour workday may not be a universal human right, but it is well understood to be the standard workday. Any deviation from this like the ten hour days you describe should be stated up front by the employer.

If you've signed a contract that states working hours are between 9-5, I think it's not his job to communicate any diverging preference, that would be the job of management. If 50 hour work weeks are expected, put it in the damn contract.

We're both speculating a bit; neither of us knows what the contract said or how the conversation went during the courtship process. But regardless of whose fault the miscommunication is when it happens, both sides would be better off if they discovered the mismatch in values sooner rather than later, right? FWIW when I'm talking to potential employers I always have an open discussion around work-life balance expectations long before there are contracts on the table. It's a practice that has served me well.

True enough - we don't know the details, and your advice is sound.

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