I’m not staying at a job past 5 unless I have a share of the company. Screw that. Every startup owner thinks they are unique and that’s why 90% of them fail. If you are working at a new startup the stats says it’s going to be time to look for a new job anyway in a year so why go any extra miles when you don’t have stake? Silicon Valley isn’t a charity
> I’m not staying at a job past 5 unless I have a share of the company. Screw that. Every startup owner thinks they are unique and that’s why 90% of them fail.
Not all companies are the same, and not all companies are startups. I'm back working at the same company which was my first job in tech. Not for the second time, not the third either, but the fourth time now. I was first hired there over 22 years ago in tech support. It's always been a good place to work, that takes care of it's employees (even if it can't pay a huge amount for some positions, there's always a lot of recognition that everyone is needed to make it work, and everyone is appreciated), and I never left because I disliked the company or the work, but because I wanted to focus on school, or explore a new opportunity, or work with family, etc. Our customers love us, and my fellow employees generally like working here, to my knowledge.
They don't expect me or my fellow employees to work past our normal hours (except when on call, or it it's a night-op for sysadmins, which you can generally just take chunks of time off the next day if you like). Yet people do work a little later to finish stuff, or check in to make sure something they did earlier in the week isn't causing problems over the weekend. Because they care about not making problems for their fellow employees, and not adversely affecting our customers, which have a high opinion of us.
All that is a long way of saying that not every company is a startup or behaves as one. People in silicon valley are somewhat conditioned to look for the startups and make that gamble, but there are other choices, and they aren't always nearly as bad as people have been led to believe. Many jobs that are considered shit work can be rewarding if approached the right way. Even IT or programming at a bank can be rewarding if you're lucky enough to have management that mostly gets out of the way and if you cultivate a relationship with the people (the other employees in this case) that you're serving, and see how you make their life better an easier (and there are always opportunities for this, if you pay attention).
> even if it can't pay a huge amount for some positions, there's always a lot of recognition that everyone is needed to make it work, and everyone is appreciated
I can't pay my rent in recognition or appreciation though.
What point are you trying to make? Nowhere in the post does it say the job doesn't pay enough to cover rent. If you are spending a large amount of life employed, it's reasonable to trade off a percentage of the maximum possible renumeration you can achieve in exchange for making that time as pleasant as possible (eg if you luck out and end up working with a group of people you care about and who care about you). It's not as if any extra money you make can ever buy you that time back
There's nothing wrong at all with just seeking maximum income at all times, but that's normally to some end (happiness, security etc): if what you're seeking is partially served by a given job, then you often aren't really gaining much by sacking that job off for one that pays more
But it makes it easier to stay motivated to keep working. Of course, at the end of the day you still need enough to pay the bills. You still have a better, healthier, less stressful life than if you feel you are being exploited or not recognised.
There was no mention of the job being underpaid, was there?
Then, if your definition of “underpaid” is “lower salary than one could get elsewhere”, well, we are all underpaid. But it matters only if your salary is not enough to cover your lifestyle. Bearing that in mind, I’d rather be paid less to work in a nice working environment than better paid in a stressful professional nightmare. I’ve done my share of nightmares already.
If the extra money is enough you may have enough to become your own boss after some time spent being miserable.
I've been quite miserable whenever I worked as an employee (I carefully picked the companies I worked for and I don't really have many complaints - I just can't stand company politics, power plays and stupid decisions from above) but I used my time as an employee to save some money and use paternity leave to build a family. Also, as a sleepless parent, my brain is not in top shape and I'm ok with doing what I need to do to collect a paycheck.
Now, those 5 years being miserable will translate to buying a property in cash somewhere with nice weather, lowering our expenses tremendously (more than half is rent right now) and allowing us to live off some almost passive revenue stream (think, 1 man micro-saas). We're planning to use the free time to build more products and edge ourselves against the risk of not being able to afford our lifestyle and have to go the employee route again.
I mean "some people" is clearly not the person you're replying to and I agree with them. I'd much rather get paid for the work I do. Unless I have a stake in the company, the company is not my family and my work is a means to an end
> the company is not my family and my work is a means to an end
That's fine. I wasn't making some argument that you should work for someone that's like family, just that there's a whole spectrum between "caring about my company stops at shift end" and "my identity is bound up in this place I work".
I think most people would agree that money isn't the only thing most people care about when choosing a job. There's plenty of people here that would balk at writing better missile targeting code, or exploits for a government, or spying software marketed to spouses, or even writing video games that trigger compulsive behavior. For some people, dislike of the work outweighs the fact that they can get paid very well doing it.
FWIW, some of my time in the past was spent working for my brother at his IT company, which also employed our other brother. It's great working with family until it isn't, and when it isn't, it really isn't. I don't recommend working for family most the time, and I don't think people should treat their coworkers as family. I do think people should try to find a job where they enjoy the people they are around and are proud of the work they do, if they can afford to choose a job like that. If you're going to spend close to half your waking hours doing something, I think it's much more fulfilling and better for your mental health to care about more than the amount you're paid if you can afford to.
> But using your money to buy happiness after your ten hour work Saturday is not going to be a big success, either.
It depends. If working 10-hour Saturdays for a year results in me buying a yacht, you can be sure that actual real money bought the happiness that came with my yacht.
It's all a tradeoff and for some things you are unlikely to get the big payoff without a risk involved. Determining where your personal boundaries are with the risk-taking is an individual decision.
TLDR; you can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket.
If you have a reasonably high income, I think the tradeof is actually never worth it, because the marginal happiness from money gets so low. Sure I could buy a yacht but that's not going to make me much happier. Buying a mansion by the sea would not really make me much happier either. Sure I might do it if I had the money because why not but that would not accept to work on weekends for a few years to get it even if it was guaranteed.
> It depends. If working 10-hour Saturdays for a year results in me buying a yacht, you can be sure that actual real money bought the happiness that came with my yacht.
Great. Now you have to pay for maintenance, staff, and insurance. So you need to keep making that amount of money or you’ll lose it. The added stress and expenses make it a bit of a poisoned gift.
> TLDR; you can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket.
Then you will be stuck working 10-hour Saturdays to pay for the running costs and maintenance of said yacht, which still leaves you with barely any time to actually enjoy your yacht.
That's not meant to imply they don't pay well. I included that as a nod to some people I've known in the past that thought they didn't pay well enough, but I also know they've been much more competitive for tech positions the last decade or so (you have to, being SF adjacent). As for tech support (where I think a majority of grumbling traditionally was), I'm not sure what that's like now. It's also a problem of supply and demand though, lots of people are qualified for that.
It doesn't matter how much you like a specific company if they don't have a need for your skills or your skills don't provide enough to live off of. I'm not saying abandon your tech career to work as a janitor at your favorite company, just that there are lots of other choices for someone in tech other than working at a startup. Some pay okay, some pay quite well. Some may not pay well at all. What someone thinks is worth it is obviously up to them and their circumstances.
> They don't expect me or my fellow employees to work past our normal hours [...]. Yet people do work a little later to finish stuff, or check in to make sure something they did earlier in the week isn't causing problems over the weekend.
You know, managment will become accustomed to that. My first scuffle with US “work ethics” came when I spent a year in a fairly well-known company and yeah, everyone was enthusiastic and passionate and... management expected no less than total dedication and zeal from their underlings.
How does it go? “The beatings will continue until morale improves”
After I left I heard of more grief and drama, burn outs and bitter separations.
> You know, managment will become accustomed to that.
Eh, I'm sure they can, but I think I wasn't communicating that it isn't all people and it isn't all the time. It's not the same people always staying late. It's sometimes that someone stays to finish that last bit or to stop at a good point, but people also take off early routinely to counter that, and feel free to run errands in the middle of the day as needed. It's less that management is getting extra time out of a lot of people than it is that people feel flexible with their time, and willing to give a little here and take a little there, to make sure other people aren't left in the lurch, and neither are they.
I am management and I work at a company that is similar to the post you are replying to and I would never get used to it. If someone does get used to it they have serious value issues (same as if employees take bonuses for granted).
Well, unfortunately it’s something inevitable like entropic decay.
The guy that hired me was someone like you, but was kicked out and replaced with a more ambitious gentleman who must have promised to squeeze us more efficiently.
The problem is that if you look beyond the rhetoric and the propaganda, employee well-being are only second-order to measurable and targetable outputs. There always will be someone that promises to achieve objectives in some other manner, and given enough time they will get their chance and ruin everything
Equity is just another way to not give you money in most cases. Unless you are at the founding level, wasting years of your life for just a few extra thousand dollars? Imagine if you were getting paid $150K instead of $100K + options. In three years, do you think your options would yield $150,000 in case of a liquidity event, in the BEST case scenario?
> Nowadays, stock options given to employees often end up being worth nothing, even on a successful exit.
This seems unlikely.
Exits and IPOs have much greater valuations now than they did ‘back in the day’ so far more early employees end up with a significant infusion of cash.
Super-early employee here. Pay for your options your first day of employment. They should be inexpensive; and your employer should be willing to give you a signing bonus to cover it (after all, the money just goes right back to them). Then when you leave, you get to keep all vested shares with no tax consequence, no need to pony up any cash, and no need to sell right away. Worked out great for me.
This is the way for companies to do right by the first few employees (and have a longer than 90 exercise window when leaving). I know a super early employee who left and had to take a loan to exercise and pay taxes. It's kind of sad to think about it.
> They should be inexpensive; and your employer should be willing to give you a signing bonus to cover it (after all, the money just goes right back to them).
The first part of this can be false. If you're 1/2 way to billions IPO then your options can easily be a year or more of salary to exercise.
About the second part if the company gives you that as a signing bonus you're still on the hook to the IRS for the bonus so now you're 10s of 10000s deep on an illiquid position.
If your company allows for it, you can early exercise and file a 83(b) election so that even as your options vest over time, you only pay taxes for the spread between your strike price and the fair market value at the date of the early exercise, rather than the date of vesting. The taxes can be 0 if you early exercise when the fair market value _is_ the same as your strike price.
It's called election 83(b). For it to work, the company grants you restricted stock instead of options. The restriction is that the company can buy back the stock on a vesting schedule, so it's effectively equivalent to stock-options. The difference is that you can buy all of them on day 1 at fair market value and pay no tax.
It's usually done for early employees who join before multiple rounds of funding occur.
You pay ahead, and if you don't make the cliff, or if you leave after the 1 year cliff but before the full 4 year vest, you get the shares you vested, and a refund of the cash that didn't end up buying the rest.
You need to consider that a very, very small percentage of companies have IPOs.
Many "successful" exits are actually acqui-hires, where a larger company acquires a dead or dying company for its talent. Often the product from that company is immediately shutdown, or at least shelved and no longer actively developed.
Other "successful" exits pay some percentage back to the recent preferred shareholders. Earlier investors are not made whole. Common shareholders generally get nothing.
Founders will still spin these "exits" a positive because they didn't have to shut down. The reality is the venture was a failure. Employees got jobs... that they could've had anyway.
In my 30 year career, I have never had a stock option worth a single penny. When I have someone talk up options as part of a compensation package, I tell them that options are nice, but my experience is that they have had no value in my past and that's the value that I'll assign them in the present and the future.
> First, overwork doesn't lead to more productivity for knowledge workers. You get to pay that piper one way or another in the end.
I have never seen any research showing net negative productivity for any job for under 60 hours a week of work. Overwork sucks but if you have evidence that it’s bad for productivity please cite it.
From the academic paper linked to in that news article
> the hours at which output is a maximum is at 67 and at 64, respectively. In fact, there are a few cases in which actual observations on hours of work exceed 67 and 64 meaning that, in these instances, average observed hours were at levels where the estimated marginal product of hours is negative!
In repetitive work of course more time is always gonna be more productive, with diminishing returns. Until the worker/slave mind or body breaks at least.
Mind you, I'm not saying the same doesn't apply for knowledge workers. Just that this specific articles doesn't provide evidence for knowledge workers.
I imagine that there will be more science being done for productivity on knowledge workers once there's some decent way of measuring productivity for knowledge workers.
My original claim was that there’s no research showing negative productivity for any job for less than 60 hours a week of work. If you have anything to the contrary please share.
There is no reason to believe knowledge workers are any different than manual workers here. Your productivity turns negative when you make so many mistakes that you’re destroying value, not creating it. The article may be only weak evidence for knowledge workers but it certainly isn’t no evidence. Other forms of evidence while not rising to the standards of publication certainly don’t point to 40 hours work a week being optimal for productivity of most knowledge workers. Physicians, professors at research institutions, top tier lawyers, all these people work insane hours.
There is no evidence that working less than 60 hours a week is better for productivity, anywhere, just a bunch of people wishing really hard.
> Your productivity turns negative when you make so many mistakes that you’re destroying value, not creating it.
One thing to consider about knowledge/skill workers vs unskilled labor is that most complex systems are house of cards style situations where a single mistake can both destroy a network effect of value, but also take several orders of magnitude of time and effort to detect and rectify the actual issue.
Introducing a subtle, but value destroying, bug into a system can do value damage to the N systems it interconnects with, and can lead to a near total loss of the whole system (eg: drop table). Of course there are safeguards that can help avoid this like backups, but still the point is a carpenter wouldn't make the whole house worthless by a misplaced nail.
Because manual workers and knowledge workers get mentally weary in the same way and make mistakes in the same way, using their brains. Your muscles are perfectly capable of going longer. Your attention span, working intelligence and executive function are going to get messed up whether you’re putting 60 hours into putting the right amount of powder into every container or checking the Excel formulas are all correct.
Manual laborers are people no less than accountants or mathematicians.
Ok, there’s just so many facts contrary to all normal experiences, so I’d like to see some sources. For example, I can easily work twelve hours per day while painting the facades of my home, without being mentally fatigued, only bored. But my body is surely sore after climbing up and down stairs all day. On the other hand, I’m hardly capable of doing six hours of really focused mental work per day.
Feel free to name any category of professional where working over 40 hours a week isn’t quite normal. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors. It sure looks like people who work more than 40 hours a week on average do better than those who don’t. This is not a claim about what I wish was true, but about what actually seems to be true.
The actual research on this is scarce to the point of non-existence. It may actually be non-existent for knowledge workers, at least published work.
> Feel free to name any category of professional where working over 40 hours a week isn’t quite normal.
YMMV but the only time I ever experienced the myth that "working over 40 hours a week is the norm" was when I started working at a US-based company.
And the only reason unpaid overtime was the norm was that managers, specially skip-level management, did a piss-poor job establishing sane goals based on realistic time-frames, and typically threatened to fire people pretty much each and every single week if they did not met those unrealistic goals.
Strangely enough, everywhere else people managed to do their job within the 40hours work week.
> YMMV but the only time I ever experienced the myth that "working over 40 hours a week is the norm" was when I started working at a US-based company.
Even in France, where the base legal hours are only 35 hours a week, intellectual/upper professions in a full-time position work an average of 43 hours a week.
That's the average which includes women, who work 10% less (in terms of number of hours worked) than men. If you only consider men, you reach an average week of 45 hours for those professions.
Yes, many places are willing to have lower productivity in exchange for higher quality of life. The US has a different culture and has most economically dominant companies.
> The US has a different culture and has most economically dominant companies.
The US's post-WW2 dominance doesn't explain why layers of lower management from the US stationed abroad insist in scheduling 3 weeks worth of work into 1 week in spite of being fully aware of how long the task takes, and afterwards boast to their leadership that their non-US teams outperformed US-based teams by a long shot while leaving out that team some non-US developers had to pull consecutive all-nighters to pull it off.
> YMMV but the only time I ever experienced the myth that "working over 40 hours a week is the norm" was when I started working at a US-based company.
Irish lawyers and doctors work well over 40 hours a week on average too. I feel pretty confident the same is true in finance. Tax professionals in Spain do too. That about exhausts my personal knowledge of working hours in Europe but I kind of doubt management work less than 40 hours a week anywhere, even the civil service.
> and typically threatened to fire people pretty much each and every single week if they did not met those unrealistic goals.
The secret to greater American productivity and hence wealth. People just work more hours.
> Feel free to name any category of professional where working over 40 hours a week isn’t quite normal.
Just because something is considered "normal" does not mean that it's actually efficient, or "good".
Certain job sectors, like social jobs, have been chronically overworked and underpaid for pretty much as long as they existed. Even during non-pandemic times burn-out, depression, and suicide rates of people working in healthcare have been way above those of the average population, particularly the people who actually do all the "grunt work" like nurses.
A situation has become much worse during this pandemic, yet remains largely ignored.
> It sure looks like people who work more than 40 hours a week on average do better than those who don’t.
Tell that to people working in logistics, those people delivering you packages the next day. Ask them how many hours they work and how "well off" they are financially in exchange for giving up large parts of their private life.
As a matter of fact, only two out of the 4 professions you listed are actually considered overworked to a degree of burnout: Physicians and attorneys [0].
The vast majority of the rest of the list is populated by professions that are generally not considered well-earning even when working massive hours: Nurses, social workers, teachers, school principals, police officers, public accounting, fast food or retail.
Most of these professions would have a very lasting and visible impact if they were gone, it would make society overall objectively worse to be missing them, yet somehow society at large still refuses to properly recognize that trough proper financial compensation even with many hours worked at very important tasks.
Working any number of hours isn't "normal", it's a trade off between free time and money (for example, colleagues who work part time in order to sleep late) and a consequence of social pressure (e.g. competitive attitude) and practical constraints (e.g. keeping a shop open at constant and useful hours).
In some cases people want to work, to some extent, because their job is more pleasant than their free time activities, but it cannot be considered "normal".
Medical error is apparently the third-leading cause of death in the United States (see https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading...). It certainly seems plausible that our culture of overworking doctors contributes to that significantly.
Specialist doctors are not staying late on a Friday or working the weekend. While a walkin clinic doctor might be pushing 60 hours.
An average business owner might spend more than 40 hours a week. The most successful business owners hire people to work for them while they enjoy their lives.
8 hours of tired programming gets less done compared to a well rested 3 hour work session.
> Specialist doctors are not staying late on a Friday or working the weekend
This isn’t true. Obstetricians work 24 hour shifts as standard. Babies don’t get born 9-5.
If you come into the ER on a Friday night with severe brain damage you’re seeing the neurologist immediately. If you have a punctured lung you’re not waiting for the pulmonologist to clock in at 9AM.
Nearly all medical specialties work shift patterns or are required to be on call.
As best I can tell the specialty with the lowest annual hours worked is pediatric emergency medicine at around 52 hours a week. Vascular surgery average 66 hours a week. If you want to check my calculations the below paper has annual work hours for different specialties.
> 2018 Average Physician Hours Worked Per Week
Physician Type Average Physician Workweek
Age 45 years or less 54.73 hours
Age 46 years or more 49.87 hours
Male physicians 51.89 hours
Female physicians 50.46 hours
Practice owners 51.96 hours
Employed physicians 53.73 hours
Primary care physicians 50.64 hours
Physician specialists 51.76 hours
Maybe plastic surgery, dermatology, rheumatology, and psychiatry don't, but other doctors are going to be splitting weekends and call among the members of their group. For specialties that have fewer doctors nationwide like vascular surgery, cardiothoracic surgery, and neurosurgery you can expect to be on home-call every third night and covering the weekend every third weekend. You might have to come in to operate every other call, and on the weekend you'll have to round on all of your group's patients on Saturday and Sunday and operate if anything operative comes in.
My sister-in-law is an Ob/Gyn. Yes, there's call, but that gets compensated for by fewer hours during the M-F week. There's a reason why doctors on the golf course on Wednesdays is a cliche.
employees should negotiate whatever compensation they think is fair for the work they provide. bonuses and perks can be part of that, but it's probably better to just ask for a base salary that is fair
salaried employees are generally not paid by the hour, and it's rare that 40 hours a week (or any maximum) is specified in a high compensation contract. if I know that a job won't be "9-5", I'll factor that into whatever base salary I ask for
Bonuses are very rarely negotiated, but they are added by the management. It is very stupid to assume something about bonuses because I've seen it so many times that they can be unpredictable. Negotiate your salary and other perks, if you get bonuses on top of that be happy but don't except that you will get those bonuses in further negotiations.
Having unreasonable schedules thrown on you is the sign of a bad startup. Working overtime means tomorrow will suffer. It might be worth it for that critical moment but tomorrow will come and the rest piper must be paid.
I don't see why a startup would even offer a bonus or perhaps why employees would expect one if they aren't already showing a profit..., but I've experienced the latter first hand.
Should the opposite be true as well? Startup employees going home at 5 and fighting unreasonable schedules?