This article is megalomaniacal. Insisting that your company with 200+ employees will only hire people who will work themselves to the bone without any mention of how those people will be properly compensated is wild corporate propaganda.
I honestly don’t know why the tech industry continues to capitulate to leaders like this who obviously, and loudly, mistreat and dehumanize their employees by insisting that if you are not obsessed and willing to put in incredible energy into someone else’s project that you are bad. It does not follow that people should be obsessed with someone else’s business that they won’t be properly compensated for. No matter how many times someone rich says it, it will never be true.
I will say, however, that this is an extremely popular position with the rich and powerful. From startups to big consulting firms, there was not a single company in SF that I worked for that did not echo this. From PC saying how proud he was that we did not hire more engineers at Stripe while people were pulling 60+ hour weeks for months at a time, to engineering managers explaining how they slept under their desk while they were working at Facebook, to Big 3 consulting firm partners exhorting 22 year olds to work 80 hour weeks being screamed at by misogynistic clients in cities across the globe, the song remained the same.
I've worked in industries(gamedev) that bias towards hiring people who "give a shit". It leads to that passion being exploited into crunch time, burnout and all the fun things that entails.
What I've found is that you should be building teams where you "give a shit about the people". That doesn't mean that we don't work hard and that we don't tackle interesting problems. It does mean that we plan for the long term and pace things accordingly. That you make opportunities for people to grow both technically and in their career. That we succeed as a team and not due to the rock-star behavior of one or two individuals.
My experience is this builds high-trust teams that are resilient, adaptable and often product even better work than teams who over-index on the domain space. They bring diverse perspective and have significant less turn-over which is a compounding effect. While the tech stack or product you built is important, in the end it was the team that created it and where you should invest if you want to continue to see success over time.
I went through this recently at a startup. I was extremely passionate about their mission and product at first. Company slowly started bringing in external management, and with them, all of their "battle-hardened" management practices. What once used to be a vibrant culture turned into one without transparency, with rampant bullying and "1-up" culture, perpetuated by the CTO (a naive bully, not a leader). They then used their product as a way to inhibit growth in engineering, despite claiming that the product was there to help us grow.
The lesson is that if the company shows me that they no longer care about me or my co-workers, and try to pit us against each other, then I immediately stop giving a damn about their mission and product. If you want your employees to "give a shit" then you absolutely must make it clear that you "give a shit" about them, and that they "give a shit" about each other. That startup has a lot to learn. Culture should be motivated by love, not fear. So I have to disagree with the viewpoint put forth by Scale AI.
I think the way the author expands on it isn't too great, with questions like "How many hours were you working a week?" and "obsessed person". However, I do think there's sense in the general premise of "hire people who care about what they do", but this doesn't need to translate to "work your ass off".
A lot of the time when I see people produce really crap code it's because they just don't care. They show up for work and anything that meets the minimal standards is fine with them. There's no passion or interest in doing more than absolutely needed. This isn't about "hours worked", but about passion and trying to make whatever you're working on the best it can be. You can do that perfectly fine in just 40 hours/week.
But yeah, some people seem to conflate "passion" with "work your ass off for 60+ hours/week", and that's just silly.
Agreed—I had a mixed reaction, having worked for a FAANG. There are nuggets of truth there, the biggest one being "A recruiting team that looks like a college admissions office is certain death for a startup." That is undoubtedly true IMO. But toward the end it goes off the rails, with the stuff about working 5-hour days revealing a lack of commitment and indifference. The reason why Google engineers can work 5-hour days is because they are a large company, not a startup, and they can direct resources more efficiently than a startup and devote engineering hours to core problems instead of startup-style "all hands" processes. So IOW, if engineers are working 5-hour days, does it really surface not giving a shit? I'd say "it depends." It depends on whether you are a startup or a Big Corp, and it depends on the company culture and workflow. I don't think it's an A/B indicator of passion for the company or the product.
Overall though, this post left a bad taste in my mouth, and I could only keep thinking that I'd never want to work at Scale.
There's a weird cargo culting of hours worked vs productivity. Reminds me of Asian business practices (especially in Japan). Yet that should be a warning, not a model to imitate (remember how Japanese tech took over American one? I don't either).
He's right that a company should hire folks that care about their work and the company. The way to do that is with a stock comp. I still see tier 2 markets complaining they are getting tier 2 devs that don't care. But when I ask about stock comp they suddenly get defensive.
I wouldn't brag too much about "working harder than Google". Because that invites the comparison between the two companies at an equal stage in their respective growth (time, number of employee or funding rounds) and that doesn't really make Scale look good. He's really bragging that what Google can get out of an engineer in 5 hours, he has to do in 10+.
Agreed. Not to mention expecting people to work 60+ hours a week is direct discrimination against people who give a shit about their {mental health, diet, cardiovascular health, family, friends}.
A further problem for those of us who are adults with at least a decade or more of experience in this industry is that Wang is practically a child, and that means 100% certainty that he does not have the leadership experience to either convincingly swagger or lead a company. He needs to dial down the attitude on posts like this and learn from startup leaders who understand what success and healthy work/life balance looks like.
I hear he loves meetings. That's another huge red flag for me. This is a guy who demands late-stage employees be committed to his startup even though their shares will never vest (if they receive shares at all), and he promotes a culture of wasting the productive hours of the day on meetings. Run away, run far, far away.
Some people would always produce crap code, because they simply don't care. But for others, it may be a reaction to how they are treated by the company. Making the code nice takes some time, and if the project is understaffed and people work overtime... you just want to get it done and go home, not take additional overtime to refactor it nicely.
Definitely. I've been watching Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares in the last week or so (the less sensational UK version), and one thing that struck me is that in a number of cases you have decent or even good chefs who are demotivated, bored, have little or no responsibility, and have given up and produce crap results.
Sometimes even just a little injection of responsibility can revive the enthusiasm.
I've never seen people produce crap code because they don't care; it's always a lack of education, a last minute fix, or it's just declared crap code because it doesn't meet the reader's threshold for maintainable code, which is very subjective.
Exactly. Passion may be indicated by that time you stepped up for a 60 hour week in a given situation, but I'm not seeing anything where the author expects such strict dedication at all times. I simply read it as a plea to reduce the job-hopping culture of tech (and perhaps of other industries that are following suit because of tech).
I don't know what it's like to work at Google but can guess there is a preponderance of disengaged paycheck-grabbers. You want to avoid hiring people that are just in it for the money and will jump ship when something better comes up.
This is not confined to SV nor to tech. It's very common in the finance industry as well, but the worst is arguably in health care, where patients can literally die due to mistakes or lack of enough attention by overworked doctors and nurses running on an extreme lack of sleep.
This doesn't even begin to address the casualties from burnout, which can lead to depression, stress-related health issues, and suicide. How much compensation is worth that?
In the finance sector, which is almost literally swimming in money, I never understood why they didn't just hire more people and instead preferred to work the talented people they attract half to death.
Can confirm its creeped into a few automotive repair jobs I've had. I worked for a year at a famous chain of oil and lube stores with a blue and red sign that would do spot reviews. If you habitually declined to work overtime, didnt make it a point to upsell everything, or werent above a certain number of vehicle services per day then your hours were reduced.
Turns out not a lot of people were real excited to drain boiling oil from pissed off soccer mom SUVs all day for ten dollars an hour until their arms fell off for no benefits. anyone who was talented enough on day 1 eventually became a hung over burnout that stripped bolts and took a lot of smoke breaks.
>> I never understood why they didn't just hire more people and instead preferred to work the talented people they attract half to death.
I think that a small number of talented people that will work themselves to death will be much more effective than a large group willing to work reasonable hours.
Over what time frame? A year? Sure. But three years? Five? Ten? It's simply not sustainable for 95% of people. And it's unrealistic to hold everyone else to the standard of that 5% who are 1) naturally hyper-productive or 2) have little else going on in their lives.
The cynic in me wonders if the attempt to turn overwork into a virtue is just to keep people busy enough that they don't stop to wonder what it's all for in the end. Somehow everyone seems to have forgotten that the economy should exist to serve people, not people serving the economy.
Maybe, some companies seem to adopt the strategy of “hire talented 22 year olds out of college, work them until they burn out in two-three years and move on, hire more”.
Now that you mention this I've seen this pattern happen and it repeats. Usually all we see is the end: a medium blog telling us why they left so and so company. They always give a reason that sounds like someone is still figuring out why they left their "dream job" without ever getting to the core. This happens more with big companies like "Stripe" than we like to believe. We sell ourselves in the comments section on how great "Stripe" is to work at while employees are being crushed with 60 hour weeks.
It does show in the products. Great products like "Stripe" start out wonderful but in time slowly move away from that initial greatness into products that slowly get worse and the company lives on in a shadow of what they once were.
If you are doing anything more complicated than gluing a pair of APIs together, it is very likely that the marginal value of work past 60 hours is negative. Reaping what you coded during a 3am espresso binge is rarely a happy experience.
But yeah, if all you are trying to do is build out Facebook before some other social network gets there maybe it makes sense to pull 100 hour weeks.
Healthcare is dysfunctional. But there's a guaranteed demand for it so it's not allowed to fail.
There's lobbying by the AMA to keep a cap on residency spots to create artificial scarcity too. That partly explains the overworked schedule: it's either that or share the pie with a lot more professionals and earn less/have less bargaining power. So residency has turned into a kind of hazing ritual that selects for individuals that are more functional when sleep deprived.
I agree with most of what’s being said but I don’t think that it’s just that it’s a bad bargain. It looks like he’s saying, “will you work harder for the same money” and people are saying, “yes”. It makes him a jerk but he’s being fairly transparent about it. What’s really evil about it is it’s a Ponzi scheme of being crappy to other people. I think what’s really going on is he’s saying, “ I’m going to be crappy to you and in return I’m going to allow and expect you to be crappy to others.” As long as you can find more people to be crappy to you’re going to come out ahead.
He’s building a “generational” company for his heirs and inve-erhem sorry, “society”. Aren’t you motivated by that alone? If not, when was the last time you worked obscene hours for something? Because if you haven’t, you clearly don’t give a shit about anything (except ya know, work life balance, family, hobbies that have nothing to do with tech, etc)
If we don’t want toxic cultures, then we all need to prioritize that when job searching.
I have been shitting all over people like this for a long time and trying to get people to see the light that a job is a job and nothing more, but then I get blamed for having a “mercenary mentality” and “not a team player”.
You are renting your skills to an entity that needs your skills for an agreed upon rate for a certain amount of time. If another employer offers you a better situation and your current employer doesn’t counter with a better offer you leave. The rules are simple and your employer knows how to keep you if they really want you.
Getting a job is not like joining a gang or a fraternity where you are first promised a community and good life and then the money is just a formality, but that’s what people seem to see it as. Rest assured, it should always be about the money first. Money is what I’m all about and my career isn’t any worse off for it nor have I ever had to work myself to the bone for no reason just to please the company gods.
Loyalty isn't rewarded, at all, unless there's an additional reason for the reward that can be disguised under 'loyalty', where 'reward for loyalty' is pointed to as an internal marketing exercise to motivate the workforce.
As soon as the underlying reason(s) no longer exist, loyalty will be revealed to have evaporated.
I've seen it multiple times at multiple companies. A couple of which were employees of over twenty years with the respective companies. None of which were bad places to work, or in any way brutal with their employment policies or conditions.
That's just how it is.
The best thing to give a shit about is the quality of your own work. That will serve you well for now and the future.
This seems logical, but I've yet to experience a software shop of any complexity where you can just plug people in and out with this mercenary approach. A year or two is when I notice people actually start adding significant value, and the really high value work when you get in tune with an organization's DNA maybe still years later. Companies need veterans. If it seems like someone can't even pretend to get invested, it's a waste of time. Smart people who have a rap sheet of skills a mile long are cute, but I've personally found such peoples' dominant skill is marketing themselves...which I can't blame them for, but I think articles like this are the result of people being burned by the "mercenary" mentality.
Also, there are many ways how you can "pay for" people: You can increase their salary. You can hire more of them, so that they don't have to work overtime. You can buy them better tools. You can rent a working space that actually contains rooms with doors. Etc.
Different people have different preference here. But if you have an open space, and zero budget for tools, and chronically understaffed projects, and the salary is kinda average... well, you send a loud message.
Try it the other way: let the veterans have their own room with doors, give them the tools they need, maybe reduce their work time to 6 hours a day while keeping their salary competitive... and most of them will be happy to stay.
Or be honest and admit that you prefer it the way you have been doing it so far.
It’s not their responsibility to swear life long loyalty just because you need them. Especially when the second they are no longer needed a company wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of them.
Most software shops can’t have mercs because they aren’t built for it, they just assume people will stick around. If you want to run efficiently and confidently with mercenaries, get knowledge out of people’s heads and into robust documentation and architectural design records.
> Getting a job is not like joining a gang or a fraternity where you are first promised a community and good life and then the money is just a formality ...
On that note, there seem to be many tech companies which try to portray working for them as joining a community + good life + money (etc).
To see examples of this, look at almost any tech company's "Careers" page, before it shows open positions. ;)
I can empathize with the merits of this idea but I also agree that such cult worship of a business idea is absurd.
There is a massive gap between the output of passionate people who go the extra mile to provide original solutions in the highest quality way versus people who watch the clock and press buttons on a keyboard. The biggest problem is how to achieve maximum talent. The solution is ownership and setting high standards, not compensation.
Ownership means allowing some control of product decisions and connecting compensation to product performance. The product staff must be willing to work hard because there is a clear connection between their effort and their rewards. This is more like a commission than a salary or equity package.
If founders really want to instill that mentality for the long term they will earn a slice off the top while driving product strategy just like a sales manager. That redirects energy away from the founders and investors back toward the thing driving revenue.
It's a good question, and I think the article's author unfortunately brings two different things together:
i) People who are intrinsically motivated to do good work, regardless of who it is for. Personality psychologists call this quality conscientiousness, and it's as predictive of good outcomes as intelligence.
ii) People who are willing to sacrifice all other aspects of their life in their employer's interest.
Hiring type i people is an admirable goal. Hiring and taking advantage of type ii people is not.
Yes! I completely agree with the need to hire people who “give a shit”, but to me this means e.g.
- Dogfooding
- Fixing a bug even if your manager doesn’t notice
- Proactively noticing strange system behavior and investigating
- Actively contributing to strategic discussions; showing genuine interest in the problem space
- Jumping in to help when the server mysteriously starts crash looping, even if you’re not oncall
All but the last one have nothing to do with working more hours. Even the last one is intended as an exceptional event, not a baseline expectation.
This is what I was exactly thinking by reading the first two paragraphs. But then he jumped on "Just must need to work 80 hours per week to do something meaningful" bandwagon.
One time I got approached by a recruiter from a startup. I wasn't actively looking to change jobs, but I accepted to go to an interview.
One of my interviewers opened with the cliched "Why do you want to work for us?". I laughed out loud and said "You are the ones who called me here, why do you want me to work for you?"
I'm not usually that snarky, but I couldn't help it this time. Working relationships work both ways, and some companies need to be less full of themselves.
The fact is that you need people to have this collective delusion to work really hard and care about something, before value can be created. This kind of work ethic and commitment is what virtually every company that you admire today has required to get where it is today.
I personally don't think this is "dehumanizing" or unfair, since the whole point is to explicitly opt in for such a life. There are enough people out there who want to dedicate a lot of their time to working on a team or mission they care about, and OP's narrative is great at selecting for people like that.
I'm curious. How many misogynistic clients actually scream at 22 year old analysts in MBB? I'd assume business norms would ensure some form of civility in meetings. I haven't heard from any of my MBB friends (who are mostly in India btw), of being yelled at.
When I was in PE, I was the 25 year old shouting at some 45 year old CEO (with the license of my firm's MD) for BSing around. Fun times, but that was a very exceptional circumstance.
Consultant for well over a decade now. I've worked with quite a few MBB kids over the years as well as with clients who previously hired them. I'd say it's fairly uncommon for clients to actually yell at the analysts on the ground, but it does happen. It's more likely that the MBB associate or engagement manager gets yelled at for various reasons. But it's a lot more common for the analysts to be told "do whatever the client wants" and end up working absolutely stupid hours to cover client demands that should have been pushed back on, on top of internal commitments to stay on the right side of the "up or out" funnel.
I never got yelled at in consulting, and honestly if the client is upset that’s the partner’s fault. Most of the time there wasn’t a lot of pushback because the partner knew what the client cared about. The exception was PE firms who would push back on certain assumptions.
I want to add only that the people who are good at pretending to give a shit in interviews are sometimes low-level sociopaths who are good at faking things, whereas people who actually give a shit often come off as stiff because they take the interview more seriously.
From my experience, the people who get hired are people who complain about corporate propaganda and don't work hard while what I considered hard working individuals are the ones who struggle to find work. Companies hire for mediocrity, not skill. If skill mattered, I would dedicate my life to a company. But it doesn't I so won't ever care.
If you think a company would swear life long loyalty in return to you just because you happen to have some skills, wait till you see what happens when they no longer have use for your “skills”. Never swear loyalty, it’s business, not the military.
I assume you don't have skills if you don't dedicate your life to it. I assume you have blah blah blah family blah blah blah memories in which you chose some something else over harnessing your skills. Something you can only do when when you have a job in the first place. You more or less defined mediocrity
This mirrors the sentiment of many people on HN are heavily against the idea of doing anything more than 9-5, and prefer to live the relaxed engineer life collecting paychecks and tending to their microbrews.
Maybe the hatred stems from that there exists a large pool of engineers that are passionate about their work and are okay not measuring their work as "hours per week". And that makes the pool of engineers that don't want to do that look not desirable.
I've worked way over 9-5 for ~months a few times and I usually feel very unhappy with my decision for months afterwards.
If you are just an engineer, there is no point. You are just burning yourself out to make someone else's dream come true, or get your boss promoted, or get your director their bonus. Maybe you will get promoted, or a better rating. Even when I've seen that outcome I was still unhappy with it.
Any company will always have an endless backlog of work and burning it down faster doesn't do anything. IMO you should only do it when financial or career incentives are very well aligned.
I don't know if I've ever met another person who is truly (not for resume/career/money purposes) "passionate" about the kind of software people get paid to write. Most software is really boring. Even for software that isn't, it looks boring once you've seen how it works.
I've seen many, many people (myself included) burned by putting in many extra hours (in terms of burnout, in terms of the effort going to waste because higher ups decided to change the schedule, in terms of not being appreciated when the situation reversed), while the number of times where people, in hindsight, said it was worth it has been quite few.
Its not that people aren't willing to dedicate themselves to their work, in my experience, most people do go above and beyond; its that more often than not, they get nothing for it or even suffer negative consequences long term while spending their precious time and energy to enrich someone else and end up feeling exploited.
I think this comment nails it. For me, I'm happy with a shared struggle towards some goal (though of course it cannot become the norm.) Pressure-Ease-Pressure-Ease cycles are also fine for me.
...but if all that results on a nice pat on the back while some salesperson or product manager gets promoted, then it isn't really a shared struggle anymore. Rewards need to be distributed to the entire team that struggled, not just the ones presenting the project.
Further, i think organizations need to understand that different people want different things. Consulting firms have a firm-wide up-or-out policy...but tech companies should probably subscribe to a up-or-steady policy where some choose to worker more intensely for growth while others choose to work normally and remain stationary.
The hatred stems from not wanting to spend all my life at work, doing work.
Seriously, the narcissism on display here. Take a day off from your own ego, and perhaps also reflect on the idea that if your special sauce isn't competence or experience or even just plain genius, but that you're willing to spend stupid amounts of time in the office, then you've written "sucker" on your forehead in that special ink only managers can see.
This is incredibly naive. Another view is that enough engineers have been burnt enough by these founders that they got smarter. Not everyone is looking to tend their microbrew as you think.
This is crazy. The reason it's pointless to go past 40h/week is because programming isn't a walk in a park. It's extremely mentally draining activity. The notion that that people need to work silly hours to be seen as valuable and productive belongs to the Victorian times. My takeaway from the article is that the guy patting himself on the shoulder because he asks how many hours people did in their jobs. One of my first jobs was in construction,where the director was outright maniac. I remember he gathered us all around himself, he stepped on a a few bricks and started pointing fingers to all of us saying we are thieves. Why? Because he saw a couple of guys having 35min lunch, instead of 30min..He accused us stealing his time.. The guy in the article is a modern version of my ex director,only in software industry.
That's a lot of silly assumptions. Everyone has their own passions. Sometimes that aligns with their chosen field of work and sometimes it doesn't. This isn't unique to software development nor is it wrong for those who just want to deliver the responsibilities they're paid for.
Unless "passion" is explicitly being compensated by the company, why would you expect others to freely deliver it? And if you're so passionate, why do you care? Focus on your ambitions and let others chase theirs.
I used to be that workaholic who worked crazy hours and had "passion" for the job. Thing is, it's not sustainable in the long run no matter how much you love it. It might be OK in your twenties. But you're not going to be doing that for four decades. You need to live a life outside work as well. Otherwise you'll be a burned out wreck with crippling RSI.
For the record, I did get crippling RSI in my early thirties and this forced a drastic reevaluation of my priorities. Eight years later, and the RSI is manageable but only because I completely changed my lifestyle. Part of that is only working a regular workday, and doing other stuff outside that time. Like running and mountain biking. I quit my "second job" as a Debian developer and general open source contributor because of that. I still do some, but it's strictly casual with no commitments. That's the price for not being physically crippled. You've got to consider your long-term health. Sitting at a desk is terrible for your body. Doing it in the evenings as well is even worse.
Regarding not looking desirable. I think you're a bit off about that. Sane people and sane companies do not work themselves and their staff to death. They want people to be able to work over the longer term, and not burn out. In most of the places I've worked at, working out of hours has been strictly frowned upon. If you can't do your assigned tasks within work hours, that indicates a management failure in assigning you too much work, or in underestimating how long it would take, or in overestimating your capabilities. There is a reason we do all of the sprint planning and backlog refinement. It's to ensure no one is over- or under-worked over the long term by having a consistent and (most importantly) sustainable workload. If someone did find themselves having to work longer hours, the first thing they should do is tell their manager and get the situation fixed. Not to pull out all the stops and burn the midnight oil.
The younger me would have been that person. But part of getting more experience is learning to say "no". No matter how much work you do, there will always be more work the next day. And you will rarely be thanked or acknowledged for going above and beyond the call of duty; ultimately you have to look out for your own self-interest as well as the interests of the company. Sometimes there are good reasons to work overtime, but that should never be a routine part of your existence.
My personal experience of people who work crazy hours is that they wear their "heroic" efforts like a badge of honour, but the work itself is often terrible. (And I include myself here.) When called out upon this during code review, you get excuses like "yes, but it was 2am on Saturday". "OK, but it's Tuesday now, why didn't you review it in the cold light of day and fix all of these obvious defects? We don't lower the bar just because you chose to work late while very tired."
It's extremely paraphrased and slightly exaggerated, missing some of the context (intentionally, because I don't want to break confidentiality).
It was an attempt to provide an example of why working long hours is not a good idea overall. More often than not, work done in a rush, while tired and sleep-deprived and not thinking straight, is of poor quality, and I don't think it's in our interest to lionise "heroic" performance when the end result is not acceptable. More often than not, they would have done a better job if they slept on it and picked it back up in the morning. Or, at the very least, carefully reviewed their work in the morning and fixed all the defects they introduced during the night. Ultimately, every code review needs to be held to the same high standard, and the circumstances of poor quality work should not be used as a justification for submitting or accepting bad work.
That's probably not the best way to frame it, but it's important to make people aware that they can't work 60 hours at the same quality of the first 30.
Even if they could, they'll either burnout, get promoted or leave within 24 months and then you'll need to backfill with multiple people.
Even as an evil manager, you're still better off stopping people from overworking, as you'll get more work overall from them at a sustainable pace.
I honestly don’t know why the tech industry continues to capitulate to leaders like this who obviously, and loudly, mistreat and dehumanize their employees by insisting that if you are not obsessed and willing to put in incredible energy into someone else’s project that you are bad. It does not follow that people should be obsessed with someone else’s business that they won’t be properly compensated for. No matter how many times someone rich says it, it will never be true.
I will say, however, that this is an extremely popular position with the rich and powerful. From startups to big consulting firms, there was not a single company in SF that I worked for that did not echo this. From PC saying how proud he was that we did not hire more engineers at Stripe while people were pulling 60+ hour weeks for months at a time, to engineering managers explaining how they slept under their desk while they were working at Facebook, to Big 3 consulting firm partners exhorting 22 year olds to work 80 hour weeks being screamed at by misogynistic clients in cities across the globe, the song remained the same.