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.
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.
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.
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.
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+.
Sometimes even just a little injection of responsibility can revive the enthusiasm.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Not claiming this is necessarily effective.
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.
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.
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.
If we don’t want toxic cultures, then we all need to prioritize that when job searching.
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.
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.
They pay for mercenaries, they get mercenaries. Rarely do companies pay for veterans, at least not good ones.
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.
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’m not interested in any of those things. They are better off showing two businessmen shaking hands or stacks of money.
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.
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.
- 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
The last one is especially telling, especially if the debugging ends up documented somewhere/explained to the junior on-call.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-...
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.
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.
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.
What ever you're doing isn't working for you but you can change your situation. There is hope.
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.
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.
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.
We need to stop glorifying exploitation.
...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.
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.
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."
Keep yourself healthy and sane for the long haul.
Did someone react like that for real after 2am Saturday work? (sounds a bit callous to me also when 2am was a bad idea)
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.
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.