The "someone else" in bullet point 3 is the co-founder of Xamarin (as well as the former GitHub CEO post Microsoft sale) with the person in bullet 4.

Co-founder and CEO. Bullet 4 was actually CTO. Interesting divergence of opinion within the same (successful) company

Not sure why you would make a photo of a sleeping colleague but besides that if I understand it correctly the person sleeping had managing role? I always like it when manager stay and be accessible when they asked you to work late. Nothing worse when a manager ask you to do overtime and then themselves go home. Quickly stopped doing overtime when that happened.

I don't even understand how they can sleep at work while the company is laying off half of its employees

Maybe they're trying to keep their job?

Pretty much, musk has put everyone on crunch for his whims.

They should try to get fired, get severance and look for something else

Why would you want to keep your job in an environment like that though? The only thing I can think is there will be a lot of openings above you... Or you're on an H1B visa? Or maybe you're being vastly overpaid.

It still does not make any sense from a management perspective. They’re selecting slaves, not high performers.

The implication is that they're working so many hours, it makes more sense to sleep in the office than to bother going home.

It's sad and repulsive that there are people with such a cultish devotion to capitalism that they admire this behavior and culture.

It's not a cultists devotion. It's business. Your competitor can exceed you if you aren't willing to pull all nighters.

Well run companies do all nighters, and aren't so cultishly devoted to a "work life balance" that implies 4 hour workdays on slack.

Well run companies also understand sustainability. Max effort will need to be demanded to exceed current capacity, but it is important not to rely on it as a crutch to get past poor design, poor process, or other management misfires.

This is something games are seeing now, most of the industry luminaries cut their teeth in an era where the whole game fit on one disk. They assume that the weekend long anger coding to bash that one bug is the same as what they're asking their company to do.

> Well run companies do all nighters

Well run companies have adequate resourcing so that staff don't need to work all night

Adequate resourcing is irrelevant.

Think of the holidays for retail - do you pay 2 to 3x the employees year round to support the November to December shopping season?

If you did that, you would be very silly.

Conditions will frequently demand that an "adequately resourced" company has to run overtime to take advantage of an opportunity, beat a competitor to a new feature, or other such situations. This happens all the time.

Honestly I think your comment shows part of the problem here, though I do understand your point. But if "mere" employees feel that they are personally in competition with basically the rest of the world it easily becomes a war of attrition and employees become kind of soldier-ants. I'd rather be my own person thank you very much. People can in fact be loyal and productive in 8 hours per day without being a slacker and maybe have some energy left to partake in society outside of work. Nobody likes people with a bad work-ethic but if a good work-ethic is considered to require regular overtime than maybe it's time to reconsider that concept.

The unfortunate part is that your company is in competition with the rest of the world.

I made the comment about slackers because having moved from retail to military to tech, the amount of privilege shown unironically by tech employees on "crunch" is borderline unbelievable.

Well run companies do not do all nighters (except in exceptional circumstances).

I think there's a valid point hidden in your insane comment: there is a competitive advantage to abusing your staff, so it's really up to governments to force companies not to. Things like reasonable holiday allowance. Good statutory sick pay. The EU working time directive (which was sadly made optional but it at least set the tone).

All of that is missing in the US which is presumably why companies there don't hesitate to push people as hard as they want.

I worked once for an investment bank and there it was mandatory to take once in year min 2 week vacation minimum. It wasn't because of their sympathy, it was due to the fraud prevention :-) Forced 2 week long vacation, locked out access to the systems for that period of time.

How does forced vacation for a minimum of 2 weeks prevent fraud?

Frauds are very often hidden or disguised as "bad investments" (yeah banks do mistakes as any other human beings) and covered with money from "slush funds". When they are on vacations, rogue traders cannot cover their intentional bad investments, losses, close warning notifications and so on. More kn this topic here https://www.fdic.gov/news/financial-institution-letters/1995...

Two reasons: lots of fraud requires continual maintenance, and when you're away someone will presumably take over your duties and might notice what you're doing.

> it was mandatory to take once in year min 2 week vacation minimum

That’s actually the law in some countries. It’s not really enforced much, but the idea is that you have a weapon to sue your company if they prevent you from taking 2 weeks off once a year.

When I worked at SpaceX, I slept in the office a handful of times. It wasn't out of an apparent obligation to work long hours, but because I was indeed doing something awesome at the time, like remotely flying a space ship. Of course, Elon Musk's expectation was for everyone to work themselves to their limit, and he praised the folk putting in 80 hours per week. I myself found success in confidently maintaining a sustainable work-life balance, and never felt pressured to work longer than I wanted to.

did the `praised the folk` translated to anything other than `a pat on the back`?

Oh no, nothing as meaningful as that! More like, Elon would explicitly disqualify them from his scorn when addressing the company. :-)

I don't think the people that are successful working close with Elon Musk are the type that need constant validation. In my experience of having occasional day-to-day interactions, he's awkward but means well. He's just laser focused on solving problems, and it never stops. Sometimes the solution is to pay for an employee's laser eye surgery on a whim. Sometimes the solution is to fire a dozen people.

Are you specifically asking about financial compensation? There was the occasional token salary bump, bonus or stock option grant. Nothing to get too excited about. We would all laugh/cry about getting 0.7% raises and then go to the bar. I was never concerned about the details of my compensation while there, and I didn't spend any energy worrying about it. I just focused on making space ships. Financially and career-wise, it's embarrassing how positively fruitful my time there was. By far the best choice I could have made coming out of school.

When you get older you will realize that praise means absolutely nothing. All it did was make Elon and the stake holders richer while you skipped on family, fun, time off.

Good thing I exercised my SpaceX stock options when I left, then? At this point they're probably worth enough for me to retire. I am 36, married with a 4 year old and a newborn baby, for which I am taking the rest of the year off from working.

Count yourself lucky as one of the few that didn't get unexpectedly sick, injured or was laid off.

Indeed, I do joke that I was the one employee that left the company when I was happy rather than burnt out! I don't think my overall experience was in the minority, though? It's not like everyone was dropping like flies. I don't know anyone that was injured from work while I was there. I have plenty of friends that worked there long after I did, and I don't think any of them regret it. I also never saw a lay-off while there. A small number of people got fired for performance reasons, but other than being unpleasant, it seemed like a positive change for both parties.

Where do you get an accurate valuation for spacex equity? Isn't it private and heavily dependent on government contracts? Hasn't musk said he doesn't care about it being profitable because he needs to get someone pregnant on mars to save humanity?

Taking a year of parental leave is just a normal thing in most developed countries.

The company's value is determined each funding round, based on how much investors are willing to pay. Whether you consider that accurate or not, the company provides some liquidity through tender offers. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/spacex-employees-offer-sell-s...

There's also secondary markets, where people are willing to pay a premium for any shares they can get their hands on. That's not in the company's best interest, though, and so it is discouraged.

I believe Elon needs SpaceX to be incredibly profitable in order to fund his Mars ambitions. I think his point is that the company's finances are a means rather than an end?

I'm not bragging about paternity leave, I was responding to the parent post's claim that I sacrificed quality family time and would regret it. The opposite is true; my time spent working there has had a compounding effect on my finances and career opportunities. I've had the luxury of working on my own terms for many years, on meaningful projects intrinsically worth my time. My memories of working at SpaceX grow fonder with age.

Thanks. I had no idea what most of the comments were even responding to!