Except you're troubled by it because you're competing with them. You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos but you're competing for the same salaries and promotions as people that do. Them glibly throwing away their weekends does affect you because you're in the same competition space as them.
I dunno, I have some dissonance here. I've been young and had fun on a work project and did unpaid overtime because I just really enjoyed it, and I'd have been rightly pretty pissy about it if you unrelated unaffected person on the internet told me to stop. But now that I'm older if I were laid off in favour of all-nighter people I'd also be pretty pissy about that.
Especially if those terms changed after I chose an employer based on the stated hours and felt like I met them. The way you "solve" this in a market way is by putting it in the employment terms. I take a job knowing the terms, and maybe I take a pay cut for choosing the non-all-nighters job, fine. But then a Musk can come along and ignore all of that. The protectionist way is regulating the all-nighter folk away but younger me would have absolutely ignored it and a Musk event would have rewarded it in exactly the way you're unhappy about.
All I'd add is look where it got this guy: still fired. And I bet he got less severance than the people who opted for the 3 months from that form Musk sent out weeks ago. I started my career in startups and I saw the same thing quite often. Passionate young engineers sinking their life into a project only to get the same, or an even worse deal than the people who did less work but were more politically savvy.
> One day I created a tool that made it faster to download things from your work email that you might need if you were looking for a job: performance evaluations and that sort of thing. I posted the tool on Slack so that my colleagues could also benefit from it if they needed to. One hour and four minutes later I was fired.
I credit them for wanting to help their peers and it sounds like their intentions were good and I'm not supporting this decision by upper management but it sure seems like an unwise thing to do during an organizational change like this. Especially if you like working 70 hour weeks and helping out peers just for the sake of making someone's life easier.
Still my idea of fun! Can’t do it anymore for health reasons but I still pull all-nighters doing my own retirement projects.
Yes. Ressentiment is ubiquitous these days. Nietzsche would be amused but it's not a good look for our culture.
You see this plenty even in less extreme examples, my old company had yearly awards for outstanding performance, and there was a clear pattern that the story of why the person had won almost always involved some personal sacrifice in service of the company. No one was winning awards for just being good at their job, showing up every day, and being a value to the team. You had to take a break from your vacation to get on a meeting, or work 2 weeks straight to get the award.
I'm sure the well-meaning among leadership (which I do believe was a decent amount of them) saw this as more of an apology. "Here's something to recognize that you did something you shouldn't have had to do". But functionally, it was creating a culture where you needed to abuse yourself in order to be recognized.
He was undercutting his colleagues by working for free. So it kinda is my problem.
I mean, fine, since people's wages are not the same anyway some people might as well decrease their hourly wage by overextending.
But I feel a need to remind those people of that they are suckers and won't be compensated for it in the end.
The author just got fired.
Make your choices and let others make their choices. Not everyone wants to optimize for the same things in life.
You work for a large, for-profit company. You have some free time outside of the typical 9-5 M-F work week and you would like to spend some of it working. Great! You could:
* contribute to an an open source project or start your own
* start a side project/business
* volunteer somewhere
* take an online course
* exercise
* goof off
* do almost anything else
The effects of these on on society and yourself range from neutral at worst to helpful at best.
Instead, you choose to:
* contribute extra unpaid time to your employer
This may enrich your life, but it definitely enriches the shareholders of your company. It dials up the expectations of others who are in the same employment pool as you. It hurts future generations of workers by eroding the expectation of work-life balance that we are lucky enough to have achieved in our industry.
To me, it is pretty clear: if you put your extra time into for-profit work, you suck.
Uh huh. So? That's what choose means.
You only care because you're competing with them, but that's not really their problem. That doesn't resolve any of the dissonance at all. What if their motivation isn't enjoyment but money, so they're choosing to outcompete you. What if they're doing that because they have to feed their very hungry family and their family is hungrier than yours. Does that change the calculus? You're walking into this with a set of values and just assuming that everybody else has the same ones so you can throw them on the table and say, see? But that's exactly what makes it complex, that they don't have the same values and they live next to you in the same world you do.
I'm still just as split on how to feel about enjoyable overtime but I'm not at all conflicted that your take that anybody else is obligated to maximise your metric instead of their own is a bad take.
Yes, it does. I should have been more clear in the outset: I am frustrated by people who work more than 40 hours because they enjoy doing it, not because they need to in order to make ends meet.
If you work 60hrs/week in order to pay off student loan debt and feed your kid, my heart goes out to you. If you work 60hrs/week because it's your idea of fun, please log out of work and get a hobby... you're actively making harder for the parent with loan debt to capitalize on the extra 20hrs/week they're putting in.
> You're walking into this with a set of values and just assuming that everybody else has the same ones so you can throw them on the table and say, see?
I mean, kinda, yeah! I value being able to work <=40 hours a week. If you don't value that, we're going to disagree.
To reduce it to a contrived version: If you value being able to litter because it lets you get where you are going faster, I think you suck! We have divergent values, and I don't have any qualms saying that you pursuing your values actively works against my values.
With this hybrid approach, you're still advancing the cause at $work, but you're not doing it directly or exclusively for them, and the open source project will have visibility, scope, and utility beyond $work and your employment there. You never know, it might even be the start of future promising career opportunities.
There be dragons of course with how exempt employment and copyrights work in the US, though (as in, this might be a trivial case where if the side-project is successful, your employer can claim rights on it). You could come to some agreement with your employer ahead of time about the independence of such projects, though.
What an odd perspective. I was brought up to recognize that hard work and going above and beyond what was expected is admirable and will get you appreciation, recognition, and advancement. Voluntarily doing work that you think needs doing because you want to be valued isn't bad, it's a life lesson. I got my first software testing job by going above and beyond my menial mailroom duties. I got my first software engineering job by going above and beyond my testing duties. I got all my promotions, bonuses, and stock grants and more than a few job offers by consistently doing more than I had to do.
If there's a project that I'm enthusiastic enough about to want to spend a weekend working on it? Hell yes, I'm going to do it, and I'm going to enjoy myself without worrying that someone else thinks I'm raising expectations beyond the bare minimum. Maybe someone with that attitude just isn't offering as much to an employer and they should get comfy with the idea of others outperforming them.
I work 40 hours a week, no more. (If paid overtime were a thing at my company, I might do more. But it's not.) I bust my ass during those 40. Sometimes I work on personal side projects in my free time for fun or to sharpen my skills.
If you want to be promoted, I'd rather you work harder and smarter, not more. If a coworker of mine got promoted because they worked weekends, I would actually be pretty frustrated at them.
PS: how dare you work harder than me! You're raising the bar and that's not fair! ;)
I don't understand that at all. You'd rather work 60 and 20 of that slack instead of 40 ? Why would you want to have less time for hobbies/family ?
That solves all of that, employer can't just convince gullible teenager to get extra work out of them for little benefit and have active motivation to hire enough people to not have to crunch very often (as doing that makes them pay 2x per hour of work).
Those laws are in place because for every "crunching and happy for it" there is ten that stay for longer out of fear that they will get fired for wanting to work normal amount in favour of someone that lives work.
Ultimately, if you pour more person-hours into software (or other "mind jobs") you should expect to get an inferior end product and/or diminished productivity.
Just look at Musk himself: sending out completely idiotic emails at 2AM. At least a portion of his behavior could be attributed to having completely diminished his mental faculties due to overworking himself.
This feels like a really under appreciated point. If you overwork yourself for 10 years it's going to have nasty effects on you.
> Let's be honest this is far from what people call slavery. They are being paid multiples of six digit salaries, RSUs and work in one of the most happening tech ecosystems of the world.
> I would love to be a part of something like this. Heck most of us would love to be a part of something like.
> I kind of envy those guys working on these projects. I hope I was the one there.
So, unfortunately, your post encourages what the ones at the top with all the capital love: getting the rest of us fight over the scraps. Because the truth is that it's all scraps to them, and that's how they want to keep it.
That's only a negative for one side.
If someone likes that work environment - great, let them work very hard on interesting and meaningful projects, these are the kind of people Elon Musk seems to want to leave at twitter. People who don't like this kind of work environment are free to leave for companies more focused on work-life balance.
If that is not the case, it doesn't matter how much I'm being paid, I'm not going to be happy ("self-actualized") for long. Likewise, whether I work 40 or 60 hours a week has no bearing on this. I imagine quite a few people joined Twitter because they believed in the company's stated mission and the vision of its founder. The mission and vision have now changed, so it's appropriate for some of those people to move on, voluntarily or otherwise. Framing it as some kind of Marxist class struggle sheds no light on the issue, and isn't helpful in the least.
This can and should be a condition on top of respecting yourself enough to expect that you are paid for the time you work and have the freedom to establish a good work-life balance based on those hours. Assuming for one second that the folks running the business--if they are any good at it--think about you in anything other than economic terms at the end of the day is simply foolish.
If you're exchanging time for money, you ain't on the capital side of the struggle.
The fact this is even legal indicates congress sold out the working class in the '80s.
Sure you may be able to slack off a lot in some jobs, and effectively make more money per hour. But it's an absolute certainty that if you work 80 hours a week, you're not going to be paid more as an exempt employee. It's one of the nice things about being a contractor, you can actually get overtime pay. And as a result most companies will be strict about not making you work more than 40. Funny how that works.
So you’re privileged, you say. What about your employer?
While you're 100% correct in that, I do believe the "parent" post is against people being put into situations where they begin to feel that such actions are their only remaining option if they ever want to have a life outside of work.
I feel like this thread contains a lot of people upset that other people are better than them at a game that's not worth playing anyway. Promotion is an extremely artificial game setup so that neither companies nor employees have to play the actual game of capitalism. In a real market economy you deliver value by trading with others; if you feel that others are capturing more value than you, take the other side of the trade. When competition requires that you work 60 hour weeks to be considered good at a field, that's a sign that there are too many people in that field and you should get out of it and instead consider employing that field in your new job instead.
We can speculate whether overwork is related to Prince's drug addiction and eventual death.
So yeah, failing to rest properly does have bad consequences.
So yes, overworking does create a race to the bottom.
To pop up a level, your comparison is very bad. In Twitter's case, the "model" behavior is that engineers are working longer hours, and not whether they are producing better results. A better analogy would be a sports player who trained extra hard and extra long, but didn't improve their level of play, but still all other players were expected to work extra long hours anyways.
Don't turn our field into one where you have to sacrifice your personal life to succeed.
I'm glad you think I have that much power! Seriously I'm not suggesting any such thing. But why shouldn't people who work harder reap the benefits. And more to the point, does that cause a race to the bottom?
Michael Jordan might be a great example though, he worked harder then anyone else, and ALSO raised the standard of how hard people needed to work on the team beyond the normal limits.
They all did benefit from the Championships that followed, but it was certainly also a strain of the mental health of players like Dennis Rodman.
Why isn't he a good example? He worked hard and wrote a bunch of good music. He didn't seem to cause a race to the bottom.
I thought Band Mates was the best comparison, because we were talking about fellow employee's suffering at a company. And if your comparison was of Prince to The Music Industry at large, it sort of works, but sort of doesn't because other musicians are Prince's competitors not team mates.
Hell, I'd be able to buy a house after a month.
What a fucking stupid comparison...
One of my big hobbies was doing everything I could on a computer way before I got paid to program. I doubt the author considered what they did a waste since they were doing something they enjoyed.
Unless there's a fixed "here's how much extra you will be rewarded, and thus how much it will cost the company" policy about working past normal working hours, people who do so are scabs.
One can find fulfillment in hard work and going the extra mile without that expectation from the employer and without expectation of a tangential reward. There is often intrinsic value in hard work that can be rewarding in and of itself.
There have been times in my life where I stayed late or worked weekends on my own accord because I felt the situation warranted it. I wasn't asked to do it and I didn't get paid extra, but I felt good doing it and in the long-run, the short-term sacrifice yield wonderful long-term gains.
> just because we're paid well.
People might try another perspective. Does $200k a year sound good? How about $100k a year?
How many say "yes" to the first, but "no" to the second? While still working weekends and staying late -- that's lying to yourself.
Working unpaid overtime, devaluates the employee. If it comes from more senior colleagues or managers, then it's at risk of creating an implicit culture. One not suitable for people with responsibilities outside the work place.
Here's my hypothesis as to why people are so glib about throwing away their lives for their employer:
People depend on their employer for their entire livelyhood. This day and age, without a pay check, you can't have any basic needs: Shelter, food or water and you'd be out on the street or worse: the average homeless person (it's shocking) lives 30 years less than a housed one.
So, it's no surprise that a large segement of people end up with stockholm's syndrom from their employer. they begin to identify with their captor and even take on their values and their beliefs. If you're kidnapped, at least you have some hope of escape. but when you're employed, you are the prison guard who holds the key. so you have no hope of escape, this amplifies the stockholm's syndrom.
Some employees are OK with working immense amounts of unpaid overtime to please a Musk-type boss. That's a very different situation than the type of employee who has a life outside of work and wants to get paid fairly.
I like my job. I like my hobbies better. I'd still not trade hobbies for job just to give users a feature week early. I'm fine with working extra occasionally but that's what I signed for by picking jobs in ops, not because I think that's good.
Also, OP is OBVIOUSLY talking about people that maybe have few months of savings and have them getting fired heavily affect their lives, not people earning 250k
Many people enjoy work.
Most people do find fulfillment out of work, many even enjoy it, myself included. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't fight to be compensated for what we put in, and doesn't mean we shouldn't practice solidarity with coworkers, many of whom don't have the time to work as much as we do (for example a working mother).
Everyone, even billionaires undergo social conditioning from an early age. Some people have a need to be successful in order to feel good about themselves. they feel they need to "be" someone. And for some, their work becomes a part of their identity.
Becoming a billionaire doesn't free you from all the stuff that's been conditioned into you.
I called Elon’s boss and he corroborated it. His boss even makes him use one of those punchcard machines—how quaint!
No, it's great that the author helped out a colleague. The fact that it benefited Twitter is secondary.
Helping out your colleagues (who are now all over new companies as they've all been fired from Twitter) is how you build your network, get your next job, get people to give you nice recommendations, etc.
Corporations are amoral and greedy and should not be helped unless they are helping you, but that doesn't mean you should piss on everything and everyone around you either.
Just stop, please. There's nothing wrong with working long hours and people enjoy it, let them live in peace.
It's not cool to paint pressuring employees to work long hours as a good thing, and we need to be more vocal about this. It's great the author is fine wasting his weekend working on changes to a verification system that was launched for only a few days, but some of us have family and friends we like to spend time with. Hobbies and other things outside of work that give our lives meaning. Generations of workers fought hard for things like weekends and we shouldn't just glibly throw them away just because we're paid well.