This is very true, and there's certainly nothing I could do if our industry becomes filled with people who are willing and eager to put in 70 hour weeks for months at a time.

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.

This is probably why they got fired:

> 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.

My take on this is that this guy is your typical high-performing developer with a huge ego and an attitude that he's untouchable because he's been valued so much at every job he's ever had. He was reckless to release his tool because he never imagined that management would suddenly become so thin-skinned that he'd get fired over something like that. Well, he was wrong about this particular management, and he found out. I haven't tried to find any of his info on social media, but I'd be willing to bet that aside from some public griping about it, he's not feeling like he screwed up big-time. Most likely, he's wearing this as a badge of honor that demonstrates how capricious and short-sighted Elon Musk is to fire a clearly valuable engineer just because that engineer likes to buck authority. The consequences are that now he has a good "why I got fired" story, and he needs to spend a little time and effort finding his next wildly overpaid job. NBD

I'm here wondering what the "tool" exactly did that simple desktop email client didn't...

> You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos

Still my idea of fun! Can’t do it anymore for health reasons but I still pull all-nighters doing my own retirement projects.

> 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.

Yes. Ressentiment is ubiquitous these days. Nietzsche would be amused but it's not a good look for our culture.

I'm not sure if it's so much resentment as an implicit rewriting of the contract of employment. If I'm contracted for 40 hours a week, but the only people being promoted are the ones who "voluntarily" work 80 hours a week then the revealed policy of the employer is that everyone's being paid to work 80 hours a week, or 60, and if you're doing what was agreed to in the original contract you're slacking off.

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.

> This sounds like it's not your problem.

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.

This makes about as much sense as being upset that some people eat healthy and work out and as a result are more physically attractive/competitive in the same dating market that you're in. Or that some people study and hone their professional craft sometimes before 8:59 AM or after 5:01 PM.

Make your choices and let others make their choices. Not everyone wants to optimize for the same things in life.

I appreciate that you represent both sides of argument here, but I've found a way to frame it for myself that removes all the dissonance:

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.

> Instead, you choose to

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.

> 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?

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.

One of my core values is encouraging people to make their own choices in how they spend their life.

Another interesting way to split the difference: identify a need at $work that could really use a better open source solution that $work could use off-the-shelf. Go write that on your free nights/weekends as an independent open source project that's more-broadly useful to others outside of $work, and then when you're back on the clock, switch hats and make use of it.

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.

If you get paid well and have a unique talent that further incentivizes you to step up and do extra on occasion, what's the big deal? Engineering salaries have never in the history of technology been geared toward clock-watcher/union-boss mindset.

> 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.

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 should be clear that I am talking about expectations of time, not expectations of effort or competance.

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.

Try to recognize that there are people who would rather work more than harder and that's ok. You provide your value and I'll provide mine. To be frank, I'm not sure I'm capable of working harder, but the occasional weekend project because you're fired up about the goals or the challenge is exhilarating. For you to think you can dictate that I shouldn't ever do that seems kind of selfish to me.

PS: how dare you work harder than me! You're raising the bar and that's not fair! ;)

> Try to recognize that there are people who would rather work more than harder and that's ok.

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 ?

Well, first off, I haven't put any numbers on it, so 60 hours is made up. Second, I'm not saying I'm going to "slack" during the 40 and waste 20 hours, I'm just talking about doing a normal job (with a normal amount of slacking interspersed. Let's not ignore that I'm posting on HN during my standard business hours at this very moment). And third, I am capable of adjusting how much time I need for hobbies and family on any given day, and sometimes I'll happily trade a saturday with hobbies or family to do some good work. I honestly don't know what it would be like to have a job that I never ever felt passionate enough about to willingly put in a little extracurricular time. It sounds horrible.

You don't work 40 full hours a week. No one actually _works_ every single minute of a 40 hour work week. There's lunch for one, bathroom breaks, interruptions by coworkers, meetings that they may not even need you in, etc, etc.

Looking at my country laws you'd be entirely fine to pull the all nighters at work but paid 150-200% for it.

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.