wageslaving

someone taking this job for $150,000 while working 70 hours a week is helping to depress wages across the entire industry.

I don't care how much I love the work, I get paid the value of my labor or I walk. If that means $800,000 year for 80 hours a week, that's what it takes. There are very few cases I would ever take less compensation then I think my time is worth, even for a job I would love. To me, its a matter of self-respect.

the name of the game is leveraging explosive, unsustainable growth into a high rate of return into cheap capital into a big payday for founders

everything else is long-term

This is my industry. I don't want to companies to start expecting a minimum of 70 hours of work for 40 hours of pay. Until they start adding "one-and-a-half compensation for overtime" to these job, I will always see this as a thinly veiled attempt to extract free labor from their employees without paying for it. Companies openly engaging in that kind of behavior worries me, and unless you own a business, it should worry you too.

All I can see are the economics of it. If he was paying his engineers $600,000 / yr in compensation for all the overtime they're working, I would have no trouble with the arrangement.

However, software engineers rarely get any form of compensation for extra hours work outside of small vanity bonuses. This is just someone looking to take advantage of the fact they can get free labor out of their employees by "encouraging" them to work an extra 30 to 40 hours a week.

Personally, I would expect at least time and a half applied to those last 30-40 hours as well. Which would be 85/40 to 100/40.

The issue with yielding to investors is that investors are primarily interested in making money for themselves, rather than growing the companies they are investing in. An investor will always vote to have large companies take loans in order to purchase the hundreds of millions of dollars worth shares they just purchased back a 25% increase over their current market value, or get a lump sum in the form of the newly issued dividends as it was in Apple's case. And then they take the money they made, reinvest in another large company they can leverage and do it again.

There's absolutely no reason to seek growth based returns which carry risk while this approach is available. Dividends and stock-buybacks represent a no-value-created system of incentives for the richest people in the world, directly extracting the surplus value of laborers at the expense of workers and long-term investors. Only when a company starts to topple does there seem to be any interest in moving into new markets or improving their existing lines of business.