996 is fine if you're a founder of a company. It's not okay for ill-compensated workers that will never become billionaires.
We don't have much time on this planet. Why should he expect others to be droning slaves for him? People should enjoy what little life they have, not spend most of their time as cogs in a machine.
You have production access to the company’s most important relationships. If you’re falling asleep in meetings or just unable to exercise emotional intelligence, that seems pretty bad for the company.
EDIT: falling asleep in meetings is bad, not good.
I think it's worth defining what "fine" is in this context.
It's fine in as much as it's your gig, it's on you to decide what is right or not. If you believe that working extreme hours at the cost of your own wellbeing and rational performance will end up being a benefit to you in the long run then it's "fine" for you to make that choice and you either reap the benefits of suffer the consequences and hopefully learn from it.
It's not fine to project your notion of drive and passion onto people who are employees and expect them to match your personal standards when the potential rewards are magnitudes different.
I always wonder about cases where a person's work depresses them as such that they start self-medicating (for example, with alcohol). Would that still be self-imposed, or a result of the circumstances?
I'm not an investor, but if I were an investor I would want my stewards of capital to be awake and aware and full on. Airline pilots and professional drivers (truckers) have mandated rest, for a reason.
I'm an investor and former VC-backed founder and I'd like my stewards of capital, who are typically the best work force in the early days of startups, to work more than 40 hours. I'm sure that they do in the overwhelming majority of successful startups.
I work in finance and am sorry but you don't sound like a legit investor if you measure the effectiveness of your capital towards startups by work hours. What about their revenue models, plans for growth, talent structure and market niche? Why do you expect them to work longer hours as long as they have deliverables on time? Also, working longer hours may introduce potential compliance/HR costs (mental/physical problems due to overwork, people leaving due to work-life balance issue), which could be deadly for early startups.
> I'm sure that they do in the overwhelming majority of successful startups
You would need to back up this statement with evidence and show positive correlation between longer work hours and success of startups.
You can prove me wrong by actually arguing/answering the questions I had but instead you fell into Tu quoque...don't think this is how a healthy argument should be.
> someone who develops software and pretends to be some sort of financial expert
Your assumption is baseless and does not help your argument. Commenting on HN does not mean someone develops software for a living. HN is open for everyone.
> You're just wasting time and space with your insults and rhetoric
I engage in arguments but where do you see insults?
I know very well you can read comments and profiles. I've had an HN account since 2011 and it gave me enough time to become well versed in finance. Plus I call myself software engineer because I work in quantitative finance and software engineering is big part of it. I'm also a CFA charterholder and not putting it on my HN profile doesn't make me less versed in finance.
It's ok if you don't want to engage in arguments, but don't assume you know someone by simply skimming through their HN profiles.
Truckers are mandated (in the USA) to do 60 hours in 7 days, which is more than 40 hours. If your founder works 96 hours a week for 6mths what do you think their state of mind will be?
I worked 96 hours a week for eight weeks finishing off my dissertation. I finished it, but basically went crazy - I needed some time off, which was good because I crossed the line. Startups used to be like that I suppose, but now it takes far longer to cross the line to an exit than it used to, are you making the best use of the human capital you are deploying?
> Truckers are mandated (in the USA) to do 60 hours in 7 days, which is more than 40 hours. If your founder works 96 hours a week for 6mths what do you think their state of mind will be?
What does that have to do with anything? 60 hours is 50% more than 40 hours, it's regulation and not science and it's a totally different job with different risks.
> are you making the best use of the human capital you are deploying?
If they are working 40 hours or less, the answer is "no" with 100% certainty. Above that, it depends.
Well - the example I used was set to 60 hours not 40 - which was a number that you used.
On the other hand are you sure that you are reasoning correctly? Have any of the companies that you have worked with failed because the founders have worked too little?
What was the least working that you saw? What was the outcome and the driver there?
> Well - the example I used was set to 60 hours not 40 - which was a number that you used.
So what is your conclusion from this? That 60 hours are too much? Or is it OK to work 60 hours (i.e. more than 40)? Why bring it up if your example basically confirms that my expectations aren't unreasonable?
> Have any of the companies that you have worked with failed because the founders have worked too little?
Yes. And I know a couple more.
> What was the least working that you saw? What was the outcome and the driver there?
15-30 hours/week. No product after a few financing rounds. Lack of grit. Also, very poor decisions.
There is a difference between regularly working 50-hour weeks and setting those up well, and always working 72-hour weeks, which doesn’t leave you time to do the life-admin, exercise, cooking, and sleep you need to keep a clear head.
Founders are already 'working' more than that. They are typically thinking about their company with every waking hour.
With that said, it doesn't mean they are not getting plenty of sleep. What it means is that when they are not sleeping, they are probably working. At the gym, they are probably thinking about work. At social events, they are probably thinking about work. Etc... It's just the nature of getting a company off the ground.
Ali Baba is the Amazon of China. It is enormously profitable. I assume that in return for working so hard, the employees are paid quite well, or else they would find better jobs.
I guess the unsupported claim that they're "ill-compensated" out of the blue was what annoyed me.
It looks like the average senior software engineer salary at Alibaba is around $30k.
That's well above the average annual salary in China, but it's about average for a software developer, and no one is going going to become a millionaire working for those wages.
Also long hours are normal in China. If your choice is to work for one of 50 companies that all have insane schedules, it's hardly informed consent.
If long hours is the industry standard, to me that is exactly informed consent. I mean, no one will be surprised by the standard workplace arrangement.
There's no way Alibaba is giving away 15% of their revenue in stock grants, so I'd take that with a huge grain of salt. Regardless the vast majority of their employees aren't going to become millionaires working there.
>If long hours is the industry standard, to me that is exactly informed consent. I mean, no one will be surprised by the standard workplace arrangement.
That's not what informed consent means--informed consent has to be voluntary or it's not consent. If 72 hour weeks are standard and your choice is long hours or being unemployed, it's not informed consent.
The logical conclusion to this argument is that there is literally no limit on how bad you make your working conditions so long as everyone else is doing it. A century ago it was common to pay employees in company scrip and to not pay them enough to live so that they ended up permanently indebted to the company. It was the standard work environment in many places so by your argument all the employees freely consented to it.
Your consent argument makes no sense to me. We're probably too far apart to communicate, but I'll make an attempt:
I agree that "informed consent has to be voluntary or it's not consent".
But this is absurd: "If 72 hour weeks are standard and your choice is long hours or being unemployed, it's not informed consent."
Note that you can replace "72 hour weeks" with "40 hour weeks" or "10 hour work weeks" without changing the argument. I'm guessing your silent assumption is that anything worse than your current middle class American expectations are by definition inhumane. This implies that poor people across the world can't consent to anything.
To me, as long as you can freely walk away from something, you are there by consent. No other definition makes logical sense.
There is obviously a large gray area between coercive and completely consensual when it comes to employment. Even 40 hour a week employment in the western world isn't completely without coercion in every case--only if the person has other alternatives.
>This implies that poor people across the world can't consent to anything.
In many situations they can't. When the power differential between 2 people is too great, there can be no consent. If the president asks an intern to sleep with him and he tells her she is free to walk away with no repercussion, there's still an element of coercion to the proposal.
>To me, as long as you can freely walk away from something, you are there by consent. No other definition makes logical sense.
How far does this belief go? If you come across a dying man in the desert and offer to sell him water in exchange for everything he owns, I'd say that's obviously not a consensual agreement. Despite the fact that he can freely walk away from it.
That's like if you said "what if everyone won a lottery". You know full well this sweatshop bullshit produces very few millionaires, and millions of burn-outs.
We don't have much time on this planet. Why should he expect others to be droning slaves for him? People should enjoy what little life they have, not spend most of their time as cogs in a machine.