Entitled shit, indeed! The bad thing about “startup culture” is when you really want to treat you employees as white collar slaves you can yell at while they work 16-hour days for 4-hour pay.
Listen, if you can’t make your startup work with 9-5 employees and a decent salary for all, you cant make your startup work period. Gamble your VC capital away in the casino instead, that’s more likely to give a decent return.
Okay, normally I like to remind people that almost anyone from a developed country is already enormously wealthy, and stands head and shoulders above the vast majority of the world, and thus whining that there are people even more wealthy might be seen as a little… entitled.
But the “true equality” comment (which got 5 likes and not one rebuttal) makes me angry. It’s practically word-for-word what I heard when I accidentally got into a “blacks are taking our jobs” debate in high school (while I was visiting the USA).
How the hell are we not talking about “true equality”? They’re not really human?
They have less overhead because they don’t have any money! God, it’s like a time machine. “Well, the blacks can live in any old slum. But real housing for real people costs $200/month.” (It was 40 years ago.)
Garbage - first artificially low currencies of any sort are at absolute maximum 10-20% lower. The reason that there is a market for incredibly cheap stuff (with a corresponding lack of quality) is because there’s a market for it and because they’re being paid incredibly little.
Dear God. [sarcasm]And of course real people couldn’t possibly have to live like most of the world lives, packed into sub-North-American-standard apartments. The idea that a decent salary of $10K allows them to move up out the slums into a small apartment with running water (perhaps with shared facilities)? That’s absurd. At that level of poverty, they probably can’t tell the difference anyway.[/sarcasm]
Ah, progress. It used to be that competition between white Americans was real, but the rest, that’s just absurd. You can’t possibly expect white people to compete with black people. Those people will take any wage and all it gets them is a better class of hovel.
Now, we’re much more progressive. All Americans, and maybe even the developed world are real people with whom equality (and thus competition) is possible. But Good God, you can’t expect to treat those brown people in India like… people, worthy of direct competition with us.
This argument made me madder than hell 40 years ago, and I’m amazed enough that it’s still making me mad today. I’m okay with a low level of hypocrisy. My expectation is a slightly embarrassed silence at someone pointing out the obvious so that we don’t get too far along the “poor me, I’m not rich enough” track.
But I absolutely didn’t expect a doubling down with the “they can’t truly be equal” and “you can’t expect real people to live like that” that I heard in my childhood.
I do ask. I’m in the global 1% ($48K household income), and I constantly ask myself, did my hard work make me a 1%-er? Do I really work harder than 99% of the workers, including those working in horrible, unsafe working conditions? Or did centuries of other people building a society make me rich?
The answer is obvious.
“An injury to one is an injury to all”
I like the idea, but it has limits. If I actually followed through on that properly, I couldn’t possibly justify stopping those Indians to compete on my home turf directly with me rather than be hampered by immigration restrictions that keep them poor and me obscenely wealthy by any sane standard.
Again, I don’t mind the “I’m willing to be considerate of others, but in the end, I need to be rich,” That’s exactly how I feel. It’s the lack of self-awareness that annoys me. It’s the rage of the self-entitled rich against the self-entitled richer that grates. If the people in the USA (or the developed world) are the only ones that count, then make that clear. But then let’s put away the the pretensions of “an injury to one…” and make it clear that it’s way more important that the GINI coefficient of the USA is going up (which it is) than the GINI coefficient of the world is going down (which it is).
Sorry for the rant, but “you are not talking about true equality”? Arg!
I’ve been in the IT industry, programming/development side, since 1993 - straight out of college. Here’s my advice for anyone out there newer to it, who wants advice.
YMMV. Just one man’s opinion.
I completely agree. I am at a startup, and only the founders are pulling 50+ hours a week regularly. Next week will be a long one for all of us, but it is an exception and not the rule.
And we are kicking ass and taking names while working sane hours, cause our leadership actually knows how to do their fucking job. It’s refreshing.
I’ve spent almost all my career working at companies with overtime bans except at crunch times. I very, very rarely work over 40 hours a week.
I’m amenable to overtime, just as long as I get paid for it.
I did have a job when I was on call at all hours and working shifts and weekends for a couple of years, but that was what the job was and they gave us all a massive pay rise to cover that.
Yeah, when something absolutely has to happen perfectly (like next week, when the stealth mode company I work for comes out of stealth mode), I’ll pull as many hours as needed. And it is important for a companies culture to not make everything a fire drill. Besides, how much actual work does a person do on a 14 hour shift?
Do I have access to the BBS?
I’m not against OT. When it’s constant (in a “we work a 50 hour work week here” way) that’s a form of abuse.
I was once asked on an interview “we work 50-55 hour weeks here - what do you think of that?” I answered “I think you have more than one position to fill then”. I didn’t get the job - but once that question came out I was certain I didn’t even want it.
“As long as I have access to EC2, for all you know I work 168 hour weeks.”
The Wobblies don’t agree with your limits. They were one of the few unions in the US who allowed anyone who didn’t have the power to hire or fire people to become members, at a time when other unions effectively had a “whites only” policy. I don’t think they are happy with current immigration restrictions either. It doesn’t benefit anyone other that the profiteering class.
Is there any reason we can’t work towards improving both?
I have done some research and apparently I am not in the global 1% (although I am on disability benefits). Some of the people who live in the same Oxford housing estate as I do, they may be, but that doesn’t change the fact that they need to go down to the food bank to feed their families, or go to the clothes bank so they have school uniforms for their kids or can look presentable at work.
And things are getting worse. Rent and utility prices are still rising faster than a lot of peoples incomes are. Being middle class is no protection from the poverty line anymore and the 0.01% (pleas note, not 1%) are still filling their pockets at the rest of the worlds expense.
Can you blame me for thinking that capitalism is broken beyond repair? Maybe capitalism is working as intended? Either way, I have no interest in supporting it anymore. The days when I thought it could be reformed are long gone, and my anti-capitalist views do not stop at the British border, or the boundaries of the EU.
IME, yelling at employees is very much antithetical to startup culture, as is miserliness.
Overwork, though, is definitely a key component.
Because they’re living the dream in all its exploitative glory, and it sucks fucking balls.
So why attack people who are clearly not doing better than them? If you have a job you hate, and then take your frustration out on the homeless, what precisely is the point of that?
TL;DR: A rich man said “Shut up and give me your soul!” While the whole world is on the verge of collapse.
I was explaining, not excusing.
Sure, I assumed as much. I guess I just don’t get that mindset? Do you have any insight into that, because I’m not sure I do… unless it’s just straight up individualism that can’t connect the self to a larger community that isn’t entirely self-selected? Or maybe it’s an inabiliity to see past one’s own needs, but again, that’s just individualism, I suppose.
Only a software developer starts his list with 0. instead of 1.
While I don’t disagree with the gist of what y’all are saying (people should be fairly paid for the hours worked, startup culture is somewhat toxic, etc), it is mildly amusing to see 50-55hrs held up as a “long week”.
Talk to some scientists or doctors; 55hrs is barely warming up. In a medical research lab, 60hrs would be considered a fairly light week. When it gets busy, 80hr+ weeks are routine.
I once spent six months straight running rats in the lab midday-to-midnight seven days per week. Didn’t see my friends or any pre-midnight TV for half a year.
I’m not recommending this type of work culture as sane, just or sensible…but it is worth keeping in mind as a reference point, especially when the techbros start with their “we earned all this money by working hard at our startup” rants.
Yes, it is all relative. But when that is your normal non-busy week it’s no good. It’s easier for some people to swing than others, but regardless it leaves one with little time to tend to the rest of ones life (like health, spouse, children, etc). The hardest part for me to accept is that my company was billing the client for all of my hours. The extra 10-15 a week I was working was all gravy for them - overtime was unpaid for ME but PAID for THEM.
Long hours are much easier to accept when you’re getting paid for them. There are plenty of people who work far more for far less and in far harsher conditions. My advice does not quite apply to them.
And people who are too lazy to renumber everything when they have a new first item. Luckily I’m both 
