I didn't realize "caring" meant "being exploitable" as in "working extra hard for no extra pay."
I guess I just don't care.
hazek112 · 4h ago
Unless it's my own company I'd have to be making at least $500k to really "care".
oceansky · 5h ago
"How many hours were you working a week?"
Funnily enough, hearing this question is a huge red flag for me. It signals they value work hours more than quality delivery.
cosmotic · 3h ago
I thought the same thing. The moment the article equated 5h work day to not giving a shit, they lost me.
thedevilslawyer · 16m ago
I'll take the opposite side of the comments and the body of cynical people here.
It absolutely matters to care about the problem you're solving. A team of people with a skill level of X that cares about a problem will be better in both performance and in general culture and being around than a team with a skill level of 2X that consists of mercenaries.
I learned it the hard way. When I was asked to set up a team of 14-16 engineers, I first went the latter way. The interviewing was difficult and the bar was higher, but the people who were there were focused on what they could get out of the role. Circumstances led to a reset, and the second time around, I built a team that optimized for caring about the problem. I started with the two people I liked working with in the initial group because they liked the problem statement. I had to lower the computer science performance bar to build the team to size. I also had a budget left over for other purposes, as we didn't need to pay for 2X performance, and the team was heavier with younger folks.
We delivered the goals in three months. More importantly, working with people who have a shared purpose, rather than "getting mine," is just a better place to be. I had to spend time skilling up some people, but they did it in a month!
Since then, I've always optimized for being around "mission-driven" people, rather than "mercenaries." Sometimes you need that 5X skill set, in which case a limited-time contractual helper is probably better, but the team has a soul.
robocat · 5h ago
Odd that the article doesn't address the most obvious criticism: is the CEO just matching the cliche of trying to select for people that overwork for underpay?
Wanting to work hard is positively correlated with perseverance and work which inspires.
Hard working is good when it's good.
atoav · 4h ago
A absolute rookie mistake is thinking your exhaustion-level has a linear correlation with the quality of the results. I know people who get suspicious if they haven't exhausted themselves, how can they have done a good job if they are not drained?
The truth is that the level of your craft has probably the biggest impact. A beginner can tear themselves apart with stressfull allnighters while doing a job and deliver the result a seasoned pro would have delivered in an afternoon.
And if all your employees are doing is stressfull allnighters and damage control they have no time to learn how to do properly and fast. But I get it, the goal is to extract money from their labour, not be their friends or produce quality products.
catigula · 4h ago
"It isn't enough for your work to make me rich. You also have to care."
We're in a weird place where we can actually read what these people think publicly.
cam_l · 21m ago
In a somewhat misguided defence of the OP, he actually makes two points.
Giving a shit about your work is the second point. Without any other comments suggesting the alternative, I assume this is second in order of importance. And as there are only two points I would take that to mean the second point is the least important.
His first point is to give a shit about the company. This being the most important point probably explains the accusations of late payments and wage theft from former employees and contractors against the company. They just weren't putting the company first!
As an aside, I have been thinking of this in relation to the 3 laws, as in a sense, executives see workers as robots, and I think the 3 laws mesh quite nicely with corporate directives.
1) A robot (employee) may not injure thecompany or allow thecompany to come to harm;
2) A robot must obey their manager unless it conflicts with the First Law;
3) A robot must protect its own existence (in the company) as long as it does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The work doesn't really come into to it, unless it is a subset of the 3rd law.
rr808 · 5h ago
Hire people who only do it for the money you'll have to pay them properly. Hire people who care instead.
forty · 4h ago
Then maybe build a cooperative, where all employees are effectively co-owning the company? Then you can expect everyone to care as much as you do. Otherwise it doesn't seem to be a fair thing to expect.
Paracompact · 3h ago
> In no world can you be working 5 hours a day and be giving a shit.
"Four hours of creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician." ~~ Henri Poincaré.
I rather have the impression that many bosses/companies actively avoid people who do care: this kind of people is often rather inconvenient to manage, since because of the fact that they do care, they are very willing to fight (also or even particular to superiors) for their vision.
Thus, hiring people who do care requires very particular kinds of bosses who can accept/handle people who care. Companies who do not have those are in my opinion often better served with people who don't give a fuck, but hardly ever (because they don't really consider it to be worth their time) actively disagree with orders from above. If the description of such people sounds passive-aggressive to you, I don't disagree: such people sometimes are this way. So, it might actually (surprisingly) make sense for companies to scout for passive-aggressive people. :-)
ZunarJ5 · 5h ago
It would be nice if the employer also cared in return, however in my experience, this is exceptionally rare. I think more than a fair share of us here learned our lessons in investing ourselves rather sharply. It rarely, if ever, pays off for the worker.
MrDarcy · 5h ago
To be fair, he says in TFA he wants to recruit like a cult. I don’t know many cult leaders who care about their followers, so at least he’s honest if not psychopathic in the way he says he’s going to abuse you before he does so.
aleph_minus_one · 4h ago
> I don’t know many cult leaders who care about their followers
My impression is that cult leaders often do care about their followers. The problems rather start when the cult member becomes disobedient - this is when matters become very dirty.
aeve890 · 4h ago
>My impression is that cult leaders often do care about their followers.
Cult leaders care about their followers insofar as they stay submissive ass-kissing sycophants. It's not like they care about the follower's actual well-being.
atoav · 4h ago
This is my experience as well.
As a former freelancer the standards I hold myself to are exceptionally high. Then I got employed and carried that standard with me (still do). The problem is that this means work will be pushed my way, because I am sometimes literally the only person who can do it within a day instead making it a month long project.
This led then to such an amount of work that I could mo longer hold that quality level, which made me unhappy. Of course I complained all the way, with no real change.
The only thing that worked was a strategic leaking of the fact that I was looking for positions elsewhere, suddenly a whole lot of concessions were made, and since then it has gotten better and I got much better at rejecting work.
Care too much and you burn out and get replaced.
aleph_minus_one · 4h ago
> Care too much and you burn out and get replaced
... or you become a menace to your boss. :-)
paulcole · 5h ago
In practice what would an employer caring look like to you?
ZunarJ5 · 4h ago
You know what caring looks like. You experience it in your personal relationships every day. The disconnect isn't knowledge, it's incentives. The practical answer is straightforward: predictable schedules that people can plan around, living wages that are indexed to the COL, transparent paths for advancement, respect for work-life boundaries, investment in employee development beyond immediate productivity needs (i.e. good healthcare for the worker and their dependents), genuine sick leave without retaliation, respect for physical and cognitive limitations, and protection from arbitrary termination.
But you're asking the wrong question. The real question is why, despite decades of evidence showing these practices improve retention and performance, they remain exceptional rather than standard. The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as designed. It is optimized for wealth extraction, not value creation.
Public companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. Every dollar spent on employee wellbeing that doesn't directly boost quarterly metrics is arguably a breach of fiduciary duty. Middle managers who genuinely care get promoted out or pushed out. The few companies that do care either have unusual ownership structures (co-ops, private ownership with values-driven founders) or are temporarily buying talent in hot markets. Once conditions change, watch how quickly that 'caring' evaporates.
So yes, we all know what caring looks like. The question is why we keep pretending the current system has any mechanism to deliver it at scale.
tome · 4h ago
> The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as designed.
I don't follow this bit. It's worse for employees, it's worse for employers, and it's exactly as designed?
ZunarJ5 · 4h ago
I have expanded on this above.
awesome_dude · 3h ago
One of the weirdest things I am seeing is the pushback from employers on "Remote"
We have actual studies showing that remote workers are more productive, have higher morale, and save themselves and their company money (no commute, no office rent)
And yet employers are still doggedly determined that employees sit in their toxic offices being miserable.
Employers are worse off (lower productivity), employees are worse off (lower morale).
Paracompact · 3h ago
> Once conditions change, watch how quickly that 'caring' evaporates.
I work in a tech field, but not quite the "pamper you with massages and ice cream sundaes" part of it. I am profoundly uncomfortable with the cultural deception at those types of places.
BobbyJo · 5h ago
What risk/return are they expecting employees to accept? What risk/return are they willing to accept? Any advantage they give themselves over the employee, to me, means they don't care.
nickff · 4h ago
I don’t understand what you’re talking about; could you please give some sort of example, or perhaps further elaborate?
BobbyJo · 4h ago
For larger companies, "You have to move to X place and work 1 day a week in-office, but also we just laid some people off and will give you no guarantee that you won't be laid off after moving" is a good example that's common right now. You know none of the leadership is getting that kind of deal, but they expect a % of their employees to deal with it.
For smaller companies, bad equity splits, or a lack of transparency around equity or company performance is probably most common. It's pretty common for startups to avoid telling the whole story to the rank and file to keep them unaware of the actual risk/reward they are taking, which then allows founders/leadership to pad the risk/reward they themselves get.
atoav · 4h ago
Well a classic would be to insist the employee treats the company like "family" and comes in when someone misses their shift on their free day.
But when the employee is in need the employer discards them like an expendable resource, instead of making good on the "we are family"-tagline.
Work world is full of these one-sided "deals".
koakuma-chan · 4h ago
Employer who pays themselves less than they pay their employees.
awesome_dude · 3h ago
That's a foolish metric - the employer is usually making money through asset accumulation (the business that they own is worth more)
Cash compensation isn't very reliable.
atoav · 4h ago
When I was producing no-budget movies (people work for you without pay!) the secret trick was to keep a mental list of why people were here. Diana the camera assistant was here because she liked to learn, John the actor was here because he liked to try some things out, Linda was here to meet people, Joe was here because he is your friend.
Now you only need to make sure the basics (food, shelter, etc) is alright and that everybody gets what they came for each day.
So to answer your question: What it looks like for an employer to care depends on the specifc employee. Some may just look for financial benefits, others (like me) may just want to be given the time and means to do their job well, yet others value free rime more than money, or a better office, more autonomy within their domain or whatnot. The wishes are many.
But you need to first get the basics right, and many fail at that.
awesome_dude · 4h ago
There are employers that care - they genuinely try to keep their staff engaged, and happy. They also, when times are hard, are the ones least likely to make people redundant, they hold on as long as humanly possible.
Then there are the employers at the other end of the scale, those who couldn't care less about their staff, they think that they pay the staff and that's all that's required of them, and everything that goes wrong is the staff's fault.
So, in practice, the employers that see their staff as human beings rather than "resources" to be exploited is a bloody good start.
cyberax · 4h ago
Stock options.
hinkley · 4h ago
Unless they're preferred stock options, that's not caring. It's misdirection.
rjbwork · 4h ago
Yup. If they won't show you a cap table or if you have different shares from the founders, you value it at zero until proven otherwise (liquidity event).
cyberax · 4h ago
Uhm... No? Founders typically also have common stock. Preferred stock is for investors.
hinkley · 3h ago
I'm pretty sure that's not the case, but I've never heard of a early or even founding engineers getting preferred stock.
Which is just a roundabout way then of saying that they want to appear like they care, but they don't actually. You will become math to them at the point where they get rewarded and find out your reward is more work.
cyberax · 1h ago
Sorry, but you're wrong.
"Preferred stock" is not really "preferred", it has a lot of limitations that common stock doesn't have. But it does have preference during liquidation and/or secondary market tender offers.
There are ways that founders or major stockholders can use to screw the minor stockholders, but preferred stock does not protect against them at all.
> Which is just a roundabout way then of saying that they want to appear like they care, but they don't actually.
If people are giving non-trivial amounts of stock in a company where they work is "just math", then I don't know what else you want.
throwmeaway222 · 5h ago
Yeah they're literally paying you money so they don't have to.
hexage1814 · 4h ago
It oftentimes feels like you are paid way less than you actually gave to the company – assuming you actually worked hard and cared.
In my country it's like "Well, the company broke all records of profit, we earned 500 million dollars more than last years. Here, have this box of chocolate as a gift. Keep the good work guys"
saulpw · 4h ago
This is why workers are "losers" according to the Gervais Principle.
Maybe this opinion would have more weight if you respected that humans are not perfectly spherical massless money sinks.
mrbungie · 4h ago
Not to invoke a true scotsman fallacy, but most knowledge/white-collar workers I know aspire to be more than just being a cog on a payroll.
hinkley · 4h ago
Maybe this opinion would have more weight if you didn't use a throwaway account to post it.
NegativeK · 4h ago
That, at best, is dehumanizing the employer. There is no corporate structure that exists without humans making the decisions at some point in the chain. The decisions might be abstracted or broken into small chunks, but it's still humans at the bottom.
And humans that replace caring with money are assholes.
RobRivera · 4h ago
I missed this clause in
checks notes
Literally my entire career.
awesome_dude · 4h ago
No. They are profiting from your labour, and returning a smaller portion of that profit to you.
Your work creates the profit that your salary comes from, the employer takes a cut of that and gives you what they deem they can get away with.
atoav · 4h ago
No, they are giving you a tiny fraction of the cake you earn them. The fact is that you are there to make them money.
throwmeaway222 · 1h ago
I guarantee you, if you were running the company you work at, there might be a few here and there that you truly care about, but the vast majority of your workers are workers.
alphazard · 5h ago
This is a very round-about way of saying that trait conscientiousness predicts employee performance (which it does). Good to see a random guy's Substack coheres with the psychometric literature.
hinkley · 4h ago
Random guy is CEO of an AI company.
I'm finding the cognitive dissonance of both trying to do away with workers and having opinions on what makes a good one to be headache-inducing.
koakuma-chan · 4h ago
What a word. I understand consciousness but conscientiousness is going too far.
andy99 · 5h ago
Random guy :)
peer2pay · 4h ago
I’ve never agreed with a title and then disagreed with the content more than this article.
Jokes on you, I care a lot about my work and can still get it done in 5 hours a day.
rooftopzen · 4h ago
I agree w post, and relevancy from its original date in 2020, but curious on what original intention was to repost from such a long time ago, see link belwo
A lot of the criticism in this thread sounds like it’s coming from people who don’t give a shit and just want a paycheck
Some people are motivated by what they produce at work, not their compensation
The benefit of this being from 2020 is we can see he was right, he built a colossal company at breakneck speed
DonsDiscountGas · 4h ago
Are you looking for a job by any chance? I promise you'll have the opportunity to produce great things for extremely mediocre compensation. That's what you want, right?
koakuma-chan · 4h ago
Are you hiring? I can work for minimum wage.
NegativeK · 4h ago
I give a shit, want a paycheck, _and_ want a life outside of work.
It's completely possible to want fair hours while also caring. And, like many commenters, I'm frustrated with employers that want more than a third of my waking existence.
lvl155 · 4h ago
It’s hard to find people with talent period let alone people willing to take ownership without reciprocal financial incentives. In my 20s, I was this guy. I worked hard and just assumed it will work out in the end. Boy oh boy was I wrong.
andy99 · 5h ago
(2020) - I agree, personally I think two issues are 1. taking advantage of people caring to give them below market comp for the work expected of them, and (more subjectively) 2. having some lame and disconnected mission or stated culture. It's easier to care about building something cool than about displaying grit and authenticity or whatever BS some cost center has come up with.
Point being, it should be reciprocal. Most (at least many) technical people will always want to do good work and care about the problem they're solving, it's easy to destroy that by expecting them to care only about story points or whatever instead of something meaningful.
hazek112 · 4h ago
The first step to hiring people who care is paying them enough that they have a reason to care.
Frankly, during my time at Amazon I was never really that worried about a service going down. Wasn't paid enough to lose sleep over someone else's problem.
Founders care because they have the most skin in the game - unless it's for a family or a huge ego I don't find it surprising when employees don't care outside of 40hrs a week. I even support that line of thinking.
latchkey · 4h ago
I read through all the comments and it is amazing that nobody is mentioning the fact that the reason why this 2020 post is coming up now is because of this:
Scale recently laid off 200 full-time employees and terminated 500 contractor positions. The CEO, author of the post, went to work for Meta.
- We are a cult: Check
- Align with the mission: Check
- Be obsessed: Check
- Abandon everything for the obsession: Check
- Overwork and get underpaid: Check
I mean, I deeply care about what I do, yet I also care deeply care about my work/life balance (slow careers be damned, I gotta live once, and my passion needs cooling down, and my family is equally important to me). I will pull all-nighters if I see them as a necessity, not because you force me to do so, and I'm not shy of doing them.
This mentality of the author is deeply flawed. Yes, success requires hard work, but doesn't necessitate a burnout.
I'll pass, thanks.
magicmicah85 · 4h ago
Comments disabled. 2.7 rating on Glassdoor for work/life balance at Scale. I’m sure it’s nothing.
As to the substance of the article, I agree with the title, but the line of interview questions used is trying to answer “how many hours can we squeeze out of you?”. Being concerned your company will become a credential rather than a cult? I’m not here to drink the Kool-Aid, I’m here to do the work and then do the other things I care about outside of work.
mr90210 · 5h ago
Hire professionals. My care is reserved to me, my family and my friends.
hinkley · 4h ago
Professionalism is a form of caring, though.
MengerSponge · 4h ago
Professionals care about the quality of their work. They care about what they're mastering and making. Life's too short to not care.
It's not the same caring that is reserved for family and friends, though.
GEBBL · 4h ago
Is it common that folks are going into work at 11am and leaving at 4pm? I thought America had a crazy work hour culture
AlotOfReading · 4h ago
It's very uncommon to go in that late. What's much more common is people taking morning meetings from home and then going into the office to complete their day. If you're a 996 grindset blogger, I suspect you're fairly likely to mistake one for the other.
I guess I just don't care.
Funnily enough, hearing this question is a huge red flag for me. It signals they value work hours more than quality delivery.
It absolutely matters to care about the problem you're solving. A team of people with a skill level of X that cares about a problem will be better in both performance and in general culture and being around than a team with a skill level of 2X that consists of mercenaries.
I learned it the hard way. When I was asked to set up a team of 14-16 engineers, I first went the latter way. The interviewing was difficult and the bar was higher, but the people who were there were focused on what they could get out of the role. Circumstances led to a reset, and the second time around, I built a team that optimized for caring about the problem. I started with the two people I liked working with in the initial group because they liked the problem statement. I had to lower the computer science performance bar to build the team to size. I also had a budget left over for other purposes, as we didn't need to pay for 2X performance, and the team was heavier with younger folks.
We delivered the goals in three months. More importantly, working with people who have a shared purpose, rather than "getting mine," is just a better place to be. I had to spend time skilling up some people, but they did it in a month!
Since then, I've always optimized for being around "mission-driven" people, rather than "mercenaries." Sometimes you need that 5X skill set, in which case a limited-time contractual helper is probably better, but the team has a soul.
Wanting to work hard is positively correlated with perseverance and work which inspires.
Hard working is good when it's good.
The truth is that the level of your craft has probably the biggest impact. A beginner can tear themselves apart with stressfull allnighters while doing a job and deliver the result a seasoned pro would have delivered in an afternoon.
And if all your employees are doing is stressfull allnighters and damage control they have no time to learn how to do properly and fast. But I get it, the goal is to extract money from their labour, not be their friends or produce quality products.
We're in a weird place where we can actually read what these people think publicly.
Giving a shit about your work is the second point. Without any other comments suggesting the alternative, I assume this is second in order of importance. And as there are only two points I would take that to mean the second point is the least important.
His first point is to give a shit about the company. This being the most important point probably explains the accusations of late payments and wage theft from former employees and contractors against the company. They just weren't putting the company first!
As an aside, I have been thinking of this in relation to the 3 laws, as in a sense, executives see workers as robots, and I think the 3 laws mesh quite nicely with corporate directives.
1) A robot (employee) may not injure the company or allow the company to come to harm;
2) A robot must obey their manager unless it conflicts with the First Law;
3) A robot must protect its own existence (in the company) as long as it does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The work doesn't really come into to it, unless it is a subset of the 3rd law.
"Four hours of creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician." ~~ Henri Poincaré.
https://nesslabs.com/how-much-work-is-enough-work
Thus, hiring people who do care requires very particular kinds of bosses who can accept/handle people who care. Companies who do not have those are in my opinion often better served with people who don't give a fuck, but hardly ever (because they don't really consider it to be worth their time) actively disagree with orders from above. If the description of such people sounds passive-aggressive to you, I don't disagree: such people sometimes are this way. So, it might actually (surprisingly) make sense for companies to scout for passive-aggressive people. :-)
My impression is that cult leaders often do care about their followers. The problems rather start when the cult member becomes disobedient - this is when matters become very dirty.
Cult leaders care about their followers insofar as they stay submissive ass-kissing sycophants. It's not like they care about the follower's actual well-being.
As a former freelancer the standards I hold myself to are exceptionally high. Then I got employed and carried that standard with me (still do). The problem is that this means work will be pushed my way, because I am sometimes literally the only person who can do it within a day instead making it a month long project.
This led then to such an amount of work that I could mo longer hold that quality level, which made me unhappy. Of course I complained all the way, with no real change.
The only thing that worked was a strategic leaking of the fact that I was looking for positions elsewhere, suddenly a whole lot of concessions were made, and since then it has gotten better and I got much better at rejecting work.
Care too much and you burn out and get replaced.
... or you become a menace to your boss. :-)
But you're asking the wrong question. The real question is why, despite decades of evidence showing these practices improve retention and performance, they remain exceptional rather than standard. The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as designed. It is optimized for wealth extraction, not value creation.
Public companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. Every dollar spent on employee wellbeing that doesn't directly boost quarterly metrics is arguably a breach of fiduciary duty. Middle managers who genuinely care get promoted out or pushed out. The few companies that do care either have unusual ownership structures (co-ops, private ownership with values-driven founders) or are temporarily buying talent in hot markets. Once conditions change, watch how quickly that 'caring' evaporates.
So yes, we all know what caring looks like. The question is why we keep pretending the current system has any mechanism to deliver it at scale.
I don't follow this bit. It's worse for employees, it's worse for employers, and it's exactly as designed?
We have actual studies showing that remote workers are more productive, have higher morale, and save themselves and their company money (no commute, no office rent)
And yet employers are still doggedly determined that employees sit in their toxic offices being miserable.
Employers are worse off (lower productivity), employees are worse off (lower morale).
I work in a tech field, but not quite the "pamper you with massages and ice cream sundaes" part of it. I am profoundly uncomfortable with the cultural deception at those types of places.
For smaller companies, bad equity splits, or a lack of transparency around equity or company performance is probably most common. It's pretty common for startups to avoid telling the whole story to the rank and file to keep them unaware of the actual risk/reward they are taking, which then allows founders/leadership to pad the risk/reward they themselves get.
But when the employee is in need the employer discards them like an expendable resource, instead of making good on the "we are family"-tagline.
Work world is full of these one-sided "deals".
Cash compensation isn't very reliable.
Now you only need to make sure the basics (food, shelter, etc) is alright and that everybody gets what they came for each day.
So to answer your question: What it looks like for an employer to care depends on the specifc employee. Some may just look for financial benefits, others (like me) may just want to be given the time and means to do their job well, yet others value free rime more than money, or a better office, more autonomy within their domain or whatnot. The wishes are many.
But you need to first get the basics right, and many fail at that.
Then there are the employers at the other end of the scale, those who couldn't care less about their staff, they think that they pay the staff and that's all that's required of them, and everything that goes wrong is the staff's fault.
So, in practice, the employers that see their staff as human beings rather than "resources" to be exploited is a bloody good start.
Which is just a roundabout way then of saying that they want to appear like they care, but they don't actually. You will become math to them at the point where they get rewarded and find out your reward is more work.
"Preferred stock" is not really "preferred", it has a lot of limitations that common stock doesn't have. But it does have preference during liquidation and/or secondary market tender offers.
There are ways that founders or major stockholders can use to screw the minor stockholders, but preferred stock does not protect against them at all.
> Which is just a roundabout way then of saying that they want to appear like they care, but they don't actually.
If people are giving non-trivial amounts of stock in a company where they work is "just math", then I don't know what else you want.
In my country it's like "Well, the company broke all records of profit, we earned 500 million dollars more than last years. Here, have this box of chocolate as a gift. Keep the good work guys"
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
And humans that replace caring with money are assholes.
checks notes
Literally my entire career.
Your work creates the profit that your salary comes from, the employer takes a cut of that and gives you what they deem they can get away with.
I'm finding the cognitive dissonance of both trying to do away with workers and having opinions on what makes a good one to be headache-inducing.
Jokes on you, I care a lot about my work and can still get it done in 5 hours a day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=alexw.substack.com
Some people are motivated by what they produce at work, not their compensation
The benefit of this being from 2020 is we can see he was right, he built a colossal company at breakneck speed
It's completely possible to want fair hours while also caring. And, like many commenters, I'm frustrated with employers that want more than a third of my waking existence.
Point being, it should be reciprocal. Most (at least many) technical people will always want to do good work and care about the problem they're solving, it's easy to destroy that by expecting them to care only about story points or whatever instead of something meaningful.
Frankly, during my time at Amazon I was never really that worried about a service going down. Wasn't paid enough to lose sleep over someone else's problem.
Founders care because they have the most skin in the game - unless it's for a family or a huge ego I don't find it surprising when employees don't care outside of 40hrs a week. I even support that line of thinking.
Scale recently laid off 200 full-time employees and terminated 500 contractor positions. The CEO, author of the post, went to work for Meta.
https://scale.com/blog/scale-ai-announces-next-phase-of-comp...
On the other hand, I can easily imagine why nobody mentioned this fact befor you did: only few people read startup gossip.
Numbers disagree: 485 comments, 470 points.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44268197
This mentality of the author is deeply flawed. Yes, success requires hard work, but doesn't necessitate a burnout.
I'll pass, thanks.
As to the substance of the article, I agree with the title, but the line of interview questions used is trying to answer “how many hours can we squeeze out of you?”. Being concerned your company will become a credential rather than a cult? I’m not here to drink the Kool-Aid, I’m here to do the work and then do the other things I care about outside of work.
It's not the same caring that is reserved for family and friends, though.