What's the legality of this? In many jurisdictions, at least my former one, you can't be made to work overtime I believe. I had a job where I had to sign something that said I agreed to work overtime (unpaid as a salaried employee) but understood I could refuse and be accommodated.
I know it's a startup so if that's what they want to do, cool (even if I think it's misguided) but I'd expect everyone would have to have some vested equity ie be an owner and not being forced to grind as an employee.
Provided the employee is appropriately classified as except OR they are hourly and paid appropriate overtime rates, I'd expect they are ok. Maybe their hours don't surpass 40? More likely there's no limit on number of hours worked (I'm unaware of any in my state)
In the US, where this company is located, software engineers are exempt from overtime rules.
The exception is supposed to be for workers that control their hours and managers who control others. Software engineers are explicit exception. The manager exception was cresting problems for low-salary managers so they added salary limit which are talking about increasing.
We were "exempt" too in the sense that we didn't get paid o/t, but could also (at least by law) refuse to work more than a legislated maximum, either 40 or 44 I believe.
Replying to myself: also, at least in my experience, if your job is digging ditches, making well formatted powerpoints like in consulting, or some similar mindless work, you can pretty much just add more hours and be productive. For brain work, it doesn't work that way and six days will get you less output than four. I'm pretty sure this is accepted wisdom.
So either they have a bunch of mindless grinding work to do that doesn't require autonomous thought, or they're going against accepted practice for working productively. I'd be concerned if I was an investor.
I'm pretty sure that even the concentration of a security guard will start to falter after 20 consecutive hours. That is probably going to be to the detriment of the security of whatever they were supposed to guard.
It's only considered working "overtime" if you're working beyond the required hours for the role. And the job posting is pretty clear that the role is 6 days a week. It might not be your cup of tea, and the job description does a good job of screening you out before you even apply. I don't think there is any malpractice here.
Sorry to "uhm ackshually" you but software engineers, and many other professions to my knowledge, are exempt from overtime in the US regardless of what the job description is.
at will, exempt employee. no overtime. There is generally no cap on the number of hours an employee can legally work in a day. Employer can ask for just about any hours, and you can quit if you don't like it.
It is a 5 person engineering team, so I’d give them the benefit of the doubt. But more importantly, where are the salary ranges? You are required by law in California to post salary ranges.
Why is the team size more relevant than the equity share when evaluating fairness of 1 day weekends? Since usually full-time workers aren't compensated for overtime, and startup pay is usually low, while founders and investors take the lion's share of an eventual payoff
5 person engineering team is the total size of engineering presence. They mention they don’t want managers till they grow to 20-30 engineers, which makes me believe this is a very small startup and not an established company. It is very usual for employees at companies that size to work more than just 9-5 5 days a week, usually in anticipation of a big eventual payoff.
Or maybe someone thinks it's better to be explicit about how they work like crazy. Or they want to be "generous" by giving you Saturdays off once in a while.
The day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, was NOT a day off on the company calendar at one of my previous jobs. And yet every year, without fail, the CEO sent an email a few days before saying he was giving us Black Friday off.
I always rolled my eyes when Thanksgiving would be near and we'd get the benefit of an "unplanned" day off again.
Most of those retail jobs also keep you an hour or more under full-time status to deny benefits coverage because it's more profitable that way. Not much a standard of behavior to model.
fabricated outrage. There is no reason why a "go for it" startup wouldn't be honest about the hours they want to get out of employees. You don't have to work here. It's not always a conspiracy.
Most jobs in the bay area are 6-7 day a week jobs. You may not be logged in to Slack on Saturday and Sunday but you're monitoring email or on the look out for PagerDuty.
I’ve been working in the Bay for over a decade and this is what an on-call rotation is for. If you’re doing this every week and are not a founder quit your job.
Rotation helps, but as a more senior/experienced person on the team it's easy for things to be "elevated" up to you because person X couldn't figure it out, etc.
"- We implement a loose SCRUM methodology with a 15-minute standup every day
- Our product/engineering cycle is two weeks and culminates in a demo/product planning day"
Imagine working Saturdays so you have time for a all day Scrum ...
Yeah there have been times in my career I've given the discretionary effort to work extra hours. I enjoy the baseline work. But only during the times I had real autonomy, never during the times of micromanaged bullshit like this.
To agree to these exceptional terms I would have to be offered something exceptional. A very large equity stake, or a very (personally) meaningful job. Something tells me that this company offers neither. No salary range mentioned in the posting and a vague description "ubiquitous cloud platform to store, visualize, and analyze data from biological experiments".
How many people wake up on a Saturday morning full of excitement to go to the office in Mission Bay to build some web visualization dashboards for B2B? Hmm...
> Our product/engineering cycle is two weeks and culminates in a demo/product planning day
This is great, honestly. It's a self-sustaining way of enforcing accountability.
If you have nothing to show or demo after a 2 week sprint, during which you were surely assigned tasks to do, it's clear you haven't actually done anything.
> If you have nothing to show or demo after a 2 week sprint, during which you were surely assigned tasks to do, it's clear you haven't actually done anything.
Having just gotten out of a role like this: It's not.
It punishes doing backend / infra, tech debt, planning, or any work that isn't customer-facing (ie: stuff your senior+ engineers typically are expected to do). The demo day audience is largely non-technical people rather than it being a technical demo.
If you spent the sprint, or a large part of it, helping others or laying the groundwork for future projects with a company that treats demos like you've stated, you'll quickly push out anyone who is doing anything but blindly working on product.
I didn't leave / get pushed out because of the above, the cycle and meeting-heavy schedule drove me up the wall frankly.
The thing to keep in mind is that many of these young startups, which likely includes the one from the OP, are built on the cloud/AWS. With AWS, there is no infra to manage like in companies of yesteryear; it's all abstracted away to AWS. In fact, at my current job, there doesn't even exist a "sysadmin" job role.
Additionally, I would argue that, especially if you are a senior+ engineer, not having anything to show after a 2 week sprint is a red flag and sets a poor example for junior engineers. Either you aren't meeting expectations for your role, or something is deeply wrong with how your company operates that prevents you from doing any real useful work day-to-day.
Expecting your senior engineers to be producing like exponentially or even linearly more work is not utilizing those engineers' expertise correctly, especially at a startup, in my opinion.
Seniors and especially higher should be expected to be spending some amount of their time on mentorship, helping others, creating/advancing product initiatives by planning or coordinating. If your product managers are flying solo with no input or even having non-technical managers dictate, that's worse than pulling seniors into some planning.
I've never had someone lay this out for me but my experience is there is a large chasm between senior and higher. Bridging that chasm generally doesn't come with increased individual technical output, it comes with utilizing others to advance projects with you.
That isn't to say senior+ can have no technical output all the time but I wouldn't be demo-ing an engineering RFC or new engineering initiatives at a demo day which will be consumed by other teams. Demo days aren't for the engineers or even product team; they already know what they did that week, I can go into version control or listen at standup.
I don't understand how a senior developer partnering with juniors rather than crushing tasks solo equates to eschewing accountability -- especially if the goal is "continuous improvement" of the engineering org.
Although, it's not like the first time I've seen it expressed that senior engineers should outproduce juniors in terms of individual tasks/storypoints, and spend lots of time mentoring and pairing with juniors. Which I think is what you're getting at?
I disagree mightily with that. Those goals are in conflict and emphasizing individual stats is more or less the emperor of all perverse incentives. Instead, I favor the traditional agile/scrum emphasis on team velocity.
> With AWS, there is no infra to manage like in companies of yesteryear; it's all abstracted away to AWS.
I would argue that this is an extraordinary simplification. Infrastructure is abstracted away to the cloud vendor insofar as you don’t (typically) need to worry about power, physical connectivity to the host, logical networking at the layer of (for example) BGP, backup power, and so on.
But you absolutely have to concern yourself with infrastructure management to some extent. Be it backups, CI/CD infrastructure, BCDR management, geographic redundancy, proprietary vendor software that has prerequisites that your cloud provider doesn’t manage, OS patching for VMs, and so on.
Even if a business is 100% on a serverless stack for its service, it will still find itself with infrastructure to manage somewhere.
Some businesses have infrastructure because they need some type of interoperability to failsafe between clouds.
Even if a software business could succeed with no infrastructure of its own and no system administrators, that doesn’t have anything to do with tech debt. Tech debt can and does happen in any stack.
especially if you are a senior+ engineer, not
having anything to show after a 2 week sprint
is a red flag
Is it? Couple of thoughts.
One: At agile/scrum shops where I've worked, it's the team who's responsible for completing goals and demoing and shipping. Not individual developers. So an IC having their own stuff to demo would be incongruous. (I believe this is official "Scrum" doctrine, not that I necessarily care because I'm not the biggest fan of Scrum)
Two: A senior engineer can optimize their time for crushing lots of solo work, or mentoring/collaborating with the junior devs. In that light, if a senior developer was racking up rockstar individual stats, I'd want to make sure that junior devs on their team are getting enough time and guidance.
I can think of countless exceptions to the above. Maybe you have a team comprised entirely of senior+ engineers and no juniors and there's no reason to really collaborate, so senior engineers should then of course be delivering.
If you need a demo day for your five-person team that works in person to identify that one of the four other people hasn't done any work over the last two weeks then something has gone very weird.
I might be spoiling my hand but I get concerned whenever I see any startup saying they are looking for employees to act like owners / put in a lot effort / "we aren't your average place!"
It just seems like it will be amateur hour: immature founders who are in love with startup culture combined with junior and/or desperate employees who don't know better.
I don't mind working hard, crunch, or even acting like an owner but when the these listings also have average salary ($135k - $190k [0]) with no mention of equity (meaning it's either 0.00% or not substantial), that's not ownership; that's a bad deal. If you want me to act like an owner, I expect to be treated and compensated like an owner or at least more than a "cog role" at another startup would be.
Any founder who does the math on what it would take to hire a senior+ employee to behave like an owner (a very large chunk of your employee pool) will realize it's not feasible to hire like that.
No mercenaries! We want people who have been waiting their whole lives to work on something like this.
They don't explain what a mercenary is but from the context it seems they mean people who want to exchange their work for money.
It's obviously important for people to enjoy their jobs and be engaged, but anything that reads to me like they want to skimp out on proper pay and working conditions because of how passionate the employees are just smacks of immaturity.
I think most mature businesses owners would want a mercenary as opposed to a fanatic. If you're doing it for the money, you'll work as part of the team to execute the leader's vision. If somehow you feel you were made to do this, presumably you also come with a bunch of baggage about how you think the product should be, etc etc which maybe is helpful as a co-founder but could be a hassle as a junior dev.
I’ve been on both sides of that table in my career.
As a business owner today, I definitely want a mercenary. A well prepared and thorough mercenary.
The only business I’m willing to be an “owner” of these days is my own. I’ve worked for my dream employer and “took ownership” and learned a few good lessons about how when you don’t own your dream job, it can (but won’t always) become a nightmare.
Agreed. Also, I make a great salary (> $190k) and I work 4 days a week, 5-6 hours a day (or less) most of the time (my work is 100% task based and not hours based). Why would I slave over a company when I can get paid just as much, if not more doing what I love while having tons of free time doing other things I love?
I earn <$110k with relaxed and flexible working conditions (but still 37 hours a week). I worked for $170k, had to travel, worked 50+ hours, and “felt ownership” without having any. I understand if their comp range corresponds to an extra day’s worth of salary to some.
I just couldn’t get $170k without either doing something smarter or harder. The extra money wasn’t worth never being home or present.
Big disclaimer - this is a moot point outside bay area. If you are willing to do a startup for 170k because it is lot more than 110k, why wouldn't you leetcode your way into a fang say as an L5 (adjust level to YoE) making atleast 350-400k?
I should've been more specific with regards to it being average salary for an engineer.
It's not at all a bad salary, it's actually a great salary but because of how many places do pay this well, places shouldn't have sky-high expectations of working six day weeks or constant crunch.
Yes, but you need to consider purchasing power parity and cost of living, as well as out-of-pocket expenses which in other countries might be included in taxes or paid by the employer.
The higher the pay, the higher the competition. Those $150k+ jobs are extremely competitive if they're remote. Senior only. No junior or mid-level.
The average developer looking for a remote job can probably expect closer to $110-140k as an individual contributor in a fully remote job outside of major cities. I'd say this is the majority of the volume of job openings.
Of course there's a minority that pay way more, but as mentioned, competition for those positions is extremely high. The only reason to pay $150k+ is if a company is looking to hire people extremely quickly and the company wants to pay at a level that makes it very hard for employees to jump to another job to earn more.
Source: My company hires engineers in the $120-140k range. We often talk to candidates who at first say they want $175k. We tell them we respect that, and to come back to us if anything changes. More often than not, they come back 1-2 months later asking for the job and happily accepting $120-140k. In the current market you really have to be pretty amazing in order to command $150k+ for remote jobs. For in-person jobs in SF or NYC, getting those salaries will be easier but you'll be paying extremely high COL.
what if the push to work 4 days instead of 5, and less hours in a day, and the wedge being driven between the founders and the proletariat is the result of a psi-ops from Russia and China to hobble the US from the inside. Convince the current generation that working hard and pursuing your craft is inherently a bad thing. I feel like this would work.
> Convince the current generation that working hard and pursuing your craft is inherently a bad thing
It's not. Pushing forward blindly largely builds tech debt either through paths that get abandoned or eschewing documentation & understanding. Most teams would benefit from going slower with many more small probes to figure out how to build the best feature vs throwing tons of big features out.
My opinion on this is that a slow Michaelangelo (eg: every stroke matters) is a better product than a really huge Pollock.
"You will be working on difficult problems in software, including but not limited to web development, systems programming, database administration, algorithmic programming, and cloud infrastructure."
Hm, almost nothing there sounds like "difficult problems in software" it sounds like very routine IT stuff. Of course a lot depends on scale, but even scale is pretty well commoditized these days except for the few companies that are on the leading edge of providing it.
Their two Glassdoor reviews are a fun juxtaposition...
From "CEO-Founder": "First team in biotech software that actually knows what they are doing when it comes to biotech software", "Advice to Management: Keep doing what you are doing."
From "Contractor": "Rude and overconfident management who make it really undesirable to work there. If they are not successful it will mainly be because Alfredo and Aidan are mean people with a big ego who drive away good people from considering joining the company."
78 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadI know it's a startup so if that's what they want to do, cool (even if I think it's misguided) but I'd expect everyone would have to have some vested equity ie be an owner and not being forced to grind as an employee.
Provided the employee is appropriately classified as except OR they are hourly and paid appropriate overtime rates, I'd expect they are ok. Maybe their hours don't surpass 40? More likely there's no limit on number of hours worked (I'm unaware of any in my state)
The exception is supposed to be for workers that control their hours and managers who control others. Software engineers are explicit exception. The manager exception was cresting problems for low-salary managers so they added salary limit which are talking about increasing.
So either they have a bunch of mindless grinding work to do that doesn't require autonomous thought, or they're going against accepted practice for working productively. I'd be concerned if I was an investor.
The only kind of work I have done where you could add hours was security guard, since you do almost nothing all day.
I worked 12h shifts, 13 shifts per month, and that is probably in the higher end of what's doable.
Some people got really strange from working at night. So it is probably not very healthy ...
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...
I see this as a good thing to disclose, rather than finding out that overtime is expected after you start the job.
Or maybe someone thinks it's better to be explicit about how they work like crazy. Or they want to be "generous" by giving you Saturdays off once in a while.
I always rolled my eyes when Thanksgiving would be near and we'd get the benefit of an "unplanned" day off again.
Most of those retail jobs also keep you an hour or more under full-time status to deny benefits coverage because it's more profitable that way. Not much a standard of behavior to model.
Imagine working Saturdays so you have time for a all day Scrum ...
How many people wake up on a Saturday morning full of excitement to go to the office in Mission Bay to build some web visualization dashboards for B2B? Hmm...
This is great, honestly. It's a self-sustaining way of enforcing accountability.
If you have nothing to show or demo after a 2 week sprint, during which you were surely assigned tasks to do, it's clear you haven't actually done anything.
Having just gotten out of a role like this: It's not.
It punishes doing backend / infra, tech debt, planning, or any work that isn't customer-facing (ie: stuff your senior+ engineers typically are expected to do). The demo day audience is largely non-technical people rather than it being a technical demo.
If you spent the sprint, or a large part of it, helping others or laying the groundwork for future projects with a company that treats demos like you've stated, you'll quickly push out anyone who is doing anything but blindly working on product.
I didn't leave / get pushed out because of the above, the cycle and meeting-heavy schedule drove me up the wall frankly.
Additionally, I would argue that, especially if you are a senior+ engineer, not having anything to show after a 2 week sprint is a red flag and sets a poor example for junior engineers. Either you aren't meeting expectations for your role, or something is deeply wrong with how your company operates that prevents you from doing any real useful work day-to-day.
Seniors and especially higher should be expected to be spending some amount of their time on mentorship, helping others, creating/advancing product initiatives by planning or coordinating. If your product managers are flying solo with no input or even having non-technical managers dictate, that's worse than pulling seniors into some planning.
I've never had someone lay this out for me but my experience is there is a large chasm between senior and higher. Bridging that chasm generally doesn't come with increased individual technical output, it comes with utilizing others to advance projects with you.
That isn't to say senior+ can have no technical output all the time but I wouldn't be demo-ing an engineering RFC or new engineering initiatives at a demo day which will be consumed by other teams. Demo days aren't for the engineers or even product team; they already know what they did that week, I can go into version control or listen at standup.
There is a general movement to eschew accountability which is a huge mistake because this concept is critical in continuous improvement.
Although, it's not like the first time I've seen it expressed that senior engineers should outproduce juniors in terms of individual tasks/storypoints, and spend lots of time mentoring and pairing with juniors. Which I think is what you're getting at?
I disagree mightily with that. Those goals are in conflict and emphasizing individual stats is more or less the emperor of all perverse incentives. Instead, I favor the traditional agile/scrum emphasis on team velocity.
I would argue that this is an extraordinary simplification. Infrastructure is abstracted away to the cloud vendor insofar as you don’t (typically) need to worry about power, physical connectivity to the host, logical networking at the layer of (for example) BGP, backup power, and so on.
But you absolutely have to concern yourself with infrastructure management to some extent. Be it backups, CI/CD infrastructure, BCDR management, geographic redundancy, proprietary vendor software that has prerequisites that your cloud provider doesn’t manage, OS patching for VMs, and so on.
Even if a business is 100% on a serverless stack for its service, it will still find itself with infrastructure to manage somewhere.
Some businesses have infrastructure because they need some type of interoperability to failsafe between clouds.
Even if a software business could succeed with no infrastructure of its own and no system administrators, that doesn’t have anything to do with tech debt. Tech debt can and does happen in any stack.
One: At agile/scrum shops where I've worked, it's the team who's responsible for completing goals and demoing and shipping. Not individual developers. So an IC having their own stuff to demo would be incongruous. (I believe this is official "Scrum" doctrine, not that I necessarily care because I'm not the biggest fan of Scrum)
Two: A senior engineer can optimize their time for crushing lots of solo work, or mentoring/collaborating with the junior devs. In that light, if a senior developer was racking up rockstar individual stats, I'd want to make sure that junior devs on their team are getting enough time and guidance.
I can think of countless exceptions to the above. Maybe you have a team comprised entirely of senior+ engineers and no juniors and there's no reason to really collaborate, so senior engineers should then of course be delivering.
It just seems like it will be amateur hour: immature founders who are in love with startup culture combined with junior and/or desperate employees who don't know better.
I don't mind working hard, crunch, or even acting like an owner but when the these listings also have average salary ($135k - $190k [0]) with no mention of equity (meaning it's either 0.00% or not substantial), that's not ownership; that's a bad deal. If you want me to act like an owner, I expect to be treated and compensated like an owner or at least more than a "cog role" at another startup would be.
Any founder who does the math on what it would take to hire a senior+ employee to behave like an owner (a very large chunk of your employee pool) will realize it's not feasible to hire like that.
[0]: https://wellfound.com/jobs/2524214-systems-software-engineer
Easier to buy a lottery ticket.
I saw this in a job posting recently:
They don't explain what a mercenary is but from the context it seems they mean people who want to exchange their work for money.It's obviously important for people to enjoy their jobs and be engaged, but anything that reads to me like they want to skimp out on proper pay and working conditions because of how passionate the employees are just smacks of immaturity.
I'm a merc at heart. Fuck you, pay me.
Personally I've had great luck with mercenaries.
As a business owner today, I definitely want a mercenary. A well prepared and thorough mercenary.
The only business I’m willing to be an “owner” of these days is my own. I’ve worked for my dream employer and “took ownership” and learned a few good lessons about how when you don’t own your dream job, it can (but won’t always) become a nightmare.
The lack of awareness is stunning.
I earn <$110k with relaxed and flexible working conditions (but still 37 hours a week). I worked for $170k, had to travel, worked 50+ hours, and “felt ownership” without having any. I understand if their comp range corresponds to an extra day’s worth of salary to some.
I just couldn’t get $170k without either doing something smarter or harder. The extra money wasn’t worth never being home or present.
Wtf? Are salaries THAT high in the US?
I should've been more specific with regards to it being average salary for an engineer.
It's not at all a bad salary, it's actually a great salary but because of how many places do pay this well, places shouldn't have sky-high expectations of working six day weeks or constant crunch.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/under-100k-low-income-s...
The average developer looking for a remote job can probably expect closer to $110-140k as an individual contributor in a fully remote job outside of major cities. I'd say this is the majority of the volume of job openings.
Of course there's a minority that pay way more, but as mentioned, competition for those positions is extremely high. The only reason to pay $150k+ is if a company is looking to hire people extremely quickly and the company wants to pay at a level that makes it very hard for employees to jump to another job to earn more.
Source: My company hires engineers in the $120-140k range. We often talk to candidates who at first say they want $175k. We tell them we respect that, and to come back to us if anything changes. More often than not, they come back 1-2 months later asking for the job and happily accepting $120-140k. In the current market you really have to be pretty amazing in order to command $150k+ for remote jobs. For in-person jobs in SF or NYC, getting those salaries will be easier but you'll be paying extremely high COL.
It's not. Pushing forward blindly largely builds tech debt either through paths that get abandoned or eschewing documentation & understanding. Most teams would benefit from going slower with many more small probes to figure out how to build the best feature vs throwing tons of big features out.
My opinion on this is that a slow Michaelangelo (eg: every stroke matters) is a better product than a really huge Pollock.
There are times to go fast and take on a little debt vs going slow and getting it right.
It's often hard to know the right time to apply the right strategy. I would like to believe that's what experience gives us.
Hm, almost nothing there sounds like "difficult problems in software" it sounds like very routine IT stuff. Of course a lot depends on scale, but even scale is pretty well commoditized these days except for the few companies that are on the leading edge of providing it.
As mentioned in another comment if you’re not a founder this is a waste of your time.
You’ll be better off and will make significantly more comp at a public company / FAANG if you want to work this hard for someone else.
This philosophy is what founders sell to young engineers to burn them out for peanuts and pizza while the founders get an OK exit if they’re lucky.
From "CEO-Founder": "First team in biotech software that actually knows what they are doing when it comes to biotech software", "Advice to Management: Keep doing what you are doing."
From "Contractor": "Rude and overconfident management who make it really undesirable to work there. If they are not successful it will mainly be because Alfredo and Aidan are mean people with a big ego who drive away good people from considering joining the company."