Is 7 days a week the new norm (for YC)?
I had to unfortunately voluntarily quit the last on-site contract due to it being 7 days a week (I tried to take off a Sunday, didn't work), on top of a requirement to be there until 8-9pm daily and occasionally pull all-nighters when there are sales demos (at the office until 7AM the next day - then stayed at work for the next day). I tried to stick it out, and even though I consider myself to have the best work ethic of anyone I know, being at an office nearly 24/7/365 to do basic React work with constantly changing directions/requirements felt pointless to say the least. It wasn't like we were building something with a clear goal in mind - and the founders did nothing. They would shoot hoops with the nerf basketball, leave for 2-3 hours at a time, come back with food, talk, etc.
Anyway, so I quit to find another gig, and in my first interview (YC company, just raised) the CEO says "We work weekends, so it's 7 days a week, just want to make sure that's ok with you".
So my question to the YC community is:
Is this the new norm for YC startups?
YC founders who are requiring 24/7/365 work:
What do you feel you're getting out of it? Better output? Or is it more about a person completely dedicating themselves to you?
88 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadI've been a startup manager for 12+ years and I can count the number of times I've asked someone to work a Saturday on one hand.
It sounds like YCombinator needs some training on talent management.
Not saying I agree with the practice or the value of the signaling, just kind of speculating here.
I worked at a YC company a couple years ago. They did not say they were 7-day-weekers, but the culture encouraged it.
There were 2 planning meetings per week, one on Thursday and one on Monday. So if you set a goal on Thursday… you should have it done by Monday.
A young manager there would work 24/7, stressing the hell out of most people who worked with them.
Of course, things would be broken that required weekend death marches.
The thing with startups is, it’s easy to default to this. After all, to the founders, this is the most important thing ever. It’s their ticket. And they try to make it seem like your ticket as well (it’s not).
But smart people don’t work like this. Smart thoughts don’t come out of exhausted brains. It’s a meat grinder for no reason. It’s sadistic.
It can be fun in a way, for a while, if you don't have a family and you get along with all your coworkers and have a good team dynamic established. But it's not sustainable and it doesn't produce high quality code. When you are working with a deadline of "tomorrow morning" you make all kinds of compromises to get stuff working, that are then immediate technical debt that slows you down on the next feature and it just keeps piling up (this was also in the days before automated testing was popular, so you ended up breaking a lot of stuff that you didn't find out about until the QA team started reporting bugs).
We had a couple of middle-aged folks in the company and they tended to disengage from this, not so much because they did not have the stamina but because they had families and responsibilities outside of work, and they had enough experience to know that it was ultimately a path to burnout.
It makes total sense to create technical debt if you run against the clock spending VC money. If you don't make it till the next round -- it doesn't matter how great everything was.
But they time to pay it all back will come.
> After all, to the founders, this is the most important thing ever. It’s their ticket... But smart people don’t work like this. Smart thoughts don’t come out of exhausted brains. It’s a meat grinder for no reason. It’s sadistic.
They're smart, but they're angry.
Go around and ask the 22 year old YC founders, "How do you deal with anger?" and their answer is "grind." I've asked 5 YC founders on different occasions, every single person said grind! They even used that word.
Some kids didn't deal with their anger, with their parents hitting them and the capriciousness of cram school. Other kids took Women, Gender and Sexuality classes, or they painted, and addressed their anger earlier.
Once a YC founder told me that "this" was "about" what sounded like a college aged vengeance. To proverbially prove all the haters wrong. Dude, that's nuts! These people are angry.
YC sincerely wants people to succeed. It's attractive for people who deal with their anger by working a lot. That's reasonable. Is it sustainable? I don't know, it's a complex question. I wouldn't do it to myself. But I don't feel angry every day.
I disagree on both points 1) that only young, inexperienced founders have this mindset and 2) that this mindset is somehow better than other forms of inspiration/opportunity.
No amount of "being angry" equals having the skill, finesse, or revenues to see a successful exit. I recently read the avg. age of a founder who exits (acquisition or IPO) was age 45. The 20-something founders who "grind" are not more successful.
Creating a company to "prove the haters wrong" seems misguided and actually far less potent than doing it out of survival, or because there is an incredible financial opportunity in front of you.
> Is it sustainable?
An adjacent question, but the answer is an obvious "No" right? Anyway I was really getting at the question: Is this what to expect from YC founders in 2024+? Context being I've never been asked to work weekends as a normal schedule in 15+ years of working at startups in San Francisco, but recently got asked twice in a row, both from YC.
> YC sincerely wants people to succeed. It's attractive for people who deal with their anger by working a lot.
Equating the success metric to people who have anger problems from the perspective of YC.
Was there ever a consensus that 20-somethings who grind are more successful? I don't think so.
They simply do not have the requisite broad life skills that are required in business to succeed. They may have the energy, grit, a narrow set of skills and then stumble upon a goldmine product, but the combination of these factors results in what, a 1-2% successful exit rate?
As for the answer of "is it sustainable", it really depends how rich their parents are and how much they can fail upwards. Apparently, there are a lot of rich parents in the US.
Another point of view is that, if what you say is true, then this isn't as important as it seems.
That's the point.
My first job was at a startup in the mid 1980s. This was the norm then. Ever hear of the term "Death March?"
In the 1990s we started to understand that working developers too much was counterproductive - they ended up adding more defects to the system than they were resolving or delivering. Part of what we learned was a developer is shot after being in the office for 10 hours. We also learned that you need at least one day a week where you weren't in the office at all. Altogether, that means we learned 60 hours per week is the max you can get and maintain quality and morale.
So, companies today are going to re-learn these lessons, you say?
Those who refuse to learn to learn history are doomed to repeat it, they say. I wouldn't want to return to the period from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s. It was counterproductive and morale-destroying.
https://www.amazon.com/Death-March-Developers-Surviving-Impo...
Or maybe that's where the 10x developers shine. I wouldn't know, not being one and never having met one...
Above that, the teams will be present, or rather their bodies will be, but non productive.
Death march is a real thing and it results, as the name implies, in death.
As a manager, if you choose to run your team in death march mode, then it implies reaching your goal is more important than the well-being of your team and the ability to function long-term. Short term is... short term.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_overtimeexemptions.htm
https://starpointinjurylaw.com/articles/information/work-7-d...
Startups don't fit into one of the excepted categories.
When I started my company I personally worked 7 days a week, but expecting it of employees seems completely bonkers.
Expecting that of employees? Ngmi.
Yeah I know, worked at a startup, founders where pressuring everyone to work harder, asked why people left before 8pm, they got at million exit, no-one else got anything.
And they were spending company money on cars, travelling and expensive lunches each day (most expensive steaks in town), living the life.
An extra 10 hours never made or broke a business in the history of civilization.
I would laugh in the face of whoever suggests to work literal 7 days a week as total nutjob, but I'm hopefully done with the whole VC and big tech thing.
I've had all-nighters, 7-day weeks, and death marches, but those were the exception, the result of unplanned, temporary circumstances. The norm was 5 days, engineering shouldn't be a sweat shop.
It's the main reason why I avoid working for startups too. Had a brief stint working for one a decade ago, although they didn't ask me to work weekends, there was this pervasive idea that people had to work more than what was stipulated in their contracts. This was already a big red flag to me.
Why governments aren't regulating this more, is beyond me. In Europe you'd probably struggle to do a 7 day, 10h+ work week legally, but in the US it appears to be fine.
Why YC isn't enforcing better standards is another question. I suppose, again, that it's extremely skewed to the founder's perspective and to them it's obviously worth it.
In any other case I'm not sure why you'd let your life be thrown away like that.
I've never heard of any employee who has "founder equity" (AKA preferred stock), but I guess I wouldn't know, people don't really share. Are there any famous examples?
It's rare, but not totally unheard of, for key early technical hires to get, say, 4-5% of the company. Typically though the first few get 1-2%, and it tapers off quickly. By the time you hit employee twenty-something, they're getting 0.1-0.3%.
Not any company I found. The only "founders" who totally give their company to investors are kids who just graduated who get to raise a huge seed round because of family connections, and half the time it's not even their idea nor their company really.
My wife and I run a local business here in SF that does well on its own, but if at any point we wanted to take on VC funding, we would never in a million years do a deal where we give up the board and all the actual ownership of the business we started and grew ourselves.
Selling preferred stock doesn't "give up all the actual ownership of the business". The norm is literally the opposite: Preferred shares don't come with voting rights. Common shares do.
What preferred shares give investors is their investment back first in the event of liquidation. If an investor gives you a million dollars for 1% of your company, and you turn around and sell it for a million dollars, then the investor gets their million dollars back and you get nothing. Obviously. But if you sell the company for two million dollars, then the investor gets their million back and you get a million for yourself.
That's called a liquidation preference. Under standard deal terms investors get 1x. Nothing else to it.
So your fantasy of founding a company and giving yourself preferred shares makes no sense because a) no investor will put money in without seniority rights to recoup the investment if you fail, and b) preferred shares don't mean anything if you don't have investors.
I think you aren't aware of how the real world works, and have a textbook understanding. But not even that because you don't realize you can end up with basically nothing at the end holding only common stock that is given to W-2 employees.
> your fantasy of founding a company
You misread? Maybe intentionally. The company exists and has more customers than 99% of these YC startups. How many businesses are you operating?
> preferred shares don't mean anything if you don't have investors
Obviously, that's the context we're talking about. Bringing on investors. You think common stock is no different than preferred stock which is your main error.
I've founded two successful venture-backed companies. The current one raised a $25m Series A earlier this year. My investors have no control over the company, which is completely normal.
You're deeply confused about all of this.
Why are you focused on YC/startups? Are you interested in the stock options, as a get rich quick scheme? Or are you interested in working during your life and being employed.
Working 60-80 hours a week is above normal and should be compensated as such. Startup stock is a huge risk.
Are you curious why the founders of a company spend 24/7 working it, and why they expect you to do the same? Well there you go, its the only thing the founder thinks about, and they want people to support them in that.
HOW ARE THEY COMPENSATING YOU. Thats the only thing that matters. If you make $1mil/year plus bonus, 80 hrs a week seems more reasonable.
You can probably earn 125-150% of that while working 40 hours a week...
I've worked at a couple of large, well-known companies too but I like startups because there's usually more of a focus on building a product, and usually everyone on the team is interested in the space. In some cases there are early customers with requests/feedback/needs that the iterations are centered around and it's interesting to be close to that, especially when I genuinely care about the problem space.
In most startups I'm also working in an ideal or nearly ideal tech stack - either something I don't mind learning or something I'm already using in my personal stuff. Where at a big corporation it's often a painful tech stack unique to their predicament with devops processes that are outdated and complex. It's also hard to change anything, or introduce new tech which can be much easier at a startup with only a few developers. We can be like "this looks sick let's try it" vs "this looks sick I'm gonna go to Google Docs and create a Request-For-Comment, submit it to my engineering manager for approval, which after some debate he will send to the DofE for approval, which will be mulled over (?) for 6 weeks before being mentioned to the CTO who asks his friend/developer his thoughts who suggests an alternative which sparks a debate in the Google Docs comment section about the time complexity of a click handler".
Why YC: The startups in their directory tend to be more aligned with the problems I care about in tech, and are often quite cutting-edge in terms of mission and tech stack. I used a lot of AngelList in their heyday as well for similar reasons. It felt like a curated list of the startups who were: In SF, have a budget/runway, use modern tech, founders are (ideally) technical themselves or at least passionate about a space and have serious drive.
> Are you curious why the founders of a company spend 24/7 working it
If you read the post I said they were not there 24/7 working, they're often doing other things. Maybe this is the image put forth by YC and maybe it was once the truth, but I'm seeing the opposite now where founders expect 24/7 workers but they themselves are not so passionate and engaged.
> If you make $1mil/year plus bonus, 80 hrs a week seems more reasonable.
Nowhere near that of course, just google market rate salaries in San Francisco (don't forget to adjust for cost of living).
Additionally, this type of time spent can only be done on short time periods and you need to see success at each milestone to warrant ongoing work. So is the big picture vision broken down into reasonable success milestones?
Finally, your physical and mental health is paramount. Working that hard will take a toll on both if you dont have a balance. 7 days of work per week is feasible if you can take some time to exercise or relax within each day. Your mileage (MPG) can increase if you go slower, even if you are working everyday - and will take you further on the long stretches. Its a balance...
Not having a clear goal in mind, not leading by example and using time in the office as a benchmark for progress are all red flags.
Meaningful progress is not about how long you can work, it's about how effective you can be in leveraging limited resources. Problem solvers know that death marches are counterproductive in the end. The big question is how to work smarter and solve more problems using less, i.e. how to not die.
To the downvoters: ultimately the market doesn't care how hard you work. It's brutal but it's true.
I've worked 7 day weeks in companies during crunch time, trying to seal deals for early customers. But working 7 days a week "just because" is busywork.
- Planning for 7day weeks results in no slack for actual emergencies, because the baseline is emergency mode
- This is not sustainable from a quality or output perspective, but people trick themselves into believing it is by using the wrong metrics (butts on seat vs outcomes)
- This is not scalable as the company grows and as successive rounds of employees get less and less equity and thus less motivation for outsized success
- This is great when voluntary and self-driven and terrible if mandated.
- Even if done voluntary, nights/weekends work should focus on learning tasks rather than just increasing the volume of work.
Founder mode. :cool:
^/s I agree with all of your thoughts, especially:
> great when voluntary and self-driven and terrible if mandated
It's an interesting psychological thing: No matter how easy or even comfortable a job is, if you have to be there at X time for Y hours it's now work. It's the scheduling that kills all the joy.
Even if it's your favorite hobby that you do everyday anyway, but now you have to do it for someone at a specific time, even if they agree to pay you for it. Why does it now suck? Add in other layers like: Do it this specific way, do it in a group of others with competing opinions, do it in a distracting office 1 hour away, etc. and it quickly becomes the polar opposite of what you previously considered to be a rewarding hobby or skill.
On the flip side it can be the hardest work in the world but if I do it on my own terms when I feel like it (sometimes I really want to fix something) - then you don't even have to pay me! It's my pleasure. Glad I could help.
Funny how that works. To truly "love what you do" in a career sense is trickier than it seems, because it often involves tolerating a lot of peripheral stuff that everyone naturally hates like commuting or having a bad manager (among other things). For the capable, it takes changing things at your job to get as close to imitating the fun hobby as possible (tech, meeting schedule, hours, flex time) - so that you can actually think and perform from a place of comfort and well-being (why every manager is not perfecting this art is beyond me).
PM: OK, so you did your 5 tickets for this week, but it seems you also put in this cool other feature. If you had time for the cool feature, then why couldnt you just have done the 6th ticket instead which I had prioritied?
Me: Because I dont want to spend Saturday and Sunday on that 6th ticket, I want to do it on something I find interesting.
PM: ?
Me: I'm totally happy not to work on the cool features on my Saturdays and Sundays if that is creating problems, I can just work on open source projects instead, no problem at all.
PM: No please dont do that.
This translates to "I am a bad manager"
investor appears
Investor: "But 10x'ers can"
/cape
investor disappears
Founders: "Whoa"