A note I sent to YCombinator

I think that at a core level, many of us -- especially in the managerial world -- understand that working people to death, especially technical people, never works out well.

The adage of "work smarter, not harder" is absolutely correct. Just like it's better to write five lines of algorithmically beautiful code than a hundred lines of obfuscated spaghetti, it's also better to work reasonable hours in an atmosphere that is comfortable and enjoyable. Working less is often exponentially more productive. Will there be a crunch time, especially in the world of startups? Of course there will, and anyone who would promise otherwise is just plain wrong. That said, it shouldn't be crunch time all the time.

There needs to be a balance. Everyone needs to take their job seriously, and needs to get their work done in an acceptable amount of time... but stressing people out to the point of misery is counter-productive. My engineering team, for example, allows flexible work hours. I lead the team, and usually get into the office around 9:45am. I am rarely in the office before 9:30am, and I'm only in before 9 if I have an important call or meeting. I usually stay until six or six-thirty at night, because that's when I start to feel my productivity slipping. Some of my guys are early risers, and work 7am - 3pm. Some of them sleep later than me, but then go home and work until 3am. As long as their work is getting submitted on time, I don't mind at all: I want people to be comfortable, and not sit in a desk chair for the sake of keeping it warm.

Different companies work in different ways, but I agree with the points that Doug is putting forward in his post. The trend of "we work 18 hours a day to get anything done!" might sound super enthusiastic to a potential investor, but think about the message you're sending your potential talent. Founding a company is one thing, and it's going to require longer days than working on the codebase (unless that's what the founder does at your organization...), but there needs to be a balance. Hopefully, we'll get there soon.

Or, more generalized: "We have some huge thing we want to do, and can't do it ourselves, so we're looking for someone that can pretty much just come in and do it for us."

And all the postings offer in terms of describing/selling why such a immensely talented individual would work for them is: "We're reinventing the future of everything, we work hard and play hard, we can offer competitive salary and equity."

The OP seems to feel this is borne out of some sort of maliciousness, but I really think this is mostly just cluelessness. When you get a little bit of traction and you have a little bit of money in the bank, and you're trying to go even faster and you have 20 major initiatives you want to do and you can only work on like 2 at a time, it's easy to conclude, "We need to hire! We love our company, this is so much better than working at some corporate stuffy job, why wouldn't anyone think the same?"

Most of these companies would probably just be better served forgetting about hiring and building out the core product until they have more product-market fit, so they have enough revenue/funding to compensate employees closer to their talent level, and have a "popular" brand that people would want to actively work for.

Unfortunately this would mean delaying that 3rd party API, or porting your applcation to iOS, or started using SEO/SEM to drive some traffic, which all have huge learning curves that are tough to navigate while you have a ton of other things to do. But if they were THAT critical, I would suggest those startups prioritize them over those other things and doing it themselves.

I imagine a frat house orgy of people puking up code.

If there were some inside knowledge from people who have taken these offers and lived to regret doing so, then maybe this would have some substance. To me, without more info and being willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, it just seems like speculation and pessisism.

I paid charity for my atheist years.

God says... C:\Text\WALDEN.TXT

thy victory, then? Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness -- to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require th

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You DO go to church, right?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7spyhVBrA4

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So, I did a driver for HD Audio. It has a bunch of "widgets" that you connect with wires in software. So, I did my best to make sound come-out all the speakers. :-) The fuck you think I'm gonna do?

It worked on bare metal hardware on two machines, but not in VMWare.

I guess only2-3 people on the planet have to deal with it and once it gets done, it's done. Still, I was wishing for my Commodore 64 SID chip. Actually I just wanted two buffered D2A convertors.

I blissfully remember C64 days. Everybody made waveforms. Now, it's WAV files. I did waveforms in Windows -- had to handle 8 different datatypes. Not fun.

Part of the entertainment value of computers used to be programming them. It's a shame programmers don't get PCs and everybody else gets game consoles. Naa.

God says... C:\Text\DARWIN.TXT

ds. I freely admit the former existence of many islands, now buried beneath the sea, which may have served as halting places for plants and for many animals during their migration. In the coral-producing oceans such sunken islands are now marked by rings of coral or atolls standing over them. Whenever it is fully admitted, as it will some day be, that each species has proceeded from a single birthplace, and when in the course of time we know something definite about the means of distribution, we

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http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/standards/high-defini...

Sometimes, those guys need to grow a pair of balls and say. "It's gonna be 44KHz and 24Bit".

God says... possessest greaves Protasius shamelessness convertedst just_between_us endearments terrors are_you_insane killest powers broughtest derived gains repentest I'll_let_you_know unchain gathers inflamed banquetings sunder restlessly contagion gliding Percival thank_you_very_much dragons deceive assailed wound principally assented vainglorious remarkable horns principles runs multiplicity text strip garlands combined incorruptibly getting Righteousness fruitful are_you_deaf aptly Scriptures mine envious gainsay alone primary breathe in_a_perfect_world forsaketh prefer abase effaced soothed virtue perplexed confirmed liar Nod torment anxious sent unrighteous sky uttered worshipping air new-born rigidly obeys disk allegorically sitteth Soft transforming struck gallantry wings don't lightened may drama ask saying mule oratory sitting fair hither corporeally descent US unsating burn I_forgot astonishment e covenant concord testimony prosper forgetteth forbade I_could_swear Iowa protracted BOOK absetively_posilutely taunted If_had_my_druthers All-creating pwned husbands learn indications Another recoveredst Oil numberest Life well-grounded penalties finally littles alternately befitting fitted transferred modulation reward necessary pertained endued equalled region by_the_way

I also think you're being far too presumptuous about the comp packages these startups are offering. You seem to imply that they're being too stingy. Do you have any evidence for this?

Tim McClarren

By saying "36 hour week" instead of "35-hour week is better", you're showing a bias that better working hours means working less days or taking longer weekends (i.e. 9 days every two weeks), rather than less hours per day (i.e. 7 hours a day). Certain types of people (including you I guess) would prefer the extra day as reward, other types prefer the extra hour each day. Don't forget about the latter types of people.

This is a bad example. The Shuttle code is a extremely narrow, well-specified piece of functionality where they had many years to work on and refine it using formal methodologies like Z specifications (IIRC) and I don't even remember how many millions of dollars the _Fast Company_ article said was spent developing the code over the years.

Every single one of those qualifiers and adjectives is likely to be false in a startup context.

Coming out of two startup sales, I have to say if you want to make money you shouldn't be an early employee anyway; you should join when the company is willing to pay good money.

According to a lot of sources, including Tom DeMarco's PeopleWare, 35 hours a week is the only sustainable pace for intellectual work. Plus or minus a few hours, maybe.

But that was about stable companies. I'm not sure that startups are trying to be sustainable.

Arguably a startup is really exploring a space of possibilities, searching for a profitable niche. So probably delivering crappy code that delivers three features is better than producing one solid thing. I've been on the cleanup crew for a couple of acquired startups, as well as products that were developed in 20% time at large corporations and grew into larger teams. My impression is that code quality barely mattered to their initial success. So I'm not sure what the optimum workload in a YC-style startup should be.

Also, we have to modify DeMarco et al's advice for a team composed of two or three twentysomethings. It seems likely that their stamina is going to be well above average and their knowledge and experience is going to be well below. So perhaps they are playing their cards right to bet on stamina.

I am looking for the following in a company, in this order:

    - A culture of morality
    - A culture of respect
    - A culture of good listening
    - A modicum of intelligence and talent

> What is true is that for a VC's business model to work, it's necessary for you to give up your life in order for him to become richer.

Let's get a movement going here.

  but they all say they offer excellent compensation

Every YC job ad is basically the same as every other. It's a BS con-job, just "come work for us, and you'll get rich" scheme that simply isn't true.

These VC funded companies will promise you the world, work you to the bone, and then dilute your equity to nearly 0 percent, and you will be left with nothing with the pride of being used to make other people rich. Avoid every job ad that sounds remotely like dclapp describes.