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From my own household/wife I have a person who's worked her ass off for a hugely incompetent CEO who has a majority stake. When I say ass off I mean 12-14 hours

From my own household/wife I have a person who's worked her ass off for a hugely incompetent CEO who has a majority stake. When I say ass off I mean 12-14 hours a day even on weekends. A promise of unlimited holidays and then coercing all employees to work during government mandated holidays and now he's trying to scam her out of her less than 1% options by coercing her to write a maternity leave policy that would make sure she doesn't get to vest. This is a sequoia invested company. I don't think this company has even 10% of equity allocated for all the other employees. No way it's that much. She's sacrificed her own health, the health of her child and her personal relationships for someone who's coerced a bunch of people who are to scared to talk to a lawyer into a bunch of labour law violations. When I myself interview with startups and they try to sell me on their BS vision fantasies, I tell them that I'm not available 24/7. I'm not on call duty either and if they have issues with that I'm happy to use my experience to help them transform/automate their business into a situation where they are more efficient and don't need to burn out their employees. Some people respect this as a sign of experience and others, especially the valley considers this not aligning with their "values". This is exploitation plain and simple. They cheat their employees into thinking taking abuse is acceptable, because that's what you have to do to change the world. If anything such people change the world for the worse if you ask me. EDIT: also, due to the lack of experience it's clear that some of the directions actually come top down from whatever VC is involved in it.

bostonsre 5y ago
They're not all that bad. I've worked in a horrible startup before and they absolutely forced everyone to work harder with longer hours instead of working smarter. We had a few ~12-16 hour deploys that started after a full work day where the entire engineering department was required to stay and the oncall was brutal 2 week long slogs because no effort was allowed to be put into actually fixing stuff. But on the other hand, I've also been at ok jobs that were pretty great companies and the one I currently work at is absolutely amazing and it's a joy to work at. The pay has been pretty awesome as well. Larger companies in my experience can be soul crushingly beaurocratic and the slower pace means your skillet grows more slowly (no big tech companies in the valley, just some large public companies after startup acquisitions). It's just anecdotal from my experience and I'm not really sure how big of a haystack the amazing startup needles are in but they are out there. Work is work, but you spend a huge portion of your life at work, if you can enjoy it thoroughly, you can live a happier life.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  If you're saying not all startups are bad, I completely agree with you, but we're talking about a specific kind here. I've worked at some really challenging startups where I also did overtime during deploys(I did get to charge the hours though) in which I learned a lot. AND THEN we actually worked on reducing those issues for the future. They didn't actually make that part of the job either. I could have rejected if I wanted to. And there was never a vision alignment talk with miniscule equity with an unwritten agreement of doing anything that was asked otherwise I'd kiss my equity goodbye. EDIT: I can't believe I have to clarify this. Most of the startups that would fit my above description don't market themselves as startups to begin with. I.e. they don't think their distinguishing feature is to be a startup with equity.
  - catillac 5y ago
    You’re saying not all startups are bad, just a specific kind are bad: bad startups. Seems tautological.
Grimm1 5y ago
I’ve never had these abuses working for a startup. I feel like you have to push back against things instead of just going with it. Or choose the position better because they sound like bad jobs regardless of the type of business. That’s what I can’t help thinking when I hear that because I’ve now worked for 5 different startups and while there was some crunch time occasionally the majority by far was an 8 hour day and then I was out, even for one of the companies when I was the 4th engineer. And they just closed another 20 million round recently. I really don’t think people do enough due diligence about where they should work plain and simple. Work is a mutual contract where you want to try to extract as much value from your employer while negotiating to the point they’ll still hire you. And a lot of the negotiation is figuring out if it’s a good job anyway and walking away to another option if you get the sense it’s not a good from either a financial, time or social perspective.
- harikb 5y ago
  We either need agents who will negotiate on the employees behave or some kind of training that is part of a 4 year degree. Negotiations and finances are hard - this is why some people are good at selling and some are not. Engineers are usually good at their primary job and usually not that good at defending against other social engineering tactics founders use edit: don’t want to blame founders, they also need to preserve their equity for future employees but there has to be a better balance
- zepto 5y ago
  > I feel like you have to push back against things instead of just going with it. In a bad startup you typically can’t ‘push back’ meaningfully. If the management doesn’t understand how to treat people well, people pushing back won’t educate them, and employees have to get work done to justify their presence rather than fighting battles all the time.
  - Grimm1 5y ago
    In that case, you leave. If you're a decent engineer you'll find work in a few weeks and any other startup will be happy to have you. Unfortunately for non engineers I understand that may be more difficult and for those starting out too. So matter of perspective definitely since engineers aren't the only employees at a startup, but I would hope with due dilligence that is caught while you're interviewing.
rcruzeiro 5y ago
It's funny how often I got rejected after saying that I am not 24/7 available and that I believe that, if someone needs to have this kind of availability, it means that something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed. The words they used in the rejections were always something like: "we feel like you are not willing to put enough skin in the game" or "everyone else sees the opportunity here is is willing to work their asses off, why are you different?" It's specially funny to hear all this after the CEO has basically told me that they are planning for an exit in a couple of years, and being someone who has seems this first hand a few times., it usually means everyone works til the point of burn out and, in the end, the CEO gets handsomely while everyone else has a regular Wednesday.
- swensel 5y ago
  I don't like having to be on call 24/7 either and would prefer to work on a team that has 24/7 ops, so the devs don't have to do that. However, in the case of a startup where the devs also do ops, what is the option? I don't understand the part where you said that this means something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed if devs need to be on call. What happens if something goes wrong with an environment and an auto restart doesn't fix the issue? I am curious because I'd like to have a better answer for potential startup opportunities that won't spend money on a 24/7 ops team and ask this of their devs.
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    Hire for it? Don't coerce your employees into doing something you you don't want to pay for? What most people don't think of is that when you're on 24/7 duty your salary is less than half of what it should be. Halfway decent enterprises will reimburse you for off-hour duty usually at multiple times your normal rate plus a minimum pay. Or just hire someone in a different timezone. The reality is though, most people don't need panic calls from their CEO at midnight and the company would still do perfectly fine without it. There really is no excuse for this.
    - varjag 5y ago
spoonjim 5y ago
So... why does your wife stay there?
- matsemann 5y ago
  Possibly golden handcuffs (the options are worth much in theory, but cannot be exercised or cashed in until IPO for instance). Another reason why it's often bad to be a normal employee in a startup when it comes to equity. The terms of the options are often against you.
Aeolun 5y ago
> that's what you have to do to change the world It may be what you need to change the world. But making a n uber clone for dogs is not changing the world. Literally 99% of startups have zero claim to trying to change the world.
- astrange 5y ago
  Doing this for dogs is a good way to productize research if it’s too regulated to cheaply do for humans.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
runarberg 5y ago
Thank you for sharing. As a worker passionate about labor rights, I believe sharing these stories is an important step in raising awareness to what happens when we waive our labor rights. In a just society these kind of labor violations would be as criminal as a bank robbery. There would be prison time involved and the victims would be paid, both for the value of the work that was stolen from them, plus compensation for the crime committed.
BurningFrog 5y ago
> This is exploitation plain and simple If so, it's voluntary exploitation. She can quit on Monday. Don't give 2 weeks notice if you feel the situation is abusive. You'll lose a paycheck, but you always have to be prepared for that when at startups. Mainly because they die all the time, but also for these kinds of scenarios.
- mLuby 5y ago
  > Don't give 2 weeks notice If they want you gone too, then sure. Otherwise, consider if and how that move may affect your next job's reference or background checks.

bostonsre 5y ago

They're not all that bad. I've worked in a horrible startup before and they absolutely forced everyone to work harder with longer hours instead of working smarter. We had a few ~12-16 hour deploys that started after a full work day where the entire engineering department was required to stay and the oncall was brutal 2 week long slogs because no effort was allowed to be put into actually fixing stuff. But on the other hand, I've also been at ok jobs that were pretty great companies and the one I currently work at is absolutely amazing and it's a joy to work at. The pay has been pretty awesome as well. Larger companies in my experience can be soul crushingly beaurocratic and the slower pace means your skillet grows more slowly (no big tech companies in the valley, just some large public companies after startup acquisitions). It's just anecdotal from my experience and I'm not really sure how big of a haystack the amazing startup needles are in but they are out there. Work is work, but you spend a huge portion of your life at work, if you can enjoy it thoroughly, you can live a happier life.

rjzzleep 5y ago
If you're saying not all startups are bad, I completely agree with you, but we're talking about a specific kind here. I've worked at some really challenging startups where I also did overtime during deploys(I did get to charge the hours though) in which I learned a lot. AND THEN we actually worked on reducing those issues for the future. They didn't actually make that part of the job either. I could have rejected if I wanted to. And there was never a vision alignment talk with miniscule equity with an unwritten agreement of doing anything that was asked otherwise I'd kiss my equity goodbye. EDIT: I can't believe I have to clarify this. Most of the startups that would fit my above description don't market themselves as startups to begin with. I.e. they don't think their distinguishing feature is to be a startup with equity.
- catillac 5y ago
  You’re saying not all startups are bad, just a specific kind are bad: bad startups. Seems tautological.

Grimm1 5y ago

I’ve never had these abuses working for a startup. I feel like you have to push back against things instead of just going with it. Or choose the position better because they sound like bad jobs regardless of the type of business. That’s what I can’t help thinking when I hear that because I’ve now worked for 5 different startups and while there was some crunch time occasionally the majority by far was an 8 hour day and then I was out, even for one of the companies when I was the 4th engineer. And they just closed another 20 million round recently. I really don’t think people do enough due diligence about where they should work plain and simple. Work is a mutual contract where you want to try to extract as much value from your employer while negotiating to the point they’ll still hire you. And a lot of the negotiation is figuring out if it’s a good job anyway and walking away to another option if you get the sense it’s not a good from either a financial, time or social perspective.

harikb 5y ago
We either need agents who will negotiate on the employees behave or some kind of training that is part of a 4 year degree. Negotiations and finances are hard - this is why some people are good at selling and some are not. Engineers are usually good at their primary job and usually not that good at defending against other social engineering tactics founders use edit: don’t want to blame founders, they also need to preserve their equity for future employees but there has to be a better balance
zepto 5y ago
> I feel like you have to push back against things instead of just going with it. In a bad startup you typically can’t ‘push back’ meaningfully. If the management doesn’t understand how to treat people well, people pushing back won’t educate them, and employees have to get work done to justify their presence rather than fighting battles all the time.
- Grimm1 5y ago
  In that case, you leave. If you're a decent engineer you'll find work in a few weeks and any other startup will be happy to have you. Unfortunately for non engineers I understand that may be more difficult and for those starting out too. So matter of perspective definitely since engineers aren't the only employees at a startup, but I would hope with due dilligence that is caught while you're interviewing.

rcruzeiro 5y ago

It's funny how often I got rejected after saying that I am not 24/7 available and that I believe that, if someone needs to have this kind of availability, it means that something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed. The words they used in the rejections were always something like: "we feel like you are not willing to put enough skin in the game" or "everyone else sees the opportunity here is is willing to work their asses off, why are you different?" It's specially funny to hear all this after the CEO has basically told me that they are planning for an exit in a couple of years, and being someone who has seems this first hand a few times., it usually means everyone works til the point of burn out and, in the end, the CEO gets handsomely while everyone else has a regular Wednesday.

swensel 5y ago
I don't like having to be on call 24/7 either and would prefer to work on a team that has 24/7 ops, so the devs don't have to do that. However, in the case of a startup where the devs also do ops, what is the option? I don't understand the part where you said that this means something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed if devs need to be on call. What happens if something goes wrong with an environment and an auto restart doesn't fix the issue? I am curious because I'd like to have a better answer for potential startup opportunities that won't spend money on a 24/7 ops team and ask this of their devs.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  Hire for it? Don't coerce your employees into doing something you you don't want to pay for? What most people don't think of is that when you're on 24/7 duty your salary is less than half of what it should be. Halfway decent enterprises will reimburse you for off-hour duty usually at multiple times your normal rate plus a minimum pay. Or just hire someone in a different timezone. The reality is though, most people don't need panic calls from their CEO at midnight and the company would still do perfectly fine without it. There really is no excuse for this.
  - varjag 5y ago

spoonjim 5y ago

So... why does your wife stay there?

matsemann 5y ago
Possibly golden handcuffs (the options are worth much in theory, but cannot be exercised or cashed in until IPO for instance). Another reason why it's often bad to be a normal employee in a startup when it comes to equity. The terms of the options are often against you.

Aeolun 5y ago

> that's what you have to do to change the world It may be what you need to change the world. But making a n uber clone for dogs is not changing the world. Literally 99% of startups have zero claim to trying to change the world.

astrange 5y ago
Doing this for dogs is a good way to productize research if it’s too regulated to cheaply do for humans.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

runarberg 5y ago

Thank you for sharing. As a worker passionate about labor rights, I believe sharing these stories is an important step in raising awareness to what happens when we waive our labor rights. In a just society these kind of labor violations would be as criminal as a bank robbery. There would be prison time involved and the victims would be paid, both for the value of the work that was stolen from them, plus compensation for the crime committed.

BurningFrog 5y ago

> This is exploitation plain and simple If so, it's voluntary exploitation. She can quit on Monday. Don't give 2 weeks notice if you feel the situation is abusive. You'll lose a paycheck, but you always have to be prepared for that when at startups. Mainly because they die all the time, but also for these kinds of scenarios.

mLuby 5y ago
> Don't give 2 weeks notice If they want you gone too, then sure. Otherwise, consider if and how that move may affect your next job's reference or background checks.