4 ms·

It's kind of a weird situation. As told, this person enjoyed what they were doing and hanging out with their friends, and that happened to be on a project that

It's kind of a weird situation. As told, this person enjoyed what they were doing and hanging out with their friends, and that happened to be on a project that benefited their employer. This sounds like it's not your problem. Except you're troubled by it because you're competing with them. You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos but you're competing for the same salaries and promotions as people that do. Them glibly throwing away their weekends does affect you because you're in the same competition space as them. I dunno, I have some dissonance here. I've been young and had fun on a work project and did unpaid overtime because I just really enjoyed it, and I'd have been rightly pretty pissy about it if you unrelated unaffected person on the internet told me to stop. I still do sometimes. But now that I'm older if I were laid off in favour of all-nighter people I'd also be pretty pissy about that. Especially if those terms changed after I chose an employer based on the stated hours and felt like I met them. The way you "solve" this in a market way is by putting it in the employment terms. I take a job knowing the terms, and maybe I take a pay cut for choosing the non-all-nighters job, fine. But then a Musk can come along and ignore all of that. The protectionist way is regulating the all-nighter folk away but younger me would have absolutely ignored it and a Musk event would have rewarded it in exactly the way you're unhappy about.

spaced-out 4y ago
This is very true, and there's certainly nothing I could do if our industry becomes filled with people who are willing and eager to put in 70 hour weeks for months at a time. All I'd add is look where it got this guy: still fired. And I bet he got less severance than the people who opted for the 3 months from that form Musk sent out weeks ago. I started my career in startups and I saw the same thing quite often. Passionate young engineers sinking their life into a project only to get the same, or an even worse deal than the people who did less work but were more politically savvy.
- godshatter 4y ago
  This is probably why they got fired: > One day I created a tool that made it faster to download things from your work email that you might need if you were looking for a job: performance evaluations and that sort of thing. I posted the tool on Slack so that my colleagues could also benefit from it if they needed to. One hour and four minutes later I was fired. I credit them for wanting to help their peers and it sounds like their intentions were good and I'm not supporting this decision by upper management but it sure seems like an unwise thing to do during an organizational change like this. Especially if you like working 70 hour weeks and helping out peers just for the sake of making someone's life easier.
  - heleninboodler 4y ago
    My take on this is that this guy is your typical high-performing developer with a huge ego and an attitude that he's untouchable because he's been valued so much at every job he's ever had. He was reckless to release his tool because he never imagined that management would suddenly become so thin-skinned that he'd get fired over something like that. Well, he was wrong about this particular management, and he found out. I haven't tried to find any of his info on social media, but I'd be willing to bet that aside from some public griping about it, he's not feeling like he screwed up big-time. Most likely, he's wearing this as a badge of honor that demonstrates how capricious and short-sighted Elon Musk is to fire a clearly valuable engineer just because that engineer likes to buck authority. The consequences are that now he has a good "why I got fired" story, and he needs to spend a little time and effort finding his next wildly overpaid job. NBD
  - ilyt 4y ago
    I'm here wondering what the "tool" exactly did that simple desktop email client didn't...
tomcam 4y ago
> You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos Still my idea of fun! Can’t do it anymore for health reasons but I still pull all-nighters doing my own retirement projects.
golemotron 4y ago
> Except you're troubled by it because you're competing with them. You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos but you're competing for the same salaries and promotions as people that do. Them glibly throwing away their weekends does affect you because you're in the same competition space as them. Yes. Ressentiment is ubiquitous these days. Nietzsche would be amused but it's not a good look for our culture.
- noirbot 4y ago
  I'm not sure if it's so much resentment as an implicit rewriting of the contract of employment. If I'm contracted for 40 hours a week, but the only people being promoted are the ones who "voluntarily" work 80 hours a week then the revealed policy of the employer is that everyone's being paid to work 80 hours a week, or 60, and if you're doing what was agreed to in the original contract you're slacking off. You see this plenty even in less extreme examples, my old company had yearly awards for outstanding performance, and there was a clear pattern that the story of why the person had won almost always involved some personal sacrifice in service of the company. No one was winning awards for just being good at their job, showing up every day, and being a value to the team. You had to take a break from your vacation to get on a meeting, or work 2 weeks straight to get the award. I'm sure the well-meaning among leadership (which I do believe was a decent amount of them) saw this as more of an apology. "Here's something to recognize that you did something you shouldn't have had to do". But functionally, it was creating a culture where you needed to abuse yourself in order to be recognized.
rightbyte 4y ago
> This sounds like it's not your problem. He was undercutting his colleagues by working for free. So it kinda is my problem. I mean, fine, since people's wages are not the same anyway some people might as well decrease their hourly wage by overextending. But I feel a need to remind those people of that they are suckers and won't be compensated for it in the end. The author just got fired.
sokoloff 4y ago
This makes about as much sense as being upset that some people eat healthy and work out and as a result are more physically attractive/competitive in the same dating market that you're in. Or that some people study and hone their professional craft sometimes before 8:59 AM or after 5:01 PM. Make your choices and let others make their choices. Not everyone wants to optimize for the same things in life.
kdmccormick 4y ago
I appreciate that you represent both sides of argument here, but I've found a way to frame it for myself that removes all the dissonance: You work for a large, for-profit company. You have some free time outside of the typical 9-5 M-F work week and you would like to spend some of it working. Great! You could: * contribute to an an open source project or start your own * start a side project/business * volunteer somewhere * take an online course * exercise * goof off * do almost anything else The effects of these on on society and yourself range from neutral at worst to helpful at best. Instead, you choose to: * contribute extra unpaid time to your employer This may enrich your life, but it definitely enriches the shareholders of your company. It dials up the expectations of others who are in the same employment pool as you. It hurts future generations of workers by eroding the expectation of work-life balance that we are lucky enough to have achieved in our industry. To me, it is pretty clear: if you put your extra time into for-profit work, you suck.
- ff317 4y ago
  Another interesting way to split the difference: identify a need at $work that could really use a better open source solution that $work could use off-the-shelf. Go write that on your free nights/weekends as an independent open source project that's more-broadly useful to others outside of $work, and then when you're back on the clock, switch hats and make use of it. With this hybrid approach, you're still advancing the cause at $work, but you're not doing it directly or exclusively for them, and the open source project will have visibility, scope, and utility beyond $work and your employment there. You never know, it might even be the start of future promising career opportunities. There be dragons of course with how exempt employment and copyrights work in the US, though (as in, this might be a trivial case where if the side-project is successful, your employer can claim rights on it). You could come to some agreement with your employer ahead of time about the independence of such projects, though.
- mcrad 4y ago
  If you get paid well and have a unique talent that further incentivizes you to step up and do extra on occasion, what's the big deal? Engineering salaries have never in the history of technology been geared toward clock-watcher/union-boss mindset.
ilyt 4y ago
Looking at my country laws you'd be entirely fine to pull the all nighters at work but paid 150-200% for it. That solves all of that, employer can't just convince gullible teenager to get extra work out of them for little benefit and have active motivation to hire enough people to not have to crunch very often (as doing that makes them pay 2x per hour of work). Those laws are in place because for every "crunching and happy for it" there is ten that stay for longer out of fear that they will get fired for wanting to work normal amount in favour of someone that lives work.

spaced-out 4y ago

This is very true, and there's certainly nothing I could do if our industry becomes filled with people who are willing and eager to put in 70 hour weeks for months at a time. All I'd add is look where it got this guy: still fired. And I bet he got less severance than the people who opted for the 3 months from that form Musk sent out weeks ago. I started my career in startups and I saw the same thing quite often. Passionate young engineers sinking their life into a project only to get the same, or an even worse deal than the people who did less work but were more politically savvy.

godshatter 4y ago
This is probably why they got fired: > One day I created a tool that made it faster to download things from your work email that you might need if you were looking for a job: performance evaluations and that sort of thing. I posted the tool on Slack so that my colleagues could also benefit from it if they needed to. One hour and four minutes later I was fired. I credit them for wanting to help their peers and it sounds like their intentions were good and I'm not supporting this decision by upper management but it sure seems like an unwise thing to do during an organizational change like this. Especially if you like working 70 hour weeks and helping out peers just for the sake of making someone's life easier.
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  My take on this is that this guy is your typical high-performing developer with a huge ego and an attitude that he's untouchable because he's been valued so much at every job he's ever had. He was reckless to release his tool because he never imagined that management would suddenly become so thin-skinned that he'd get fired over something like that. Well, he was wrong about this particular management, and he found out. I haven't tried to find any of his info on social media, but I'd be willing to bet that aside from some public griping about it, he's not feeling like he screwed up big-time. Most likely, he's wearing this as a badge of honor that demonstrates how capricious and short-sighted Elon Musk is to fire a clearly valuable engineer just because that engineer likes to buck authority. The consequences are that now he has a good "why I got fired" story, and he needs to spend a little time and effort finding his next wildly overpaid job. NBD
- ilyt 4y ago
  I'm here wondering what the "tool" exactly did that simple desktop email client didn't...

tomcam 4y ago

> You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos Still my idea of fun! Can’t do it anymore for health reasons but I still pull all-nighters doing my own retirement projects.

golemotron 4y ago

> Except you're troubled by it because you're competing with them. You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos but you're competing for the same salaries and promotions as people that do. Them glibly throwing away their weekends does affect you because you're in the same competition space as them. Yes. Ressentiment is ubiquitous these days. Nietzsche would be amused but it's not a good look for our culture.

noirbot 4y ago
I'm not sure if it's so much resentment as an implicit rewriting of the contract of employment. If I'm contracted for 40 hours a week, but the only people being promoted are the ones who "voluntarily" work 80 hours a week then the revealed policy of the employer is that everyone's being paid to work 80 hours a week, or 60, and if you're doing what was agreed to in the original contract you're slacking off. You see this plenty even in less extreme examples, my old company had yearly awards for outstanding performance, and there was a clear pattern that the story of why the person had won almost always involved some personal sacrifice in service of the company. No one was winning awards for just being good at their job, showing up every day, and being a value to the team. You had to take a break from your vacation to get on a meeting, or work 2 weeks straight to get the award. I'm sure the well-meaning among leadership (which I do believe was a decent amount of them) saw this as more of an apology. "Here's something to recognize that you did something you shouldn't have had to do". But functionally, it was creating a culture where you needed to abuse yourself in order to be recognized.

rightbyte 4y ago

> This sounds like it's not your problem. He was undercutting his colleagues by working for free. So it kinda is my problem. I mean, fine, since people's wages are not the same anyway some people might as well decrease their hourly wage by overextending. But I feel a need to remind those people of that they are suckers and won't be compensated for it in the end. The author just got fired.

sokoloff 4y ago

This makes about as much sense as being upset that some people eat healthy and work out and as a result are more physically attractive/competitive in the same dating market that you're in. Or that some people study and hone their professional craft sometimes before 8:59 AM or after 5:01 PM. Make your choices and let others make their choices. Not everyone wants to optimize for the same things in life.

kdmccormick 4y ago

I appreciate that you represent both sides of argument here, but I've found a way to frame it for myself that removes all the dissonance: You work for a large, for-profit company. You have some free time outside of the typical 9-5 M-F work week and you would like to spend some of it working. Great! You could: * contribute to an an open source project or start your own * start a side project/business * volunteer somewhere * take an online course * exercise * goof off * do almost anything else The effects of these on on society and yourself range from neutral at worst to helpful at best. Instead, you choose to: * contribute extra unpaid time to your employer This may enrich your life, but it definitely enriches the shareholders of your company. It dials up the expectations of others who are in the same employment pool as you. It hurts future generations of workers by eroding the expectation of work-life balance that we are lucky enough to have achieved in our industry. To me, it is pretty clear: if you put your extra time into for-profit work, you suck.

ff317 4y ago
Another interesting way to split the difference: identify a need at $work that could really use a better open source solution that $work could use off-the-shelf. Go write that on your free nights/weekends as an independent open source project that's more-broadly useful to others outside of $work, and then when you're back on the clock, switch hats and make use of it. With this hybrid approach, you're still advancing the cause at $work, but you're not doing it directly or exclusively for them, and the open source project will have visibility, scope, and utility beyond $work and your employment there. You never know, it might even be the start of future promising career opportunities. There be dragons of course with how exempt employment and copyrights work in the US, though (as in, this might be a trivial case where if the side-project is successful, your employer can claim rights on it). You could come to some agreement with your employer ahead of time about the independence of such projects, though.
mcrad 4y ago
If you get paid well and have a unique talent that further incentivizes you to step up and do extra on occasion, what's the big deal? Engineering salaries have never in the history of technology been geared toward clock-watcher/union-boss mindset.

ilyt 4y ago

Looking at my country laws you'd be entirely fine to pull the all nighters at work but paid 150-200% for it. That solves all of that, employer can't just convince gullible teenager to get extra work out of them for little benefit and have active motivation to hire enough people to not have to crunch very often (as doing that makes them pay 2x per hour of work). Those laws are in place because for every "crunching and happy for it" there is ten that stay for longer out of fear that they will get fired for wanting to work normal amount in favour of someone that lives work.