9 ms·
Latch Bio: “We work six days a week”
- codr7 3y agoYeah, good luck with that losers :)
- version_five 3y agoWhat'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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Forge36 3y agoWhat was your former jurisdiction? 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)
- version_five 3y agoIt was Ontario, Canada. It was either > 40 or 44 hours that counted as overtime, I can't remember if there was anything about the number of days.
- ianburrell 3y agoIn 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.
- version_five 3y agoWe 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.
- version_five 3y agoReplying 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.
- MaxBarraclough 3y agoIf I were an investor I'd have concerns about employee retention.
- rightbyte 3y agoI assure you, you can't just add hours to dig more ditches after a point. You mess up if you get tired. The only kind of work I have done where you could add hours was security guard, since you do almost nothing all day.
- carlob 3y agoI'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.
- rightbyte 3y agoYe well you need to sleep too. I just ment that you can do longer shifts than other occupations. 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 ...
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoIt'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.
- coldtea 3y ago[dead]
- madamelic 3y agoSorry 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. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-computer https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...
- mb22 3y agoat 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.
- cj 3y agoAt least they’re honest? I see this as a good thing to disclose, rather than finding out that overtime is expected after you start the job.
- fakedang 3y agoMade it to the front page at least, you did.
- darth_avocado 3y agoIt 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.
- laksdjf 3y agothat's for employers with 15 or more employees
- wahnfrieden 3y agoWhy 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
- darth_avocado 3y ago5 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.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoNot relevant to what I said but ok
- justin_oaks 3y agoMaybe they work shorter days? 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.
- justin_oaks 3y agoThe 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.
- fortran77 3y ago[flagged]
- bdcravens 3y agoWouldn't the same be true of the many retail jobs out there that never guarantee Saturdays off?
- wahnfrieden 3y agoYes and? 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.
- mb22 3y agofabricated 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.
- consoomer 3y agoMost 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- almost_usual 3y agoI’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.
- consoomer 3y agoRotation 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.
- almost_usual 3y agoThis should be a rare event. If it’s not it’s also a sign of immaturity and disorder. Not worth it, especially as a senior engineer.
- baz00 3y agoUm, no thanks.
- rightbyte 3y ago"- 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 ...
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoYeah 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.
- palmer_fox 3y agoTo 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...
- brailsafe 3y agoDamn, I get to do "algorithmic programming" and have a standup on 86% of my days?
- lopkeny12ko 3y ago> 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.
- madamelic 3y ago> 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.
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoThe 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.
- madamelic 3y agoExpecting 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.
- madamelic 3y agoI 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. [0]: https://wellfound.com/jobs/2524214-systems-software-engineer https://wellfound.com/jobs/2524214-systems-software-engineer
- almost_usual 3y agoThere’s a good chance the equity is also worthless. Easier to buy a lottery ticket.
- version_five 3y agoIt's a big red flag. I saw this in a job posting recently: 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.
- unforeseen9991 3y agoThat's one where they want you to be "family" I'm a merc at heart. Fuck you, pay me.
- 3y ago
- stuaxo 3y agoWow, their staff need to unionise right away.
- mb22 3y agowhat 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.
- madamelic 3y ago> 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.
- mb22 3y agoSlower != better 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.
- SoftTalker 3y ago"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.
- kyleee 3y agoThe novelty of the work stems from the fact you’ll doing it on Saturdays too; doesn’t that excite you!?
- Shindi 3y agoIn this thread: a ton of people with european work standards
- almost_usual 3y agoWork harder not smarter right.
- mb22 3y agowhy not both? If you want to do something incredible, sacrifices often need to be made.
- almost_usual 3y ago> If you want to do something incredible, sacrifices often need to be made. 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.
- reureu 3y agoTheir 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."
- Banditoz 3y agohttps://archive.today/mA62y https://archive.today/mA62y
- flashgordon 3y agoSigh. I cannot believe people write such shit job postings with a straight face!