13 ms·

You don't even have to go outside of HN to find this attitude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445484

irahul 13y ago
The main issue with these douchebags is they want to pay for 20 hours and have the employee work 80 hours. I would be a lot more enraged if I got the impression that anyone worth his salt would actually consider working for him. 80 hours building wordpress plugin while being paid for 20 or lesser for a startup headed by an idea guy who declares who won't hire anybody who tracks his hours and is unwilling to work overtime? That will happen the day a monkey comes out of your ass you piece of shit. I am still concerned that it's employers' market and some poor soul will end up getting exploited. Man, sometimes assholes make me hate free markets and I wish for regulations. And then the guy talks about "premium" salaries. Yeah. Right. Even assuming 50 USD/hour(which is pretty reasonable), 50 * 80 per week comes up to 16000/month comes up to about 192000/year. Unless you have that kind of cash, don't go on shitting garbage about 80 hours/week.
- rhizome 13y ago
  What you find is that the interview process is hunky dory and everybody's all "yeah, cool!", then when you sign on for a salary they try to squeeze all the time out of that fixed rate that they can. It's like feature creep when quoting a project rate in freelancing.
  - irahul 13y ago
    Yeah. Hourly rates helps keep things in perspective. But hourly rates also worsens the douchiness where people start feeling that the number of hours it takes is disproportionate to the amount of work being done. But in that case, I try to first politely explain them that estimates do go wrong, especially in the cases where I am doing things I haven't done before. I recently setup a xmpp based web chat for the first time. I communicated beforehand that I am not familiar with xmpp web clients and whether I would be able to just use a xmpp web client or I will have to code something from scratch using strophe.js or convere.js, or if it can be done at all. The task is basically "it will be done when it will be done" but I will be able to at least tell you if it can be done at all in a week. Reasonable explanations mostly work with people who start getting restless when things take longer than expected, mainly because I too vet my clients. But the thing with hourly billing is, if the stakeholders are being unreasonable, I ask them to go eat shit and cut my losses(if any) and I don't have to deal with unreasonable expectations that comes with a fixed price bucket.
    - rhizome 13y ago
      Sure, "Engineer's Savings Time" is a common imaginary time scale, which has led to a rule of thumb for engineers to triple their instinctive time estimates for tasks by default.
      - bandy 13y ago
        "Double your estimate, and convert to the next higher unit." is what I've always heard.
        rhizome 13y ago
        The corollary to which is "projects always slip by the units in which they were estimated." :)
fchollet 13y ago
Now that's a position I would envy: busting your ass working 80 hours a week developing world-changing products ("WordPress plugins and iPhone apps like Santa Strike") so that somebody else, who doesn't respect you as an employee, can get rich off your effort (while they spend their time browsing HN). > "I want people that think about the product even when they aren't in the office." God forbid your employees have a social life, hobbies, or side-projects. Enriching some sociopath by building "santa strike" apps is a cause worth sacrificing everything for, right?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- visakanv 13y ago
  Word. Here's the funny thing, which makes employment a lot like romance- I DO think about my product even when I'm not in my office, but I do this because my employer and colleagues are awesome, and I want to make all of us successful, and we have a common purpose and goal. People won't love you because you insist it. They can't. You'll have to be lovable to begin with, and you do that by being goddamn awesome. Possessiveness is for the unenlightened, needy, insecure.
  - patja 13y ago
    It takes a certain amount of life experience to arrive at the conclusion that many challenging work problems are solved by an insight that hits you in the shower, or while jogging, or during other seemingly idle moments that an 80 hour work week robs you of.
- jtheory 13y ago
  There's something heinous about demanding that a group of people think about "the product" in every waking hour. I think I'm mostly objecting to the wording -- "product" is such a lifeless, anodyne word. If I want people who are passionate about what we're building, we have to build something that inspires passion, and I can't imagine ever calling that "the product".
smtddr 13y ago
I find that post you linked disgusting. Now I see why we need laws for things I feel are obvious. I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal. I mean, sure I understand crunch time as release-to-production draws near. I have slept in my cubicle overnight before to make sure a critical production-change went smoothly, but that's my choice when I deem it necessary or a manager I respect is in a tough-spot and would really like me to help him/her out. In what world does any manager think they can demand >40hrs/week from me on regular basis? Unless I own a significant part of the company, I'm just an employee and as such >40hrs/week for a regular employee is an indication of a problem.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal. Actually overemploying people should be illegal (at least, it should be illegal without a regulated rate of overtime pay that lets employers and employees rationally negotiate the ethical-lifestyle trade-off involved). Refusing to hire someone because they won't let themselves be abused is doing them a favor.
- sanderjd 13y ago
  Nah it's cool, it's not so hard to just not work for people who don't grok work-life balance. I mean, yeah, sure, labor laws are a great thing, but in this case and in the current market for tech hiring, it's pretty easy to fix by asking "hey what's your work-life balance like?" in the interview, making decisions based on the answer, and leaving if the answer turns out to have been a lie.
  - huherto 13y ago
    ...furthermore the cost for such a company will be not being able to recruit and retain great talent. Intangible cost but very real.
- ruswick 13y ago
  What's really appalling about that post is that the expectation was that people don't complain about working excessive hours. The implication is not only that workers need to work more than the internationally-accepted precedent, but need to do so with total enthusiasm. I can see people begrudgingly working extra time if the circumstances demanded it, but the idea that complaining about working those extra hours should be a capital offense is horrifying.
jthol 13y ago
Don't you see the value that guy brings? He's an "Idea guy." You just need to do all that work stuff. Hell he's thinking ALL DAY.
- me2i81 13y ago
  If I had a dollar for every "idea guy" who's pitched me on writing his great iPhone app for free (excuse me, for "equity"), I'd have...well, probably about $10.
  - Turing_Machine 13y ago
    Oh, yeah. Sometimes, though, they're friends and relatives who just aren't aware of how much work is involved. I don't want to be mean to them. I usually just ask them how much capital they have to invest in the joint venture. That's typically the end of it. :-)
  - ianstallings 13y ago
    A friend of mine wanted to sell me an idea. I laughed in his face and said "I have a list of at least 50 of my own ideas I can work on right now. There's no shortage of ideas. No one pays for ideas, they pay for work".
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - jeffasinger 13y ago
    "Idea guys" who ask you to write their app for free, but not before signing their NDA, of course.
- nhangen 13y ago
  I'm thinking all day after I spend 8-10 hours writing code...if that's what you mean.
  - fallous 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- smtddr 13y ago
  3) "more than" Seriously, go back and read what you wrote. (EDIT: Well, this comment makes no sense without seeing what I replied to)
  - irahul 13y ago
    Out of curiosity(and I am being amused and enraged at the same time at the world changing "idea" guy and 80 hours/week) what did the comment you replied to said?
    - smtddr 13y ago
      Nothing special, he said something like: "I don't know what you're all upset about. I only mentioned 2 things: 1)work 2)forty hours a week" So I replied "3)more than", referring to the original comment he made that was linked[1] in this thread. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454520
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - smtddr 13y ago
      I would never hire someone that complained that more than 40 hours/week was too much ^ If you actually meant that and structure your hiring-process to match, I'd say it's illegal - at least in USA. EDIT: I was about to post your HN-account details in this comment, but I see you just now removed your name & company-name from your profile info. EDIT#2: And now you deleted the comment I was replying to!!! EDIT#3: Ah! But another user was smarter & faster than me and got the info already! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454675 ...and you can't alter anything in that day-old thread. EDIT#4: http://i.imgur.com/2hsWCWG.png http://i.imgur.com/2hsWCWG.png Okay, I'm done here. I fully expect to read a front-page news article about this person a few days from now.
aidos 13y ago
I actually interviewed for a contractor position at a place last year which was on HN who's hiring. It's a big place and had a good team but they offered well below market rates. I pushed on this an they came up a little (nowhere near enough to entertain). Instead I was greated with an offer to make it up via overtime. I believe the phase was something along the lines of "there's no shortage of work and we don't cap the number of hours you can work per day". I really liked the guys but I thought that was totally disrespectful of my time.
- irahul 13y ago
  I would be actually ok with that provided that they offered to pay for the overtime. I think they told you the rates they are willing to pay, and left the number of hours up to you. This kind of arrangement works for me. There isn't anything shady going in the background(paying for 20 hours, expecting 60 hours). I have an option to take it or leave it, but they aren't trying to offer a "t&c applied" deal.
  - cjrp 13y ago
    But if they're offering below market rate, you're having to work overtime every month just to make a reasonable wage.
  - aidos 13y ago
    I get what you're saying, they're not hiding anything - but you're still losing out. Instead I took another contract for 2.5 times as much - and I was working a lot of overtime on that contract. You have a finite number of hours in the day, and your life. Don't give them to someone else to profit off. That's crazy.
    - irahul 13y ago
      I am not advocating letting someone use(exploit?) you for his own profit. But I like free markets and I am saying if the employers aren't doing anything shady and just offering low salary, someone who finds the salary good enough can take it.
  - 13y ago
over40guy 13y ago
http://nathanhangen.com/ http://nathanhangen.com/ 80 hours for this???

irahul 13y ago

The main issue with these douchebags is they want to pay for 20 hours and have the employee work 80 hours. I would be a lot more enraged if I got the impression that anyone worth his salt would actually consider working for him. 80 hours building wordpress plugin while being paid for 20 or lesser for a startup headed by an idea guy who declares who won't hire anybody who tracks his hours and is unwilling to work overtime? That will happen the day a monkey comes out of your ass you piece of shit. I am still concerned that it's employers' market and some poor soul will end up getting exploited. Man, sometimes assholes make me hate free markets and I wish for regulations. And then the guy talks about "premium" salaries. Yeah. Right. Even assuming 50 USD/hour(which is pretty reasonable), 50 * 80 per week comes up to 16000/month comes up to about 192000/year. Unless you have that kind of cash, don't go on shitting garbage about 80 hours/week.

rhizome 13y ago
What you find is that the interview process is hunky dory and everybody's all "yeah, cool!", then when you sign on for a salary they try to squeeze all the time out of that fixed rate that they can. It's like feature creep when quoting a project rate in freelancing.
- irahul 13y ago
  Yeah. Hourly rates helps keep things in perspective. But hourly rates also worsens the douchiness where people start feeling that the number of hours it takes is disproportionate to the amount of work being done. But in that case, I try to first politely explain them that estimates do go wrong, especially in the cases where I am doing things I haven't done before. I recently setup a xmpp based web chat for the first time. I communicated beforehand that I am not familiar with xmpp web clients and whether I would be able to just use a xmpp web client or I will have to code something from scratch using strophe.js or convere.js, or if it can be done at all. The task is basically "it will be done when it will be done" but I will be able to at least tell you if it can be done at all in a week. Reasonable explanations mostly work with people who start getting restless when things take longer than expected, mainly because I too vet my clients. But the thing with hourly billing is, if the stakeholders are being unreasonable, I ask them to go eat shit and cut my losses(if any) and I don't have to deal with unreasonable expectations that comes with a fixed price bucket.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    Sure, "Engineer's Savings Time" is a common imaginary time scale, which has led to a rule of thumb for engineers to triple their instinctive time estimates for tasks by default.
    - bandy 13y ago
      "Double your estimate, and convert to the next higher unit." is what I've always heard.
      - rhizome 13y ago
        The corollary to which is "projects always slip by the units in which they were estimated." :)

fchollet 13y ago

Now that's a position I would envy: busting your ass working 80 hours a week developing world-changing products ("WordPress plugins and iPhone apps like Santa Strike") so that somebody else, who doesn't respect you as an employee, can get rich off your effort (while they spend their time browsing HN). > "I want people that think about the product even when they aren't in the office." God forbid your employees have a social life, hobbies, or side-projects. Enriching some sociopath by building "santa strike" apps is a cause worth sacrificing everything for, right?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
visakanv 13y ago
Word. Here's the funny thing, which makes employment a lot like romance- I DO think about my product even when I'm not in my office, but I do this because my employer and colleagues are awesome, and I want to make all of us successful, and we have a common purpose and goal. People won't love you because you insist it. They can't. You'll have to be lovable to begin with, and you do that by being goddamn awesome. Possessiveness is for the unenlightened, needy, insecure.
- patja 13y ago
  It takes a certain amount of life experience to arrive at the conclusion that many challenging work problems are solved by an insight that hits you in the shower, or while jogging, or during other seemingly idle moments that an 80 hour work week robs you of.
jtheory 13y ago
There's something heinous about demanding that a group of people think about "the product" in every waking hour. I think I'm mostly objecting to the wording -- "product" is such a lifeless, anodyne word. If I want people who are passionate about what we're building, we have to build something that inspires passion, and I can't imagine ever calling that "the product".

smtddr 13y ago

I find that post you linked disgusting. Now I see why we need laws for things I feel are obvious. I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal. I mean, sure I understand crunch time as release-to-production draws near. I have slept in my cubicle overnight before to make sure a critical production-change went smoothly, but that's my choice when I deem it necessary or a manager I respect is in a tough-spot and would really like me to help him/her out. In what world does any manager think they can demand >40hrs/week from me on regular basis? Unless I own a significant part of the company, I'm just an employee and as such >40hrs/week for a regular employee is an indication of a problem.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal. Actually overemploying people should be illegal (at least, it should be illegal without a regulated rate of overtime pay that lets employers and employees rationally negotiate the ethical-lifestyle trade-off involved). Refusing to hire someone because they won't let themselves be abused is doing them a favor.
sanderjd 13y ago
Nah it's cool, it's not so hard to just not work for people who don't grok work-life balance. I mean, yeah, sure, labor laws are a great thing, but in this case and in the current market for tech hiring, it's pretty easy to fix by asking "hey what's your work-life balance like?" in the interview, making decisions based on the answer, and leaving if the answer turns out to have been a lie.
- huherto 13y ago
  ...furthermore the cost for such a company will be not being able to recruit and retain great talent. Intangible cost but very real.
ruswick 13y ago
What's really appalling about that post is that the expectation was that people don't complain about working excessive hours. The implication is not only that workers need to work more than the internationally-accepted precedent, but need to do so with total enthusiasm. I can see people begrudgingly working extra time if the circumstances demanded it, but the idea that complaining about working those extra hours should be a capital offense is horrifying.

jthol 13y ago

Don't you see the value that guy brings? He's an "Idea guy." You just need to do all that work stuff. Hell he's thinking ALL DAY.

me2i81 13y ago
If I had a dollar for every "idea guy" who's pitched me on writing his great iPhone app for free (excuse me, for "equity"), I'd have...well, probably about $10.
- Turing_Machine 13y ago
  Oh, yeah. Sometimes, though, they're friends and relatives who just aren't aware of how much work is involved. I don't want to be mean to them. I usually just ask them how much capital they have to invest in the joint venture. That's typically the end of it. :-)
- ianstallings 13y ago
  A friend of mine wanted to sell me an idea. I laughed in his face and said "I have a list of at least 50 of my own ideas I can work on right now. There's no shortage of ideas. No one pays for ideas, they pay for work".
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- jeffasinger 13y ago
  "Idea guys" who ask you to write their app for free, but not before signing their NDA, of course.
nhangen 13y ago
I'm thinking all day after I spend 8-10 hours writing code...if that's what you mean.
- fallous 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

smtddr 13y ago
3) "more than" Seriously, go back and read what you wrote. (EDIT: Well, this comment makes no sense without seeing what I replied to)
- irahul 13y ago
  Out of curiosity(and I am being amused and enraged at the same time at the world changing "idea" guy and 80 hours/week) what did the comment you replied to said?
  - smtddr 13y ago
    Nothing special, he said something like: "I don't know what you're all upset about. I only mentioned 2 things: 1)work 2)forty hours a week" So I replied "3)more than", referring to the original comment he made that was linked[1] in this thread. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454520
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - smtddr 13y ago
    I would never hire someone that complained that more than 40 hours/week was too much ^ If you actually meant that and structure your hiring-process to match, I'd say it's illegal - at least in USA. EDIT: I was about to post your HN-account details in this comment, but I see you just now removed your name & company-name from your profile info. EDIT#2: And now you deleted the comment I was replying to!!! EDIT#3: Ah! But another user was smarter & faster than me and got the info already! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454675 ...and you can't alter anything in that day-old thread. EDIT#4: http://i.imgur.com/2hsWCWG.png http://i.imgur.com/2hsWCWG.png Okay, I'm done here. I fully expect to read a front-page news article about this person a few days from now.

aidos 13y ago

I actually interviewed for a contractor position at a place last year which was on HN who's hiring. It's a big place and had a good team but they offered well below market rates. I pushed on this an they came up a little (nowhere near enough to entertain). Instead I was greated with an offer to make it up via overtime. I believe the phase was something along the lines of "there's no shortage of work and we don't cap the number of hours you can work per day". I really liked the guys but I thought that was totally disrespectful of my time.

irahul 13y ago
I would be actually ok with that provided that they offered to pay for the overtime. I think they told you the rates they are willing to pay, and left the number of hours up to you. This kind of arrangement works for me. There isn't anything shady going in the background(paying for 20 hours, expecting 60 hours). I have an option to take it or leave it, but they aren't trying to offer a "t&c applied" deal.
- cjrp 13y ago
  But if they're offering below market rate, you're having to work overtime every month just to make a reasonable wage.
- aidos 13y ago
  I get what you're saying, they're not hiding anything - but you're still losing out. Instead I took another contract for 2.5 times as much - and I was working a lot of overtime on that contract. You have a finite number of hours in the day, and your life. Don't give them to someone else to profit off. That's crazy.
  - irahul 13y ago
    I am not advocating letting someone use(exploit?) you for his own profit. But I like free markets and I am saying if the employers aren't doing anything shady and just offering low salary, someone who finds the salary good enough can take it.
- 13y ago

over40guy 13y ago

http://nathanhangen.com/ http://nathanhangen.com/ 80 hours for this???