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by lumost 1095 days ago
> But for those that want to push their limits and find out what they are capable of, this culture is for you.

Its really unclear to me why a startup would expect their employees to be game for this in 2023. Once upon a time, the equity grants could be worth something. For an average exit, an early employee could easily see a life changing amount of money - for a late employee, they'd still get a down payment or something meaningful.

If I'm at a company that capped the upside of my equity, that created an equity pool which is only meaningful on surprise upside, that is not doing well... why would I suddenly be game for increasing my workload by 20-30%?

1 comments

It screams of a mindset that says "I think my employees are idiots who deserve to be exploited if can convince them to be." No way in hell would that CEO ever be convinced of his own argument if he were in his employees' shoes.

I can see why it works, though. There are people who are motivated by the belief that they're more hardworking/better/etc than other people, and if you offer them a metric that could make them feel "better" than someone else, they'll try to meet it even if its to their own detriment. Hustle culture depends on these types existing.