[morgante]

This is preposterous and basically kills startups completely.

You genuinely think a seed stage startup should hire a complete "night shift" to ensure no engineers ever get paged "after hours?" This simply kills startups completely.

[intended]

I’m sorry, this insults quite a few startups and firms that don’t believe in wage theft.

Getting equity is not wage theft.

If the principle behind your equity pay out scheme is wage theft with extra steps, you’ve got a huge problem, and an unsustainable business.

[morgante]

Asking employees to participate in a reasonable on-call rotation is not "wage theft." Your antagonistic/adversarial relationship is exactly what destroys cultures.

If you attitude to an outage on a weekend is to ignore it and say that's the company's problem you should simply never join a small startup. You don't deserve equity if you refuse to share in responsibility.

[amonith]

If you do offer equity then that's a slightly different thing. That can be considered payment by those who are willing to take the risk. However, a lot of "startups" in EU do not offer such thing. They do standard employment with unpaid on-call. And those can f right off.

[morgante]

Yeah I agree those so-called startups deserve your scorn.

[intended]

Those are NOT the same things. It seems we will have to get into the weeds to be clear.

Firstly - the conversation here is about startups - however its not specified if its what stage of maturity the startup is at.

Assuming it’s an early stage startup, which is typically what “startup” evokes; the risk and return profile is different, and should be captured in the contract. The equity payout early stage employees get is different from what a regular work contract entails.

This is how risk and reward are priced - (and risk and reward is the heart of pricing, which is what this conversation is really about.)

If you want regular employees to do startup hours, or be on call for those times - then the pricing for that time must be commensurate.

That’s it.

Nothing more, nothing less. Frankly, I think you would vehemently agree with this.

Suppose, Shit happens. You have some emergency, you need staff to respond. Guess what though? The wording of the regulation seem to cover this scenario!

However, you are in a bad spot, you need to make numbers, so you decide to make people work hours they aren’t paid for?

Well come on. That’s crap, and I REALLY doubt you are advocating for this, because that’s a corrosive attitude that only shields bad management and managers.

That is why these laws exist. Not because of the golden situations where you can have a justifiable ask.

It’s because there’s more people willing to use power over fairness. To cover up their deficiencies by saying “work harder”, instead of fixing issues to actually be sustainable.