[BillTthree]

How are they compensating you for the expected work? If you can earn 50-75% of that compensation while working 40 hours a week, why would you go YC?

Why are you focused on YC/startups? Are you interested in the stock options, as a get rich quick scheme? Or are you interested in working during your life and being employed.

Working 60-80 hours a week is above normal and should be compensated as such. Startup stock is a huge risk.

Are you curious why the founders of a company spend 24/7 working it, and why they expect you to do the same? Well there you go, its the only thing the founder thinks about, and they want people to support them in that.

HOW ARE THEY COMPENSATING YOU. Thats the only thing that matters. If you make $1mil/year plus bonus, 80 hrs a week seems more reasonable.

[sokoloff]

> If you can earn 50-75% of that compensation while working 40 hours a week

You can probably earn 125-150% of that while working 40 hours a week...

[bschmidt1]

> Why are you focused on YC/startups?

I've worked at a couple of large, well-known companies too but I like startups because there's usually more of a focus on building a product, and usually everyone on the team is interested in the space. In some cases there are early customers with requests/feedback/needs that the iterations are centered around and it's interesting to be close to that, especially when I genuinely care about the problem space.

In most startups I'm also working in an ideal or nearly ideal tech stack - either something I don't mind learning or something I'm already using in my personal stuff. Where at a big corporation it's often a painful tech stack unique to their predicament with devops processes that are outdated and complex. It's also hard to change anything, or introduce new tech which can be much easier at a startup with only a few developers. We can be like "this looks sick let's try it" vs "this looks sick I'm gonna go to Google Docs and create a Request-For-Comment, submit it to my engineering manager for approval, which after some debate he will send to the DofE for approval, which will be mulled over (?) for 6 weeks before being mentioned to the CTO who asks his friend/developer his thoughts who suggests an alternative which sparks a debate in the Google Docs comment section about the time complexity of a click handler".

Why YC: The startups in their directory tend to be more aligned with the problems I care about in tech, and are often quite cutting-edge in terms of mission and tech stack. I used a lot of AngelList in their heyday as well for similar reasons. It felt like a curated list of the startups who were: In SF, have a budget/runway, use modern tech, founders are (ideally) technical themselves or at least passionate about a space and have serious drive.

> Are you curious why the founders of a company spend 24/7 working it

If you read the post I said they were not there 24/7 working, they're often doing other things. Maybe this is the image put forth by YC and maybe it was once the truth, but I'm seeing the opposite now where founders expect 24/7 workers but they themselves are not so passionate and engaged.

> If you make $1mil/year plus bonus, 80 hrs a week seems more reasonable.

Nowhere near that of course, just google market rate salaries in San Francisco (don't forget to adjust for cost of living).