Given what Elon has said about valuing people who work long hours and have an "extremely hardcore" work ethic, I can't imagine it's healthy to stay for too long.
An idea I had (not sure if correct) is that many people have a similar amount of "work ethic", but distribute it differently. So, for example, person A can invest nearly 100% into their job and will be perceived to be "extremely hardcore", while person B might have the exact same absolute amount, but only allocate a fraction to their job, distributing the rest to other activities. This person will be "normal". Most people should limit the allocation to their job because they have very limited upside. Most entrepreneurs should allocate much more than employees because of less limited upside.
I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.
I had a [founder] boss who would say to his team "I want everyone on the team to act as though they owned the business!" He and his family owned 100% of the equity.
In reality, that boss probably was just repeating something that he heard - hoping that his boss would like how it sounds. I recall similar parables in early 00's agile. It is a lot easier to say things like this than come up with an actual strategy.
Usually the response is either to just double down "this is the most important thing that we do" (with no further explanation), or anger: "Idiot! How can you not possibly know what I mean to be committed like the pig in my story".
The context I have heard the ham and eggs analogy was for certain scrum rituals that were supposed to be for ham people only (ie, excluding people without a stake in the outcome). Someone probably told this boss to butt out of a meeting.
It is all dumb stuff, imo. 00's agile got away with a lot of stupid things - usually with the implicit aim of increasing the number of billable devs (or to sell conference tickets or books. It was almost like, the more absurd, the better. There are still remnants of that but, thankfully, it has mostly disappeared.
I dont think the metaphor breaks down at all I just think it is saying things that while very true are not meant to be communicated to the pigs and hens.
>I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.
I agree, and I think that if you look back at the early dot com startups that did things like food, recreation, laundry and even housing right on-campus you'll see a culture that tried to actually meet that need in a way that doesn't seem unfair. The idea was "you give us everything you've got at work and everything else will just take care of itself". Then, as inevitable as death, came the investor class demanding more for less and eliminating the benefits with the hope that the sigma grindset would just perpetuate itself anyway.
Thread makes a good point that everyone should be evaluating their time investment in work vs. their potential upside, especially if they're sacrificing time to other aspects of life. (Relationships, family, travel, etc)
Giving everything you've got with a potential huge reward = risky but possibly worth it
Doing the same without a huge reward = you're a sucker, because your company is getting more from you than they're giving
Yeah they can. That's exactly what someone who does your laundry for you does. They give you that time back, and in exchange for some of your time (in the form of money, which for working people is never anything but time spent doing things other than what you want). If I make $70/hr and can buy an hour of doing laundry back for $20 I can work that hour instead of spending it on laundry, have the same amount of time and $50. Or I can work that hour and buy laundry three times, netting me $10 and 2 hours.
Same with the food and housing examples. Save meal prep time given back, commuting time given back (I am assuming corporate housing is relatively close to the office compared to usual, self selected housing).
Yes, they want you to give all you've got and neglect all other aspects of your life. Young people are very good candidates to fall into this trap. Once they burn through those precious years working for somebody else and get none of the upsides they get it too. But there are always new young people ready to "change" the world.
This is what unions are all about - most people should limit the allocation to their job, but a lot of employers (not just Musk) want employees to work "like owners" without providing real ownership of the equity upside of the company they work for. Even most equity packages do not provide upside on a remotely similar scale (you might make 500k extra) compared to what the founders, execs, and VCs will make on your labor. I'm not sure that HN is going to be very Marx-friendly but Capital Vol 1 gets into this if you can hang through all the blathering about coats and fabric.
This is true in the sense that everyone has the same number of hours in the day, and someone who is 25 and single and lives in a studio apartment 3 blocks from the office will by definition be able to spend more time working than someone who lives 90 minutes from the office in the suburbs and has 4 school-aged kids.
But there are absolutely different levels of work ethic and stamina between people. And I'm not even talking about willingness which obviously varies, but some people can work for 12 hours straight and some people are just physically incapable of doing it.
I think there are some companies / missions / bosses, who can clearly identify goals and a concrete strategy to achieve them. This, plus some equity, can really help set people's incentives in the right direction such that people want to put in more time and effort.
On the other hand, a lot of companies don't offer either and seem to believe that simply rallying the masses to put in 20% more time (on average) will somehow lead to outsized gains.
did you know that in EU way back in imperial times some of the worker protection rules where not introduced by angry workers by companies which realized that having well rested and healthy worker will long term produce much better results and then countries following up by enforcing it to boost their countries productivity (and internal stability)?
(and yes I _very_ grossly oversimplified it including lumping all EU countries together even through they had very different inner political histories)
The reason I'm pointing it out is because recently some people seem to be forgetting that at the core a lot of work protection isn't rooted in "being social/nice to your citizens" but in "having a more internal stable and international competitive" country.
Henry Ford was largely responsible for the popularization of the 40 hour work week and paid his factory employees nearly double of what they would ordinarily get.
1926: Henry Ford popularized the 40-hour work week after he discovered through his research that working more yielded only a small increase in productivity that lasted a short period of time. Ford announced he would pay each worker $5 per eight-hour day, which was nearly double what the average auto worker was making that time. Manufacturers and companies soon followed Henry Ford’s lead after seeing how this new policy boosted productivity and fostered loyalty and pride among Ford’s employees.
Of course, this is a rarity. Most employee concessions in the US were earned with blood.
I don't think he did it out of the goodness of his heart, the calculus just happened to work out in favor of the worker in this singular case. With large factories you have training costs, retention costs etc. Paying higher than the going rate meant you had higher quality workers because you could select the best ones from a larger pool. This caused manufacturing defects to go down and remanufacturing costs (extremely expensive) to shrink. Paying more for better workers reduced costs. Limiting hours worked per week reduced costs as well as those workers made fewer mistakes reducing remanufacturing/rework costs. Stable employment, good wages and short(ish) work weeks resulted in worker retention going way way up which meant less churn, less training expenses etc.
TL;DR Henry Ford realized car manufacturing was a semi-skilled job, not an unskilled job, and hired and paid for it accordingly, quality went up and costs went down. It's not rocket science.
> I don't think he did it out of the goodness of his heart, the calculus just happened to work out in favor of the worker in this singular case
It wasn't a singular case.
He was principled enough about it that Dodge sued to compel him to put shareholders' interests ahead of employees and customers-- a suit Ford fought against, and lost.
Not just "in this singular case". I don't think Ford's assembly lines needed uniquely skilled people; most assembly line work would be the same, with the same calculus.
And the calculus was not just "the most skilled workers". It was also "diminishing returns".
Healthy, happy, rested workers are more productive, full stop. Folks who force the grind are eating seed corn but don't care, they'll be gone by the time it matters.
GDP per Capita is a metric for value of production as a whole.
Much of that GDP per Capita for NL can be attributed to high margin industries like Oil Refining (Royal Dutch Shell, Dutch Disease), Financial Services, and Biochemicals Manufacturing [0], which are not industries where at 5.5h workday is realistic.
And once you remove part-timers, the hours worked in Netherlands are comparable to the US [1].
The bigger question should be why part-time labor participation is significantly high in Netherlands, as part-timers and youth appear to earn at least half of full-timers [1], but this could also be confounding due to age along with gender [2].
Imo this makes Netherlands' job market look similar to post 2010 Japan's labor market, which isn't a great thing.
That said, it does go to show that median income and personal living standards are not tied with GDP per Capita.
> And once you remove part-timers, the hours worked in Netherlands are comparable to the US [1].
Sure, if you remove 40% of all the people working (maybe more?) then you are left with the people working full weeks. That’s… not very surprising? The point is kinda that so many people work part time that it significantly skews the average number of hours worked.
It’s kinda wonky that the average for full-time still sits at 40 hours though. I know very few people working 5 day weeks (e.g. 60 or 80%), and I’d assume they’re still classed as full-time due their contracts.
> Sure, if you remove 40% of all the people working (maybe more?) then you are left with the people working full weeks. That’s… not very surprising?
And how many of those 40% are working at an Oil Refinery owned by Shell PLC, an assay workbench owned by Solvias, or working on Clearing or ForEx at Goldman Sachs Amsterdam?
The majority of Netherlands' GDP is derived only from those kinds of activities in ONG, Biopharma, and Finance (also agricultural exports but that's a whole other story).
Not all jobs are made equal, and this is where productivity (as is defined in economics) comes to play.
It's the same in Japan with almost all economic activity being derived from automotive, medical device, and biopharma manufacturing along with financial services [0]. Most other roles are cost centers in some shape or form, and even Japanese companies have been offshoring roles not associated to those sectors to the rest of Asia.
From a competitiveness standpoint, it's not good, as it prevents other industries from being sparked and prevents economic diversification. If there's an ONG glut, or the EU signs an FTA with a major pharma manufacturer hub like China or India (as is the plan this year), or trade normalization between the EU-UK finally happens, then major sectors of the Dutch economy can become extremely wobbly, and reduce the ability to provide a social safety net, as those cost money. There's a reason why it's called "Dutch Disease".
Even the TNO [1] and CBS [2] has pointed out this issue, as the rise of part time labor in the Dutch economy seems to have been sparked by the Eurozone crisis.
> It’s kinda wonky that the average for full-time still sits at 40 hours though. I know very few people working 5 day weeks (e.g. 60 or 80%), and I’d assume they’re still classed as full-time due their contracts
If you are on HN, most of your peers are probably also working in tech or chill white collar jobs like government or back office work.
> having well rested and healthy worker will long term produce much better results
You said the two words which will ensure this never happens in the US: "long term". Most companies have zero decision-makers who care about the "long term". They are not the company's stewards, they are its parasites. Despite popular belief, most American corporations are not ruthless money-making machines, they are festering husks being ruthlessly parasitized by sociopaths while they slowly sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Confinity created its PayPal product in 1999 and Musk's company got merged into Confinity in 2000 because Thiel said they were both working crazy long hours and it would be more beneficial for everyone to join forces into a monopoly instead of compete with one another. Then Musk got kicked out of the company because they didn't think he was doing a good job, and he was fortunate to benefit financially when they sold to eBay. So it's a pretty classic case of survivorship bias, and the fact that he invested into an already innovative electric car company does not mean his taskmaster leanings are assuredly the key to success. For every one of Musk's companies, there are countless others enjoying a healthy amount of profit without the excessive hours.
Paypal is not some monument of success (how much did Adam Neumann make from WeWork?), nor is X, he just bought Twitter by borrowing against his Tesla shares at an inflated valuation (inflated by sentiment and hype). Is he good at slave driving people who mostly care about mission? Yes. Does that mean it is what we want to optimize for at scale? I argue no. Important to be mindful what we are and what is worth optimizing for collectively and how that changes over time.
If I drive my workers to various flavors (emotional, physical, etc) of failure to succeed economically, are you going to look up to me? If so, you've failed the litmus test. Progress is nice, but so is a reasonable balance for our short existence on this rock. Be Woz, not Jobs or Musk.
(high empathy human, early TSLA investor, own Teslas, know people at SpaceX, etc)
If Europe wants to be "more internal[ly] stable and international[ly] competitive", then its 40-hour-per-week, 5-weeks-holiday-per-year companies have to compete with Tesla, Spacex, Paypal, X etc.
Europe has SEPA for instant value transfer, they do not need paypal. AT Protocol can replace X, no need for Europe to have their own X ("protocols, not platforms"). Europe can eventually build EVs faster and/or better (~20 moving parts in a drivetrain) and improved space vehicles when they're ready, they're not trying to live on Mars.
What has US tech built that Europe needs? Europe has services and great quality of life, the US has performance art capitalism paperclip maximizing for shareholder returns and is a third world country [1] [2] [3], broadly speaking. The race is not what you think it is. What are you building for? To just keep grinding or building? Or for people to live happy, healthy lives at scale? Engineering is fun, and leads to progress, but it is a means to an end, not the point of life.
good luck getting Linus Torvalds back from us! Jokes aside, i think the EU needs to reach consensus on a new operating system if you want digital sovereignty. So far I know of a few nations doing so for law enforcement/military, and I know of Jolla or webos, but I am unaware of any efforts like Huawei and harmonyOS to create a sovereign unified ecosystem.
Old money is a toxic accretion of capital: because it optimizes for "not losing" as opposed to "maximally investing"
There's a reason the British industrial revolution was funded by new, sugar/slave-trade money -- because it went to people open to investing in this new, weird steam power thing.
this is a pointless argument as close to all US mega cops have been quasi subventioned until they became monopolies, not sure how you expect a proper competition there (specifically subventioned by a few very wealthy entities, not the state).
in addition many of them did end up where they are by taking advantage of a major technological change, while being quasi subventioned, while being in a huge country which has until recently exported it's culture and tech, while systematically breaking all kinds of (non employee protection related) laws and regulations (including US laws/regulations, through seldomly with consequences in the US)
there is little which indicates that mistreating your employees was overly relevant for them to get where they are in most cases
actually it's even the opposite to some degree, multiple of the US mega corps have been known to be quite good employers (e.g. MS, Google). Microsoft was also one of the first huge companies which tried out a 32h week in some of their offices (and the results of that study indicated that it was leading to improvements).
and in general I think most people have no issues with highly payed highly skilled people "working hard like crazy" if
- it's well payed (i.e. you work "crazily hard" a few years and then can lay back for years after
- it's fully free of your choice to end up there
- you are also fully free to leave if you realize it's hitting your health to hard
Like company founders working "crazily hard" at the start of their journey is as normal in the EU as it's in the US. And paying people which work "crazily hard" extra, often in form of annual Bonus payments, is also in some markets not that uncommon in the EU. Also jobs which people very often don't do for more then a few years, because it's just not healthy.
But what Musk is pursing is so far beyond that on the unhealthy spectrum.
And a more normal employees has to be able to work their job without larger gap for like what 50 years at least. That just isn't compatible with "working crazily hard".
But Musk is just an extreme example of what you see in in general more in the US:
Indirectly force people to work harder then long term substainable and when it start causing chronic issues take "medicine" to fix it.
And then be surprised if your country has pain killer/drug addiction epidemic which doesn't just affect the people which did fall through society but like all levels of society.
And wrt. internal stability, have you looked at the US recently!? It's more unstable then it ever has been since the civil war.
Musk's operational involvement in PayPal was 4 months (though he remained on the Board for a while, IIRC).
He didn't create it, it was a (pre-release) working thing when his company (which was failing at building an online bank) merged. He was made CEO, and spent his tenure trying to throw away the working app because it was Java on Solaris for ASP because that's what he knew.
Four months in, he gets married. The BoD attends his wedding on the Saturday, and on the Monday morning when he leaves for his honeymoon, they fire him in absentia. Not "other priorities", "family time", but "fired on your honeymoon".
Since then, most of Musk's "contribution" to PayPal has been cashing the dividend checks.
Yes. U.S. is way behind in banking tech. Even in poorer countries like many of those in latam, you can easily do direct bank transfers. It's pretty common to see e.g. street vendors with QR codes that you can scan to send money directly without the need for a non-bank intermediary.
I'm not sure that it's entirely that the US is behind, it's that they introduced credit cards so early that they've ended up with those dominating the space.
And now because of that, there's lobbying against direct bank transfers and capping of interchange fees.
yes kinda, it's complicated (as in depends on country and in some countries is still can involve a 3rd party "middleman" even through you do auth with your bank and don't need an account with the middle man)
through what matters is that in the end you can pay on most EU sites without having either paypal or a credit card
so that use case really doesn't need paypal
and for the p2p money sending you need it even less
and if you buy stuff from outside of the EU you most times can pay with both paypal or credit card, so if you have a credit card you don't need paypal for that either
Umm, yes? Not sure about the rest of Europe, but here in Czechia most of merchants have a direct payment method based on QR code.
Basically: 1) you select your bank at the checkout; 2) you're redirected to the bank's payment page with a QR code; 3) you scan the code from your banking app and confirm it; 4) the bank redirects back the merchants page with the payment status confirmed/declined. No payment processor involved and the money goes straight from your account to merchant's account.
Yes, at least in Poland. You can either use Blik (mobile payments integrated with your bank account) or get redirected to your bank website for fast wire transfer.
Working long hours is not a sign of success, it means things don't get done on a normal schedule so everyone has to bust their ass to meet the deadline. Working this way in perpetuity is wasteful and totally stupid.
I think the biggest problem is, 99% of the jobs out there is boring and meaningless, regardless of level and pay. I don't know about other people, but I can't really be "hardcore" unless I really believe in the work.
That's fair. Programming Starship's flight computers is definitely one hardcore job that I can sleep on the floor. I do have a family but this feeling of "in something, for something" beats everything else combined by one hand.
How sad. I'm sure your kids will speak fondly of how you missed major milestones in their lives so you could help Elon land himself on Mars. Imagine the headstone "Absent father but hey he wrote a kernel that handled Starship's fuel mixing servos."
Gotta disagree here. When you choose to have kids you're giving yourself to something greater. Ignoring them to dedicate yourself to a career is not someone's "yum", it's just being derelict in your duties to your children. Don't have kids if your "yum" is dedicating your life to your career, and no one will have any problems with your choice.
>Don't yuck someone's yum, if they're making decisions for themselves with open eyes.
Why? You cannot critique the decisions of anyone? They are free to ignore me, or think I'm wrong. In respect to you points, an engineer is not a astronaut, a seaman or a pilot. You are not required due to the nature of your job to be away from your children, or sleep in the a cold floor like an animal.
Not even the quality of the work needs it, it's just so you don't hire more people. Sure, there are real emergencies were you might take a rain check with your kid once or twice a year, but a constant culture of grind is different. The whole "hardcore" mentality is cultivated because it is cheaper, the sacrifice is yours and the Elons of the world reap the rewards.
This is not mere personal choice, it's purposely engineered. The plan is that everyone in tech becomes a corporate GameDev, and like it.
LOLOL. These companies have really got some people fooled. My goodness. If you're actually sleeping on your office floor, all you're "in" is "in line for extreme burnout" and all you're "for" is "for making your CEO and shareholders wealthy."
Oh, I totally believe that that is his perspective. And he's entitled to that.
The bigger issue for me is that he's making decisions, ignoring (and now "canceling") regulators who prevent or minimize the impact of decisions he makes along that line to protect our QOL. Because Musk sure as hell isn't bringing along anything up to 8 billion of us with him.
All big-tech CEOs would value people working long hours even if they wouldn't say that publicly. Elon is the only one saying the quiet part out loud that every big-tech CEO was thinking but never saying to avoid backlash.
In a way, I value Elon more than the rest, since he has no filters, what you see is what you get, unlike the rest who are walking PR machines, saying one thing while meaning and doing another. The devil you know is better than the ones you don't.
But Elon lies too, and frequently. Worse still, at least some his lies seem to be motivated by a childish need to score brownie points and/or worship from random internet users. His continuing claims of being a "top player" in online games spring to mind.
Except that in 2025 Elon Musk promised FSD in 2017. A lot of marketing delivers grandiose claims but Musk's are extraordinarily grandiose & unrealistic even by marketing's hyperbolic norm.
There was a web site[1] that cataloged Every claim and prediction Elon Musk has made and how long it's been since he made them, but it looks like they stopped updating it. It was probably a huge amount of work since he makes ridiculous claims every day.
Where are they promising it then? Board meetings? I don't think lying (or creating unsubstantiated truthyness) is the same as saying the quiet part out loud.
I know decent people with no filter. But in the past decade, increasingly, phrases like "has no filter", "doesn't sugar coat things", "calls it like he sees it", etc, have come to be used simply as attempts to positively portray obnoxious, tribalistic, anti-social, antagonistic, mocking, disrespectful, superior, or petty behaviors (behaviors which, not coincidentally, are also up over that time period, especially in leadership).
Also, your premise is flawed. CEOs get a lot of justifiable hate, and yes, many surely wish for employees devoted to the business, rather than proportionally devoted to each aspect of their life. However, there are also plenty of CEOs who genuinely don't want employees to work overtime. And Musk's attitude is arrogant/authoritarian even by the standards of less reasonable CEOs.
Its going to be funny to see the cognitive backlash when it comes out that Elon has a serious ketamine addiction and has essentially been a drug addled raving lunatic for the past half decade.
> I mean it's widely theorized that Trump eats Adderall for breakfast, lunch and dinner, too...
I have never heard this before, but it's an interesting perspective given some of his less coherent actions (tarriffs for you! Oh wait no, actually wait have some more tarriffs).
Social media and tech news is full of CEOs praising long hours, start up culture, hustle culture, putting success first or whatever euphemism they prefer. Musk is just on the extreme and in the public eye a lot.
He's in the public eye because PR is one of his primary skills. He constantly says one thing and does another, just that his following is such that people believe him and do significant internal justifications and contradictions to do so. Musk leads the marketing hype of his companies, which consistently promise one thing and deliver another. He's doing the same with DOGE. Tesla FSD is not going to be delivered in 2017. Mars is not going to be colonized by 2050. Elon Musk lies, a lot, and a large number of people's identities involve celebrating each of those lies.
> [Elon is] in the public eye because PR is one of his primary skills. He constantly says one thing and does another
Indeed. At this point, he's a real world manifestation of an Instagram influencer: 'You'll be wealthy with these 3 tricks!' (ignores thousands of hours off-camera or how money was really made)
"no filters", "what you see is what you get", "tells it like it is" has been said about a lot of pathological liars. I don't really get it. People said the same thing about Trump. There seems to be this thought that people who are saying extreme things must be telling the truth, and the rest of us are merely thinking extreme things but we filter it out. No, I am not thinking those things. I do not to apply some social filter to prevent myself from doing Nazi salutes. The reason I don't do Nazi salutes is that I have no desire to be a Nazi. He's genuinely just a liar and an awful human being.
I'd much rather live in a world where the fascist lying sociopaths are under societal pressure to hide their true selves, rather than the one where they can openly do Nazi salutes and threaten to jail their political opponents. Give me the walking PR machine any day.
I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.