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A problem with startups and startup hours is that in a startup, there are real existential threats, and this enables a class of narcissistic managers to present their own bikeshedding and ill-advised pet projects and unreasonable demands as existential issues. If you're an entry-level engineer at Google and your manager tries to convince you to work a 60-hour week because of some existential threat to the company, you're going to say, "I'll gladly do that, but I want an EMG award and a double promotion." It's just not plausible that a sophisticated, large company would bet itself on the work of a low-level grunt and if it did, this would be one hell of a great time to ask for a promotion. But at a startup, for there to be an existential threat is plausible, and a lot of managers at startups abuse this (both down, in exerting long hours from subordinates, and up, in misleading executives). I recently saw a 25-year-old on his first white-collar job, using existential-threat FUD arguments, convince the CTO and CEO of a $100m+ startup that the entire codebase needed a "rearchitecture" that turned out to be the worst idea ever-- botched in every possible way from political deployment, language choice, schedule and scaling. It was a complete and utter disaster, and possibly killed the company (it's teetering, the culture has been completely destroyed, and a number of that company's best people have left or been fired in the past few months). |