"Update: @dhh Nobody @GitHub cares about your tweets. The post expired. Focus on your irrelevant development framework, failed career as a race car driver, or Basecamp, which as you know, has no future and has been replaced by much better alternatives that are highly innovative."
@dhh created Ruby On Rails
No wonder their website is still "under construction". Who funds these kind of narcissistic idiots?
Wow...can easily call out @dhh for "unsuccessful" attempts at various endeavors, but fails to recognize his impact on the very industry this guy works in? Basecamp, being around since 1999 with 50 ish employees and contributed heavily to the remote work culture. 17 years profitable is nothing to sneeze at either.
I'd call a guy who can even try to be a race car driver in his spare time immensely successful.
Looking at his profile is fucking terrifying of the people who agree with him
> @larbysamirouche is clever to post a job ad that weeds out lazy developers, and genius to get them to tweet it out. I’ve hired devs who voluntarily work 60+ hrs bc that’s what they truly enjoy doing. They get paid for their work, and I wish I had more employees like them!
Inferring from his LinkedIn, his company appear to be a web marketing/advertising services company for tech-unsavvy clients, not an investor funded startup. He works in the "shady used car sales" corner of the tech biz.
Unless I'm misreading, he placed first-in-class at Le Mans a few years ago. SUre, his racing career never _took off_, but I wouldn't call that any sort of failure.
I’ll admit in my early 30s I did 7a-12a 5 (sometimes 6) days a week. But I was the founding CTO and had a good amount of skin in the game. My hours broke down as: 7a-4p support, calls, meetings, being available to the team. 4p-12a working on my coding tasks.
It also involved walking around 6p-7p and “kicking out” others. Very rare was anyone else there on the weekends with me.
It sounds like you made a choice, and like the examples he cites in the article, you had significant upside. And, kicking everyone else out meant that you were aware of the tradeoffs, at least conceptually. Think a lot of us have chose tradeoffs like that in our lives. The thing that's tacky here is that the CEO assumes his employees need to behave like a founder.
I agree, but feel that this is something that only comes with experience. It's very easy as a new grad to not value your time as much as it's worth (imposter syndrome maybe?).
I signed a contract for $X salary for Y hours of work. If I work 1.5Y I never got paid $1.5X. That's a lesson most developers need to internalize.
I have never had a salary job that did not require on a regular bases over 40 hours a week. I worked for a college and during August I would work easily 70+ hours a week getting ready for the school year.
On contrary, I never had such a job - always 40h weeks, having 6 different employers. In past 15 years I worked literally once hard over whole weekend, to deliver on Monday 1am. In my current work I had to come during weekend once every few months for go-live, but it was due to business nature of employer - you can't patch ebanking or banking core integration during week (unless fixing showstoppers of course).
I have some colleagues around me who work more than I do, for no good reason - they don't get pay more because of this, some vague promise never put on paper/email that maybe yearly bonus will reflect that (it rarely does), or they might get a raise (they rarely do), or even get promoted (happened like once in past 6 years). Surprisingly, their private life ain't very rich, they definitely don't compensate "quantity with quality".
The remaining life that you have - be it next 30 or 60 years, NOW are the best times to enjoy it. You will not get healthier or stronger over time, you will not have more free time or motivation. You can't put a price on a life lived well. What you definitely can do is having regrets later, when its too late.
I noticed both Ryan and Larby (job poster) are in Chicago, same city as DHH. I find it hard to believe being involved in Internet marketing and angel investing they don't know of Rails and DHH, and being in the same city as him, almost makes me think this is a joke the 3 came up over beers.
This is why I stopped practicing law and started my own web design company where I could set my own schedule. We strive to work 35 hour weeks and usually come in around 35 to 40 per week. Burnout will happen at higher numbers.
You cut both sentences midway through in full they read:
>Based on the job posting and the interaction of the CEO on twitter, I’m going to assume that this job pay six to nine times more than the average developer can make, because otherwise I can’t really figure out why anyone would work in such a place.
And,
>For this job posting, again based solely on the text and the CEO’s behavior, I’m assuming there is no such upside.
The first quote is a complete enclosed thought about how for such a large downside there must be a large upside. It sets up the rest of the article.
The second quote comes much later in the article after he's explored why he thinks the 60+ work week is such a bad thing and given examples of careers where it is prevalent and that in most cases come with an upside to balance it. He's returning to the starting assumption and coming to a conclusion for the article based on all the points he's made in it including that the behaviour of the CEO makes it unlikely in his opinion that the job really will pay the employee back for all they give up to work a 60+ hour week.
This isn't a contradiction you've just smashed together two sentence fragments without considering the context that led up to them.
I think somewhere there exists a perfect happy balance between work hour requirements, project productivity and employee hours. My ideal candidate is okay with a 45+ hour requirement, BUT does not become a clock-puncher. Hopefully putting in 50+ because they want to or are deep into a project and can't step away. But, will easily coast out of the office after 40 hours on occasion.
I think the focus needs to be on setting a reasonable baseline and encouraging productivity without sacrificing well-being or the work/life balance.
edit: I think maybe I wasn't clear about my last point. I'm very much on the life side of the work/life balance. I'm okay with an employee who puts in 35 hours but is meeting/exceeding expectations. In fact, I encourage it. It's up to the manager and the individual to have an understanding of what's expected.
if my employer is tracking everything i do and asking me to log time against tickets/projects etc etc . . . yet doesn't expect me to be intentional about defending my own time/life outside of work? sorry, but it goes in both directions.
I can't ever see myself requiring time tracking on projects, that's far too scrutinous. Unless we were billing hourly on project.
It's more about finding that balance of what the business needs and what the employee needs. Setting standards and expectations is important so that there's very little left to question or ambiguity if an issue ever comes up. BUT, it's up to the manager to decide if there's other factors outside of hours worked that contribute to productivity. I doubt that I'd ever write up or fire somebody for putting in 35 hours and is meeting project/productivity requirements.
I lean more towards the life side of the work/life balance. The company I currently work for has purchased vacations for employees who took little or no time off. Not out of policy, but out of need.
My ideal candidate works 35 hours in the office, is engaged enough to think about work problems in their "shower time" and has enough energy to be effective whilst they work.
So, are you suggesting that the company has an overtime policy (regardless of exemption status) in an effort to reward any extra time put in? I don't disagree in the least. But, that would still need to be reviewed to prevent abuse. Much in the same way a 35 hour employee's work would need to be reviewed to ensure they aren't being unproductive.
35 hours is 5 days 9am-5pm with an hour for lunch.
Reviewing for abuse is of course correct and good behaviour, but your assumption seems to be that people putting in that amount of hours are probably going to be unproductive.
If you don’t want a clock puncher then why qualify in hours at all? Autonomy in work matters so if the end product is good then how long it took shouldn’t matter. What qualifies as working hours is hard to define too. Every night I go home and think about my job for free. That’s a lot of free labour my employer gets from me that’s hard to qualify but has huge impacts on my preparedness for the next day.
This is very true. Work product outside of office hours is a sign of a good candidate. Somebody who's always tinkering, reading or enriching themselves is obviously beneficial to both parties. This is a character trait that should be obvious upon hire or review.
Unfortunately, minimum hours requirements need to exist in some businesses to set the expectations. It's up to the manager on how to enforce that. If I have a employee that is clearly meeting project deadlines and is a positive impact in the company, I'm going to be less scrutinous on their hours. But, that person can't just skate by on 30 hours. I've seen far to many culture/team issues arise from somebody who is productive on paper but doesn't put in a "fair" amount of hours compared to other employees. "They work more than you" doesn't always go over well with other employees.
My point was about finding the balance between what the business needs and what the employee needs. Your point about autonomy (ie trust) is paramount to all of this.
There's really no upside to regularly working over 40 unless you have some sort of equity stake or other upside (like a being on a promotion track). The company is not going to pay you extra and you're just decreasing your hourly rate
I think a 30, 40, 50, 60 hour employee can be very different things. A 50 hour employee who isn't productive is clearly an issue. A 60 hour employee who is clearly burned out BUT productive is a problem too.
I don't think that hours are the first or only thing by which an employee can be judged. It's more about setting a standard and allowing the manager to monitor and enforce that based on the individual.
My experience might be a bit jaded. I work for a company that is "small", very close (many 15+ year employees). So, time spent "in the office" doesn't necessarily mean we're locked to our chairs and keyboards.
Of course a 50-hour employee is productive, but would you say consistently over a longer number of weeks he's 12.5% more productive than a 40-hour employee?
To give myself as an example: I work out 3-4 times a week, spend my time effectively reading books, playing the piano regularly and spend some quality time with my wife. These activities I would not be able to do would I work consistently 60+ hours a week. Nonetheless, it has had and continues to have a profound positive impact on my energy levels, motivation, communication and creative reasoning.
70 hour work weeks are common in some industries or job roles. Chefs, game-devs and cruise ship staff come to mind straight way...
Most of these people are taking the hit for the extra hours for some kind 'added value', which this company hopes to compete with maybe? They just seem like a shitty marketing company though?
I consider it supply and demand, that there are places out there not demanding more than 40 hours a week for the same job.
Then I read the CEOs reply after being called out for it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/larbysamirouche/status/10314168074526351... If you don't want to look at twitter:
"Update: @dhh Nobody @GitHub cares about your tweets. The post expired. Focus on your irrelevant development framework, failed career as a race car driver, or Basecamp, which as you know, has no future and has been replaced by much better alternatives that are highly innovative."
@dhh created Ruby On Rails
No wonder their website is still "under construction". Who funds these kind of narcissistic idiots?