Comment by alephnerd
2 days ago
You don't have to work at an early stage startup - in fact most people don't. But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup, and plenty do in Europe as well.
> So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.
And this is why when I was a PM, we shut down our Amsterdam office and shifted it to Praha, Bucharest, and Warsaw. You won't find as many people who will complain about a 40 hour workweek while earning €80k TCs
As usual, the problem is not 996 itself but comp. You can get 996, you just have to pay for it.
The reason Europeans don't want to do 996 is because the extra effort isn't fairly compensated.
Not only is it rarely compensated, it's rarely effective.
Software work is bursty and creative, not mechanical and hourly.
I think the occasional burst of activity can and does work, but it’s a budget you need to spend strategically and let it recover. Constant 996 indeed won’t work.
you are lucky to have lived a career where that is true. it is largely true in the states and sometimes true in startups. there are corners of the world where it is less true than one would hope.
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if you surround yourself with people who are only motivated by money, you will believe that everyone is only motivated by money. if you surround yourself with people who are motivated by a creative urge to build something they can be proud of, you may start to believe that this is everyone's motivation.
it is often useful to think of people as only being motivated by one thing, to see clearly how application of that thing might change their behaviour. but if you believe that is the only thing that motivates them, you will have a very simplistic (and eventually incorrect) model of how they are motivated.
Maybe 15 years ago I would've agreed because there was genuine innovation in tech where you could actually be passionate and proud of building it. "I want to work here because I want this product to exist" could've been a legitimate thing to say back in the day.
Nowadays with every market being saturated and tech being a race to the bottom quality-wise, what's there to be passionate about and/or proud of? Do you think people are proud of building yet another OpenAI wrapper or advertising surface? If they actually are proud of those I would feel pretty sad for them.
Also, the majority of landlords don't take payment in "passion" or "pride" and rents have skyrocketed since the glory days of tech.
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Many people aren't motivated by money so much as wanting to spend as much time they can with their family, where they find their creative energies most rewarding.
Making the most money per hour merely allows me to spend more time with my family rather than working more for less and giving my creative energies to greater society or an employer instead of directly to my wife and children.
That's a good callout - I have found European employers and founders to be much stingier with salaries in comparison to those I've worked with in the Bay or Israel, but I feel a lot of this is because of much more conservative investors, with boards pushing back on more "realistic" compensation.
I've been adamant about paying 75th percentile TC - I want the employees in my portfolio companies to be extremely motivated, and that requires incentivizing employees and founders correctly
I wouldn't work 996 because I like having weekends off and a life outside work
Working more hours however =/= getting more done. In fact, some experiments show the opposite (within boundaries of course).
I disagree. It is more accurate to say that more working hours is a continuum of productivity. Imagine that you have two nearly identical software engineers. One works 40 hours per week and the other 41 hours per week. Which will be more productive? Very likely the 41 hour per week engineer. Now, if you compare 50 vs 51, then 60 vs 61, and so forth, the productivity gap will become much smaller, possibly hard to measure after 60. I have witnessed a few young engineers in my career with simply unbelievable work ethic and talents that could work 80+ hours a week for months on end. It was amazing to see, and their output was unmatched.
From personal experience, I worked like a dog in my younger years for two reasons: (1) To become a better engineer, you need to make a lot of mistakes and fix them yourself. (2) Much junior engineering work is just time in front of the screen pounding out simple features for a CRUD app. The more that you complete, the quicker you get promoted.
You're making a feely argument for a phenomenon that has evidence. The evidence is that there's a max amount of work you do per week, and the more you work the less you do per hour - and that max amount is below 40 hours, incidentally.
There's effective evidence that people who work 6 hours a day are more productive than people working 8 hours a day, and after 4 hours of active practice, you aren't getting any better.
And on top of this, perpetually tired and exhausted people are not at their best.
Regardless of whether or not you accept that someone working 41 hours really isn't doing more work than someone doing 40 - you can see that two people working 30 is much better than one person working 60. Working people for long hours is mismanagement, at some level.
I agree, but the issue is the impetus behind the statement. The tone which that poster took and the default negative assumption is a negative trait to most hiring managers - especially at the early stage. At an early stage organization, you want your employees to be self-motivated but also open to pull crunchtime if needed (eg. customer escalation, rolled up product launch, pivot)
> But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup
You don't need to push yourself into burnout as an employee in order to participate in an early stage startup.
> earning €80k
80k€ gross is not a lot for a decent SWE in western europe. The reason people complain in Amsterdam is not the hours, it's that your comp is shit.
140k AUD. In major cities in Australia that is a reasonable mid level salary. I imagine that is good in Prague.
It's a much better salary in Czech republic, Poland, etc, yes.
80k a few years ago was the price point at which you would get few Western Europe remote candidate and many Eastern Europe ones.