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Comment by infodroid | Hacker News Reader

Contrary to what this VC believes, it is NOT okay to expect someone to "work 60 hours a week at Facebook and then another 40 hours a week on your side project". Because starting a business should not be founded on giving up your personal life. Quitting your job to focus on your idea full-time is a perfectly reasonable expectation. Investors need to start doing their homework instead of pushing founders to the burnout limit.

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An "idea" isn't worth much. I have lots of "ideas" but would take time to figure out if any of them are viable. Quitting my job to focus on any of my ideas full time would be financial and personal suicide in all but the very unlikeliest of cases. Given enough personal time I might be able to figure out if an idea is worth betting it all on.

If you won't do it, someone else will.

Life is all about tradeoffs. Just because someone else's is different than yours, doesn't make it bad/wrong/illegal.

>If you won't do it, someone else will.

This mentality can be used to justify far too many stupid things.

This is why it's important to have limits.

As a society, we have laws that make it illegal to cross certain boundaries.

As an individual, I'm free to set my own limits on what I'll do. For one, I don't work at facebook or other adtech companies because I think the world has enough advertising and I don't like how phone-addicted people are.

I just think it's incredibly naive to assume you can have whatever lifestyle you want and be commercially successful. Success is costly ; you have to, almost by definition, be willing to do things other people aren't. I don't know where this idea that you somehow "deserve" to work "only 60 hours per week" comes from -- I just know that there are a lot of incredibly hard-working people in tech, and it's a high-stakes, high-money game, so you're going to get some outliers.

> I don't know where this idea that you somehow "deserve" to work "only 60 hours per week" comes from

Perhaps you missed labor regulations over the last 200 years during the industrial revolution? That's where these ideas come from, that someone can have a solid quality of life without trading 60-100 hours a week of their life away.

Honest question: do you see modern tech workers as "labor" in the classic sense?

I don't but you seem to, I wonder why?

My rudimentary understanding of labor law suggests it's not really clear what we are right now.

> Honest question: do you see modern tech workers as "labor" in the classic sense?

If they're owners, founders, or have significant equity? No. That's not the vast majority of tech workers though. They're (we? I'm a tech worker) just higher up in the caste system.

Capital (e.g., VCs) definitely see both founders and programmers as "labor". At best, highly successful founders can be seen as aspirational capital, That said, the vast majority of founders are not perceived that way, and they are not even perceived to have the potential to become anything other than labor.

Is this labor in the "classic sense"? "Yes" if you're talking about the capital/labor division. "Conditional no" if you're talking about industrial labor.

Capital loves how easy it is these days to get motivated and fairly intelligent people to work for incredibly low wages, especially in the Bay Area. Some of those people actually create value that can be capitalized on.

I personally consider this an abuse of labor. I imagine that industrial-style regulation is not needed, as the curtain hiding the grossly misaligned relationships will eventually be pulled back -- most likely in the next big economic downturn.

Those regulations are intended to prevent employers from abusing their employees.

They do not entitle you to be a successful startup founder for only X hours of work per week. You're not an employee when you're working for yourself.

I agree with you, but OP was not specific in that sense.

This all depends on what you consider 'success.' You're gonna be a corpse in the ground sooner or later, and if you spend most your life digging gold out of mines for 20 hours a day, I wouldn't call that a success. It may be a sacrifice. But if all you've got to show for it is wealth, then why bother?

This mentality is how you will succeed. Should you be working 40 hours outside of work forever? No. But, it may be required to push your product/idea to the marketplace.

I did the same thing for about a year before I finally quit my day job. I haven't work those kind of hours for many years.

If you aren't willing to sacrifice your free time, you probably won't succeed as a business owner and you are better off just working a regular job.

I'd shorten that to:

> Contrary to what this VC believes, it is NOT okay to expect someone to "work 60 hours a week at Facebook"

Let's get one of these already https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive

I suspect that tech workers already have that ability for themselves. Don't want to work 60 hours a week at Facebook? Great; don't.

What they don't have is the ability to prevent others from doing it. Personally, I like that and hated working in Germany where I was forced to stop working because of an arbitrary hours limit per week.

While that might apply to some BigCo there's large parts of tech that would really benefit from a WTD(GameDev I'm looking at you).

> What they don't have is the ability to prevent others from doing it

Yes they do. They have a law.

Citation needed [that tech workers have the ability to prevent others from working 60 hours per week at Facebook].

Vote for politicians who support such a law. Join/form a union that will campaign for that sort of law. Talk to your friends and family to tell them that such a law should be brought in.

That's the thing. I oppose such a law and prefer the status quo in the US. But others who do believe in it should feel free to lobby for such a law.

I agree that its not ok to expect someone ELSE to work that way. But its ok to expect this from yourself.

While you're thinking it is NOT okay to work 40 hours on your side project, someone else IS working 60 hours on their side project. So yeah, no one is wrong, you can do whatever you want and you are right based on your own standards I guess.

It depends of your age. Around your twenties you can play with double working while your mental health tolerate it. This is a choice. Personally I feel alienated if I focus on an idea without genuine income, so having a side project gives me the opportunity to receive real income in the meanwhile.

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