Oven (Bun)'s first employee will “grind” for nine months with poor WLB | Hacker News Reader

Oven (Bun)'s first employee will “grind” for nine months with poor WLB

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55 pointsmplewis34 comments

Good on them for being up front about it. Some will like it, some won’t… so it is. Personally I don’t see the fuss over hours. The best thing about this job is getting paid to do what I’ve spent the last 25 years doing for fun anyway. If anything I get upset when there isn’t enough to occupy myself. We’re blessed… I can’t imagine feeling bad about too much of a good thing. This is also why working on things you’re actually interested in is important!

It's been politicized because a lot of people get pressured or deceived into working like this, which people are justifiably upset about. But this isn't that, in fact it's the opposite of that! They're being totally up front about it. If you don't want to crunch, don't apply for the job, nothing wrong with that

In the current political landscape of tech. It is very brave of them to state it upfront. If Bun wasn't such a massive hit I would have no doubt the mob would have already come after him. I mean there are comments about being abusive already.

Its cool they can be a abusive because they told you they were gonna be abusive...

At our last startup we told people during the first interview that if they joined it would be the hardest they'd ever worked in their life. Some people opted out. Some people were excited and energized by the challenge. I don't see what's wrong with there being more than one company culture in the world. Not everyone wants to work at Google.

I wouldn't actually do that again, my views have evolved a bit, but I don't regret it.

> I wouldn't actually do that again, my views have evolved a bit

On the matter concerning work hours or to tell the candidates about it?

Concerning work hours.

I thought this was a pregnancy joke and I'm still not sure it isn't??

Bun. Oven. Nine months.

Perhaps?

Why would it stop being a grind? Also the condescending tone about work life balance is kind of sad. At least they're open about it.

The real question is how "competitive" is their salary. No numbers given usually mean not actually competitive

That’s a separate question, but it doesn’t make this one not “real”. This isn’t just saying they intend to exploit you by dangling the prospect of modest wealth as bait — it’s also saying they’re unqualified to run a company. By now we have studies going back half a century showing that extended crunch time produces worse results — and in this case, many of the mistakes which people would make while sleep deprived would be expensive to fix later.

This is American employee-searching 101.

List pages of duties, expectations, necessary degrees, experience, certifications, go into minute detail about $company, every detail written out...except compensation.

It's always competitive, yet if it truly were, they'd post it for guaranteed applicants with their requirements.

Best part is every company wanting an essay and for you to type out your resume you just uploaded into their broken fields and i-frames.

Oh and don't forget to create an account!

Garbage everywhere.

A Junior Web Developers gets $200K in Big Tech. Most developers ( or at least those commented on HN ) believes that are worth much more than $200K.

So yes. I seriously doubt Oven's number are competitive.

If they're totally open about it, who cares? Whoever interviews will know what they're getting into and can negotiate accordingly. If they find some workaholic who's happy to put in 100 hour weeks in exchange for a healthy chunk of the company, what's the issue?

If you can't be competitive without grinding your people into hamburger you don't deserve to exist. We need to build a more human-first society and it starts by eliminating these sorts of "loopholes" letting businesses off the hook for abusive practices "because people knew what they were signing up for"

Indentured servants knew what they were signing up for too, it was still selling yourself into slavery.

Whatever developer takes this job will inevitably be able to quit and get another, high-paying job with fine WLB whenever they want. It's not comparable to indentured servitude in any way.

There is absolutely a difference between offering poor working conditions to people who are powerless and easily exploited, vs. offering them to people who have a tremendous degree of power and the ability to exit those poor working conditions at any time.

Good point. There are probably 100 seniors at UC Berkeley EECS ready to sign up for this opportunity.

The problem is accepting companies with poor working conditions also serves to normalize poor working conditions.

Also, if people want to grind they can do so at at any company. I don’t think any company is going to tell them to stop working. The difference is if the company promotes that culture.

People who know what they're signing up for are signing up because it's their least worst option. Taking that away sounds counterproductive without a way to materialize a better option. And if you could get them a better option, you wouldn't have to eliminate the worse options, would you?

Only on HN would someone compare software engineering to slavery. Give me a break.

A key point about slavery is that you couldn't shrug and walk away anytime you wanted.

Exactly! “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.” (probably apocryphal) Sir Ernest Shackleton

It’s unlikely that “healthy chunk” will be that large - the usual pattern is someone crunching their health & relationships away only to end up with a fraction of what the insiders get - but the bigger issue is what it says about managerial competence and ability to run a project. People working under strain that long are less productive than in a more humane environment and more likely to make mistakes, and given how this sounds like them trying to avoid hiring an appropriate number or people it seems likely that they will make other bad strategic calls as well. Even if you’re a sociopath, I’d think twice about making my business depend on something which is one burnt-out person away from stalling.

A reply on Twitter had a well-put answer, "This is how you say 'we only want to hire young people' without technically violating labor laws."

There are a lot of people who'd want to be apart of this from the "ground floor". In 5 years, when/if Bun has succeeded in getting a solid marketshare of the js ecosystem, this person can say "I was a core developer from the start".

There's a lot of value in that, it's not just a question about money.

"You were the core developer of a Node.js clone? And it had a built-in Sass compiler? Wow, color me impressed."

Jared has done phenomenal work and I really like his ethos of optimizing everything, but I remain skeptical about bun's stated goal of replacing node.

Its clear now that their end goal is to make money off their hosted service, which will probably come with certain limitations.

INFO: Oven[0] is the company behind Bun, "a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime"[1]

[0] https://oven.sh/

[1] https://bun.sh/

Hope they are offering substantial equity!

With this talent market, they'll have to!

Why would you announce such a thing?

A number of comments here are along the lines of "at least they're open about it!"

No.

The problem is that crunch culture selects for people in a position to put in that time. What of people with more complex home and personal lives (most people)? What about having a family? What if you're a carer? What if you have medical needs? What if your cultural or religious practices place limitations on when you can work?

You'll wind up with little diversity, which leads to terrible culture and poorly designed products.

I dunno, people are still playing Halo 2 and 3.

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