The day I must sleep on the floor to meet a deadline would be the day I would never work there again.
Also, unless it is MY business I wouldn't grind this hard.
I can put it some extra hours once a year. But if its a failure of management then I will maybe save them once. Then, they can do the job themselves after my 40 hours.
If an individual told me they slept at the office to meet deadlines, I would tell them to seek treatment as that isn't normal.
When working hospital shifts, I routinely took naps whenever possible. I personally wouldn’t hire an engineer with your sense of entitlement, because you would be very difficult to manage and probably wouldn’t produce the same results as your other team-player colleagues.
If you find it difficult to manage a software engineer because they want to go home and sleep in their own bed at night then you're an absolutely failed manager. I'm sorry.
Hospitals work extra long shifts because every time there is a shift change there is, statistically speaking, a chance for errors. Those errors in hand-offs kill people, and they found that 12 hour shifts and fewer hand-offs save peoples lives.
The rest of the hospital just kinda follows that mantra. And that makes sense -- everyone works that way in the hospital and no one dies.
That ain't how software dev works, and no one is going to die or go into insulin shock because Twitter didn't push a UI update to Prod on schedule.
I didn't say I wouldn't do it. I'm just saying that I expect to be paid for your failures on most likely planning. As if you had done your job properly I would not be expected to work so much that I don't have time to commute to home to sleep.
> Then, they can do the job themselves after my 40 hours.
Are you in the US? Do you work for hourly wages?
I've always been confused why salaried workers think they only need to work 40 hours a week. There's an employment agreement between you and your employer with expectations on what tasks you'll perform. Rarely (never in my experience) does the agreement include you only work 40 hours a week.
I don't have an issue with your overall sentiment. I'm mostly confused about conflating things like overtime and a 40 hour work week when most folks in tech in the US are salaried workers.
> I've always been confused why salaried workers think they only need to work 40 hours a week.
Employment contracts in most developed countries will specify a) hours of business/office hours and b) an expected number of hours that the employee is to work. In many countries (including the UK for example [1]), there are even laws restricting the number of working hours by default.
> I've always been confused why salaried workers think they only need to work 40 hours a week
Self-respect/their own lines in the sand?
I don’t think anyone is under the illusion they can’t be fired for holding this position given that you can be fired in the US for ~anything. Doesn’t mean it’s a nonsense position to hold.
I'm not sure on that. It's backed by very little legally or culturally.
Lawyers, doctors, finance professionals, and other high paying, salaried professions include the expectation of more working hours, many times unexpectedly, to get the work done.
Wanting the higher wages associated with a salaried position but the stability of hourly work seems like it's backed by little but personal entitlement.
It might not be backed by much legally (and even then, that depends on your specific contract and the law where you’re at) but it most certainly has massive backing culturally.
“9-5” is a very well known cultural concept. Around the world. The 40 hour work week is a well known cultural concept. Around the world. To say it’s not is literally ignoring decades worth of media making it known.
Sure there’s nothing legally known as overtime when you’re salaried, but theres most certainly an implied cultural construct of a 40 hour work week and WLB around that number. While you may not be legally performing overtime, you most certainly are culturally if you work above 40 hours.
Yes and if you can do that without getting fired (or without struggling to find a better job) then that entitlement is obviously justified.
Having negotiating power gives you all sorts of “entitlements” that aren’t written down anywhere, that’s the point of having negotiating power.
The silly thing would be to earn all this negotiating power and then choosing to be miserable anyway because other people might call you entitled pejoratively.
> It's backed by very little legally or culturally.
Isn't it? I thought this was exactly what people fought for 100 years ago: to limit the standard work week to 40 hours. The US played a leading role in that fight, and it's incredibly sad to see how Americans have forgotten their history.
> Lawyers, doctors, finance professionals, and other high paying, salaried professions include the expectation of more working hours, many times unexpectedly, to get the work done.
If you've got a job that depends on unexpected events, then of course there's going to be some irregularity. For most software engineers, that's not really an issue because their work can be planned and won't kill someone if it's not done by tomorrow. System administrators may be an exception in that they have to fix a server right now when there's an issue. But that's a different issue than making overtime standard, and I would expect those admins to be well compensated for their work during off-hours.
There are occasional things that might cause us to work an evening or weekend here or there or spend a week or two working more like 50-60 hours a week to meet a deadline. As long as it's rare, that's probably not unreasonable to most salaried employees. What is unreasonable is working non-stop such that you're literally sleeping on the floor. You can call it entitlement if you want, but I'm happy to be entitled and give a big middle finger to anybody that ever asks me to do that. I could easily find another job within weeks. Why put up with that kind of nonsense if you have the ability not to?
Just reasonable expectations, that's all. My contract doesn't state "your manager won't scream in your face" but if he does I'm going to quit all the same.
At-will employment is definitely a double edged sword but it does give employees the power to tell their employer to get lost if they're being unreasonable, even if it isn't written in something legally binding.
> I've always been confused why salaried workers think they only need to work 40 hours a week.
It's cultural. Living in Europe, I've always been confused how salaried workers would not have set hours per week in the US.
I'm literally selling my working hours to a company. Of course the contract is going to have to include exactly how many hours I'm selling and how much money I'm getting in return.
It is an employment contract. I'm not selling the completion of a specific task or a project (that would be a different type of contract and I would price it very differently), I'm selling specific hours my time.
If you are working more than 40 hours a week on average for a salaried job then the job is either mis-specified, or the person in the job isn't qualified for the job.
> If you are working more than 40 hours a week on average for a salaried job then the job is either mis-specified, or the person in the job isn't qualified for the job.
This is the comment you replied to. It gave two possibilities if you were working a salaried job over 40 hours a week.
I am paid for completing work, I don't get paid hourly.
My employer understands I work about 40 hours a week give or take here and there.
I have interviewed for some of the biggest companies in the US and the information I received was 40hrs a week, with some crunch during fires but very rare.
This is why I would never interview for company like Tesla.
To clarify the parent commenters statement, this is rarely, if ever, part of full time employment agreements in the US (where the worker is a W2 employee and not a 1099 employee) where the worker is above a particular level/skillset.
In fact, it's codified into law and payroll systems have clear delineations about how this works. Companies often have 2 classes of workers referred to as "exempt" (these are salaried workers) and "non-exempt" (hourly workers), where what the "exempt" refers to is whether the worker is exempt from overtime rules and other concerns.
Point being, if you are an exempt worker (which I'm guessing is like 95%+ of W2 employed programmers in the US), you won't be getting paid overtime.
Sure, that's possible, although (in my experience) very uncommon.
Plus, the last half of that sentence was "where what the "exempt" refers to is whether the worker is exempt from overtime rules and other concerns", which very much is what exempt means. The US Department of Labor has more details: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime
I agree. Full time employment comes with it the expectation of a higher level of job security (contractors are fired or laid off first), along with benefits (PTO, healthcare, stock options, etc).
Let’s say 100k base salary. 5% additional comp (bonuses or stock, this is conservative number). Healthcare for you, another $300/month, not even counting employers who cover dependents. Ignoring all taxes including FICA. PTO 3 weeks (120 hours).
Base salary is 48/hour, but your total comp will bring it to more like 58/hour. Which is probably more than your contractor counterparts.
You trade a little bit more of your time (responding to outages or crunching for a product launch deadline) for the security and benefits.
If one of my employees refused to respond to an outage because it’s outside 9-5 working hours, I would fire them for cause (pending approval from legal of course).
Firing an employee for not responding to an outage outside working hours is your problem, not theirs, presuming you didn't include out-of-working hours in their contract.
What’s the difference between refusing to respond to an outage and having pre-existing commitments that make you unreachable (e.g. outdoor activities outside of cell coverage) or that aren’t compatible with work (e.g. childcare)?
I wouldn't call the full-time status as "job security". It's healthier to arrange your life and finances in a way that assumes your job can end at any moment. Employers love FT because you pay a fixed salary but you can squeeze more hours out of the employees. This person is case in point. Did she get a bonus? No. She got shit-canned.
There was a study that claimed losing a job caused the same level of grief for some as losing a loved one. Don't be that person. You are just a mercenary on contract, you are not part of a mission, or saving the world or (ugh), a FAMILY.
Yeah because total comp starting 125k total comp for lowest positions at my company, fully remote, can’t handle an outage. It’s part of the job description of a software engineer - if you don’t like that, don’t take a W2 job and just work as a contractor?
> Rarely (never in my experience) does the agreement include you only work 40 hours a week.
"Only"? Isn't 40 hours the maximum that people once fought for? Nobody should have to work more than 40 hours per week. It's the maximum for very good reasons. If you work more, it should be compensated elsewhere.
Now if you're co-owner of the company with wide-ranging responsibilities and corresponding generous compensation and a share of the profits, I can understand that you want to put in extra work, but then you're also the person directly benefitting from that extra work. But that's a voluntary choice by someone with a direct stake in the company. It should not be abused to extort extra work beyond the 40 hour maximum from normal employees.
I'm salaried and I work 30 hours a week. That's what we negotiated for, that's what I do. I get pages outside of work hours but I make it up later in my workweek.
For my part, I am confused why anyone would work more than 40; get your work done and leave.
Rarely these expectations are explicit anyway. So i'm not sure what you are trying to tell. Should we solve a one year project in a year? Cultural norms matter.
"If an individual told me they slept at the office to meet deadlines, I would tell them to seek treatment as that isn't normal."
This is reasonable advise if you're an average worker, who can be replaced by thousands of others, but if you're the only one being able to do the Job in your company, or even one of a hand full of people in your industry to do what you do, you need to change perspective a bit.
Almost two decades ago, before I became a PMC, I got hired as a Marketing Specialist for a Taiwanese computer components manufacturer that wanted to expand their core business into the high-end consumer segment.
When I started working there it was completely expected to show up to work two hours before you were contractual obliged and work overtime each day. Coming from a cultural background where you clock out when it's time and don't give a f*ck, I thought as well this was nuts.
But for my Taiwanese co-workers this wasn't an issue at all and they were happy, and so I adapted to their work culture, sometimes we slept in the office, showered and had breakfast there together.
It was a great time. We blew the competition completely out of the water because we simply outworked them and in return, besides getting casino money to spend on the weekends and other benefits, we each got the equivalent of a million dollars in local currency as a bonus by the end of the year and another one deposited as retainer with one of the best law firms in the country so we didn't really have to worry about anything.
My youngest brother got severely ill and needed experimental treatment. The company paid for it.
My neighbor started acting up, doing parties all night. The company took care of it.
My parents wanted to live closer to me, because my mom got sick not seeing me more than once a year. You guess it, they bought the flat next to me and had them move in for Christmas without me knowing.
That money helped me to start my own business and become independent later. My work ethics never changed. During my career I slept on floors, in bathtubs, once on a park bench, and never stopped working until the job was done.
I am sure that whoever survived at Twitter until now, is reaping these kind of benefits I know from my time grinding for a billionaire. There is nothing wrong with sleeping on the floor to meet a deadline, even regularly, if you know it's worth for whom you do it and why you do it.
I do not want a company doing anything for me. I want to maximize my income TO DO whatever I WANT. I don't want my personal life getting tangled with work life.
I feel sorry for people who have to work with you. Sleeping in bathtubs, floors sounds just insane.
You sound like you have very little respect for yourself.
> I am sure that whoever survived at Twitter until now, is reaping these kind of benefits I know from my time grinding for a billionaire. There is nothing wrong with sleeping on the floor to meet a deadline, even regularly, if you know it's worth for whom you do it and why you do it.
According to the article some of those who grinded for this billionaire are recently applying for unemployment.
The problem is that the very young employees for whom this may be their first job do not have the context. Looking back, I gave away a lot of my work-life balance and health on office heroics to make others look good. It takes working at a mis-managed place and then working at a functional company to know what is normal and what is just a bunch of Dunning-Krugers running around creating crises because that's how they think "management" works.
I can't imagine the benefit of sleeping in the office, especially as a PM. What is a PM doing around the clock to help ship any feature beyond helping morale?
She got exactly what she deserved. The only sad parts of this:
- She VERY obviously didn't learn her lesson. See her tweets after the layoff.
- The insane number of people responding with positive encouragement for "how hard [she] worked" and how it sets a good example. What a fucking travesty of a work culture some people have.
VALUE YOUR OWN TIME PEOPLE. All she did was help Elon attempt to recover a stupid business decision, and her reward was being sent back into the job market to do the same thing for some other billionaire in the future. This is the TEXTBOOK definition of being taken advantage of, combined with some astonishing stockholm syndrome.
> She VERY obviously didn't learn her lesson. See her tweets after the layoff.
Meh. She's saving face. Very high chance she feels like an absolute idiot on the inside but admitting as much doesn't help her maintain social media cred.
That doesn't necessarily mean she learned her lesson. She may go so deep into denying the mistake that she ends up doing it again just to prove that she was right.
Based on how fervently she's defending herself, that seems likely to me.
But yes you're absolutely right that there was no chance she was going to actually admit it was a bad idea for her to commit like this. People don't like admitting that stuff and will do whatever they can to avoid it.
I find this lack of empathy disturbing. What if this person values the time they spend on making twitter better? It's quite likely that there are people that enjoy their job so much they are willing to prioritize it over most other things.
I agree some of the comments against this person are overly harsh, and that I have seen people that take great pride in their work for its own sake and are willing to go that extra mile to do good work. That said:
1. The need to even sleep at the office in the first place was solely as a result of Musk's "chaos management". He dug the hole, and it is true that at the end of the day the only folks benefitting from her going the extra mile are Musk and Twitter investors/shareholders.
2. Wanting to do great work is one thing - sleeping at the office, though, clearly means that you are sacrificing other parts of your life, like your family, friends, health and hobbies, and putting work above all else.
As someone who used to be a workaholic, I can sympathize with Ms. Crawford. I can certainly look back at my work history and be proud of the times I worked hard to get a good result. But I also have plenty of regrets about working just for the sake of working/my identity, without really thinking critically about where I was spending my time.
Exactly. I've also worked at plenty of projects that I really cared about and eagerly went the extrs mile. I sometimes worked in the evening or even the weekend. I've even stopped freelancing and took a massive pay cut to become an employee to stay at a project I wasn't ready to leave yet.
But I always slept in my own bed. My extra work was mostly from home. The one bad idea was the massive pay cut, and that was a temporary situation (that I justified by considering it an investment to get more experience in a leadership role).
I don't naturally tend towards workaholism (unlike my wife), but when a job is sufficiently interesting and engaging, I do put in extra work, but it also makes me wary that I shouldn't mske that the new standard; it's always an exception.
> I find this lack of empathy disturbing. What if this person values the time they spend on making twitter better? It's quite likely that there are people that enjoy their job so much they are willing to prioritize it over most other things.
There are also people that enjoy drugs so much they are willing to prioritise them over most other things. It's hard to know at which point fun turns into pathology.
> The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos.
I can't bring myself to feel sorry for her. She was one of Musk's chief toadies. She didn't just sleep on the floor; she bragged about sleeping on the floor. She was in a position of power and encouraged (perhaps required) this behavior in others.
A cautionary tale for the ages. So much of tech culture is all about "rise and grind" memes, it's always useful to have a counterpoint meme, "don't prostrate yourself for a billionaire".
Elon is such a turbo jackass. like a normal jackass but faster.
he is eroding any loyalty the still employed employees may have. if they're smart employees, anyway. if they're not smart, he doesn't want them.
on personal sacrifice for an employer:
the belief that working hard and sacrificing your personal time will bring promotion and reward in the US is severely misplaced in 2023, especially with any publicly traded company, or even a private company beyond a certain size. each employee becomes a resource just like water or electricity or compute or storage, and good behavior is neither noticed nor rewarded. resources are managed as resources, and not as people. certainly not as beings which grow and improve with proper care and feeding.
This is a message to all of the remaining developers there that it's time to move on. But you know there's plenty of "that won't happen to me, I'm different" going on.
Trapped with a free pass to the best possible life they could hope for, that most people here would prefer went to people actually born here. My heart really goes out to them.
Do you think all of these people on work visas just jumped over the border and magically made it to the head of the employment line or something?
This was written like someone who has never been an immigrant or even taken a second to think about how difficult the process of immigrating is.
Every step of the process is meant to deter you from continuing, you’re scrutinized for the most minor of things anytime you cross the border, and, guess what, you still had to get the equivalent education and skills to get the job anyway.
"Someone has it worse off than you, so it's okay if I make you work in a toxic workplace under threat of losing.. well everything." is definitely a take.
To those who are saying that she got what she deserved, she will have plenty of job offers lined up because she was selling herself as being the kind of person we abhor and typical management loves and clearly we have bought it. So will some others who have jobs to offer.
If you're going to have a public presence after being laid off, you want to come off exactly how she is right now. Of course, it would be nice to live in a world where we don't have so much public presence. But humanity has been through worse.
> To those who are saying that she got what she deserved
I mean, both are what she deserved? I.e. expecting any sort of loyalty/humanity from a psychopathic billionaire, but also additional job offers because of her devotion. I mean, if she wants to sleep at work until she retires, good for her.
I think it's perfectly appropriate for someone with such a low profile to work for Elon. A low-profile employee and a low-profile boss are a very good match. By the way, sharing a photo of him lying on the floor is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life.
Jesus Christ no. This person made a voluntary decision. Don't subject the rest of the rational players to tyranny because one person made an individual decision.
It is absolutely fascinating that political groups can so strongly praise democracy while insisting that their proximate authority structure that has by far the biggest impact on their day to day lives and life satisfaction should be run like feudal states.
I mean unions are kinda clunky as far as political instruments go but they've at least got the spirit of what the point of it all is. A country where the thing people do for the majority of their working hours is shitty misses the forest for the trees.
What's interesting to me is that at first pass I thought you were in agreement with me, but on a second reading it seems that you related the non-unioned work environment to a fedual state when instead I relate the unioned work environment to a feudal state.
Why do you think non unions are fedual states? The way I see it, unions require:
- Forced periodic taxes in membership
- No self representation in negotiations
- Policies largely derived by "status" in the form of length of service, tenure, etc. uncorrelated with performance
- At any point in time the tyranny of the majority can descend on an otherwise libertarian environment and forcibly turn it into a feudal state
While non-unions allow:
- Individual representation and negotiation
- Policies related to merit or other unstructured agreements (e.g., I'll work during Diwali if you work during Easter)
- No forced requirement to pay taxes to any authority other than the government
Would bet anything you didn’t believe that when you weren’t the one in charge.
Like do y’all not have a visceral reaction to “my house my rules” or “because I said so.” Do you look back on that fondly?
Like by any objective measure I had great parents but I’ve never looked back and realized they were right when they blindly asserted their authority. Other stuff sure, but the things I fought my on parents then I still think are shitty.
Your job is not a family, and employees aren't children (I assume you're talking about the non-democracy w.r.t. minor children, because otherwise that's fucking weird).
It is a nightmare because of the Warner Act, which completely removes voluntary transactions from the labor market when it comes to collective bargaining.
I have no problem if employers want to bargain with a single authority, and I have no problem if an employee wants to only work for a company if they can outsource their bargaining. I do have a problem with the law that says that it a majority of people want to unionize then all other employees must join the union and the employer must bargain only with the union. It is nonsense and tyranny. It also leads to terrible band-aid laws like Right to Work.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but remember that this person was in a position of power in the company as the product manager leading a major effort. She sets the bar for work, and was glorifying sleeping at her desk and working insane hours to push Elon's "vision" out the door. You gotta imagine her underlings were required or pressured to do the same, and got fucked for it.
I agree with your vision of the work environment. However, both the product manager and her underlyings should all have some type of emergency fund that would allow them to risk being laid off for not spending their lives at work. I know it's easier said than done, especially when some emotional attachment and loyalty exists.
My comment was more related to how bad an idea unions are under the Wagner Act rather than anything concrete to these employees' experiences.
Also, unless it is MY business I wouldn't grind this hard.
I can put it some extra hours once a year. But if its a failure of management then I will maybe save them once. Then, they can do the job themselves after my 40 hours.
If an individual told me they slept at the office to meet deadlines, I would tell them to seek treatment as that isn't normal.