I've read this complaint many times on HN, but my real world experience just doesn't match. All the employees from startups in our YC round, that I've met at parties, meetups and other events seem to be pretty amped about what they're working on.
Our engineers are free to work however many hours they choose; all I care about is that we get stuff done. My co-founder and I certainly put in long weeks, but I would be deeply concerned in any of our engineers put in as many hours as we do. In fact, I am constantly reminding our engineers that they need to maintain work/life balance because I don't want them to burn out. To put in another way, they volunteer to work long hours and I tell them to work less.
It doesn't makes sense to overwork engineers. Talent is hard to acquire in Silicon Valley, so I (and most other startup founders I've met) put effort into retaining it.
Completely agree. I totally think this is the right way to do it, and I really hope we can sustain that model. At the very least, it'll be awesome while it lasts. :)
Our engineers are free to work however many hours they choose; all I care about is that we get stuff done. My co-founder and I certainly put in long weeks, but I would be deeply concerned in any of our engineers put in as many hours as we do. In fact, I am constantly reminding our engineers that they need to maintain work/life balance because I don't want them to burn out. To put in another way, they volunteer to work long hours and I tell them to work less.
It doesn't makes sense to overwork engineers. Talent is hard to acquire in Silicon Valley, so I (and most other startup founders I've met) put effort into retaining it.
(By the way, we're hiring Ruby hackers, learn more at http://seeinginteractive.com/company/jobs/software-engineers...)