MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-09-05 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] 9-5 workdays mythos
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The Times this Sunday had two articles worth reading - the first one I
am posting here is on the 9-5 mythos out of the startup nation is SPOT
ON, and directly relates to the computing industry
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/opinion/sunday/silicon-valley-work-life-balance-.html
Silicon Valley prides itself on “thinking different.” So maybe it makes
sense that just as a lot of industries have begun paying more attention
to work-life balance, Silicon Valley is taking the opposite approach —
and branding workaholism as a desirable lifestyle choice. An entire
cottage industry has sprung up there, selling an internet-centric
prosperity gospel that says that there is no higher calling than to
start your own company, and that to succeed you must be willing to give
up everything.
“Hustle” is the word that tech people use to describe this nerd-commando
lifestyle. You hear it everywhere. You can buy hustle-themed T-shirts
and coffee mugs, with slogans like “Dream, hustle, profit, repeat” and
“Outgrind, outhustle, outwork everyone.” You can go to an eight-week
“start-up hustle” boot camp. (Boot camp!) You can also attend Hustle
Con, a one-day conference where successful “hustlers” share their
secrets. Tickets cost around $300 — or you can pay $2,000 to be a
“V.I.P. hustler.” This year’s conference, in June, drew 2,800 people,
including two dozen who ponied up for V.I.P. passes.
But for some, “hustle” is just a euphemism for extreme workaholism. Gary
Vaynerchuk, a.k.a. Gary Vee, an entrepreneur and angel investor who has
1.5 million Twitter followers and a string of best-selling books with
titles like “Crush It!,” tells his acolytes they should be working 18
hours a day. Every day. No vacations, no going on dates, no watching TV.
“If you want bling bling, if you want to buy the jets?” he asks in one
of his motivational speeches. “Work. That’s how you get it.”
Mr. Vaynerchuk is also a judge on Apple’s “Planet of the Apps,” a
reality show where app developers compete to win funding from a venture
capital firm. A recent promo depicted a contestant alongside this
quotation: “I rarely get to see my kids. That’s a risk you have to
take.” The show’s promotional tweet added: “For the ultimate reward,
he’ll put everything on the line.”
Good grief. The guy is developing an app that lets you visualize how a
coffee table from a catalog might look in your living room. I suppose
that’s cool, but is it really more important than seeing your kids? Is
the chance to raise some venture-capital funding really “the ultimate
reward”? (Apple pulled the promo after a wave of critical comments on
Twitter.)
Continue reading the main story
This is sad enough for start-up founders, but rank-and-file workers are
buying into this madness, too. Last year, Lyft published a blog post
praising a driver who kept picking up fares even after she went into
labor and was driving to the hospital to give birth. Critics saw
dystopian implications — “horrifying” was how Gizmodo put it — and Lyft
deleted the post. But people at the company, including the driver
herself, seemed genuinely puzzled by the negative reaction.
A century ago, factory workers were forming unions and going on strike
to demand better conditions and a limit on hours. Today, Silicon Valley
employees celebrate their own exploitation. “9 to 5 is for the weak”
says a popular T-shirt. A venture capitalist named Keith Rabois recently
boasted on Twitter that he worked for 18 years while taking less than
one week of vacation. Wannabe Zuckerbergs are told that starting a
company is like joining the Navy SEALs. For a certain type of person —
usually young and male — the hardship is part of the allure.
The truth is that much of the extra effort these entrepreneurs and their
employees are putting in is pointless anyway. Working beyond 56 hours in
a week adds little productivity, according to a 2014 report by the
Stanford economist John Pencavel. But the point may be less about
productivity than about demonstrating commitment and team spirit.
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“Everyone wants to be a model employee,” said Anim Aweh, a clinical
social worker in the Bay Area who sees a lot of stressed-out tech
workers. “One woman told me: ‘The expectation is not that you should
work smart, it’s that you should work hard. It’s just do, do, do, until
you can’t do anymore.’ ”
This has led to tragedy. Last year, Joseph Thomas, an engineer at Uber,
committed suicide. His widow blamed the company’s gung-ho culture, with
its long hours and intense psychological pressure.
Now some are pushing back. David Heinemeier Hansson, a software
developer, is on a crusade to persuade entrepreneurs that they can
succeed without working themselves to death. (The sad thing is that this
even needs to be said.)
In a recent essay Mr. Hansson excoriated venture capitalists as
brainwashing founders with “an ingrained mythology around start-ups that
not only celebrates burnout efforts but damn well requires it.” He says
V.C.s are exploiting founders. Their attitude is, “Make me rich or die
tryin’,” he wrote.
“Die trying” is by far the more likely outcome. The vast majority of
start-ups fail. The odds of striking a huge Facebook-level success are
infinitesimally tiny. No one knows this better than the V.C.s, who
improve their odds by spreading their bets onto dozens of companies and
whipping them all into a frenzy.
Mr. Hansson’s essay singled out Mr. Rabois, the venture capitalist who
worked for 18 years with hardly any vacation. This prompted a debate on
Twitter, where Mr. Rabois sniped that Mr. Hansson’s take-it-easy
approach to building a company would be perfect — “for lazy people who
want to accomplish nothing.”
Mr. Hansson and his business partner, Jason Fried, run a Chicago
software company, Basecamp, that employs 56 people and turns a profit.
The workweek is capped at 40 hours and gets pared back to 32 in summer.
Mr. Hansson has enough free time that he competes as an amateur driver
in endurance car races.
In 2010, the two men published “Rework,” a book denouncing workaholism,
and they’re publishing another one, “The Calm Company,” next year. Mr.
Hansson told me that they’ve grown dismayed “seeing people being asked
to give up their vacations, their sleep, their youth, their family and
their morals on the start-up altar.”
They run workshops and do a lot of public speaking. Their talks usually
go over well — although in San Francisco they often hear “incredulous
gasps,” Mr. Fried reported. Mr. Hansson added: “People tell us we’re not
ambitious enough. We’re not trying to change the world. The perversion
runs so deep.”
The chance to become the next 20-something tech celebrity billionaire
has not lost its power. Every year thousands of fresh recruits flood
into San Francisco, hoping to be baptized into the religion of the
hustle. As bad as things have become today, there might be worse to come.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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