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I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

efinancialcareers.com

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Re: I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

#131

Post by justinclift »

tootie wrote: post #98
sureglymop wrote: post #74

> I worked 80 hour weeks I don't know how the work culture is there but that seems completely insane. I've said it many times and I'll say it again. The first thing I tell anyone that enters the work force: Do not play the hero. You don't have to save the world. You will only be rewarded with more work. Put that passion and energy into something you created and own and control.

A few years ago I clocked like a 110 hour week. I was the director but also hands on so I was doing a ton of work but also responsible for delivery. Work was at a job site away from home. Worked straight through two weekends. I felt like I was doing this because I owned it. It culminated in a big demo for the client executive team that went flawlessly. At the end nobody said a word to me. I thought I did something re…

Hopefully you learned to better identify when you should/shouldn't do that kind of thing in future?

If it's your own startup then sure, otherwise "hell no". ;)

Re: I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

#132

Post by sillysaurusx »

throwaway019254 wrote: post #115
sillysaurusx wrote: post #108

Please stop working more than 40 hours a week. It’s your choice, and you don’t need to choose to. When it goes badly, you also don’t need to use it as a point of honor. It’s not. It just means you let your employer exploit you. Doing it because you want to is a little different. I often do. But you have to understand that the only thing you’ll get out of it is mild intellectual gratification, and sometimes not even t…

> It’s your choice, and you don’t need to choose to. And if I don't choose it, I can just choose to not pay bills/rent when I'm fired. What a simple solution.

I think employers exaggerate their willingness to fire you. It’s risky for them. For example, they can’t fire everybody, so after they fire one person, the next one should be proportionally less afraid of working less.

You’re also not limited to one job. Even people in economically disadvantaged positions can usually get another one if needed.

In other words, it’s precisely this fear that employers are counting on. Speaking from experience, once you face it, it tends to evaporate.

Re: I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

#133

Post by sellmesoap »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #24

I just do not believe this story. Nobody in the right mind will fire key software engineer 48 hours after system goes live. This is where all the bugs/problems show up and you need all hands on deck to fix them. Six months after launch when all problems are solved - absolutely, you can fire engineer. 48 hours after launch? absolutely not.

A friend of mine recently related cleaning up a mess at work where the devops staff was let go 48 hours before the new site deployment - not a tech company - but another case of the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

Re: I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

#134

Post by JeremyNT »

throwaway019254 wrote: post #115
sillysaurusx wrote: post #108

Please stop working more than 40 hours a week. It’s your choice, and you don’t need to choose to. When it goes badly, you also don’t need to use it as a point of honor. It’s not. It just means you let your employer exploit you. Doing it because you want to is a little different. I often do. But you have to understand that the only thing you’ll get out of it is mild intellectual gratification, and sometimes not even t…

> It’s your choice, and you don’t need to choose to. And if I don't choose it, I can just choose to not pay bills/rent when I'm fired. What a simple solution.

Ultimately, it's just one more point of negotiation.

In a market where labor is scarce, clocking out at But when the balance shifts and your skills are in less demand, the screws are turned, and management is going to start asking questions about who is providing the best value. To a corporation, employees are just fungible cogs, ready to be replaced if they aren't delivering.

Unless you really are a 10x developer (and by definition we all sure aren't) your head could be on the chopping block. If you're a 1x developer, an easy way to get more done than another 1x developer is to put in 1.5x the hours that they do.

Re: I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

#135

Post by pech0rin »

Only time I work that much is for myself. The employer has no obligation besides whatever your contract says. They can and will screw you over to meet their bottom line. Depending on his non-compete, why not just build a new platform again and sell it to other hedge funds, seems like it would be quite lucrative.

Re: I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

#136

Post by communitynotes »

Frost1x wrote: post #120
communitynotes wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"all labor on which another profits" is not the definition of exploit. https://www.google.com/search?q=exploit+definition

That’s not what OP said. They said it was a case of exploitation and they are correct. People just don’t like to hear it phrased that way because it brings up negative connotations. Now, while the agreement may be exploitive that doesn’t mean it isn’t mutually beneficial or that the situation be zero sum, at least viewed at a small scale. It’s perfectly possible to be exploited by someone and still end up in a better…

The key word in the definition of exploit is "full" use. To simply use something and derive a profit from it is not necessarily exploitative, as the noted comment suggests.

In the context of this thread, the original claim put forth is that being "used" for 80 hours is in fact exploitative; by one calculation, this amounts to 100% of your waking time in a standard 5 day work week, assuming a typical 8 hour daily sleep period. On the other hand, being used for a 40 hour work week is not exploitative; you still have 50% of your time remaining for non-work life. The math here is used for illustrative purposes, but a reasonable interpretation of "full" would tend towards 100%, not 50%.

Workers are truly exploited in some cases. To label a 40 hour work week as exploitation, in most cases, is simply hyperbole that diminishes the real suffering and ethical issues of actual worker exploitation.

Re: I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

#137

Post by mattlondon »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #24

I just do not believe this story. Nobody in the right mind will fire key software engineer 48 hours after system goes live. This is where all the bugs/problems show up and you need all hands on deck to fix them. Six months after launch when all problems are solved - absolutely, you can fire engineer. 48 hours after launch? absolutely not.

Yeah something doesn't add up.

It sounds like they are in the UK. You can't just fire someone out of the blue like that in the UK (assuming they are a FTE), unless they have done something obviously "bad" (proper misconduct etc). If they don't need you anymore there is a defined redundancy process.

If they were not a FTE and were in fact on a temporary contract, then this is totally normal and expected, and the author should have known that as a contractor. Contractors are easy-come-easy-go - that's the whole point of them, and why the pay is higher than FTEs.

Re: I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

#138

Post by fxtentacle »

Most likely, the company is just afraid of getting tanked by a bug, so they replaced him with someone with more experience.

"Every day, I got to build really cool stuff, all while learning a new language which was unfamiliar to me"

Someone who tries to compensate for a lack of skill / experience by working extra hard, like 80 hour weeks, might be a bad fit for a startup and especially for high-risk software like in finance.

Re: I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

#139

Post by andsoitis »

ericbarrett wrote: post #77
dfadsadsf wrote: post #24

I just do not believe this story. Nobody in the right mind will fire key software engineer 48 hours after system goes live. This is where all the bugs/problems show up and you need all hands on deck to fix them. Six months after launch when all problems are solved - absolutely, you can fire engineer. 48 hours after launch? absolutely not.

I worked for a storage startup in the South Bay in the late 00s which did something like this. After staff crunched to deliver the base operating system and kernel controllers, management gave across-the-board poor reviews to all IC staff to justify no raise. Those with the ability quickly left for greener pastures; Google hired some of the best. Only those who had to (work visas, lack of experience, etc.) remained.…

”The product, being a v0.1 release implemented in C, was of course plagued with data corruption and poor performance. It read /etc/password from disk on every file access. An uninitialized int caused indirect inode corruption every ~millionth write. And so on. Because of the poor product quality, they lost multiple opportunities, …”

It sounds like the poor reviews for the ICs was warranted, wouldn’t you say?

Re: I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

#140

Post by fxtentacle »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #24

I just do not believe this story. Nobody in the right mind will fire key software engineer 48 hours after system goes live. This is where all the bugs/problems show up and you need all hands on deck to fix them. Six months after launch when all problems are solved - absolutely, you can fire engineer. 48 hours after launch? absolutely not.

Or maybe they fired him precisely because of the type of bugs that showed up. You wouldn't want a "move fast and break things" guy to manage billions in cash flow ;)
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