Well said. I've worked at 3 start-ups and at all of them I've worked long, grueling hours with the most recent one I was doing at least 65 hours a week (typically longer especially with a 3+ hour commute). I became severely burned out to the point where I didn't want to look for work or do much of anything. I was depressed and had severe anxiety. I went to the hospital with an anxiety attack so strong that I literally thought I was having a heart attack and was going to die in front of my two year old (I was trying to explain to her what to do if daddy passes out). My chest was in pain, my arm numb; I still don't understand how it wasn't a heart attack because of how intense it felt.

I eventually took some time off and started interviewing at various places. Shortly after taking time off I was told that the founders felt I wasn't "working fast enough" and was fired. I had never been fired from a job before and I contest their reasoning but secretly felt incredible relief to the point where I barely even argued, I just packed up my stuff and left with a smile on my face.

Now I'm working at a place with fantastic work life balance.

Ha! Funny you say that. When I was laid off the job I was stuck at because of the visa situation, my colleagues thought I had gone insane because I was so obviously happy and smiling right after getting the news.

The fact is, it was such a huge relief to be shot of that dysfunction-personified environment that I thought, and I quote, "This is one of the best days of my life!"

The twist in the tail was that I had just received my permanent residence in the USA, and by laying me off, the company had been forced to forgive the many thousands of dollars in legal immigration fees I would have had to repay them, had I left voluntarily to seek other work.

That's brilliant, very happy for you!

When I was made redundant from my last job, which was a very toxic place, I was extremely happy as well - seeing as I no longer had to work for those people.

Needed the redundancy payment for the time to get myself back in mental shape, though... and then to find a new job.

I feel sad for the family of the Uber engineer.

How long did it take for your residency to come once you moved to the country?

I totally relate. I'll never forget my first anxiety attack, what makes it so bad is that you don't know what's going on, and that only makes your anxiety worse. First my mouth went numb and then it started spreading down to my chest and right arm, I thought for sure I was having a heart attack. I thought anxiety attacks were just freaking out of something in particular. I was relatively relaxed when it first hit me.

Right? This was my second one, too as I had one at my previous job (also a start-up working with the same folks). My first one was apparently incredibly minor because I thought I just had some labored breathing and soreness but that last attack...I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

I too always thought an anxiety attack was someone just freaking out because they can't handle something and they're being a little bit of a baby, etc. Boy did my attitude change completely. I had no idea!!

This is why I am highly sceptical of start ups, and it would take a helluva a lot for someone to convince me to join another. I prefer big corps, as its possible to control you work load a little more and transfer internally if you get a bad boss.

Yeah I don't think it's that simple. In my current job (team of 30) we work with lots of very large corps (telcos, finance, airlines, etc), and I've been exposed to the internal workings of their IT & dev teams, and in almost all cases I've seen intense mismanagement and high-stress environments.

Imagine the stress that comes with figuring out new tech and solving new problems at the level of a startup, and then cross that with the financial stakes, entrenched processes and the management abstraction that exist in a large corporation, and you can see how big corps have their own versions of the same problem..

The combination of feeling like you're responsible for solving massive problems but have none of the ability to influence or determine how they will be solved is a terrible situation to be in.

I will vouch for this. A large company in many cases behaves like

    $startup_dysfunctionality + $dysfunctionality_from_fast_post_startup_growth + $years_of_wild_hiring + $years_of_reorgs + $useless_and_obstructive_policies_and_standards

I work at a startup and leave after eight hours. They're not all bad.

Yup, even with my story the very first start-up I worked at wasn't that bad with the hours. We had the occasional crunch time, sure, but I rarely worked more than 8 hours a day. It really depends on management style, the stage of the start-up, and how technical management is (the less technical the more customer promises and more hours for employees to work, in my experience, because they don't entirely understand what is or isn't doable in a specific timeframe and burn-out is a lot harder to explain to someone non-technical).

I work at startup called Mixpanel usually 8 hours a day and sometimes even less if I get mostly what I need to get done.

I've worked at big cos like Microsoft and other smaller companies too. Some startups legit give a shit about employees.

We are also hiring if anyone is interested.

Same here. The other day my supervisor caught me working late and told me to leave ;)

My observation is that this is far more a function of the business' product/market fit than it is the size or age of the business. When you're struggling to pay salaries and bills, and there's no end in sight, often the business (knowingly or not) overworks and stresses their teams to try to make up ground. Unfortunately, the last 3-5 years have seen a lot of very high-risk seed investments in products that seem to have no actual viable path to revenue, which fuels this belief that startups are the problem.

This is not to say startups are without risk; they obviously carry risk. My point is simply that you can absolutely find a startup that will provide you with a reasonable work/life balance. Remember, interviews are as much for your benefit (if not more) than they are for the business. Use the opportunity to ask them about their product, their revenue, their roadmap. You'll probably get a good idea of how hectic things are.

And for any founders/employers out there - respecting the personal lives of your teammates will actually make them far more productive, not less. Aside from just being the right thing to do, it also has the benefit of earning their trust and respect, which will keep them with you.

This issue isn't exclusively about big corps vs startups. There are parts of big established corps where they're growing so fast in new lines of business that it's essentially a startup in terms of the stage of process and systems maturity. There are startups at the other end of the spectrum. I think it has more to do with the leadership than the size or age of the company.

I wish it was that simple for me...by all rights I work at a place with good work-life balance (not a startup) and good management that doesn't drive stress into devs, but I feel innately against everything in this industry at this point. 99.99% of everything anyone does, including myself, seems utterly pointless.

I've had anxiety attacks so bad because of this that I haven't been able to get out of bed in the morning. I can't remember the last time I've legitimately felt happy.

I'm sorry to hear that. Have you talked with anyone? Have you explored jumping to a different industry?

Anxiety attacks are awful. I hope you can find something better.

I haven't talked with anyone, unfortunately. And I have thought about moving to a different industry but I don't even know where to start with that. Despite my total, and growing dislike, for this industry, it remains the sole thing I identify with (which is also a problem).

I do recognize that the first step is talking with someone but...it's a tough first step.

> I do recognize that the first step is talking with someone but...it's a tough first step.

It actually does help to talk through things and therapists are trained to be non-judgmental and supportive. I urge you to try it if things get too tough for you.

I can't help you with the job situation problem, but on the subject of anxiety attacks, you might find this post by a psychiatrist helpful: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/05/the-case-of-the-suffoca...

Hope you don't mind me asking, but why would you work 65 hours in the first place? Or what do people expect to truly gain for "giving up" almost all of their waking hours for a company? High salary, equity, respect of peers, personal growth?

Sure. So we had all worked together before and we all just "got shit done" no matter what. At a previous job sometimes this meant working extra a few weeks but it wasn't every week.

The management at companies like this take it to mean you can do this every week and every week it has to get done in order to get a customer, etc. So you don't want to let anyone down and possibly lose business. So you bust your ass, week after week, putting out fire after fire, until you burn out.

I'm all for people working extra during certain crunch times. That's unavoidable a lot of the time. But doing it, week after week, for years? No good. I don't care how great the company is it simply isn't sustainable without significantly harming employees.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I experienced a similar issue with chest pain at my last employer, freaked out and took a day off to visit a hospital. My parents talked me down from thinking it was a heart attack, so I didn't go to the ER but ended up talking with my general practitioner the next morning. He suggested that it might be due to stress-induced inflammation at rib cage joints.

Years ago I worked for a hospital. I noticed that many nurses smoked while physicians (mostly) did not. They read the same studies on the effects of smoking and treated the same emphysema and lung cancer patients. Yet, the difference in behavior was there. A friend of mine was a psychologist who worked on smoking cessation so I related the phenomenon to her. Apparently, it's well-known that people in jobs with high responsibility and low decision-making authority tend toward smoking and other stress relievers. That description certainly fits nurses.

Software developers tend to be in that position now. Organizations increasingly rely on software as the embodiment of their processes and gatekeeper of their information. Yet, we seem to be a leaf-node on the decision-making tree.

The job I had prior to the hospital was a startup company in the Boston area, circa 1995. I was picked for a team of 8 or so to implement a system that was, in essence, an PaaS forerunner. (They put the senior-most people on the project, which was sad because I had only two years of professional experience as a developer. But, that's another matter.) For about 8 weeks, we worked between 60-80 hours trying to jam it in. During that time, one team member went to the hospital with chest pains while another had an outright heart attack. But, the company did reward us with a $100 American Express gift card for each team member.

At some point, I keep hoping that organizations will start recognizing that we need to be used strategically: a voice in decisions on how to use technology. Frankly, organizations aren't getting full value for us until they do.

I keep reading stories like these on HN, yet I don't know a single person who has experienced anything even remotely close to this.

I don't live in the Bay Area.

Are SV startups, in general, really this badly managed? If I add up all anecdata from reading HN comments about toxic work environments, I get the impression that 50% of the Valley is run like this. I have a hard time comprehending how this can happen.

I'm not a psychologist but I have observed this kind of syndrome a couple times and I think it's usually more like a performance anxiety. You take the big fish out of the little pond and all the sudden he's a small fish in a big pond and it's a culture shock.

The time lines, the compromises and the urgency are all different at a startup. You are used to being the smartest guy in the room at a mid sized or big place, you go to a small startup that got money because the founders are exceptional and they've staffed up with some exceptional people and they are all running like hell, you might look or feel kind of ordinary and that's a tough pill to swallow. It's especially difficult if you've never felt it before, all the sudden you're "failing" Combine that with a family that thinks the world of you because "you're the best" and I expect it's worse. Or at least that is how I've tried to understand it. There are clearly other issues when it results in suicide though. Again, I'm no doctor, but I try to give them an interview problem they can't solve, I think it's good if they say "I don't know how" or "I can't do that yet"

Another symptom I've observed, when someone is in that space, they often try to do more. Rather than botching one feature, maybe they'll rush and half-ass three or four to try and "make up" for earlier shortcomings. That usually creates a rift with the team that then starts to think less of them, the new guy is a bull in a China shop.

As for management, they share some of it. Uber seems like a broken place in a lot of ways. They should know it takes time to ramp up. Also success begets success, I take things off a new employee's plate when this happens. Make it small enough for them to create a little success and then build on it. In SV there is a large talent pool and a belief that the "right person" is around there somewhere so building long term success might not be as important to some companies.

I know exactly what you're talking about. I've seen it and even been that guy.

We should be clear, though, that the "small fish in a big pond" scenario isn't exactly what happened to Joseph Thomas. According to the article he had already had a successful run at LinkedIn and had an offer on the table from Apple.

Sometimes even brilliant people just aren't a match, no matter what. But a mismatch is a mutual responsibility, and shouldn't be a brutalizing experience. The fault there lies with Uber.

I'm no fan of Uber but I think this is putting too much blame on them. If you see a toxic culture, leave. I know there are other factors, psychological things that keep you from making rational decisions etc. But lets please be clear: the world is actually a pretty brutal place for most of humanity. Most humans are stuck in a poverty loop they can't ever hope to escape. And we have a story of people who can't just say: "enough! I'm outta here?".

I'm certainly not putting the blame on Joseph, he seems to have suffered a lot despite having objectively been a good engineer. But lets not forget that we're all (mostly) at-will employees, there is nothing stopping us from getting up and leaving just right now. Personal responsibility is really important. Perhaps we should be teaching some of this stuff in high school? I don't know what the solution is IMO.

I've personally been in toxic situations as well. As soon as I realized my happiness delta was negative, I immediately started looking at other positions and switched.

> If you see a toxic culture, leave.

This is easier said than done when your own self-worth and ability to see your own value is diminished due to stress, when you have a mortgage and financial obligations and a family to take care of. Not many people are financially independent enough to just quit a job the moment they feel it's become "toxic".

> This is easier said than done when your own self-worth and ability to see your own value is diminished due to stress, when you have a mortgage and financial obligations and a family to take care of. Not many people are financially independent enough to just quit a job the moment they feel it's become "toxic".

Well, I never said it was easy.

To elaborate more, it is incredibly important to have contingency plans in place, to prevent exactly this sort of situation from happening. One of the first things I did when I started working professionally was to have enough liquidity to last at least a year, which I was able to do only after 3 years of saving aggressively. Which really came in handy after I was laid off a job and had to spend 3 months looking for another one.

I really don't understand how one can get married, have kids and not have such plans in place? IMO it seems kinda irresponsible, especially if one is working in tech, where saving money is much easier than in other professions.

I also have a years' worth of living expenses saved, and it also took me about 3 years to build. It has zero impact on my stress level at work. I don't think I feel any more free to leave than if I only had a months worth saved. The idea of leaving and potentially burning through most or all of that portion of my family's savings while I look for another job is no more appealing or satisfying than just staying in the stressful job.

Perhaps I'd feel differently if I had several more years saved or if I were more stressed at work. The thing about work stress that builds up is that your mental health declines and you can begin to think very irrationally. Paranoia and depression can set in. I've seen devastating examples of this with people I know. I think it's important not to minimize it or brush it off and to understand that what seems obvious to you or I may not be obvious at all to someone who is feeling burnt out, desperate and depressed from their work situation.

> The thing about work stress that builds up is that your mental health declines and you can begin to think very irrationally. Paranoia and depression can set in. I've seen devastating examples of this with people I know. I think it's important not to minimize it or brush it off and to understand that what seems obvious to you or I may not be obvious at all to someone who is feeling burnt out, desperate and depressed from their work situation.

I'm most certainly not "brushing it off" or "minimizing it". I'm advocating for proactive measures to avoid reaching a such a mental state that can drive a person to consider suicide as a reasonable option. In your case, it seems like the measure I suggested (having monetary guarantee for at least a year) is not sufficient, so I would advise you to look for other measures, which you can likely take now when things are good.

I didn't mean to suggest that you specifically were brushing anything off; it was more of a general statement. Sorry about that.

What are other contingency plans that can be put in place?

It's more like you are the only fish is a small pond that they want to put an ocean liner into.

Startups by their nature seem to rarely have the correct amount of resources for projects/sprints/etc. Anytime you try to cram five gallons of shit into a one gallon bucket, there are going to be repercussions.

Some people thrive on that environment, others like more traditional, better staffed and funded environments. Each to their own I guess. I feel sorry for this guy and his family, no job is worth that.

Likewise. I've worked at startups at it was a rare occasion my boss could convince me to stay past 6pm. When we were working on a big release and the work wasn't getting done fast enough or his liking the solution wasn't for me to work extra hours - it was to tell him, "you need to hire another developer to work with me". There are laws to protect you from being worked into the ground and at the end of the day, if you're a developer, finding another one isn't particularly hard whether it's at a startup or a big corp. It's a job, not a lifestyle. Work 9-6 and get out of there.

I don't disagree with you, but you're overestimating the desire of most devs (at least most I ever knew) to hop between jobs.

Yes we're sought after but that doesn't mean we want to re-adjust 4 times a year.

Of course, what I meant was that if your employer is forcing you to work 60 hour weeks you shouldn't fear threatening to quit as if you have to follow through on your threat it's unlikely you will be without employment for long. Unfortunately, in a lot of industries people don't have this luxury.

I agree with this, yes and thank you. I talked about people with more specific requirements like myself (100% remote being example).

> 4 times a year.

I think if you have to switch 4 times a year, either you're exceptionally unlucky or exceptionally bad at evaluating jobs for their effect on your personal fulfillment/happiness.

For better or worse, SV is home to a lot of incredibly high-risk investments, and a large of early startups.

Startups with a lot of money on the line and no path to revenue will do crazy things that frequently lead to toxic work environments. Raise $10 million for a product that doesn't have a market fit, hire 10 people, provide them no clear vision for your business or product, tell them to make money, and watch as your business gets pulled in 20 different directions, employees fight, and people stress out. It's not likely to end well for anyone.

It's definitely going to be more common in places where riskier investments are more likely to happen. Uber, as an example, was last valued at nearly $70b and loses nearly $800m every quarter. I would imagine that kind of cash burn with no clear path to profitability is incredibly stressful on everyone. It's almost certainly the cause for many of the horrible decisions that seem to have been made there, and the same thing can apply at smaller scales to earlier businesses.

It's sample bias. People who experienced dramatic things are far more likely to comment about them. The community is large enough that even a relatively tiny sample produces many comments under this effect.

Well, there's the stigma of talking about anything related to mental illness or depression. Personally, I've never shared any of my struggles with inner demons with anyone other than my wife (and now here).

Yes, but that's a separate issue from the work environments that I think the GP was wondering about.

Thanks. I was hoping it was just this.

All of my experiences were on the East Coast. I don't think it's unique to the bay area I just think there is a larger concentration of start-ups so you'll hear about it more frequently but it can easily happen anywhere.

This isn't unique to startups, let alone SV startups. I know from personal experience that work environments like this exist in finance and advertising, too.

I'm such a person, and it's not restricted to SV. My worst experiences were in the South East. I think that many startups, regardless of region, are poorly managed, especially as they go through the transition from startup to something bigger.

Do you have kids? Imagine putting a toddler in charge of millions and millions of dollars. Now your house and paycheck and all of your life is dependent on the demands of the toddler, and shall you try and instill any reason, she throws a tantrum and threatens to replace you with anyone else who just says "yes." That's a simple, and yet so close-to-real way to look at the reason why bad apples exist.

That said, your 50% view is probably skewed. We like to read "sensational" stories, but for every bad company out there, thousands smart and caring founders build great companies every day.

You could call it the Steve Jobs problem... or at least he is a well known face of it.

Amazon apparently has similar issues as well so it is not just startups.

The worst are whisper campaigns of passive aggressiveness.

> It doesn't even take abusive bosses who don't like you, although that just makes it far worse.

Far worse.

I've worked at startups where we had to bust ass to get things done... mid-90s... sleeping at the office, going weeks without a paycheck to get the product to launch, living off Jolt and pizza -- and trying to build something that we honestly weren't sure could be built. And even if the work wasn't always done the exact way I would have suggested or agreed with, if I had a boss that took 5 minutes to explain why we were doing it... it was fine. No stress, just get it done.

I've worked at places that didn't require anywhere near that level of focus or time commitment that left me feeling just drained and miserable. Miserable to the point of wanting to pack it up and never see a computer again. Miserable to the point of acting out... little self-destructive things like sending snarky emails, calling in sick to play hooky, or indulging in office gossip. All because I had a boss who just demanded I do things without giving any reason, or who wasn't consistent with their stories.

Now I know enough, years of therapy / career coaching... and just age... when I see someone in a leadership position who just says, "Do what I say..." I start shopping for a new job. Or if they pull any manipulation crap like, "Sally and Mike know about X, but John thinks it's Y, and Sally can't know that Mike knows..." Or just simple lying... if they tell you something different than they tell anyone else. Life's too short to deal with those people.

Transparency, integrity, honesty... without those things in a boss, it doesn't matter how much work there is to do -- it'll be very stressful. It took me 10+ years to really nail down why I was successful at some jobs and not at others... for me, it all came down to the sort of boss I had. Didn't have much to do with me liking the person (or the scope of the work), or vise versa, as long as they weren't Machiavellian we could work well together.

While I can't possibly say that I know everything about your situations, one of the things that has worked very well when working with bosses I don't like is being 100% honest and trying to get to their concerns and trying to reach a reasonable agreement on management style. I get it that most of us programmers aren't inherently good at social skills, but its a skill that can be learned and has been incredibly useful for me.

Of course if the boss is just a dickwad, that is a pretty clear indication for you to leave. But more often they are just clueless about good management practices and/or have no idea that they're alienating the team.

I feel like a lot of times they're out to game the situation.

And I feel disrespected that they aren't being honest with me about what they want. Someone comes up and says, "Oh we have to do X before Y... because it's the right thing to do!" And I just feel like they're trying to play me. I have no confidence that they won't come back tomorrow with, "Y is better than X!"

Someone comes and says, "My bonus depends on X, and not Y..." and even though I'm doing the same work, it's not stressful because I know why I'm doing it and I'm not worried the ground is going to come out from under me while I'm doing it -- if that makes sense. Having people change direction once they give me a goal is something that always causes me stress.

Contract I was on was hard. Never felt anything like that pressure and very much about setting you up to fail. In fact I think it was a case that the CTO specifically set you up to fail and try and put the blame on you suggesting you work for free to pull it up to standard. He was very keen on making you take 'ownership' and, hence by inference, the financial risk, despite constantly changing requirements.

A number of contractors working there stated how they'd never experienced anything like it. It was phenomenally toxic.

Arriving home after my last day, I hugged my daughter and broke down in tears. The relief was unbelievable.

the last job I quit was at a small company that went from having an autonomous, highly agile engineering team (of which I was an early member) to having 3 tiers of management overseeing an engineering team that had less people in it than the management hierarchy above it.

the emotional corrosion that this causes can't be understated. bad management, even without explicit abuse, is a serious driver of burnout.

burnout is a SERIOUS fucking condition and it should be acknowledged as a tier 1 health risk. people kill themselves because of it.

I also was in a similar situation. Not as bad as the engineer in discussion but, I went through similar situation.

Years ago, I started getting signals that my work was preparing to let me go, like putting me on Performance Enhancement Program, etc etc. The thing is I had not kept up with my skills and so I really couldn't find any work with similar pay I could switch to. I also decided to stay to do better work in order to prove the managers wrong. I wanted to prove the management wrong, that I'm someone worthy of employment. I wanted to prove to them that I am a person, not some disposable tool to be tossed aside. I now know it was a mistake.

The stress at work kept building up in me for weeks. I woke up in middle of nights, and I am someone who sleeps like a brick.

And it hit me. One morning, as I was stuck in a stop-and-go traffic on way to work on freeway, I went over the little section of freeway that allows you a full view of the long lines of cars packing the freeway. This view suddenly caused me panic attack and I began to feel claustrophobic. I felt the urge to take off my socks (and strip off shirt, which I didn't) and open the window (which I did) so that I could relieve the feeling of trapped in the car. I had never felt such sensation before. I believe the issue of claustrophobia went on for about 2 years, as I remember worrying about taking a flight to visit family.

I never never had such issues before.

I think I can understand why the engineer didn't leave for another job. With his experience, he could've have gotten another similar or better job, but I believe he wanted to prove the management wrong. But unfortunately the stress got to him first.

I agree that most managers aren't very bright. It's like in the movie "idiocracy" except with the added frustration that being intelligent doesn't get you noticed or promoted.