Learning what an angel investor is hasn't really changed my opinion on this guy. My opinion of him as an angel may have changed if the post were closer to "go home at noon today, we've got enough done and you deserve a break." Instead his attitude is "stay later, work harder, and get that sweet sweet return of investment.
Usually they're also the people who don't do anything... I don't know how many I've run into and ask what they're working on, only for them to give me a "catching up on email or cleaning up" response. They're just wasting time, hoping to look good.
"Catching up on emails" is something you must do and can take a lot of time depending on your role and circumstances, though. My interepretation of this answer would depend on if the answer is for "what I'm doing right now" or "what I've been working on today".
Some of us work our asses off because we're passionate, but don't pressure our coworkers to do the same... It's a phase like most things are. If I ever get a management position in my current industry, I won't expect after-hours responses/work...
Imagine not realizing that you have to take breaks to be productive. It's better to go home and forget about what you were working on and come back the next day. Can't tell you how many times I've struggled f with an issue and came back to it and figured it out right away.
That is the key thing that is wrong with the whole "work ethic" rhetoric. Working longer hours is not good for productivity unless you have a job that basically has no quality metric attached to anything you produce and quantity is just measured in time worked.
Chances are many are still working. They're combining eating with socialising with peers in the hundreds of bars and restaurants and discussing many things, including work related stuff... which is a lot healthier than always eating alone at your desk.
This is an especially stupid post coming from a guy working in Germany. As far as I know, they see leaving work early as a good thing because you were so productive you didn't need an entire day of work to complete your tasks
Some of us are nocturnal. His issue is that he thinks that anyone can stay productive for more than about 4 hours a day. That's just an unrealistic expectation created by bullshit jobs that we can autopilot through for 8 hours a day because the dictators up top decided that was the best decision.
The other day I was driving on the Autobahn at 3:30am and there were literally no cars around me. These Germans always go on and on about how the Autobahn is so fucking great, but then they are not using it? You have to be really stupid to not see how that illustrates why the entire country is going to shit
I mean does anybody other than blowhards full of nothing but air use or care a out LinkedIn? The last job they tried to push on me was working in a local five and dime in the city centre mall. Not disrespectinf the fine people who work there, but how do my master in thermodynamics and 20 years of experience with explosives fit in there?
This reminds me of a person I worked with who would wait until the evening to reply to most emails. I assumed this was so at every morning standup they could say they were waiting on someone else to get back on something.
Outlook will display the time "sent" as the time you hit send. Then they receive it at the scheduled time, and will be marked as the "received" time. Two different time stamps.
That’s not an office. That’s a hotel lobby. I do not envy anyone who needs to work in this co-working space. It’s like someone took the idea of a loud distracting open concept office, and replaced all the functional furniture and equipment with cushions and wall art.
Overtime work for your own company? If you want, sure. It all comes back to your pocket after all. You do you.
Upset that your staff isn't participating in your non-existent work/life balance? It's only weird if they don't own an equal share of the business with you, or are not well compensated for the inconvenience.
Publicly shaming your staff on LinkedIn for spending time with family? Get ready to lose your top performers.
Edit: another lemming pointed out this is a co-working space. In which case, the above doesn't directly apply to the guy in OP's post, but is a familiar story nonetheless.
His work is THE HUSTLE and NETWORKING with the office manager about getting half-caff pods while she's trying to go HOME to her CHILDREN heh while he's grinding that INBOX ZERO productivity, carefully reading and NODDING INTENTLY - BROW STITCHED IN INTENSE CONCENTRATION as he scans every single business opportunity email and either archives (never delete a lead (NDaL life)) or replies to each one individually. Sleep or inbox zero? The choice is easy for the grinder
I'd imagine that they're unproductive because of the long hours that they spend in the office. It's been a source of mystery to me (European) how our offices in America manage to put in 60 hour weeks every week, often with a crazy commute before and after, and yet never seem to make fuck all progress on anything. Better to concentrate on how to be as productive as possible for time that you are there, than to fetishise the total amount of time?
Well I imagine efficiency is measured by the amount of work done divided by the number of hours worked... I know the salary-man culture in Japan is pretty grueling, so I imagine the hours are super high. And since they're so fucking tired (Japanese men sleeping at the office is a meme), the work suffers.
So they are not only working far more hours than average, but getting the same amount or possibly even less, work complete in that time because of energy levels/morale.
Simple math that you'd hope even a CEO could grasp.
Having worked in various countries of Europe with various different work cultures, I can guarantee you that at least in Software Development the productivity of working more than 8h a day regularly (you can get away with doing it for a week or two, but no further) is so much less than in with 8h/day or less, that you're literally producing less results with your work in a whole long-hours day of work than you do in an 8h day.
In simple terms, tired people do negative work and people working long hours regularly end up chronically tired.
Maybe it works differently for people doing stuff that's all about salesmanship (like Business Angel) for whom more hours means more "meets", but in my personal experience it definitelly works as I described for people actually doing heavy thinking work that has to actually work rather than merelly doing talkie-talkie with hard to compare results and where efficiency is near impossible to measure.
I understood that when once we decided to stay longer and worked for 12h one day, and then spent the next morning un-fucking what we screwed up during those extra hours.
Or when I spent an hour debugging something late in the day, only to come in the morning and find the problem in 15 mins. At least in software development, effectiveness dramatically drops when you're tired and it's really not worth it killing yourself to do something 2h faster.
I work in IT support, which is basically the next pond over from development. Because the job is so mentally intensive, if I'm working on complex tasks for more than 4-5 hours, my brain is catatonic by the time I hit the end of my shift.
Mental effort, is still effort. Most of the time you can't see that someone is mentally tired, but it is just as debilitating as being physically exhausted.
I can not do my job while mentally exhausted. One screw up from me, and I have the ability to, entirely by accident, take out an entire organizations ability to do useful work.
Some of my clients, I've seen log into the system at 8AM or earlier, and still be online after midnight. I don't understand how they're getting anything useful done by that time.
$100 says he left immediately after taking these photos. Dr.Hustler PhD here is using precious company time to write a chapter's worth of bullshit. Get back on that horse, it's time to work.
Edit: I finally get it! This must have been what Rage Against the Machine meant when they said, "Can't waste the day when the night brings a Hurst." Still not sure how, "Rollin' down Rodeo with a shotgun," fits in this pro corpo anthem but maybe I'm just not a hard enough worker to get it. Bad tradeoff indeed.
More hours weekly correlates extremely highly with a nation's poverty index and unemployment.
The only reason a business would want their workers to work more hours is because the management is lazy and cannot find additional staff to accomplish output goals.
That office looks like a hotel lobby. Do people actually work on those couches and coffee tables? They’re probably leaving “early” to go see their chiropractor.
yeah most coworking spaces have plenty of small personal offices. walk through those and you'll probably find at least one poor engineer working unpaid overtime
The US has influenced the rest of the world so much. It's quite sad. Hopefully Trump's election will force Europe to put up some figurative walls and stop the flood of bullshit from that country.
He probably only arrived at 12:00 and is complaining about everyone that has a live besides work (children, hobbies, volunteer jobs etc) and arrive early.
Considering there's laws in Germany that prevents you from working more than 8 hours a day, hes either in violation of those laws or full of shit.
I start work at 4 am. I do work 4a - 8p one day a week but some days I'm done by noon. Usually by 1:30pm. I'd love to show up at his office at 4:30 am and post, "where's the hustle?"
I also prefer coming late and leaving late. After finishing my formal education nothing forces me into the rhythm of the morning larks anymore. I've been enjoying it quite a bit.
The whole "work hard" being a moral dictum really depends on the country.
I've worked in Portugal, Britain and The Netherlands for about a decade each and whilst the Brits have the "work hard" not just in the sense of long hours but also the bloody slogan and moral commandment, and the Portuguese too have the long hours but "work hard" really doesn't add up to a moral commandment, the Dutch have neither and in fact it's considered a bad thing if people are still at the office after 6 PM (many even come in earlier to leave at 4.30 PM) to the point that a manager is considered a bad manager if their people are still there at that hour (because it means they didn't plan the project properly), quite the opposite of the other two countries were the "bumms on seats" after 6PM are seen as a good think.
Interestingly, of all 3, the Dutch are the most productive, by far - you do a lot more in term of actual results delivered in 8h/day in The Netherlands than you do in 10-12h/day in Portugal or Britain.
I agree with the Dutch. 99% of the time ive had to work late/extra it's because the project manager wasn't doing their job and panicked at the last second.
Good work ethic is when you spend every waking moment working instead of spending time with your family, yourself, your pets, your friends, doing self care, cooking for yourself and/or family.
Sounds like a jolly old life that doesn't it? Sure would love to do that every day until I die.
Hmm, do you know what I'm doing at 6:30? I'm hanging w/ my family, and then I'll sometimes WFH on my personal projects. If you're actually side-hustling or running your own business, long hours isn't the solution IMO, instead break up those hours w/ other important things, and fit the work around that.
Thing is, no one likes to work in a co-working space. Accelerators have these Hip Spaces which are sometimes used (for Meetings and Workshops) but that is just a perk. Main focus is to get multiplication and contacts. Additionally you can join multiple accelerators (as a startup).
I have rarely seen someone working in such a space and IF it was for a hackathon or due to a "last week crunsh before release".
Home Office .... they key words are home office and core hours (which are a 4H overlap for communication between early birds and night owls)...
There, you have it. That guy has no idea about processes and employee management. This guy is a one man clown show.
Good work ethic is when you spend every waking moment working instead of spending time with your family, yourself, your pets, your friends, doing self care, cooking for yourself and/or family.
Sounds like a jolly old life that doesn't it? Sure would love to do that every day until I die.
"everyone talks about how "hard" they're working and grinding."
Oh yeah? Who? Im willing to bet that everyone in the toxic "self help" podcasts he listens to talks about how hard he should be grinding while the people at his office live normal lives.