If you listen to companies online you will hear this common refrain that people don’t want to work or that it is so hard to find good resources. Then you read posts from companies which will make you think “What on earth did I read? and is this guy serious?”. The latest example of this kind of post is from Raymond Guo at Noon AI who posted the following gem on LinkedIn:
No pets for employees because it distracts them from our customers
At Noon Al, we don’t believe employees should own pets
Pets demand time and emotional energy that belong to our customers.
We once had an employee who had a pet.
No surprise, he had a terrible work ethic.
Our team’s focus is singular: building the world’s best AI recruiting platform.
Since enforcing this policy, we’ve cut distractions and boosted productivity by 25%.
Dogs, cats, or fish.. they’re liabilities when global clients expect instant support.
Commitment means no divided loyalties, even to a pet
This is the Noon Al mentality.
If you disagree, I’d love to see what your revenue is!
Or put it another way, we want to suck all remaining joy out of your life because it will allow us to exploit you a little bit more and earn a few extra dollars. If I was told this in an interview or after I was hired I would immediately resign/start looking for another job even though I don’t have a pet and am not planning to get one. If the company is exploitive enough that they are restricting you from getting a pet (which is a personal choice and frankly none of their business) then there is no way they will allow you to have a personal life… The company might make some money in the short term by squeezing their employees but in the long term they will loose talent, and money because people will not want to work in such conditions if they have any other options.
Unfortunately this is not an uncommon way of thinking. Multiple people post daily on LinkedIn (and other forums) expecting employees to be virtual slaves and have no other interests and work other than to slave away in the office making them money. Take the following post as an example:
If you take vacations or self-care holidays then you should be fired
About half a dozen times in the past six months, I’ve emailed with a junior person
at a #VC firm who has said blithely “sorry, I can’t meet or talk that week” or “I didn’t
read my email last week” because … wait for it … “I was / will be on vacation.
Look, you can say whatever you want about vacation and time off. You can have
whatever opinion you want about work/life balance. There are a thousand fields in
which to work, a million jobs to have in life.
But if your job title is venture CAPITALIST — if you are looking to invest in high-
velocity, high-octane startups — if you are a junior person at your VENTURE
CAPITAL firm that is seeking to match up with hardcore entrepreneurs — if you’re a
junior person whose job it is to hunt deals and find treasures and make
connections to other VCs and to the startups they fund — and if you are treating
yourself to “phones down” vacations and “self care holidays” — you should just be
fired. That’s it. No exceptions. Just fired
This is one of the more ridiculous ways of looking at things that I have seen and trust me I have seen a lot of them in the past 25 years in the industry. If you are a fresher or junior person this might seem normal to you but trust me it isn’t. You need to have time for yourself to recharge/reset else you are on fast track to burnout. It might not happen immediately but the long term impacts are there (and I am telling you this from personal experience).
My suggestion to my team and juniors is that they should get a hobby that takes them away from the computer for a little while and set reasonable expectations on their work. That is not to say in an emergency they will be required to be there till the issue gets resolved but for most days I tell them to decide what time is the latest they would like to take calls (we work very closely a lot with US teams) and then ask their counterparts to schedule calls before that time.
Expecting folks to work the same hours as a founder/owner for a fraction of the pay & benefits doesn’t make sense (as an employee), Give overtime pay for extra hours worked and then you will see folks put in extra hours if they want to. You can’t get something for nothing remember.
– Suramya
