> That's why it's a mistake to insist dogmatically on "work/life balance." Indeed, the mere expression "work/life" embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. For those to whom the word "work" automatically implies the dutiful plodding kind, they are. But for the skaters, the relationship between work and life would be better represented by a dash than a slash.
So I guess this is what I'll be told the next time I ask a prospective company about WLB.
Yeah; I recently had a conversation with someone who went off at their manager because their manager said that the company (the second largest in its field in the world) told them that "work-life balance" is not the correct term, the official company policy replaces the term with "work-life integration".
Personally, I probably would have read that manager the riot act for even considering it appropriate to do.
Probably, but they'd be missing the point. The kind of plodding work at a company rarely overlaps this sort of passion work PG is talking about.
So if they give you that speech, you can turn around and demand proper skin in the game plus a huge amount of freedom and autonomy. Fair is fair. No company will affect my work life balance unless they've made it worth my while.
Yeah this is horseshit for everybody except maybe founders. I'm selling my labor for money. If I work harder and the company does better, this translates into almost no extra benefits to me, with all of the net benefit going to the owners. I want "work/life balance" because I am being paid for a very specific amount of work and I want my employer to keep its nose out of the rest of my time.
At least with a founder they capture more of the economic output of their overwork, but even then you hear so many stories of families that have been sacrificed at the altar of entrepreneurship that I can't even support this approach for most founders.
"this is horseshit for everybody except maybe founders"
Well, who do you think PG's audience is?
A 45-yo welder? A school teacher who loves their job? Or even someone happy at their FAANG job?
This advice isn't meant for them. Like most PG essays, it's obviously meant for people who want to be founders (or already are).
You might think it's dumb. But given he's seen people go out and do this, what, 5,000 times now? (Not sure what the total YC company count is) with some median level of success? He's got something valuable to add.
Perhaps you'd like 10x more qualifiers, 10x more nuance, 10x more comprehensive treatment of ALL potential types of people in his essays.
But he'd be far less effective at reaching his real audience - founders and potential founders.
I think you're mostly right, but his writing never says or really even directly implies that it's relevant specifically to founders. That would be very easy to do, but by not doing so he lends an air or universality and depth to the whole thing that makes it feel more insightful to people. The examples about startups are interpreted not as specifics but as examples of universal truths when as you point out they almost certainly are not.
PG is making large claims about the nature of schooling. The essay is not just for founders. He laments that people sit in class learning about Darwin rather than building treehouses and does not write that this only applies to a tiny minority of people who he expects to become entrepreneurs.
I also think it can be bad advice for founders too.
You’re not just selling your labour though, you’re cultivating your own career. That’s why people generally advance with more years of experience. You are the 100% majority stake owner in the startup of you.
PG is not saying everyone are skaters, neither convincing everyone to become skaters. There are definitely such people and work-life balance indeed is not as standard for them. Moreover they being hated by people who are just for money on a work as they are raising the bar, but it does not mean they should stop.
I tend to agree it's a part of a character which also can be developed.
Tangentially to that, I've worked at exactly one place that had a really good profit-sharing system. On paper, everyone had a relatively low salary. But, at the end of the fiscal year, they'd tally up the profits, divide them up among the employees, and cut everyone a check.
(Naturally, this was not a publicly-held company, nor was it financially beholden to any venture capitalists. One rarely finds much equity in extractive economies, regardless of whether the thing being extracted is mineral resources or intellectual resources.)
There were a few peculiar social phenomena that might have been attributable to this setup. One was the natural culture of collaboration and relative lack of office politics.
A more interesting one, though, was that people rarely worked any overtime at all. My guess as to why is that more traditional pay structures encourage more ambitious people to overwork, because it sets up a situation where employees feel a lot of pressure to compete with each other for raises. (And it demotivates other people, because they understand that any level of productivity in between the minimum, and whatever it takes to get ahead in the rat race, is wasted effort.) If the rising tide really does, obviously, visibly lift all boats, though, then there's no particular need to treat your entire career like a Black Friday doorbuster.
I know what PG is saying. And I'm saying that it is stupid and is (consciously or not) part of a larger culture designed to allow owners to extract ever more labor from workers without paying them more. It is so easy for him to make wild decrees about the best way to live, because he happens to hold the keys to the kingdom.
Even if I care deeply about projects and software and even entrepreneurship in my own time - that should have precisely zero bearing on my work.
he writes that there are two kind of people. one who need to separate work/life aka the worker and the ones where it all belongs together. the skater.
in my understanding, he argues that if you are the former, become the latter and thats the key tk a better life.
now he might not give precise instructions, but knowing PGs work, i assume that path goes through entrepreneurship. i think he even hints at it by writing: be(come) your own boss.
That comment is entirely unhelpful, and a net negative with the condescension. If you think someone misunderstood, help them by restating the idea in a way you find more understandable.
It really speaks to how little PG understands the realities of being an employee, rather than a founder or "visionary" or some such high up idea person.
I enter into employment with an employer, and the terms are laid out in a contract, possibly based on an agreement the company and a union.
My employer gets to call the shots during the working hours, as specified by the contract. For anything outside of that, they have no say in what I do, and the less they know about it, the better. Work is something I have to be compensated for, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it.
I bring very little of my private life into work, just what seems reasonable for general interactions with my colleagues and talk about random subjects over lunch. I'll talk about a recent concert I went to or a nice restaurant, and that's it. We can have a beer at the Friday bar and some small talk, but colleagues != friends. We have a professional and cordial relation, not a friendship.
Conversely, I also don't take my work home with me. My phone and laptop get shut off completely at the end of the work day, and they do not get switched on before I am at the office again (or around 8 when WFH).
I just wish I could get some signal out of his writings as to if PG is simply out of touch or knowingly has less than positive intent as it relates to the startup/founder/employee power balance. Does he really not understand how much more benefit founders realize versus employees at an organization? Or does he, and this is marketing for startup portfolio company employee pipelines? I assume you will be passionate if you possess double digit percentages of the total equity of your company, but not so if you have a fraction of a percent and are at will employed.
A job should absolutely be able to be just a job you perform to generate income if you can do the job, regardless of passion for it. The bar is high enough already for employees trying to climb the employment/career rock face without retired “thought leaders” adding additional constraints.
> Or does he, and this is marketing for startup portfolio company employee pipelines?
I think it's a marketing pipeline for founders. Maybe very early stage employees.
After reading many pg essays, I have this feeling that he's protective of founders. Not just YC founders, or other founders. But possible founders, too. Really the "spirit" of "founder" as it appears to him. (Use "idea" instead of "spirit" if it sounds too woo for you.)
He sometimes sees this spirit as under attack. Some other writer will dogmatically insist on work/life balance. It's probably targeted at the majority of working people who are selling their labor for the wages they need to get by. Personally, I think it's a good message. But there's no specific carve out in the article for founders, so maybe one person out there is a little less foundery than they would be otherwise. This worries pg.
So he writes some sentence like the one that kicked off this comment chain. It's really just "leave founders alone!". The intended effect is that those other writers insist a little less dogmatically, and that people feel enabled to dive into their own projects a bit more.
What the top comment is responding to is the perversion that so often happens. The line gets taken not just as gospel for the founder to live, but to preach. "We're looking for people who believe in work dash life, not work slash life." they say to the software engineer they're expecting to pop tickets off of JIRA for 40% below market wages and options on 0.01% of the company.
I don't think he's ever talking to future/lifelong employees. His passion is clearly startup founders and his writing is always directed at those people.
So I guess this is what I'll be told the next time I ask a prospective company about WLB.