Honestly, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but I really think you're absolutely right. Some people really like working in that environment. Personally, it's not for me, but at least the CEO is upfront about what he expects. Really, he's being a good leader in that respect. I wouldn't want to work for him, but he's clear about what he wants which a lot of people in management miss.
EDIT
Let me explain why this is good. First as your boss, I'm not your friend. I'm not your pal. My sole responsibility is to ensure that I communicate clearly and effectively what needs to be done and make sure it happens. That's it. Does this mean, I'm not compassionate? No, of course not, but what it means is that I am tasked having uncomfortable conversations about things that need to be done and to make it understood. Have I asked people to work nights and weekends? Yes. Several times? Yes. Do I like doing it? No. This is the job. If you want to quit over this. No hard feelings. I make it clear that this is what we have to do. Have I fired people for under performing? Yes. Do I feel bad about it? No. That's my job. I feel bad, when I have to let someone go, because we don't have the money to keep them. When management says, "lose two heads, because we want to cut costs," and they were good employees. I feel bad then.
Working weekends sucks, I agree, but sometimes you have to. If you've never worked for a company that is on the brink of bankruptcy, you really don't understand what it's like to have to lay things on the line. The CEO is being honest about consequences. We honestly, don't know the situation from that blurb. It sounds like he's being an ass, but there maybe an underlying reason for it. (Probably not, but you never know.) Whether you choose to keep going is your choice.
A previous company I worked for, was on the brink of going out of business. Only a few of us knew (out of 200+ employees). We had a shortfall of money and we didn't know if we were going to make payroll that month. They didn't want to tell anyone (in fact I was instructed not to), but I knew, because I knew several of the executives. I pushed my staff, and myself for those three weeks, because I knew that if we didn't bill, the company could quite possibly go under. People say working weekends crosses a line. Knowing that your co-worker (or employee) may get evicted from the country, lost their house, etc., because you didn't do your job for those couple of weeks, I can't do that. That's crossing a line for me.
I'm not sure if it's sarcasm or not, but asking people to work on weekends means crossing the line, whether it's expressed in a direct or indirect way.
Self note: never do business with the person that says: Bonus more important that weekend family time.
If projects are behind, re-group, re-train, re-focus. Waving the whip and telling people "work on the weekends" was never my style (to instruct or to receive).
Not only that, but by not having a consistent schedule, for example 40 hours a week, makes it impossible to know how long an upcoming feature is going to take. Because there are people who are willing to do those herculean tasks in the ridiculous timeframe and then burn out. So mangement never really learns anything and continues pushing features at the same pace. It is in your companies best interest to have a predicatable schedule.
It takes experience to know why this doesn't work and some CEOs / CTOs / PMs / etc get there faster than others.
I was involved with a company once (larger than this one) where something very similar this happened.
They threatened layoffs. What happened was that the team became immediately LESS productive. Effectively instant burnout. If not from the hours than from the loss of morale.
One of the biggest "mistakes" is they told everyone when the layoffs would happen so all the top performers had better jobs lined up for that next Monday. The really high performers phoned it in just enough to not be fired early and took their severance package when they were inevitably laid off.
Personally, I tried not to phone it in. But I actually lobbied to be laid off (there was a significant group of people that wanted to keep me). I built up my vacation time (in the US it becomes due to you as cash when you leave) and got a month severance on top of it plus a 20% raise. And I timed my start date for a week after getting laid off just to have some rest. I was a key player on the product team... the other key players left too and that entire product died a couple months later.
It takes a while for people to realize that workers will stretch or compress their work to meet the schedule. If you expect them to work weekends they will just do the same amount of work just over 7 days instead of 5. Conversely, some studies have shown a four day week has no negative effect on productivity.
Thinking to meet KPIs you throw more hours at it is a sign of a "leader" who hasn't figured that out yet. Maybe by their 5th startup they'll get it.
Edit: As an aside. I too have asked my team to work weekends occasionally (I'm a CTO not CEO but same premise). It always goes like this:
> I'm really sorry to have to do this but we really need you to put in some extra time on the weekend to meet the deadline next week. Pick a couple days next month to take off and we'll let you take them off without using your PTO. Thank you, I really appreciate it! As a company we'll try to make sure this doesn't happen very often.
Perhaps try giving them 4 future days off in exchange for working two weekend days. Weekend days are more valuable than weekdays because your family is free from work/school and there are more events.
RIP RevolutApp with such CEO leadership you are doomed to fail. Nikolay Storonsky - you will lose your best people and drive RevolutApp into the ground.
EDIT: just read a wiki on Nikolay. It all makes sense - his dad is a high up in Putin's enterprise machine (Gazprom - russian gas related entity) = part of the corruption machine. Not surprised that the son has such morals and how he treats other people is probably coming from his dad.
Regular folks are just lowlife slaves and peasants that exist to enrich him and his business (this is the way an average russian oligarch thinks).
I am very pro work life balance and think anything over 35-40 hours per week will just lead to eventual burnout and reduced performance.
Having said that, I can't bring myself to be too bothered about this tweet. At least the expectation is clear: hit your KPI goal or else.
If you were to find yourself behind, you could either work harder, lobby to change the goal, lobby for more resources, pivot your strategy, or start looking for a new job. This guy is being a dick by threatening weekend work or the dole to push people to hit their numbers, but there are worse management sins.
Working on an assembly line, sure 40 hours a week is fine. Trying to do creative problem solving with complex issues? I have met very few people who can maintain peak performance at even 40 hours a week, week after week. In my experience most people burn 8-10 hours a week on water cooler chats and personal issues that need to be dealt with during the business day.
Reasonable KPI's are good, and people should be able to work as much or as little (within reason) to meet those targets. The problem is ownership always wants more.
Plans rarely survive contact with reality. Target KPIs are just that. They are a planning-estimating-organizing tool.
And KPIs are actually benchmark indicators [hence the name], not explicit targets. Sure, you can try to make goals, even have certain contractual rights or obligations pegged to them, and CEOs can even communicate these to employees, but demanding to meet those goals, to place these goals above personal well-being is a very short sighted strategy.
So the strategy is this: Assemble teams with a low salary, then offer the withheld salary as bonus promises as an excuse to have people working on weekends and justify firing. Yes, that sounds like something it'll work for long term and is not toxic at all for the employees.
I have never been very productive when trying to do knowledge work for more than 4-5 hours a day and more than about 28 hours a week. When I start working 50+ hours a week my productivity drops below what I would have gotten done in a 20 hour week, Things become harder, you get less creative, you start brute forcing your solutions. You write bad code or documents. These are things you typically learn with experience.
>People aren't robots they need breaks, vacations, time to decompress, time off when sick.
It's worth remembering that the only reason employees get these concessions is because unions and governments forced companies to do so under threat of (sometimes direct) violence, and that part of the "disruptive" philosophy of modern startup culture is an attempt to undermine and roll back these gains in labor rights under the pretense of free-market efficiency.
The rational response when those receiving the message are not compensated with exactly the same, non-dilutive equity share class as founders, is explained in Urban Dictionary [1] from the Goodfellas movie [2]. Pay peanuts, get monkey effort. If KPI's were negotiated simultaneously with compensation, then perhaps there might be some more negotiating leverage equity between parties and a more honest appraisal and synchronization between goals and compensation, but standard practice is compensation is negotiated on a lagging basis compared to how often KPI's are established/modified.
The whole applicant's-must-book-sales-for-free schtick was so trashy they pulled it [3] once it came to light.
>I noticed that several product owners / team leaders
>are significantly below targets
>and still do not work on weekends to catch up.
The CEO addresses it specifically to the middle management (POs/TLs) and not line employees.
Given that, the vocal outrage, and the calls on Twitter for the line employees to unionize are both unproductive, and also misleading. Way to discredit your position.
Those people shouldn't work on weekends either. If the only way you can make your KPI's is working middle management to death, you as a leader are making serious mistakes in management. If you can't build a working infrastructure for people and be able to sustain and grow your business on a 40 hour week (except for emergencies, unforseen things), maybe your product or company model is not that viable.
We really shouldn't encourage this type of work ethic in any way or on any step of the ladder.
And what do you imagine that's telling middle management to do? Do the line employees' jobs themselves on weekends while the line employees are enjoying the weekend break? Not bloody likely.
Obviously the pressure from the CEO is meant to trickle down to the line employees.
Can you describe why the sentiment being addressed specifically to middle management whose teams are behind on projects makes the "vocal outrage" and "calls to unionize" discrediting?
You have to wonder how agreed upon these targets really were. Perhaps milestones are being missed because they were driven top down and were never realistic to begin with? Developers with ownership are more likely to work to complete their goals. If they aren't then that's a symptom of problems, not the cause.
It reminds me that I once worked for a manager who sets deadlines on Mondays instead of Fridays, so you still had the weekend to finish it.
As with any such managers, the deadlines are set by their own optimistic guesswork, not by the people actually doing the job (and knowing how to do the job).
> This guy was only talking about people significantly behind on their projects, for what it is worth.
What difference does that make? If people are behind they're behind. There should be a discussion, not an "work overtime" response. I want to think I'm valued and not just blamed if things aren't going smoothly.
> Of course they can be behind because they are wasting time or because the project requires too many man hours.
A failure of management either way. Hire the right people, get them to do the right job, give them reasonable targets based on reasonable estimates of velocity and the work required to bring the project to completion, create positive incentives to work instead of casually threatening the employees. You know, manage the employees.
If I worked there and knew I wouldn't meet my "KPIs" because of inept management and learned that they'd hold my bonus hostage even if I was a "great contributor", why would I want to work at all, let alone on weekends?
But this is a start-up with unpaid overtime. There is a purpose to deliberately creating unreasonable estimates, and it's to get people to work for free. Based on what I read it seems par for the course, unfortunately.
Related: Revolut and Monzo are still amazing products. After moving to the US they make it quite impossible to use revolut or monzo (it’s expensive as fuck to top up). I’ve looked into simple/varo/chime but they look pretty bad in comparison to Monzo, they are also reserved to Us citizens only so fuck people with a greencard. I have chase/capitalone/schwabe and their app are just stuck in the past. I really wish Monzo would work here :/ anything I’m not aware of?
[+] [-] lohszvu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kemiller2002|7 years ago|reply
EDIT
Let me explain why this is good. First as your boss, I'm not your friend. I'm not your pal. My sole responsibility is to ensure that I communicate clearly and effectively what needs to be done and make sure it happens. That's it. Does this mean, I'm not compassionate? No, of course not, but what it means is that I am tasked having uncomfortable conversations about things that need to be done and to make it understood. Have I asked people to work nights and weekends? Yes. Several times? Yes. Do I like doing it? No. This is the job. If you want to quit over this. No hard feelings. I make it clear that this is what we have to do. Have I fired people for under performing? Yes. Do I feel bad about it? No. That's my job. I feel bad, when I have to let someone go, because we don't have the money to keep them. When management says, "lose two heads, because we want to cut costs," and they were good employees. I feel bad then.
Working weekends sucks, I agree, but sometimes you have to. If you've never worked for a company that is on the brink of bankruptcy, you really don't understand what it's like to have to lay things on the line. The CEO is being honest about consequences. We honestly, don't know the situation from that blurb. It sounds like he's being an ass, but there maybe an underlying reason for it. (Probably not, but you never know.) Whether you choose to keep going is your choice.
A previous company I worked for, was on the brink of going out of business. Only a few of us knew (out of 200+ employees). We had a shortfall of money and we didn't know if we were going to make payroll that month. They didn't want to tell anyone (in fact I was instructed not to), but I knew, because I knew several of the executives. I pushed my staff, and myself for those three weeks, because I knew that if we didn't bill, the company could quite possibly go under. People say working weekends crosses a line. Knowing that your co-worker (or employee) may get evicted from the country, lost their house, etc., because you didn't do your job for those couple of weeks, I can't do that. That's crossing a line for me.
[+] [-] happytoexplain|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsferreira42|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koonsolo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvfjsdhgfv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HenryBemis|7 years ago|reply
If projects are behind, re-group, re-train, re-focus. Waving the whip and telling people "work on the weekends" was never my style (to instruct or to receive).
[+] [-] RubenSandwich|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepsy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2016a|7 years ago|reply
I was involved with a company once (larger than this one) where something very similar this happened.
They threatened layoffs. What happened was that the team became immediately LESS productive. Effectively instant burnout. If not from the hours than from the loss of morale.
One of the biggest "mistakes" is they told everyone when the layoffs would happen so all the top performers had better jobs lined up for that next Monday. The really high performers phoned it in just enough to not be fired early and took their severance package when they were inevitably laid off.
Personally, I tried not to phone it in. But I actually lobbied to be laid off (there was a significant group of people that wanted to keep me). I built up my vacation time (in the US it becomes due to you as cash when you leave) and got a month severance on top of it plus a 20% raise. And I timed my start date for a week after getting laid off just to have some rest. I was a key player on the product team... the other key players left too and that entire product died a couple months later.
It takes a while for people to realize that workers will stretch or compress their work to meet the schedule. If you expect them to work weekends they will just do the same amount of work just over 7 days instead of 5. Conversely, some studies have shown a four day week has no negative effect on productivity.
Thinking to meet KPIs you throw more hours at it is a sign of a "leader" who hasn't figured that out yet. Maybe by their 5th startup they'll get it.
Edit: As an aside. I too have asked my team to work weekends occasionally (I'm a CTO not CEO but same premise). It always goes like this:
> I'm really sorry to have to do this but we really need you to put in some extra time on the weekend to meet the deadline next week. Pick a couple days next month to take off and we'll let you take them off without using your PTO. Thank you, I really appreciate it! As a company we'll try to make sure this doesn't happen very often.
[+] [-] happythought|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readhn|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: just read a wiki on Nikolay. It all makes sense - his dad is a high up in Putin's enterprise machine (Gazprom - russian gas related entity) = part of the corruption machine. Not surprised that the son has such morals and how he treats other people is probably coming from his dad.
Regular folks are just lowlife slaves and peasants that exist to enrich him and his business (this is the way an average russian oligarch thinks).
[+] [-] ulfw|7 years ago|reply
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/01/revolut-cfo-peter-ohiggins...
[+] [-] dougmwne|7 years ago|reply
Having said that, I can't bring myself to be too bothered about this tweet. At least the expectation is clear: hit your KPI goal or else.
If you were to find yourself behind, you could either work harder, lobby to change the goal, lobby for more resources, pivot your strategy, or start looking for a new job. This guy is being a dick by threatening weekend work or the dole to push people to hit their numbers, but there are worse management sins.
[+] [-] maaaats|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apercu|7 years ago|reply
Reasonable KPI's are good, and people should be able to work as much or as little (within reason) to meet those targets. The problem is ownership always wants more.
[+] [-] koonsolo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pas|7 years ago|reply
And KPIs are actually benchmark indicators [hence the name], not explicit targets. Sure, you can try to make goals, even have certain contractual rights or obligations pegged to them, and CEOs can even communicate these to employees, but demanding to meet those goals, to place these goals above personal well-being is a very short sighted strategy.
[+] [-] stagas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brbrodude|7 years ago|reply
They were using hiring process for free unpaid work to reach those sweet KPIs... much worse.
Each applicant was expected to bring 200 new paying customers to go to the next phase. Any problem yet?
[+] [-] vasilakisfil|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brbrodude|7 years ago|reply
They were using hiring process for unpaid work.
[+] [-] pas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apercu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mseidl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krapp|7 years ago|reply
It's worth remembering that the only reason employees get these concessions is because unions and governments forced companies to do so under threat of (sometimes direct) violence, and that part of the "disruptive" philosophy of modern startup culture is an attempt to undermine and roll back these gains in labor rights under the pretense of free-market efficiency.
[+] [-] batrat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvilka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yourapostasy|7 years ago|reply
The whole applicant's-must-book-sales-for-free schtick was so trashy they pulled it [3] once it came to light.
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fuck%20you%2...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L4HHPTiZN8
[3] https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2018/10/140531-digital-bank...
[+] [-] dexen|7 years ago|reply
>are significantly below targets
>and still do not work on weekends to catch up.
The CEO addresses it specifically to the middle management (POs/TLs) and not line employees.
Given that, the vocal outrage, and the calls on Twitter for the line employees to unionize are both unproductive, and also misleading. Way to discredit your position.
[+] [-] akuji1993|7 years ago|reply
We really shouldn't encourage this type of work ethic in any way or on any step of the ladder.
[+] [-] leereeves|7 years ago|reply
Obviously the pressure from the CEO is meant to trickle down to the line employees.
[+] [-] happytoexplain|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Avshalom|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DyslexicAtheist|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HenryBemis|7 years ago|reply
Edit: Oh SNAP! :) Ok now I read it, a parallel HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19279746
[+] [-] pas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toddh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koonsolo|7 years ago|reply
As with any such managers, the deadlines are set by their own optimistic guesswork, not by the people actually doing the job (and knowing how to do the job).
Did I mention I workED for that manager?
[+] [-] sztanko|7 years ago|reply
Opinions my own.
Main thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19309597
[+] [-] chapium|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwighttk|7 years ago|reply
This guy was only talking about people significantly behind on their projects, for what it is worth.
Of course they can be behind because they are wasting time or because the project requires too many man hours.
[+] [-] bkor|7 years ago|reply
What difference does that make? If people are behind they're behind. There should be a discussion, not an "work overtime" response. I want to think I'm valued and not just blamed if things aren't going smoothly.
[+] [-] boomlinde|7 years ago|reply
A failure of management either way. Hire the right people, get them to do the right job, give them reasonable targets based on reasonable estimates of velocity and the work required to bring the project to completion, create positive incentives to work instead of casually threatening the employees. You know, manage the employees.
If I worked there and knew I wouldn't meet my "KPIs" because of inept management and learned that they'd hold my bonus hostage even if I was a "great contributor", why would I want to work at all, let alone on weekends?
But this is a start-up with unpaid overtime. There is a purpose to deliberately creating unreasonable estimates, and it's to get people to work for free. Based on what I read it seems par for the course, unfortunately.
[+] [-] testcross|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celticninja|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falsedan|7 years ago|reply
You swap a bright pink/orange card for a bright lime green